Details were important, so he counted the feathers in a bird's tail with the children, distinguished between the shapes of leaves, and began conversations with seemingly unimportant things, such as what was for dinner today. Magdalene, the sinner, was in his catechesis a woman gossiped about by nasty busybodies, whom they wanted to stone to death, but whom Jesus defended.
“For example, I described David's fight with Goliath in great detail,” recalled Jan Twardowski. “I mentioned how many stones each of them had. Then the children paid attention, but if I spoke in general terms, they got bored. (...) For example, the flood! Jonah in the belly of the whale! A mass of colourful images, even more than in the Gospel.”
Above all, however, he showed the children compassion.
He recounted: ‘I once said to one boy, “Dear Stefek,” and he reacted very vividly: “How nicely you speak to me, Father! Others call me a donkey or a disgrace to my family.”’
He bought shoes for a barefoot girl. Her mother appeared at the presbytery.
“I'm from the UB,” she said. “You've baptised my child. I've been ordered to keep an eye on you because you're new here. But I won't say anything bad, I can assure you.”
The parish of Żbików was frequently visited by secret police officers who disapproved of the political content of the plays written by parish priest Franciszek Dyżewski (1881-1953) and staged in the parish theatre.
Jan Twardowski recalled that Father Aleksander Kamiński had promised to keep a package safe for someone. He placed it under his bed. The UB happened to be conducting a search of the vicarage at that time. The parcel contained a machine gun. Kamiński was to be sentenced to a year and a half in prison. His lawyer defended him by suggesting that the curate was mentally ill, for which a psychiatrist acquaintance had written prescriptions. After his return, Father Kamiński admitted that he had been forced to report on every clergyman he knew. He said that Jan Twardowski wrote poems and was not very lucid.
One day, UB officers came for Father Twardowski.
It must have been after October 1949 when, at a convention of veterans' organisations, the idea arose to create a movement of patriotic priests supporting the communist system. Initially, the patriotic priests included military chaplains, former camp prisoners and people in conflict with the church authorities. Over time, priests who were not associated with the veterans' movement began to join them, often bribed, intimidated or blackmailed. Patriotic priests took part in ‘spontaneous’ rallies and demonstrations.
“Two gentlemen from the Security Office arrived,” recalled Jan Twardowski, “to inform us that we had to go to the capital for a discussion meeting. They mentioned the names of the parish priest and my predecessor instead of mine. “That’s not my name,” I protested, “I can’t go.”
They returned. Jan Twardowski hid himself, and they only took the parish priest.
But the Security Service did not give up. The next morning, they came for Father Twardowski. They took him to the Security Service building in Włochy, near Warsaw.
He said: "After three hours of waiting in the corridor, they let me into the room. Six men were sitting at the table, ready to interrogate me. They were angry with me.”
“Why didn't you come?
“Because I wasn't invited.”
“And why did you hide?”
“Because I didn’t want to come here.”
Each of them started trying to prove to me that there is no God, and one of them, apparently a historian, reminded me that during the reign of King Łokietek, a certain bishop had a child.
I suddenly replied:
“But I have seen God.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
They fell silent.
After a moment, one of them stood up and announced, “Father, you are free to go.”
They let me go, thinking I was crazy, and never summoned me again. It was difficult for them to understand that for me, a believer, God is obvious, that I feel His presence with me.
Grzebałkowska, Magdalena [in Polish] (2011). Ksiądz Paradoks. Biografia Jana Twardowskiego (in Polish). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak. pp. 177–179. ISBN 978-83-240-3867-1.
A large part of the current wave of social discontent is expressed, at least in countries classified as areas influenced by ‘Western culture’, in populism with a clear ‘right-wing’ face. This does not exclude countries that are very modern according to the categories adopted as a reference point by domestic liberals and leftists. There are few exceptions, and even they usually drift to the right in terms of form and the non-economic sphere, such as the left-wing Slovak Smer or the initially ‘centrist’ Czech Ano.
Although every country has its own specific characteristics, which the ‘internationalist’ dogmatists like to forget, social phenomena usually have cross-border causes and effects. Today, populism is ‘right-wing’ firstly because of the far-reaching collaboration of the left with (neo)liberal elites and the decreasing number of differences between them.
Secondly, because the upper classes and the lifestyle they promote are no longer right-wing Victorian but hedonistic and ultra-consumerist (with the left following suit by promoting the total commodification of even human sexuality), and the lifestyle of the working class, although far from the vision of right-wing reading material, remains much more conservative, not on doctrinal grounds, but on an intuitive and reflexive basis.
Thirdly, in a world of constant change driven by capital and its interests, the working class tries to grasp any footholds of constancy and immutability.
Fourthly and finally, in a world of hyper-individualism, social anomie and the breakdown of all communities and the devastation of the commons, which are trends as beneficial to capital as they are generated by its transformations in the sphere of the means of production and the organisation of labour, ‘right-wing’ identities - such as nation, religion, etc. – are today the only collective points of reference and emotions, especially in the face of leftist defection from communitarian to individualistic and, at best, micro-community positions (it is worth noting the decline in the Western world such phenomena as left-wing nationalism or left-wing movements appealing to religiosity, even if non-orthodox).
For the working class, hyper-modernity increasingly means not liberation from ‘traditional ties’, but loneliness, lack of support from anyone or anything, the disappearance of solidarity and being a speck of dust blown about by the ultra-capitalist winds.
Kuligowski, Piotr, Andrzej Leder, Łukasz Moll, Remigiusz Okraska, Rafał Woś. 2023. „Ankieta na temat Andrzeja Leppera i partii Samoobrona”. Praktyka Teoretyczna 2(48): 139–153.DOI: 10.19195/prt.2023.2.5
Liberalism separates the self from his political nature and reduces him to a bare economic consumer. And yet, when conflict and struggle rears its ugly head, as it often does, liberalism cannot call upon its citizens to make the ultimate sacrifice: His life, for his community. This is de-politicization. Liberalism reduces man into a catatonic economic and materialistic worm wherein no virtue remains in him and he has nothing to truly life for, which means he also has nothing he is willing to die for. His political nature has be oriented to the politics of the self, which is the politics of nihilism (e.g. political hedonism). His body overwhelmed with “joyful” pleasure, man doesn’t want to surrender this.
In short, man abdicates the difficult questions and demands of political society. Man is drunk on hedonistic nihilism. He no longer knows who he is. But the danger is that other people know their nature, in its warlike, conflictual, and friend-enemy distinction, whereby those “savages” will overwhelm and displace “enlightened man.” As a result, liberalism reduces and totally destroys collective sovereignty and power by becoming the domineering power over man in its own peculiar ways. Liberal man wants to consume things or engage in activities without consequences. War without war. A race without winners or losers. Consuming beverages without after effects or ill-effects. We want cheap goods without cheap labor. Man simply wants to consume and be left alone without consequences of his actions. But the real world is very different than this world that liberalism forcibly creates.
Because human nature is defined by friend-enemy conflict, liberalism cannot escape this reality so it too becomes a domineering and oppressive system despite considering itself a system of liberation and freedom. “Ethical or moral pathos and materialist economic reality combine in every typical liberal manifestation and give every political concept a double face. Thus the political concept of battle in liberal thought becomes competition in the domain of economics and discussion in the intellectual realm.” What Schmitt means here is that the struggle that dominates reality is what liberalism engages in, even if liberalism is claiming to be about peace, discussion, and resolving disputes without physical violence.
The very essence of economic growth requires competition (or struggle). Even economists admit to this. And yet competition is what leads to conflict according to Hobbes and Locke and this is bad and should be avoided. The double-face of liberalism’s essential economism is that it lies to people about how competition isn’t about domination but is about free trade, free movement of capital and labor, expands our choices in goods, allows for a free system of exchange whereby one is not being exploited or dominated. The reality is the opposite. Of course you’re being taken advantage of, oppressed, and exploited! That’s human nature.
The cost of peaceful consumerism from the liberal perspective means the liberal state will shed itself from the checks and balances that liberalism claims will check the state because the state is what best achieves totalizing economic uniformity to advance the human desire to consume more and more economic products. Liberalism arose to confront an enemy historically as Schmitt says: “The residues of the absolute state and a feudal aristocracy.” With liberalism having destroyed these enemies liberalism is without aim until it finds a new enemy to overcome: human nature itself with all its tribal identities.
Because the friend-enemy distinction is the nature of politics, liberalism will attempt to destroy those enemies to achieve its totalizing consummation. National sovereignty, religion, particular cultures, etc., all of these things serve as impediments, or oppositional barriers, to liberalism’s dream of universal and homogenous peaceful consumerism. Ergo liberalism must transcend nation-states, religions, and cultures (that is to say, destroy them) in order to achieve that peaceful homogenous state of consumerism which secures the liberal ideals of life, liberty, and property.
Liberalism has many enemies it must defeat: Trade protectionism, nation-states, borders, etc. (must establish the global system of capitalist economics and free trade), religion, national identity, and culture (such things are barriers to the economistic way of life and may restrict an individual’s choice and movement). While liberalism is very effective in destroying its enemies its unintended consequence is that it offers nothing for its citizenry to truly live for since it has destroyed the citizenry’s culture, religion, identity, and, in embracing free trade, has embraced open immigration which facilitates the destruction of organic culture, religion, and identity and the concept of the nation. And this, for Schmitt, opens up the community that has been infected by liberalism to be invaded and easily conquered from outside threats. Schmitt’s warning is this: When something arises to confront liberalism, liberalism cannot defend itself because it has de-politicized the body politic and will therefore fall to whatever challenges it.
Paul Krause Hesiod (31 March 2020). "Carl Schmitt's "Concept of the Political": Understanding Liberalism".
The center-left sphere has revolved around a very focused discourse and rhetoric. It seemed almost like a World Bank program; there was a lack of universal proposals. This has already been analyzed by François Dubet: those who are not poor enough, not female enough, not “disadvantaged” enough, are left out and feel that policies do not reach them. One of our questions went in that direction, and it was impressive to see how many said they had been left out. An orphanhood that was ideological but also identitarian. A loneliness that the pandemic aggravated.
A student at the University of Quilmes named Noelia Ávalos conducted a small survey in which she asked respondents about their sense of belonging to a group, whether they felt they had a group, whether that group was their place in the world, whether there was a group that included them but not that much, whether they did not have a group, or whether “everyone has a group except me.” Well, the vote for Milei among students at the University of Quilmes was low on average, with approximately 15% voting for him. But it rose sharply, to almost 40%, among people who said they felt lonely.
Javier Balsa (18 August 2024). "¿Por qué ganó Milei y cómo enfrentarlo?". Jacobin (in Latin American Spanish). Interviewed by Martín Mosquera.
Because of its success in entering the institutions, today's left has abandoned the field of revolutionary culture. Indeed, the right embraces cultural counterrevolution precisely in order to expel the left. Of course, we are talking about a social democratic, liberal-progressive left, not a communist left, but the latter has contracted in size over the last 100 years in large part because so many of its demands—for social welfare, labor rights, education, and autonomy— have been met. It would appear to be impossible to deny that the left has become deeply inserted into dominant cultural and intellectual institutions. Indeed, the irony of left-wing activists ensconced in the universities has been widely noted for decades, and frequently identified as a factor blunting the left's appeals to or connection with its former workingclass base. (Jacoby, 1987/2000). In Poland, Hungary, and the USA the academy has been a bastion of opposition to the right, just as the right keeps winning politically. Instead of seeking a Bolshevik-style cultural revolution, today's left aims to preserve the independence of the institutions in which it does have influence. Meanwhile, the Hungarian government tries to outlaw the Central European University, the Russian government closes the European University, and Erdogan in Turkey has conducted a wholesale purge against educational and civil service institutions. Revolutionary culture is today embraced by the right.
Stalin offered only lukewarm support for the cultural revolutionaries and broke with them decisively in 1934. Having declared that socialism had been officially achieved, it followed that the people and institutions that contributed to such historic success should be rewarded. People were now supposed to live normal lives. Material consumption was promoted, family values feted, discipline applauded (Hoffman, 2003). The civilizing project had arrived.
In a break from both NEP cultural policies and the cultural revolution, the cultural superstructure deemed appropriate to the new socialist base introduced with the Five-Year Plan, mass industrialization, and urbanization, was precisely a conservative one. This about-face in culture made Soviet society more amenable to traditional and apolitical citizens, to those tired of the unending politicization of everyday life, and those psychologically less disposed to change.Women tired of sexual intimidation rationalized as revolutionary “free love,” and eager to banish the phenomenon of “Red Don Juans,” supported the new denunciations of “sexual anarchy” and encomiums to traditional marriage, if not necessarily the sudden scorn now heaped on masturbation (Goldman, 1993; Hoffman, 2003, pp. 90–97). Traditionalists critical of the work and lifestyles of the radical artists of the previous decade appreciated the official embrace of calmer, more conservative, less arresting, and thus more “popular” art and literature. For these groups the “civilizing” turn made state socialism seem almost normal.
The new turn, however, drove away much of the left's international support. Not right away: in the 1930s, many Western leftists also embraced a traditionalist aesthetic as a way of appealing to the “common people.” Ever since the 1960s, however, with the rise of second-wave feminism and a pervasive counterculture, the left has been almost uniformly anti-traditionalist. Today it would be hard to find a left that accepts this state socialist cultural conservatism. On the contrary, that part of the Russian Revolution now belongs to the right, all of whom acclaim traditionalism as the fount of a new society, and many of whom explicitly support Russian President Vladimir Putin, who personifies traditionalism today.
The irony, then, is that because of the strides made by progressives and the left in promulgating the Enlightenment project, today's right embraces cultural revolution in order to achieve a counterrevolutionary traditionalism, whereas in the Soviet Union the cultural revolution was blocked so that traditionalism could advance. In the end, though, the civilizing project that is part of the inheritance of the Russian Revolution is now fully within the purview of the right.
[…]
The point is not that PiS or Fidesz see themselves as following the Russian Revolution but that, given the social and economic gains made by the left after World War II that have since withered with the dominance of neoliberalism, it is the right rather than the left that is more anti-systemic today, and in that way closer to the legacy of the Revolution. The left, too, rejects neoliberalism, but because it seeks to preserve the gains made during the social democratic postwar consensus it is not anti-systemic. The right, on the contrary, sees almost nothing in the postwar system that it seeks to preserve. It rejects both the left-oriented regulated capitalism and neocorporatism of the postwar period and the neoliberalism that has been dominant since the 1970s. Today's left rejects only the neoliberalism. As in politics and culture, so too in the economic realm do we find surprising links between today's right and the Russian Revolutionary legacy.
David Ost (19 December 2017). "The surprising right-wing relevance of the Russian Revolution". Constellations. 24 (4): 522–523. doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12328.
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