The Polish August / Solidarity: Poland in the Season of its Passion
Ascherson, Neal & Weschler, Lawrence
This is why norms have only to be brought to consciousness, studied and objectified, to be weakened, why a housewife who has once categorized her duties as "deferring to her husband's will"...
...Ascherson and Mr...
...Thus, with the exception of the AFLCIO and certain West European trade unions, the Solidarity movement has found few enthusiastic supporters for its wide-ranging agenda...
...In short, Solidarity is our democratic values put to the test...
...2 country replied, "Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture...
...Thus it is Truman and Byrnes, but not Stalin, who are responsible for Poland's metamorphosis into a chunk of the Stalinist monolith...
...A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Serving Wall Street area since 1895 darity aspects both comforting and threatening...
...BERNARDQ 2400 Wastheklw, # 106W (T), H~JSinn, IX T/W6 T. John Jamieson As President, Richard Nixon found himself able "to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found...
...Indeed, both the American Left and the American Right find within Soli,SAVE UP TO 90% ON PERFUMES We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Renta, 1000, L'Air du Temps, Chloe, Shalimar, Norell, Halston Night, etc...
...tachment produces distortions which undermine what otherwise are welldocumented, well-written, and wellmeaning enterprises...
...It was not socialist-minded workers and intellectuals, but this middle class~blocked from career advancement by the Communist Party's restrictive nomenklatura system of rewarding loyalists with top-level administrative and managerial positions~which gave impetus to Solidarity's movement for worker self-management...
...In doing so, Solidarity has captured Our hearts...
...I Next Month THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR's 15th Anniversary Issue I I I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 29...
...It is "political and economic burdens," but not the structures of the economy and polity, that are at the root of Poland's difficulties...
...Who, then, is to blame for Poland's absorption into the Soviet bloc...
...In both cases, this political at...
...It is Gomulka's shortsightedness, but not Communism, that accounts for the .upsurge in worker militancy in the 1970s and beyond...
...In his view, the impasse between the union and the government and the deterioration of the economy were clearly testing the patience of all Poles...
...Many on the Left (Ronald Steel is a telling example) have seen within Solidarity a challenge to the postwar status quo and a threat to the possibility of detente...
...Frankly, I suspect that today the author would retract this ludicrous assertion...
...Both Ascherson's and Weschler's accounts, however flawed, nevertheless have the virtue of portraying Solidarity as a wide-ranging social movement whose revolution profoundly affected the lives of millions of Poles...
...THE POLISH AUGUST Neal Ascherson/The Viking Press / $14.95 Penguin Books / $5.95 SOLIDARITY: POLAND IN THE SEASON OF ITS PASSION Lawrence Weschler/Fireside Books-Simon and Schuster $15.95 cloth, $8.95 paper Adrian Karatnycky More than two years ago, striking dockworkers at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk captured the world's imagination with their stunning triumph over the Polish government...
...nonetheless, it is open to question whether that little book held the key to the wisdom requisite to form a great statesman...
...And the Soviet Union gained an irrefutable argument for coordinating Polish foreign policy more closely with its own...
...Lawrence Weschler's Solidarity: Poland in the Season Of its Passion is a narrative full of closely observed d e t a i l , the work of an enterprising and facile journalist...
...Russell Kirk to the White House and asking him, "What one book should I read...
...Nearly one year ago, General Jaruzelski's declaration of a "state of war" Adrian Karatnycky is research director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and associate editor of Workers Under Communism, a quarterly journal...
...Without hesitation, the last bonnet laird of the stump T. John Jamieson is a Richard Weaver Fellow at Northwestern University...
...This is why norms have only to be brought to consciousness, studied and objectified, to be weakened, why a housewife who has once categorized her duties as "deferring to her husband's will" cannot return to those duties with innocent authenticity, why "consciousness raising" is so effectively corrosive...
...Such thoughts come to mind in reading Neal Ascherson's The Polish August and Lawrence Weschler's Solidarity: Poland in the Season of its Passion, the advance guard of what one expects will soon be a flood of books on Poland's free trade union movement...
...Ascherson's erudition and-the breadth of his knowledge of recent Polish history, they will no doubt be confused by his consistent effort to exonerate the guilty...
...The Western Left has seized upon those traits of Solidarity most consonant with socialist values: its trade union nature, its radical egalitarianism, its support for worker selfmanagement...
...ended the brief but remarkable period of Solidarity's ascendance...
...at $16.00 per oz...
...Ascherson's telling, it is today unclear whether Stalin intended to incorporate Poland and other East EuroPean states into the Soviet orbit...
...But precisely for this reason the union could have played an important stabilizing role had the government shown a modicum of true masterpieces~ And it is simply absurd to suggest that "from reading them one comes away with the suspicion that this man really felt he had to act the way he did in order to save the nation...
...Men's colognes too...
...It remains in our consciousness because it is an aspect of our values, an affirmation of the universal aspiration of men to be free...
...We might, however, forgive Mr...
...By Mr...
...Ascherson's view of this period is rigidly revisionist, yet even _9 from the point of view of revisionism some of his arguments are startling...
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...Weschler asks: "Isn't Solidarity's own experience of democratic process~the convoluted movement and the agonizingly slow pace of the process--cause for concern when Solidarity is advocating its transposition into the economic realm, where decisions have to be made within the context of a world market that is constantly changing at the speed of a computer printout...
...Essential Products Co., Inc...
...It is not clear to me how a priest who once regarded slum clearance as his earthly mission can devolve into the simple shepherd of his flOck--or how his flock, once aware that such aspirations are possible, can expect him to...
...As Weschler observes, two months before the clampdown, "The government issues statement after statement, each more shrill than the one before...
...The author cites Secretary Byrnes's famous Stuttgart speech in September 1946, where he announced that the U.S...
...For example, he contends accord the ,ar,!~;n lcgal status~ Thus, while readers of The Polish August may be awed by Mr...
...A poll appearing in a Warsaw j o u r n a l . . , reveals that fully forty percent of those interviewed expect a bloody resolution to the crisis sometime in the near future...
...The union's persistence will continue toinspire new works on the Polish struggle for freedom...
...Of the two books, Ascherson's is the more ambitious in scope, with nearly half of it given over to an examination of Poland's postwar history...
...Written and recorded in the months before martial taw, Solidarity reveals a keen and almost uncanny prescience...
...Weschler is successful in capturing ~oland's alternating moods of euphoria and foreboding in the period of Solidarity's heyday...
...His account !ays bare much of the piety and fuzzy thinking that seemed to afflict even some of Solidarity's ablest leaders...
...The Western Right in turn has emphasized Solidarity's rejection of the Communist model, its firm commitment to traditional religious values, its nationalism and patriotism...
...The 17 months in which the movement was ascendant was a remarkable period of free speech and public participation, a period of freedom that cannot be eradicated even by the severe repressions under martial law...
...he even thought he had "leisure to read, to reflect, and converse...
...had " r e - voked its approval of Poland's new Western frontier on the Oder-Neisse line...
...He provides an excellent account of the tensions and negotiations between the union and the government in the period before martial law...
...Ascherson, " L i t t l e remains of the old Western orthodoxy of the early Cold War [which] held that Stalin meant from the outset to reduce the Eastern European states to servile clones of the USSR . . . . " It is an astonishing claim...
...It is perhaps for this reason that planned demonstrations protesting martial law have been so sparsely attended...
...If I were in Dr...
...At every opportunity, he prefers to blame everyone and everything but the source itself...
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...Everybody is jumpy...
...With each successive protest, with each daring Radio Solidarity broadcast, with each new periodical that appears in the Underground, and with mass demonstrations in May and August--all executed under threat of severe reprisals--the Polish people and their trade union movement appear to have passed their test admirably...
...Yet I believe Weschler errs when he argues in the epilogue that Poland "was lapsing into a state of near anarchy...
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...That Stalin needed an "irrefutable argument" when he could rely on the irrefutable Red Army is an innov, ative discovery indeed...
...Because Weschler carries the ideological baggage of the Left, he is incapable of viewing Solidarity as anything other than a movement of increasingly radical proletarians...
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...Society is a Foucault pendulum: By the time the bob has swung back, the ground has shifted underneath...
...Jerry Falwell may not be Julian the Apostate, but nothing can be as it was before...
...Whether the President ever read that little book or not, we do not know...
...Ascherson his lamentable judgments were it not for their grim consistency...
...Doubtless many activists and rank-and-file workers were becoming more militant...
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...One can only hope that the next generation of books will be free of the ideological fetters that prevent both Mr...
...Ascherson strains to mitigate the Party's 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 blame...
...And this in turn resulted in the Polish government's losing "much of the international room to manoeuvre which was so important an element of its relative independence within the Soviet alliance...
...It is Mr...
...Ascherson's contention that those most culpable are the United States and its secretary of state, James Byrnes...
...Both books are written by authors whose biases can be fairly characterized as belonging to the Left...
...and finds that unionists' answers to this and other thorny questions are frequently glib or evasive...
...Yet despite the severity of the martial law clampdown, Solidarity persists and continues to haunt our imaginations...
...Admittedly, when in the latter half of The Polish August Ascherson turns to the emergence of Solidarity, he is on firmer ground...
...Solidarity will persist in th6 underground and eventually will reemerge...
...He therefore fulfilled Burke's prescription for a natural aristocrat by summonipg Dr...
...But even though his sympathies clearly lie with Solidarity, Mr...
...Despite the fact that Poland continued to be occupied by the Red Army well after hostilities had ceased, that the Soviets during the war had instructed Polish Communists to challenge the legitimacy of the Polish governmentin-exil-e and to create their own parallel "government," that all key ministries and institutions in postwar Poland (including the security forces, the army, and the functions of the press) were in Communist hands, and despite the arrests and sentencing in 1945 of General Leopold Okulicki and other representatives of the armed anti-Nazi resistance to long terms of imprisonment, we are expected to believe that Stalin had no clear idea of what he was doing there...
...plus $2.00 delivery charge first bottle, 50 cents each additional one...
...Weschler from examining Solidarity's revolution in all its variety and complexity...
...Own wardrobe/glflsf Write for I . ] _9 on~ pr=en~ ~ 8ema~'s ~ons~e ~ l.:Jl' .IF-~ of smashing British braces/exciting American A'~ f_,h, suspenders...
...On the Right, representatives of major American financial institutions likewise have found Solidarity to pose a threat to their own set of higher interests...
...Praise, however, has not been unqualified...
...And perhaps he did...
...Consequently, Weschler ignores an alternative, though far more persuasive, view of Solidarity as a movement representing the aspirations not only of Poland's working class and intelligentsia, but also of Poland's middle class of middle-level managers and technical intelligentsia...
...It is these educated workers who were and remain Poland's only hope for true economic development and stability...
...In doing so, he persuasively chronicles the evergrowing pressures upon Solidarity's leaders from an increasingly frustrated and radicalizing rank-and-file...
...Weschler senses the growing despair among ordinary Poles: "Fear, frustration and fatigue are setting in: the lines, the shortages, the anxieties about the ~oming winter...
...but, to be brutal about it, the Polish freedom movement has not captured our minds...
Vol. 15 • November 1982 • No. 11
