Outlook Visegrad: An Ominous Shadow

Andrzej Wajda in Polityka believes the Church holds the key to Polish politics.  In the Czech Respekt Václav Havel reveals his next project, Sanatorium. In Hungary’s Népszabadság Róbert Friss predicts a dark future for the West, while František Šebej in the Slovak .týždeň foresees an even darker one for Israel.

English version updated on Thursdays

Gazeta Wyborcza / Duży Format  (Poland), 12.03.2011

Reeling from the shock of reading the most horrific book he has come across in the past few months – Bernard Poulet’s La fin des journaux et l’avenir de l’information [The End of Newspapers and the Future of Information] – Krzysztof Varga confesses: „I love paper. Its texture, its smell - the smell of fresh print in a book that has just made it onto a shelf in a bookshop and from there to mine, but also the faint whiff of mould emanating from the yellowed pages of an old tome picked up in a secondhand bookshop or at a bouquiniste stall in [Warsaw’s] Wilson Square where even the air is not particularly kind to one’s airways. But I also love the smell of fresh newsprint, a paper fetched from a newsagent‘s and gently spread out on the table as I’m about to have my breakfast. The reason for being so gentle is that I want to make sure I don’t rip the pages, for at this point the content of an article or a column seems secondary, the primary purpose being the contact with the paper and the letters printed on it. I love paper the way I love records in sleeves rather than MP3 files, or DVDs in beautifully produced boxes rather than downloaded from the web. I love paper and cannot live without it, just as I am not able to read longer texts on the Internet. News, columns, a feuilleton – maybe, discussion fora – why not; but anything longer – a review, and article, an essay – God forbid! I’m sorry but the web doesn’t stand a chance here, it’s got to be paper. When I contemplate my love of paper it’s the only time I’m glad to be as old as I am and to have grown up in the early eighties, without cable and Internet but with a well-stocked library, my real darkroom, where I perversely delighted in being among bookshelves full of tomes wrapped in rough grey paper. Perhaps these lines are but the roar of a dying mammoth, the death rattle of a collapsing dinosaur, but I just can’t function without reading printed paper. It has certainly resulted in me reading loads of silly nonsense and in wasting thousands of hours through pointless reading but had I not wasted them in this way, I might have squandered them in another, even more unproductive and harmful way. From time to time you have to squander time on silly things, for later reflection on the fact that you have just wasted half a day on nonsense helps you focus on real issues pertaining to the meaning, or – as the case may be – the meaninglessness of life.“

Polityka (Poland), 14.03.2011

In an interview with Jacek Żakowski entitled Eight and a half (decades), Andrzej Wajda, who has recently turned eighty-five, tries to understand the reasons for the rapid decline in the popularity of the ruling Civic Platform and Prime Minister Donald Tusk : „I sympathize with the appeal that Tusk should be left alone. Not because I think that once Tusk is gone, the Right and Justice Party might take over, but because he is being judged according to some abstract criteria that have nothing to do with reality. Wałęsa, when he was getting rid of the communists, was also seen as a redeemer and then suddenly it turned out there had never been a politician worse than he. The same thing happened to Mazowiecki. Why does it always have to be like this in this country? [...] After Kaczyński was gone and the [Civic] Platform arrived, the expectations of the elites must have been too high. Tusk was supposed to right all the wrongs of the past twenty years. Tusk was meant to do everything that others had failed to do. That’s not realistic. And now, three years on, the public believes everything that is wrong is Tusk’s fault. Although for years other people had been taking decisions affecting the economy, the judicial system, the institutions...“  When asked if Balcerowicz is a latter-day Robespierre, trying to send Tusk‘s Danton to the guillotine, Wajda recalls a fantastic story someone told him after he finished filming his Danton: „Robespierre is being taken to the scaffold. All of Paris has come out onto the balconies, everyone wants to take a last look at this hated man before his head is chopped off at last, just as he had had others lose their heads. They watch the Incorruptible One, who had imposed on France an austere revolutionary regime, the asceticism and self-denial he said was required in the name of the cult of reason and enlightenment. The death of the man to whom the Parisians had owed their freedom is now their liberation. And suddenly, as they watch the Incorruptible One, women on the balconies start pulling out the brassieres from their dresses. Their breasts pop out. Freedom! A sign that something new is beginning... Have we, too, not come close to a moment when people finally want to have a good time? Can’t you hear all these voices, those shouts and whispers all around, saying: stop all this ideologizing?! Perhaps the time has finally come to show off and admire our beautiful breasts?“  On his birthday and the bitter discussion of pensions funds: „I never expected to live to this age and certainly not to be still making films. But I have realized that it is I – a man who retired twenty years ago – who am currently the main problem. For Tusk, Balcerowicz, [and other politicians like] Boni, Hausner, and Rostowski. They will have to do something about me.“  And finally, what film would he make now if he were not making a one about Wałęsa? „It would be The Vengeance of the Cross. It seems to me that the Church is the key to the current Polish situation. The role of the Church in Poland, with its stubborn attempts to cut us off from the world. To lock us in this Catholic-national cage, just so that, God forbid, we don’t become secularized and stop going to church. The West, modernization, prosperity – all this equals  secularization. And that’s what the Church is afraid of. And that is why it is putting the dampeners on everything it can. It wants to fence us off from the world at all costs.“

Andrzej Wajda. Photo: Polityka

Népszabadság (Hungary), 05.03.2011

The Faces of Europe and the Death of Multiculturalism is the title of an article in last Saturday’s  Népszabadság whose author, Róbert Friss, paints a bleak picture of Western culture and its failure to come to terms with its nationalism. Citing recent statements by leading European politicians (Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy), who openly admit that the principle of multiculturalism as developed in the 1960s has failed, Friss suggests that the politicians’ anti-multiculturalism rhetoric is not based on conviction but rather on realizing whose votes are key: “These countries might accept, without really understanding, that the framework of political nation-states has passed its sell-by date and that it needs to be replaced by an economic and political alliance of cultural nation-states, where some political and economic autonomy is handed over to society. This is what they ought to prioritize. After all, in a globalized world – barring violent expansion – every country that isolates itself is doomed. From a global perspective the same is true of Europe as a whole. If it fails to create a new, high-quality unity and allows itself to be ruled by nationalism that destroys this unity, it can easily be driven to the global margin from where it will be almost impossible to get back into the mainstream.” While Europe has blamed immigrants and foreigners for its problems, says Friss, “…West European politicians, of course, are not thinking of China, India, let alone Africa. In their minds Muslims and Islam are the main problem.  This might be explained by the fact that ever since the 1960s the most visible immigration has been from Muslim countries. At that time the West European economic boom offered them work, albeit only dirty work, and cultural differences were hidden by day-to-day concerns. In those days the goodwill and prosperity did not demand an enemy, which the present-day toxic atmosphere of the failing state model of prosperity tends to demand. The Muslims are rather handy now.”

HVG (Hungary), 05.03.2011

HVG features an interview with sociologist Gábor Havas, co-author of the recent Hungarian education reform - the so-called Green Book. Gábor Havas, who has investigated the problems of educating children from socially more vulnerable groups, rails against ghettoization and advocates integration. His research has shown that the attainment of Roma children is much higher in integrated schools than in purely or predominantly Roma schools. The interview suggests that the greatest impediment to integrating these children is resistance on the part of parents from other social groups who do not want their children to go to the same schools as Roma children. However, Havas regards integration as crucial for the following reasons:  “Our starting point must be the recognition that a segregated system results only in an  accumulation of problems. Ghetto schools lead directly to unemployment. It is in the interest of all of society to reduce the disparity of opportunities. One way to measure the success of an education system is to look at the degree to which individual generations have mastered the core knowledge that everyone needs regardless of whether they continue in education or of the kind of work they take on. This is how it works in developed countries. International experience shows unequivocally that only those countries can really succeed in education that do not exercise severe selection by age and where the disparities between individual schools aren’t as great as they are in Hungary.”

Gábor Havas. Photo: István Fazekas, HVG

Respekt (Czech Republic), 14.03.2011

Odcházení [Leaving; for trailer and the official film website click here) – perhaps the most eagerly-awaited Czech film ever – opens next week. Jan Gregor asked its director Václav Havel what it is like to have a film debut at the age of 74, and what prompted him to embark on an adventure in movie pictures at this advanced age: “My ambition was neither to make a film for an exclusive club audience nor a so-called popular film, for women or for men. I wanted to make a film about something that will keep the audience thinking for at least a short while after leaving the cinema, something that will stir them up. All they have to do is sit down, watch the film and pay attention, as its themes build up, intertwine and interconnect. But then I’m the last person who has the right to pass judgement on it or recommend it. There can’t be many people who have had the chance to serve as the last president of one country, the first president of another and, at the age of 74, to make a film debut. This might generate increased interest, it might make the film more or less interesting, but it might also provoke resentment. All this is possible and I’m prepared for it all.” And on his future plans: “At the moment, they are at a very early stage and it would be wrong to discuss something that may still change a hundred times. The only thing that is definite is the title of my new play – Sanatorium.” And, last but not least, Václav Havel – a signatory of a recent petition against increasing VAT on books in the Czech Republic – explains how he feels about the technocratic atmosphere prevailing in the country: “It shows that all post-1989 governments have a Marxist way of thinking. They all focus on the so-called material base, which they regard as most important, and regard theatre, film and books as [Marx’s] super-structure, an embellishment. It is obvious that existence affects consciousness but at the same time consciousness affects existence, too. And in this wider context I was pleased to see booksellers and writers raising their voices. In my view this is a protest against this technocratic approach. Even though it is clearly not the only way. All you need to do is compare our country with Austria: Vienna has been rated one of the best places to live; for example, they have the most sophisticated system of overseeing urban development. Or take Germany: as soon as you cross the border you see much greater respect for the countryside, for the soil, an appreciation of what a meadow or a forest is. You can see the Germans are much better at coexisting with the countryside and at cultivating it.”

Odcházení. Photo: Česká televize

.týždeň (Slovakia), 14.03.2011

Once the dust has settled after the Arab upheavals and revolutions, a very different Middle East is likely to emerge. It will not be to everyone’s liking, most certainly not to František Šebej’s: „For Israel it is a question of life and death; yet there is hope. And the country has more than just hope, in spite of its current lack of real allies – it is a technological leader in several industries. Israel, a country of seven million, occupying an area smaller than Slovakia, half of it covered by a desert, a country that suffers from acute shortages of everything, including water, produces its own communication and military satellites that are lighter and more effective than those produced in Europe, and are propelled into orbit by Israeli-made rockets, which have so far proved 100% reliable. Israel fits US-made military aircraft with its own, more advanced, avionics. With the sole exception of the US, with its Predator, Israel is currently the number one producer of small and large pilotless planes, particularly for military purposes. It has developed its own anti-ballistic missile defence system based on the Arrow system. It has highly advanced intelligent bomb and rocket ammunition as well as modern nuclear arms (although it does not admit it) and an excellent air fleet. In particular, it has an army whose quality is unparalleled in the region. Yet everything indicates that, from an Israeli perspective, the new Middle East that will emerge once the dust of the Arab revolutions has settled will be an even more dangerous place than it has been so far. And if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, which is likely in the foreseeable future, the shadow it will cast will be even more ominous than it is now.”

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