Solidarity endures a crisis of conscience

...Tadeusz Mazowiecki's accomplishments are many and varied, but his earlier career, even by the very different set of rules for playing politics imposed by the Communists, represents an unconventional path to power...

...Yet from his very first presentation to the Sejm, Poland's parliament, Mazowiecki made it clear there would be no vendetta against the nomenklatura, that the criteria for retaining a position within the political bureaucracy would be competence and loyalty...

...Only a few days later, Jerzy Turowicz, the chief editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, chose to draw upon the vast capital of respect and admiration he has accumulated over the years to assemble in Krakow some of Poland's most prominent professors and physicians, journalists and artists, all turned political reformers and all elected members of the Sejm, who share his growing unease...

...When Minister Alexander Hall insisted on the government's policy of court-determined settlements, his words contrasted sharply with demands from some members, part of the now ascendant "opposition," that all Communist properties be appropriated...

...Kozlowski's career has made him a prominent symbol of the Catholic intellectual opposition to the ancien regime...

...While social temperance in Poland has been-and remains-remark- able, anger and frustration are never far from the surface...

...Faithful to the Christian prescription of our culture, we distinguished the sin from the sinners...

...Nice Work, to be fair, is about a great deal more than sex...

...Though that version was passed on through the Polish school system, everyone knew differently...

...Yes, it is true that in the face of the many pitfalls of contemporary politics we stand helpless, and so here it is precisely that we reach for our roots, to the ethics of the strength of the powerless or, put simply, to the injunctions of the Ten Commandments...

...We proclaimed that our politics would be conducted without violence, without hatred, without revenge...

...Knowing this, the audience also knew why no apologia from General Pudysz would ever satisfy...

...After struggling through a synopsis of the anti-Communist rhetoric he had heard in the Sejm, Michnik made it clear he would have nothing to do with that sort of politics...

...Unlike the well-orchestrated ceremonials that once characterized this part of the world, at this Mass, Mazowiecki was surrounded by fellow worshipers in the most spontaneous way, his presence, his prayers, were joined to theirs...

...Everything else is a lie and has the bitter taste of hypocrisy...

...At the moment of Solidarity's tenth anniversary, August 31, its "uncommon common man" was determined to make sure that the workers-who formed Solidarity and kept its spirit alive through a decade of repression, who ultimately were the social force that reformed the social contract-not become the primary victims of a restructured economy...

...Mazowiecki's insistence on bringing Kozlowski into the government should not be construed to suggest that the Christian spirit of forbearance has made him soft on Communist crime...

...Until recently, if one were to highlight the chief symbol associated with Walesa, it would have been the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa-Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Poland-which he has worn on his lapel since emerging from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk a decade ago...

...Coming into middle age in the English midlands in the early eighties is not unlike coming into middle age some years later in America...

...On the domestic front, the most obvious sign of a break with the past is Mazowiecki's appointment of Krzysztof Kozlowski to direct Polish surveillance...

...Like virtually all the other major Solidarity figures, he was "interned" after the Jaruzelski government announced a "state of emergency "on December 13,1981...

...Michnik sums up this position in the following way: We are fated to a life lived out in tension, in uncertainty, in eternal risk...

...As the debate progressed, the irritation and anger directed at the government's position became more and more intense...

...Finally Nice Work is about commitment to teaching and to family: Robyn does not take the plum job offered to her by Morris Zapp at Euphoria...

...He was immediately challenged on why, in ninety-three cases of violent attacks against members of the opposition during the' 80s, only one had resulted in a successful prosecution...

...The massacre of the Polish officer corps at Katyn by the NKVD became in postwar years the chief symbol of the lie that was public life...

...He maintained correct, even respectful relations with Jaruzelski and Czeslaw Kiszczak (then the head of Poland's internal security forces), the men most responsible for imprisoning him...

...And again: "We perceive acts of violence, we hear cries of hatred, we encounter calls for revenge...

...Why, asked Michnik, the sudden, fierce delight in kicking those who are down, the ever-widening ripples of intolerance, the desire to cart the ancien regime off to prison en masse, the dreams of revenge, "this chauvinism, this xenophobia, this egalitarian demagoguery...

...These days Najder gets to follow Poland's post-Communist sociopolitical conflicts up close...

...Solidarity was born in 1980 after his triumphal return as John Paul II...

...The "war at the top" then turned into the "battle over Walesa" and now we have the "war over Solidarity," with its key players-Walesa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, along with Adam Michnik, Bronislaw Geremek, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski-as the principal antagonists, and Solidarity's religious underpinnings most at stake...

...The hatred was palpable...

...Now he chairs a special commission investigating notorious cases of police abuse...

...We also hope that he has no firm purpose of amendment...

...Non-Christians such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron (two of the principal figures associated with KOR, the Workers Defense Committee) accepted these tenets, along with their accompanying overlay of religious symbolism, as readily as professed Catholics such as Walesa, or Poland's current premier, Tadeusz Mazowiecki...

...Meanwhile in the Sejm, the struggle went on to allot equitably the properties of the now defunct PZPR, the United Polish Workers' Party of Gomulka, Gierek, Jaruzelski...

...This spirit found expression, however subdued, in the phlegmatic character of Poland's first postwar non-Communist premier...

...Ever since last spring when he initiated the "war at the top" against the nomenklatura, Poland's "reformed" politics has become bellicose...

...Thus that small pin on Walesa's lapel has carried an obvious, potent message to Polish society, identifying the real patriots, marking Solidarity, rather than the "historically inevitable" Communists, as the organic outgrowth of the Polish past...

...He is the author of The Church, the Left, the Dialogue, but he is not a Christian...

...We can only guess his thoughts as he winks slyly at whatever Presence watches the charade and at the blackness beyond the grille...

...He has been a regular visitor to Poland...

...Then Adam Michnik came to the podium...

...What was particularly moving was the presence of "God's people," old women especially, remnants of what is left of ethnic Poland within the current borders of the Soviet Union...

...rather, because of an unexpected legacy, she stays on at Rummidge and even provides the venture capital for Vic's nascent company and renascent family...

...They constantly reiterated that Solidarity was grounded in a Christian belief in nonviolence...

...What gave it special impact was that all the participants along with the viewers knew which that "one" was: the murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko...

...So all we Poles, say Michnik and Tischner in solidarity, are children of totalitarianism, and carry within ourselves the habits, customs, and scars of that system...

...Possible, at least, when the opposition had both the continuity and courage to take perestroika and glasnost more seriously than their patron had ever intended...

...And the communal repetition of the words, "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us," was no hollow vocalization...

...Kozlowski, a philosopher and journalist, has been a member of the editorial staff of the Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, since 1956, and in recent times its principal figure, after Jerzy Turowicz...

...among ourselves, find some way of searching for common interests in the economy, where the incompatibilities of those interests will be significantly greater than at present...

...In some cases, such as that of Marek Edelman, the only leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising to survive, their very existence is a rebuke to the politics of hatred and violence...

...Here modern Polish nationalism and religious consciousness meet...

...Rokita was forced to reiterate the limits of his parliamentary mandate and to call attention to the lack of cooperation by the security forces...

...The show featured footage from the December 16, 1981, "pacification" by the Zomo, a paramilitary security force, of the strike at the Wujek mine resisting martial law...

...The delight he takes in the literary theology which sees God as the "ultimate floating signifier" allows him a Wizard-of-Oz-like godhead-only he invites us to come behind the throne and watch the machinery of illusion and effect...

...At the heart of this debate between the "Walesa" and "Michnik" factions is coming to terms with Poland's Communist past...

...Jachowicz writes for Poland's leading newspaper, the Solidarity-inspired Gazeta Wyborcza...

...A reliable gauge of this political atmosphere is Interpellation, a TV show, much of whose popularity rests on the opportunity for viewers to call in and ask direct questions of an expert panel...

...The deaths associated with the Wujek incident are part of the litany of proletarian saints that links worker resistance from Poznan in 1956 to Gdansk in 1970...

...As a result of leaping to escape the fire, his wife Maria was killed, his daughter seriously injured...

...Tischner, in an article placed in fraternal proximity to that of Michnik's, made clear what Polish intellectuals, clerical and lay, Christian and non-Christian, think is the essential precondition for a stable, successful parliamentary democracy: the restoration of a code of ethics grounded in a sense of individual responsibility...

...These, along with the deaths that occurred in demonstrations such as those in Lubin (August 31,1982), figured prominently in the discussion...

...Michnik's intellectual talents match his personal courage...

...Now that the "war" is no longer against the Communists, but has become fratricidal, can Solidarity's Christian outlook be preserved...

...Viewed from this perspective, the recrafting of national policies is a constant opportunity-given our theme, perhaps we should say, temptation-to pay the Communists back in kind for a half-century of persecution...

...In fact, since he was appointed chairman of Solidarity's Citizens' Committees by Lech Walesa, he has become enmeshed in them...

...Reading David Lodge is also like overhearing a confession, an elaborate, improbable, and deliberately shocking confession, meant to redden the ears of reverend father...

...During the night of April 22 an unknown perpetrator(s) doused the door of Jerzy Jachowicz's apartment with gasoline...

...The end of a totalitarian system does not mean the end of totalitarian practices and thought...

...Mazowiecki and his key Solidarity asso-ciates in this coalition government continue to resist the temptation, arguing that Christian, not Machiavellian, ethics represent intelligent moral guidelines for policy, and are, in the end, more realistic...

...Lodge's heels seem to poke from under the curtain and wriggle as he half-remembers and half-invents detail after detail...

...Far from minimizing political differences within Solidarity, the Walesa camp has chosen to accentuate conflict...

...And we know that this tradition does not permit us to resign from the truth with impunity...

...But that does not mean that we know nothing...

...That union was especially obvious in the June '87 homily he gave in Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, when he affirmed that Catholics through the Eucharist possess a priceless "solidarity" in Christ...

...The official version represented the massacre as yet another Nazi atrocity...

...Everyone hopes so, but with the passing of the Communist threat the question of Solidarity's moral vision is now the source of dispute...

...At that same moment, the week of May 6th, Michnik used Powszechny as a forum to catalogue the symptoms of sickness, first in the Sejm itself, and then in politics more generally: overwhelming ambitions run riot, like weeds, surrounding and strangling the first fruits of a newly planted democracy...

...arrested and sentenced to three years in 1985 (amnestied in 1986...

...From Czestochowa began the successful struggle to win Poland back...

...And even then the key element in his Russian itinerary was the visit to Katyn...

...Why the sudden explosion of hatred to all those who are different, to scapegoats like gypsies, or those infected with AIDS?To people such as Michnik who have dedicated their lives to freeing society from the shackles of totalitarianism, the flawed character of their Prometheus unchained is a source of special anguish...

...First arrested in the '60s as a University of Warsaw student, he spent a large part of the '80s "sitting," as Poles call it, interned by martial law: accused in 1982 of trying to overthrow the government (amnestied in 1984...

...For Walesa, by contrast, what matters most is how to empower the hitherto powerless...

...If we are to die to that life and rise to a better one we must return our politics to an ethic that does not try to shift blame, but which forthrightly accepts the inverse: each individual is responsible-for everyone and everything...

...And for that, there is no acceptable defense...

...He became pope in October 1978...

...At the end of his address he haltingly forced out the declaration in a fashion everyone could understand that he would not be a party to hatred...

...The response was processions behind empty picture frames all around the country-to Czestochowa, of course...

...In Najder's views restoring Solidarity-with its fusion of religious values to the struggle for economic-political reform-offered the best chance to reverse the fragmentation produced by the corrosion of totalitarianism, a fragmentation sure to be exacerbated by the painful transition to a market economy and private initiative...

...Among the many sources of tension surrounding the first official state visit to the Soviet Union of an entourage from the Solidarity-directed government, the pilgrimage to Katyn was the most profound...

...The Mazowiecki government has right from the start formulated its foreign policy in a fashion intended to make this break with Communist Polish governments unmistakable...

...He repeats with a difference that theme in each of these comic novels...

...Whatever faith the man, David Lodge, now professes (and tell me, gentle Reader, what hermeneutic do we use to interpret the words, "the man...

...We are children of our Judeo-Christian culture and we know that this culture, while prescribing loyalty to the government, only permits bending one's knees before God...

...Any truthful answer would call into question the very nature of the former surveillance system...

...the personal plots and intrigues...

...He is a candidate more likely to head a Catholic newspaper than a government...

...If anyone could be excused for roasting a Communist or two over a slow fire, he was the man...

...Polish resistance to communism proved so persistent because its two-century tradition of religiously inspired opposition found its culmination in Karol Wojtyla, who does see crosses in the sky...

...A Polish journalist, also leading a double life (as a waiter in an Ann Arbor hotel), interviewed Najder for his assessment of Poland's prospects...

...the perverse technique of maligning all opponents as one-time embezzlers or crypto-Communists...

...It is unlikely that Time's "Man of the Decade," Mikhail Gorbachev, set out to transform his empire because, like Constantine, he saw a cross in the sky...

...As their common call to the Polish conscience made plain, they are far from certain about the ultimate success of the Polish democratic experiment...

...must be taken seriously as a moral imperative if the struggle over its material form is to produce both life-giving and life-preserving fruit.-giving and life-preserving fruit...

...The premier is by training a lawyer...

...the majority of victims were shot in the back...

...The question was, of course, rhetorical...

...we know it is grounded in a Catholic childhood...

...We are children of our tradition...

...The most important consequence of this fusion of Solidarity to Catholicism was that, when times got tough after the imposition of martial law in December 1981, the leaders of Solidarity fought the temptation to pay the Communists back in kind...

...After all," he pointed out, "when we emerge from under the mantle of the nomenklatura and an ideologically dictated economic system we will have to find some way of coming to an understanding MARK O'CONNOR is assistant director of the honors program at Boston College...

...Thus the spectacle of a Catholic Mass celebrated in Latin, Polish, and Russian, in the bitter cold of a Russian night at a grave site surrounded by the shadows of giant pines, took on the aspect of a modern miracle, a proof of God's immanence...

...SOLIDARITY ENDURES A CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE RESISTING THE URGE FOR REVENGE MARK O'CONNOR In April 1988, Professor Zdzislaw Najder, an internationally recognized expert on Joseph Conrad, was carrying on a perfectly Conradian existence: lecturing about literature at the University of Michigan while living under a death sentence imposed in Poland during martial law for Najder's "traitorous" collaboration with Radio Free Europe...

...At Lubin police fired into the crowd as people were fleeing...

...During martial law this attitude was written off as hopelessly romantic, and one began to hear "Polish messianism" used as a catch phrase to describe how out of touch the opposition was with the way politics actually functions...

...above all, he is concerned with replacing the Communist machtstaat with a rechtsstaat...

...Michnik suffers from a severe stammer under stress...

...It is still not clear that the pope's appeal is being heeded and his prayers answered...

...In two subsequent visits during the "lean years," of the '80s, Wojtyla nurtured the link between social justice and Catholic belief...

...It would necessarily have to begin by acknowledging that the security police served as shock troops for the Polish state in its war against Polish society...

...That will only be possible under a broadly accepted, and universally applied, standard of law...

...General Pudysz, representing the ancien regime's surveillance apparatus, took issue with the charges...

...He had received anonymous warnings to stop...

...only after this did he turn toward Moscow...

...Yet his policies of perestroika and glasnost sufficiently unfroze the politics of Central Europe that room for maneuver became possible...

...He realizes that social stability will be forged out of the brittle, and bitter, class-divided remnants of Communist rule only if a society habituated to distrusting government can come to trust it...

...And with everyone in Poland who opposed communism, Mazowiecki has a lifetime of scores to settle: opportunities denied, talents underutilized, harassments petty and large...

...These noble sentiments wrested from a recalcitrant tongue were the first prominent manifestation of a broad consensus among the intellectuals that there is an urgent need to rise above the battles over particular issues and press for a different sort of political reform...

...If his decision to run for president means confrontation with former Communists or for that matter with former allies, such as Michnik and Mazowiecki, so be it...

...Najder singled out Solidarity-at that time still banned-as the key to any solution, the one hope for a way out of Poland's economic and moral morass...

...his 1989-90 visit was supported by a grant from the International Research and Exchange Board...

...The martyrdom of Popieluszko followed by the trial of the security personnel who killed him are critical political events in recent Polish history...

...The voices became ever more heated...

...But whether or not Poles carry off their great sociopolitical experiment and create a new version of their old republic, their struggle to keep Solidarity a vehicle for social justice should make clear to all those who are inclined to trivialize politics-East or West-that the preeminent political question since Plato, "What is the Good...

...Of the 146 articles he wrote during its first year, the majority were devoted to investigating the security apparatus...

...The monastery at Czestochowa and its famous icon have been at the heart of political consciousness since the seventeenth century when Sweden failed to conquer Czestochowa after overwhelming the rest of Poland...

...One Thursday evening last April, the featured guest was Jan Maria Rokita, a member of the Sejm who cut his political teeth as the head of Solidarity's student branch at Cracow's Jagiellonian University...

...As viewers called in, the incidents of abuse and the demands for action began to multiply...

...Robyn's assertion about "repetition" refers to the dangers of too uniform a literary curriculum and canon, by extension to the nature of the factory work that she has witnessed, to post-industrial England and the ways of corporations, and to the uniformity of university students...

...Mazowiecki's first major trip abroad was to the bishop of Rome...

...The combination has brought him international recognition: the Laureat Prix de la Liberte and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights...

...Where social justice has been so long denied, the temptations to score-settling are extreme...

...Indeed the cult of the "Black Madonna" is so universal that during Gomulka's time as first secretary in the 1960s, the Communists forbade display of the icon in public...

...indeed, when he became premier he was still vice-president of the Warsaw branch of KIK, the Catholic Intellectuals' Club, which he had helped establish in 1957...

...At moments we feel like the sorcerer's apprentice who unleashed an incalculable power...

...the pompous displays of belated courage...

...John Paul's "Appeal for Unity and Solidarity" on June 11, urged that the war of words cease, that Poles all over the world turn in prayer towards Czestochowa, beseeching God that this common prayer be transformed into a common consensus...

...And now there are ninety-four cases...

...Our host for dinner has got to the port stage and is expansive in his insistence on the variety of sameness, of the way in which we deal not with absolutes intersecting time, but only with time which time and time again is betrayed by language...

...As the Reverend Jozef Tischner, one of Poland's most respected and well known theologians, has observed, because communism is a warped reflection of religion, the church (once again) triumphant must acknowledge that, after a half century of subjection, its Catholic faithful to some extent perceive themselves in a deformed way...