Latest / Thinking Class / #085 - Ryszard Legutko - The Strange Alliance: How Western Liberals United With Communists After The Cold War

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#085 - Ryszard Legutko - The Strange Alliance: How Western Liberals United With Communists After The Cold War · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Rizard Legutko.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Rizard is a Polish scientist and politician, professor of philosophy, publicist, author of over 20 books on socio-political topics, translator and commentator on Plato's works.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: He specialises in political and social philosophy, ancient philosophy and the history of philosophy.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Rizard has also served as a member of the European Parliament since 2009, and is chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Rizard and I think out loud about revolutionary movements of today, why the fall of communism did not lead to a clear victory for liberalism, why sexuality has been politicized and is central to revolutionary movements, why strong family structures are seen as threats to political revolutions, how conservative media has suffered state persecution in Poland, how the liberal establishment has historically accommodated communist ideologies, why personal growth often involves challenging long held beliefs, and why the current political climate in Poland reflects a generational battle and much, much more.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not often that you hear people make the argument that liberalism and communism are two cheeks of the same backside, but you will hear it here and Rizard will point to the experience of his home country Poland, and indeed others who were once allied to the Soviet Union or within the influence of it, and what happened once the Iron Curtain came down.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fascinating episode, and you will find lots of theory and practice side by side throughout.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's grow Thinking Class together.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Rizard, you wrote a book that I think has been pretty influential amongst the thinking classes who are concerned about the state of politics and culture, uh, not just in the English-speaking world, but across the European continent and indeed beyond.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: You wrote a book, Demon and Democracy, The Totalitarian Temptation in Free Societies.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And today we see riots in LA.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: We amongst the rioters who are protesting, if that's the right word to use, against authorities, governmental authorities trying to enact deportations of illegal immigrants, we see not just national flags of non-American nations being flown, but communist flags too.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And do you see that amongst Palestinian protests as well?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: You'll see socialist workers' flags being flown and socialist workers' parties being flown.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And both of those news cycle elements are effectively sympathized with by the liberal media and liberal celebrities.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: How does that compute?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a coincidence to see socialist communist flags and being sympathized with by liberal thinkers?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what we see today, I think, in the entire Western world is a is a sort of united front which includes uh which includes uh liberals, socialists, communists, greens, uh, social democrats, and even in Europe, erstwhile Christian Democrats, which are who are Christian Democrats only by name, but they all espoused more or less the same agenda, which includes immigration, uh, green energy rights, uh, saving the planet, and uh same-sex marriage, abortion, uh, LGBT, and so on.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the difference between the political left and the political right, which had existed for several centuries, at least in Europe, no longer exist.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: There are no major conservative parties that would defend family right, or classical culture, right, or education, things like that.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone uh in the mainstream, well, that's the mainstream, that's the name most frequently used.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Mainstream is the only respectable place to be in.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so they they shared the same um uh agenda.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh yes, uh what I wrote in my book at the very beginning, that was my uh that was the stimulus that uh made me write this book, was that when I uh became a member of the European Parliament and saw the European institutions up close, I could see that I'm uh I'm an outsider.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the former communist, the former apparatus member of the Politburo who found themselves in the European Parliament, they were in the mainstream, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: They were warm welcome as uh bodies, right?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh whereas I and people like myself were marginalized and considered to be uh somehow out of place and out of time.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: How did we get here?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if we rewind to the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the uh disintegration of those communist regimes in the satellite countries to the Soviet Union, like your own country, Poland, the story was liberalism vanquishes communism.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose people would be surprised to learn that actually the liberal political establishment has not been hostile to formerly communist regime politicians at that time and people with those sympathies since.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Can you explain why that would be the case that liberals, socialists, communists ended up in political bed together?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, it's not true that it was liberalism that conquered communism.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I remember after the fall or the fall of uh the communist system, there emerged uh several books or articles uh which had uh very similar titles, such as uh Us and Them, right?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh The West and the Rest, We and They, and so on.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and most of them had this uh thesis uh put forward, namely that uh yes, it is this liberals, uh freedom loving, tolerant uh uh civilization that put an end to the uh uh ruthless brutal totalitarian regime, and uh which means that freedom always triumphs sooner or later.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that is not the case.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: First, it is not it is not the West that uh conquered the Soviet Union or led to the disintegration of the Communist Empire.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, the United States had a share in the victories.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Not all administrations, but certainly some administrations uh continued to uh conduct this anti-totalitarian foreign policy, whereas that's certainly not the case with Europe.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean from the I mean since I think since the Suez crisis probably, Western Europe uh has been accommodating to uh to the Soviet uh to the Soviet Union and the the entire foreign policy was about how to come to terms and how to cooperate together and have some kind of non-aggression uh pact, not only political or military, but also ideological.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it the the fall of the Soviet Union uh caught them by surprise.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't they they were not expecting it.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of American politics didn't expect it either.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: I remember Zigny Brzezinski, who was uh national security advisor to President Kartel and a very influential political sciences, as late as uh I think middle 1980s, he published a book called Game Plan, if I remember correctly, and that was precisely about how to uh create a stable system which includes the uh the Soviet Union.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: So the uh what why did the uh the communist system fall?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, for internal reasons uh uh but also because of the uh dissident uh or or groups that were undermining the system uh officially and and unofficially.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: And mind you, these people were not entirely accepted by the West European political elites.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were considered to be troublemakers because the West European politicians, what what they were most afraid of was uh instability, and they considered those anti-communist groups as uh destabilizing uh forces.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: So they they pref they prefer to talk to negotiate with the uh general secretaries of the Communist Party rather than uh support the these anti-communist uh groups.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: So uh still when when the system fell, people like myself, who spent uh several decades uh under the old regime welcomed our joining Europe or joining the Western world, and we still cherish this conviction that we are entering a different world, which is alternative to uh to ours.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we we bought all this stuff.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: This is the world of freedom, and this is the world of repression or totalitarianism.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: It took us some time to uh uh to find that uh the difference is not as uh huge as it uh we thought it to be at the very beginning, and there are quite a lot of uh common things.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: First uh, and I think most important is that uh what I already mentioned, this left wing agenda, that is the uh the aim of the left wing agenda, whether it's socialist, uh liberal or communist, is to uh make a radical transformation, uh radical transformation of the societies in which we live, right?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Change, uh radical change to make uh the the slogan is right to make the world a better place, and you cannot make it a better place without some kind of a revolution.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: The communists uh organized this uh revolution, it was mostly economic and political, it led to the disaster, but the contribution of the Western world, and it goes back I think to uh symbolically to 1960s uh was uh family uh sex right uh sexual life.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: This was a vehicle of revolution.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you remember such philosophers, extremely popular at that time, uh Cusa, right?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: A German born, then uh uh emigrated to the States and became an American philosopher.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was a philosophical star at the compasses in 1968.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote it openly that sex is what what was uh uh ownership, private ownership in the 19th century.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Sex is today the same machine for making a radical change.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we uh we thought at that time, people of my generation, we thought it kind of funny.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh this is this is uh fun, you know which may be attractive for uh uh spoiled brats who live in a consumerist societies and have everything, you know, have rich parents, uh drive uh fancy cars, and now they dream of uh sexual revolution, right?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Flower power, things like that.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not a kind of grotesque looking at it, you know, from behind the curtain, of course.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and then we uh later on we began to discover the sinister consequences because uh well sex is an extremely sort of private thing, and now if it becomes a political commodity and is being regulated, uh legislated uh uh right, interfered with, it becomes a powerful oppressive instrument.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why what you uh what this is exactly what you see today.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the the uh erstwhile communism, they just uh join the revolutionary forces, and uh you see those old uh guys, you know, uh uh senile, uh right, former members of the Communist Party, uh who now champion the ideas of um well LGBT, right, uh uh same-sex marriage, uh thing things like this.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well revolution, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: We are we are we are we have revolution.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and uh and since the conservative uh uh side is so weak and so timid and and spineless, uh I would say uh the the left uh are having the the time of their life.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: They can do and anything, and and they are doing everything they can.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lingering a little bit longer on the sex point, I don't think this is entirely obvious to people as to why sexual revolution and uh uh a doing down of family life uh would be so central to transformation.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, as you've pointed out, we we live in an era obsessed with sex.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh pride flags that adorn public buildings and corporate logos, uh, which represent several waves of the liberation movements of those same revolutionaries you're talking about.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: We we've normalized abortion to a huge scale.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So uh in the UK, 250,000 births every year are aborted ever since our abortion act in 1967.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen 10 million abortions take place.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, dating apps seem to be the way that people meet now, but it's typically uh a hookup culture that is promoted, and we see the word love being um uh commercialized, love is love.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what why is sex so critical to these progressive movements?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: What why is it political and why is it prevalent?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well I think from the very beginning of modern uh the idea of modern revolution, uh sex was there and uh the hostility to family was there.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Even uh the early stages of the Bolshevik revolution, but later on it changed.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh or you read Marx and Engels, they hate family because family is a place, especially a family uh well, sort of classical family when you have parents and you have children and grandchildren or grandparents and they somehow stick together.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that is this transmission of norms.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you are very much influenced by uh what you see and hear and what you manage to incorporate in a family life.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that helps when you are in dire situation.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, I uh well we know it perfectly well from our Polish experience that when you were arrested and uh uh you were faced with a difficult decision, right?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh sign something or not to sign something.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the first reaction that you have, the first the first impulse that you feel is that uh from your family life because you were taught that way and you uh you you just tell yourself what will you what would my grandmother say if she finds it out?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the whole point of all political revolutions was to make uh uh to to disintegrate uh communities, right?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: And to make society consist of individuals that is of helpless human beings, right?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you are an individual, you are deprived of your family of all the heritage that you manage to build and to somehow uh uh consume, so to speak, and uh and and you are led by it, uh then you are uh in a way you are immune and you are more difficult to uh be an object of uh manipulation.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you can read it's it's a very uh simple point you can read uh it in in uh George Orwell's right uh books when in in 1989 that this protagonist tries to find some scraps of uh history, right?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Of uh local culture, some songs he heard.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you if you want to to create a new man, homo novus, right?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: A new man, you have to get rid of everything, right?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and eliminate uh this this stuff and uh uh have a sort of clean slate, uh so to um so to speak.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: So so that that that I think you it's very important that that the family has always been an enemy number one, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh family was also uh a place where you learned your sort of sexual conduct, right?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh family uh life, uh uh courtship, uh procreation, a marriage, I mean everything, all these things are link together.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but uh sex became again starting from a different perspective, uh in In the 1950s, I think, among the sociologists or political philosophers, there was a tendency to identify the modern era, the times they were living in, as the end of ideology.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: You had it in the States, you had it in France, you had it, I think, in the Great Britain too.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: The end of ideology means that the wealth has become stable, the institutions uh function more or less properly, and there is no there is no villain, right?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: There is no enemy you have to fight, there is no monster you have to kill in order to liberate people.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Before these were the capitalists, uh right, the bourgeoisie uh, uh and now they are all gone.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: There was en bourgeoisement.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean everybody became a bourgeois because uh because the the societies became wealthier.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and now what uh that then comes the sex, and the sex has the obvious enemy, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: These are the parents, the teachers, uh the culture, literature, which uh for many years has been putting you in a certain sex role and uh imposing on you all kinds of uh restraints.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And these these are these these monsters that that had to be killed.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: So uh when you uh read uh or you see the documentaries from 1960s, these these young uh people believe themselves to be uh fighting on the barricades like um like Bolsheviks or like uh uh the French revolutionaries in 1789.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: That was the enemy.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh the more uh the longer was the the revolution of this process, it turned out that uh the the number of the enemies increased.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was not only the schools, it was not only the church, it was not only the parents, but uh but language, right?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Language which which became sexist or homophobic, and the language it which shaped your mind.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: So in order to make you really free uh well in your sexual identity, they had to uh undergo a sort of uh surgical operation, right?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: That uh that all these wrong ideas uh uh have to be somehow uh eliminated.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you are if you are not able to do it yourself, we will help you at the at the beginning, we will help you, and then the court, right, they order you to undergo such an operation because uh if you resist of changing your attitude and change your language, it means you are sick and you should be treated.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what happened uh uh in the communist uh world uh some time ago.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: We you raised anti-communist uh uh ideas, uh that they put you to prison, but it also can uh uh could send you to uh uh uh psychiatrist or the psychiatrist psychiatrist clinic, and you will be treated like a like a sick man.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: So this the sex is just to uh sum up, uh it's it's very private, so enables you enables the authorities right to interfere with your private right.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: It has the enemies, which at that time people were thinking did not exist.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean enemies in the sense of uh uh the the defenders of the status quo, the the kings that had to be abolished and beheaded, and so on.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's and it's a very good uh uh instrument to uh increase drastically increase the power of the uh bureaucracy or yeah.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here.
• 26:50
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• 26:53
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• 27:01
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• 27:20
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• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: As you were talking there about sex and why that is so so much of a cornerstone to revolutionary movements, it started to make me ask questions or at least see patterns within what's been happening within your own country's politics.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: So for anyone who's not familiar with Polish politics, up until uh relatively recently, there was uh both a conservative president and a conservative uh party, PIS, that were presiding over the country.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Donald Tusk, a former European Union Commissioner, then became the Prime Minister, and there was also a Liberal president that came in.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I I could see similar things going on with regards to what you're referring to, this notion of rooting out any of these um so-called reactionary forces, these um these conservative voices, because the previous incumbents were pro-traditional family, they were openly Christian, and uh were also um uh focused on um keeping Poland away from the mass immigration policies that Western Europe were following.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then Tusk came to power, and I think it's fair to say that there have been various examples that everything you've just described has has taken place on some level.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, I believe there was, I mean, I've I've seen him himself at um lots of pride rallies and uh promoting those in the center of Warsaw.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen um religious festivals of recently arrived minorities like Hindus uh celebrating holy in one of the town centres.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the biggest bits of news when he came to power was that there were media organizations that were aligned with conservative philosophy, which uh I I saw video of them being um shut down by um police forces uh having been sent by the the latest government forces.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: What what what is the state of play in Poland?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: I know that a new president has just been elected uh a fine margin uh and he is uh of the conservative kind saying we won't be having any more of this and I will I will block the agenda.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what what does modern day Poland look like?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh are they are the young uh typically aligned to all of those revolutionary forces you've spoken about?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is this a generational battle?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: How do you expect it to play out in the coming years?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh perhaps uh a few sentences of uh in introduction that uh Poland uh, especially under the conservative rule, but Poland in general, and and Hungary are two uh countries in Europe, in the European Union, that have uh fairly well organized conservative sides, quite strong and fairly organized.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Orban, of course, is in power or has been for several years, uh, but uh still, even if the Conservative Party lost the election, Poland still has a lot of conservative uh organizations.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's the Catholic Church still influential, though its influence has been declining recently.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we are considered, uh the Poles I mean, and Poland as a country, are considered to be uh uh a troublesome country for the powers that be in Europe, for especially for the European for the European Union.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: So they were openly hostile to to the conservative government, and uh the in fact they were undermining, they were they were doing their best to topple the conservative government.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the conservative government had two terms, then it lost, actually, we won the elections, but uh was enough to form uh a majority.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh then Donald Tusk, who as you said previously, he was in the first he was a prime minister, then he went to the EU, he was the uh in the European Council, and then went back uh with all the blessings and supports of the European bureaucracy, and it was more or less openly said that he is on a mission to uh marginalize, uh weaken uh or perhaps uh eliminate altogether the conservative uh party, and if possible, all sort of conservative uh groups and institutions, and he knew that he could get away with anything, uh, and he would be pardoned, or perhaps as was often the case, nobody even said anything about his outrageous actions, and occasionally he received uh uh prestigious prizes, uh right.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: He received uh the Chatham House, very one would say respectable institution, uh gave him a price for uh rebuilding rule of law or something like that.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean this is monstrous, you know.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: The guy who's been violating constitution almost every day, you know, thugs being sent to uh to the states institutions and uh the uh uh the the people who are in charge are being let out of the buildings.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean uh well I mean there's a whole list of things he has been doing, uh and uh and he knows he he can get away with anything.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the last elections, the presidential elections were extremely important because it was the only chance to uh have a representative of the conservative side.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: The president of Poland is not as powerful as far as prerogatives are concerned as the president of the US or the president of France, but still his power is not negligible.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: He can veto the legislative proposals.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if if Tusk and his uh allies had succeeded in having their own president, uh this president would have signed everything, right, which comes out of the parliament, including right, immigration, uh, hate speech, uh same-sex marriage, thing, things like this.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now uh now he cannot do it, fortunately, and uh but still he is uh persecuting people.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: As I said, the list of uh what he has been doing is is very long, and uh there is no doubt that this is a violation of the of the constitution and kind of elementary uh elementary norms, one would think, right?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Occupying the the television, uh for instance uh in uh on the pretext that it would be liquidated uh because uh the public television uh is secured by law, by the existing piece of legislation.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to change people in charge in television, you have to change the legislation.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you yeah, but you can change legislation because the president would have vetoed.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well what what he did was to send a troop of uh uh uh uh you know big thugs to storm the television and then uh in install the their own people there and said that uh they would be in charge of liquidating it as a as a commercial company.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is theoretically, this is possible.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Theoretically, in practice has never been done, but it's not being liquidated, it's being uh modernized.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Huge sums of money from the budget go to the uh to the to the company uh that supposedly is being is in the process of liquidation.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh people uh are being sacked uh from the highest uh position uh when the law uh forbids such a move uh and and so on and so on.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the the media are persecuted, the media that do not support uh do not uh uh support the government uh or or or even what he sacked uh he sacked the the the president or the how to call it the the office which is in charge of statistics, you know, the data and tell you why how how well the Polish economy is doing.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: So this office issued a document saying that uh the Polish economy is not doing well, so he was sacked and replaced somebody else by somebody else.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: They issued another document which uh said that the Polish economy is doing very well.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: But very simple.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I kind of joke it here, but uh this this is rather gruesome.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh fortunately, he I mean Tusk seems to be uh a spent force.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he's still being supported by European uh uh leaders, but uh less and less enthusiastically, I would think.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and the the general, even those people who vote for him or support his party, uh the majority of them are well aware that he's as incompetent as anyone could be in the position of the prime minister.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: And now he will try to he will try to uh import all these things uh from the European basket, including right immigration and and and all these things which are so uh uh well that that make the life of uh Europeans and not only Europeans uh so difficult.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: What you just described there, I think was a perfect demonstration of just how closely aligned uh both liberals, communists, socialists are with regards to the means they are willing to use to achieve their ends.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you spoke about media being co-opted uh forcefully to be able to spread uh the regime's message and policy and to um forcibly silence any opposition, which seems very Soviet-esque, as it were.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, and I I suppose for the sake of for the sake of balance, uh, if uh if someone was to ask, well, okay, so this is what the new liberal left government has done since they've come into power, uh, I accept that these are grotesque things and they fly in the face of a free society.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose their next question would be Was the previous government under the conservative banner guilty of doing anything else under the same uh under the same rubric of pushing their own agenda?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Was it as forceful as what you've seen under Tusk, or did they generally play within the constitution?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I asked that purely out of innocence, I I have no idea.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's uh the the previous conservative government had a very black image, right?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: Authoritarian, anti-freedom, uh uh well, there were all sorts of names being uh used.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh well this is the this is the part of today's uh uh language which I find uh mendacious to the core.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh the uh this government was uh constantly accused of violating the constitution, which it did not.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I I I can agree that uh the public television was not uh well sort of neutral.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, I can I can agree that.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: But uh the journalists uh from other media were not uh were not discriminated against or were invited to press conferences nowadays.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: The conservative media are not admitted to the press conferences by the uh by the uh uh prime minister and and his ministers because they would uh uh ask uh uncomfortable questions.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: So they are not admitted, they are not allowed to enter the press conferences.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: The their candidate for the position of the president, Rafol Chaskovsky, had exactly the same practice.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: No one from the other side of the media was allowed to uh ask and ask him any question.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh so there were no attempts, none whatsoever, to criminalize the opposition, as now is the the case.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean all sorts of arrest people were being uh arrested, then they had to be released because nothing is there.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Some women from working for the Ministry of Justice, young ladies, were uh arrested and kept for several months uh in custody in humiliating uh well situations, nothing like that happened.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: It couldn't have happened because the entire European Union, the president of the United States, the President Biden, everything, I mean, there would be uh, you know, up pro.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, everybody would be protesting, people will take to the streets.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we because we were so attacked, we had to be very, very careful.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and you you cannot show a single example that anything comparable to happen.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: This this is uh a paradox.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of our time that in places where you have large media freedom, like Poland when the conservatives rule, or Hungary, are being criticized for being anti-media, uh, whereas uh nowadays where the conservative media uh is a very small uh fraction of the media market, and they are the object of constant harassment, and nobody really nobody from the European Union stands up in in defense.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh well uh this is I I said that that today's language is a mendacious language, and and that's that's exactly right.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because media freedom does not mean freedom of various media, right?
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: In the entire political spectrum.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: It means freedom of our media.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when the conservative government was in power, the conservative media was about, I don't know, 30%, 35 probably at most.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the rest were liberal, so liberal social media who were anti-government.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: And now uh we have media freedom at last.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: So almost all media are in favor of the government, and they are very uh happy about it, and the European Union is very happy about it.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Democracy is not where uh you uh have uh a sort of contest for the representation of the people, and whoever wins the contest takes over as is in charge of the government.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Democracy is where the right party wins, right?
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: The liberal uh the mainstream party wins.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's alright.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Radical left party wins, it's also alright, like in Spain, right?
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's also alright.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: But when the Conservative Party's party wins, it's not democracy any any longer, it's populism.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: And populism has to be fought because populism is dangerous.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to topple the government, you do not uh destroy uh if you if the European institution want to topple the government, it's not that they destroy democracy, they are helping democracy by destroying populism.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is and I could go on and on and on because every buzzword uh that uh we hear today has been corrupted.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: It must be dispiriting as someone who lived through the communist regime to think for those few years that you've you found yourself living in the free world, uh, and from what you're telling me and the stories that you can hear and read and see for yourself, it feels like not that much has changed really.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a different sign above the door, albeit maybe the methods aren't quite as um repressive as in your face as before, but but no less real for that.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: Rizard, before I let you go, there's a question that I ask all of my guests who come on the show, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life that you once perhaps thought was an absolute, or maybe it was just something that you were relatively convinced of that that was the right thing, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm I'm not sure I understand uh the the the question.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: Could you somehow ref rephrase it because I don't know what to miss the essence of it?
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: So in the course of your life, you likely to have had ideas about how the world works, that you things that you believed to be true and unshakably true, and then perhaps something happened, something changed, you saw something different, and your mind was changed into a place that you never once thought was possible.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Have you had any experiences like that and what was it that caused you to change your mind?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I don't think I I don't think I did.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I have.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I see my life as a continuity.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh of course I changed various uh uh ideas that I had and and opinions that I had.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: That that's natural.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but there was no moment of uh crisis or uh kind of breakthrough or substantial change of what I thought is uh right.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: I come from a conservative family, anti-communist.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I was educated on classical literature, uh Polish and European, and uh and um never had any uh I'm a Roman Catholic, never had any uh temptation to flirt with communism.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the only thing probably is what we have been talking about, that is my disappointment with uh Europe.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: I still considered I I was looking at Europe through the eyes of uh well uh Shakespeare, Plato, uh, Johann Sebastian Bach.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought it is a place of subtle uh culture and uh uh cultivated minds, and my first contact with the European institution was something of a shock, but still it took me some time to identify what I see, as you know, it's it's very difficult to identify what is right in front of you because you are we are we are so full of uh cliches and uh and uh kind of patterns through which we interpret the world.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I I had it took me some time to uh to to understand it.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: But uh it it it's yes, I consider myself to be happy in in that sense that that my development was not very bumpy.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't say it was quite smooth because no nobody's development is is smooth, but it it wasn't uh it wasn't really uh bumpy and and and uh full of uh uh tribulations, shall we say?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: That that that I think is amongst people who've been raised within a tradition like Roman Catholicism and are very literate and have been inducted into the humanities, the classics, the canon throughout their formative years and up into their teenage years.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've found people to be similar to you in that it those have acted as a as a force field against these other ideas and value systems which are which which which lead to consequences that aren't particularly good for the individual society.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I I I can imagine that is uh one of the very reasons why you got into politics to try and help more people have that that protection against um the the chaos, I suppose, that we see us around see around us now.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um Rizard, before I let you go, you mentioned that you've got an autobiography coming out shortly.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um where can our listeners and viewers find your your work?
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh where the where is your online presence and um when can we expect your autobiography?
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's being published in in publish, so there's not uh used to.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I uh my you you mentioned this book uh of mine uh published several years ago, The Thing on the Democracy.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: Then a couple of uh years later I published uh The Cunning of Freedom, uh which if I can uh well recommend to you and so on to uh anybody, it's it's being well it's been published in the States, and uh I think in a few weeks uh there will appear my book on Socrates.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh and the title is The Way of the Gutfly.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: So these are three books uh that are available in uh in English, and uh whether I will see what uh uh reception my autobiography will have in Poland, and if uh reception is encouragement, encouraging, I will probably consider it its English uh version.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I will I will keep an eye out, but I have not read your other two books in in English, and I certainly will.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: Rizard, it's been a great pleasure.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming on the show and all the very best with your autobiography launch.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, thank you so much appreciate.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: It'd been a pleasure.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are run making it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X, or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.