Eminentoes / Adam's Curse

...And the more alienated he becomes from the lives of ordinary Poles, the greater his contempt for them...

...files himself...

...Their opponents, on the other hand, are guilty until they prove their innocence—even if there is no evidence of wrongdoing...

...He even befriended Jerzy Urban, who now runs a semi-pornographic scandal sheet...

...In those days, you could hardly pick up a Communist newspaper without reading a slur about either Adam Michnik or his friend Jacek Kuron...

...People in Poland were afraid of Communists," he said in an interview with Jaruzelski, which the general appended to his memoirs...

...Larded with references to himself—thirty Is, seven mys, and two mes, it reads like the effluent of a man-who can't stand the death penalty and is using the contradictions within the case law only as a pretext for renouncing it...

...Those who argue that justice should be done have suffered the full force of his holy rage...

...One suspects this provides a strong disincentive to disagree with the editor's opinions...

...In fact, Walesa's presidential record is very disappointing, but he is hardly a tyrant...

...Michnik still preaches high ideals—tolerance, fairness, forgiveness—but in a new context...

...Only the former Communists are treated with tolerance and compassion...

...My brief, as deputy minister of defense, was to bring the army we inherited from the Warsaw Pact closer to compatibility with NATO...

...Michnik has painted Communists not as villains possibly deserving forgiveness, but as victims: of witch hunts, prejudice and discrimination...

...Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's martial law dictator, to help promote the general's memoirs...

...Interestingly, Michnik announced afterward that many of his colleagues from the underground were indeed informers...

...Michnik was ordered by the courts to apologize to a former interior minister—a former dissident whom he now dislikes—after Gazeta attributed to him compromising remarks the man never uttered...

...At least two journalists resigned recently when they and other employees were asked to sign an agreement never to disagree with Gazeta's editorial policy in public...

...For Scalia, something must be wrong with a conclusion (the death penalty is unconstitutional) so plainly at odds with what the text of the Constitution clearly provides...

...For a year, it was the only non-Communist newspaper in Poland and its circulation skyrocketed...

...In fact, the threat has come from the left, and it endangers sane economic policy rather than democracy itself...

...He is still popular in the West...

...But more frequently, Michnik compares Poland to Spain after Franco, a country where it made sense to re-admit former adversaries into the mainstream once they had given up power...

...Odd as it may seem, the first question that should be asked at his successor's confirmation hearing is whether the Constitution should have any role in deciding cases brought under it...

...Many liberals;after all, want to forget that they had a soft spot for the Soviet Union...

...I myself have savored Michnik's duplicity first-hand...

...He would inter the line of cases requiring unlimited jury discretion...

...For months, Gazeta survived on the cheap credits available only to state companies...

...Jaruzelski but not to his former friends...

...Naturally, many of these people were very brave after they broke with Communism...

...f Michnik's new friendships and politics were merely the intellectual affectations of one deluded man, they could be shrugged off like, say, Sartre's Stalinism...

...Michnik himself is already halfway down a well-trodden path of declining idols...

...Partly thanks to Gazeta's stand, Gen...

...Kuklinski remains an exile in the U.S...

...Michnik's paper took a robust line on Kuklinski...

...You can hardly read a story from Eastern Europe in the New York Times without an authoritative quote from Michnik...

...This is the wing of the dissident movement that descends, literally, from People's Poland: many of its top leaders are either children of Communist Poland's establishment, or disgruntled former members of that establishment themselves...

...The one thing that might have prevented some of the losers in the transition from trusting the left would have beeh the memory of forty-five years of Communist oppression and lies...

...Yet, paradoxically, many of those who do queue for their welfare checks have been tempted to vote for post-Communist parties, who promised a "third way"—a gentler, kinder pace of reform, looser monetary policy and generous handouts...

...He said that "Lech Walesa will not be president of democratic Poland" and that Walesa's thinking reminded him of ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fiihrer...

...The underground press printed his books and leaflets, which had heroic names like Letters from Prison or History of Honor in Poland...

...Gazeta proclaimed on the front page of its first issue that it would "represent the viewsand opinions of the entire free society, various opposition strands...

...171 Ow& Chobielin, Poland A dam Michnik used to be my hero...

...Jerzy Urban, the odious spokesman for the martial law regime, routinely denounced him as a proxy of Western imperialism...

...They are citizens of a democracy, and their concerns—jobs, mortgages, law and order, taxes, justice (including for Communist criminals)—are beneath Michnik...

...his half-brother was a Stalinist judge who sentenced Polish patriots to death in the 1950s...

...Having failed to live up to the intellectual challenges of the new era, they justify themselves by inventing or exaggerating new threats...

...The Communists had him locked up...

...Former members of the Communist elite have amassed enormous wealth trading their connections for money...

...It was founded during the dying months of Communism under an agreement between the government and representatives of the democratic opposition...

...Many Poles, however, have watched the political transformation of Adam Michnik with growing bewilderment...

...T ake the Kuklinski affair, which flared up after a Washington Post article revealed that Col...

...He hectors and denounces, hysterical, self-centered, humorless...

...The question is what to do about it, and Blackmun and Scalia offer quite different answers...

...In effect, the argument goes, we should forgive the Communists because they were Moscow's puppets...

...That, of course, is the charitable interpretation of his opinion...

...Then he praised the very man who had kept him in jail—General Kiszczak, who used the months during Poland's transition to democracy to destroy thousands of inconvenient documents...

...The case law about the Constitution is for him "the supreme law...

...But could it be that Michnik's reputation for anti-Communism was founded on a misperception in the first place...

...In Michnik's reckoning, a "traitor" like Kuklinski deserves harsher treatment than the tyrant he "betrayed...

...You are certainly much more likely to bump into a former Communist functionary at one of Warsaw's flash nightclubs than at the welfare office...

...The first person it asked to comment on the affair was Jaruzelski, and it followed Jaruzelski's line throughout...

...I was not afraid because I considered it my system...

...Michnik calls his own position "anti-Communism with a human face...

...granted to the nomenklatura by the old regime, and opposed the return of property seized by the Communist party...

...Other dissidents who applied to start newspapers on similar terms were turned down...

...In this alienation and contempt may lie one final reason Michnik and his admirers in the West have made common cause: fear of being marginalized...

...W by is Adam Michnik today more sympathetic to his former totalitarian enemies than to his erstwhile anti-totalitarian allies...

...I wrote to Poland's most noble and intellectually scrupulous voice, expressing my surprise at such tactics...

...Why will he give the benefit of the doubt to Gen...

...The outside world agreed...

...Gazeta's headlines sneered...

...Czeslaw Milosz said that Michnik represented "the best tradition of the Polish intelligentsia, that of liberalism and tolerance," and compared him to Gandhi...

...Michnik's father was a prominent pre-war Communist and collaborated with the Soviets during the war: his mother wrote Communist history books...

...They have been accused not only of intolerance but also of the "politics of hatred," of "troglodyte" and even "zoological" anti-Communism...

...Michnik carries on as if nothing happened...

...with a life sentence to his name...

...If denazification was the same as revenge, then no wonder Michnik interprets every cry for justice as bloodthirsty extremism...

...The New Republic called him "Poland's most noble and intellectually scrupulous voice...

...For my labors, the paper hinted darkly—without offering any evidence—that I was probably a British spy...

...Junior staff are disciplined in other ways...

...I expected a fair-minded reply and an apology...

...In Poland people say that Michnik zionie tolerancja, roughly, "reeks of tolerance...

...Michnik has proved repeatedly wrong in his most important political analyses...

...The Democratic Union, and Gazeta with it, have since adopted the policy we launched, but at the time it was still anathema...

...Adam Michnik was appointed editor by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa...

...Scalia admits this futility, too, but unlike Blackmun he asks whether the commands are in fact constitutional...

...in 1991, Polish television showed Michnik going off with Urban to a birthday party for another prominent Communist...

...Gazeta Wyborcza is described in sympathetic profiles simply as "Poland's largest independent daily," but its origins are a little more complicated...

...Wheeling out someone like Michnik—who shares those prejudices but is actually a connoisseur of Communist jails—gives them perfect cover...

...After that, I began to hear his name on Radio Free Europe again and again, through the static caused by jamming...

...As Emerson put it, "Every hero becomes a bore at last...

...But today's ordinary Poles are not like that...

...Not that he is inconsistent...

...The paper no longer carries the Solidarity logo: appalled by its political bias, the union decided to strip Gazeta of its historic sign...

...Like kremlinologists, arms control experts, and military officers in the wake of the Cold War, Michnik and his fellow travelers in the West are too old to change careers...

...A nybody can get it wrong from time to time, but Michnik has puffed himself up into a moralist and a prophet...

...First, he defended the special pensions Radek Sikorski's book about Poland, Full Circle, will be published next year by Simon & Schuster...

...But Michnik is the editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest daily...

...Blackmun will probably retire this summer or the next...

...Jaruzelski today postures as the father of the nation while Col...

...Michnik helped them to forget...

...Blackmun argues in Collins that the court should "admit the futility of the efforts to harmonize" the two "irreconcilable constitutional commands" and accept "the fact that the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution...

...For exactly the same reasons, Colonel Kuklinski is a hero to others: he is, after all, a man who daily risked his life to harm Soviet power, and succeeded brilliantly...

...Gazeta has become the mouthpiece for one faction of the old dissident movement: the center-left, now organized into a political party known as the Democratic Union...

...Communists skillfully played up the illusion that it might be possible to have capitalism's full shelves with socialism's work_ ethic...

...Perhaps Michnik, like other prominent members of the Democratic Union, cannot bring himself to condemn his youth, his family, and his friends...

...Michnik protested that these "witch hunts" would lead to "civil war...

...The more the Communists abused him, the more I liked him...

...I was a member of a government that tried to pension off the former U.B...

...Only the regime's stooges thought otherwise: in those days, he was the most eloquent voice of free Poland...

...Impoverishment of the mind and spirit will always surface...

...All those who have lost by the economic reforms thought back nostalgically to thegood old days when rents were low, unemployment unknown, and work stress inconceivable...

...To former Communists Kuklinski is a traitor, who broke his pledge of loyalty to Poland and her steadfast ally, the Soviet Union...

...When Waldemar Lysiak's Najlepszy, a book that criticized Michnik, made it onto the Polish best-seller list, Gazeta mysteriously failed to publish the list that week...

...Together, the editor and his newspaper have helped to whitewash the past, making former Communists electable for the first time...

...No one disputes that Michnik played a heroic role in that resistance—the problem, perhaps, is that it is a role he is too vain to give up...

...Yet, while Franco may have been a dictator, with the blood of thousands on his hands, his Spain was a sovereign nation...

...Michnik has said that de-Communization would be like denazification in Germany and epuration in France—"expiation of col64 The American Spectator April/May 1994 laboration...

...secret-service informants who still held key government positions...

...Only during a recent election campaign, when Poland's lax libel laws were temporarily tightened, could Gazeta's bias be exposed...

...But since the system's collapse, in various recent controversies, Michnik and Gazeta have taken positions that seem directly contrary to the old dissident ethos...

...In the spring of 1990, Michnik suppressed a major article by a Gazeta staff writer (who later resigned) that advocated disbanding the Communist-dominated parliament and called for free electionsMichnik has since argued that free elections could not have been proclaimed at that time because nobody advocated them...

...His political concerns and language are still stuck in the era of resistance against totalitarianism...

...But that way also meant revenge, the settling of accounts, retribution...

...Most Poles, for instance, are naturally proud of the fact that no show trials such as that inflicted on the Ceausescus in 1989 tarnished the rebirth of their democracy, but Michnik opposes any de-Communization, even on the largely symbolic Czech model, to say nothing of the systematic pruning carried out in East Germany...

...Michnik's reaction: "I pity them...

...Formally, it was a limited company with three private shareholders, bin that was regarded as a minor detail at the time...

...Some have offered a personalized explanation...

...Ryszard Kuklinski, a member of the Polish General Staff in the 1970s and early 1980s, had dispatched everything that passed across his desk to the CIA, including plans for the imposition of martial law...

...The collapse of Communism means a decline in the social status of intellectuals...

...Communist authorities granted the newspaper printing capacity, newsprint, and office space, at a time when all of these commodities were impossible for any other private newspaper to obtain...

...Instead, Michnik wrote back saying that I should declare publicly my innocence...

...That he never opposed the system itself, but rather its failures...

...And because it was mine, I had nothing to fear...

...This requirement means that a jury might undo what under a constitutional death-penalty statute it otherwise properly would do...

...Michnik said that the greatest threat to Poland's democracy would be "a combination of chauvinism, xenophobia, populism, and authoritarianism...

...In fact, this tone has begun to The American Spectator April/May 1994 65 backfire: in recent months the Polish public has become skeptical of Gazeta's strident tone and its circulation has been dropping...

...0 ne would think that in any contest between the Constitution and something else, a judge would side with the Constitution...

...Unfortunately, it does not seem to occur to Blackmun that the Constitution is "the supreme law of the land...

...He now uses the idiom of liberalism to browbeat not Communists but anti-Communists...

...And it did not occur to me that there are people in Poland who thought much worse of this government, but did not speak up, because they were simply afraid...

...In a market economy it is bankers, ad executives, and management consultants who are masters of the universe, not essay writers...

...A zealous Marxist in his early youth," according to Milosz, Michnik went to school and university with the privileged children of the Communist elite...

...Mysteriously, Gazeta is now owned not by a nominal company, nor by Solidarity, but by its senior editors, including Michnik...

...Gazeta has even invented news stories from scratch—there have been faked Ukrainian kidnappings, fictional purges of the Polish army, even improper defense ministry arms deals with Iran...

...I first read his name in Opinia, a samizdat newsletter my mother brought home from the office sometime in the late 1970s...

...It still goes down well in Western literary circles, where Michnik is more in demand than ever...

...Communist Poland, on the other hand, was created by Stalin with a band of Soviet agents and had little freedom of action—indeed, that is Jaruzelski's alibi for introducing martial law, and Michnik's for exonerating him...

...11 66 The American Spectator April/May 1994...

...The front page carried the Solidarity logo and everybody assumed it would be Solidarity's newspaper...

...He also applied a double standard: as a member of an ad hoc "historical commission" he has looked into the U.B...

...In fact, most Polish dissidents regarded Polish Communism not as "our" system but as "their" system—the Soviet system...

...This was classic Michnikism: Communists and their informers are innocent until proven guilty—and Michnik will do his utmost to prevent tons of archives that would settle the matter from coming to light...

...Michnik appeared on a Paris talk show with Gen...

...Where Blackmun defers to the case law in order to condemn the Constitution, Scalia defers to the Constitution, judging the case law by it...

...Blackmun's description of the incompatible lines of jurisprudence since Furman is accurate, although he fails to give credit where credit is due: his antagonist in Collins, Justice Scalia, pointed out the conflicting case law four years ago, in Walton v. Arizona...

...Not a single prominent Communist has so much as been touched in revenge...

...While proclaiming a high-minded devotion to the ideals of democracy and free speech, Gazeta's bitchy hounding of selected politicians contributes to the atmosphere of spite and paranoia that reigns in Polish politics...

...Former Stalinist prosecutors live in luxury Warsaw flats and draw special pensions granted by the old regime...

...In fact, Communists have thrived in free Poland...

...What a hard-working spy...

...Each one of them now possesses a package of shares, possibly worth over a million dollars, which he would have to sell for a nominal sum were he to resign or be sacked...