Unearthing the Villain

Early in 1981, one of my interviews with the Voice of America evoked this response in the Polish Communist press: “By saying ‘we have won,’ those like Tyrmand [invectives follow] try to leech onto the workers’ struggle for purifying the idea of socialism.”

By “we” I had meant all those in Poland and abroad who, for a lifetime, have deemed Communism mankind’s curse, its bane, and who have never ceased to combat it. 1 was asserting that what happened in Poland during 1980-81 constituted an almost-Copernican alteration of human consciousness, proclaiming irrevocably, urbi et orbi, once and forever, that Marxism, as well as its political materializations, does not represent the proletariat and therefore has been reduced to the role of a political commercial. This outcome I still consider a victory, all the woes that continue to afflict Poland notwithstanding. Yet, in the spring of 1981, the Polish Communist Party, from the depths of its utter chaos, was making lame attempts to tie itself to the rebellion’s momentum by forging the concept of purification—which proved only that conmanship was the best answer to Solidarity’s message that the Party could come up with.

LT

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Leopold Tyrmand

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Early in 1981, one of my interviews with the Voice of America evoked this response in the Polish Communist press: “By saying ‘we have won,’ those like Tyrmand [invectives follow] try to leech onto the workers’ struggle for purifying the idea of socialism.”

By “we” I had meant all those in Poland and abroad who, for a lifetime, have deemed Communism mankind’s curse, its bane, and who have never ceased to combat it. 1 was asserting that what happened in Poland during 1980-81 constituted an almost-Copernican alteration of human consciousness, proclaiming irrevocably, urbi et orbi, once and forever, that Marxism, as well as its political materializations, does not represent the proletariat and therefore has been reduced to the role of a political commercial. This outcome I still consider a victory, all the woes that continue to afflict Poland notwithstanding. Yet, in the spring of 1981, the Polish Communist Party, from the depths of its utter chaos, was making lame attempts to tie itself to the rebellion’s momentum by forging the concept of purification—which proved only that conmanship was the best answer to Solidarity’s message that the Party could come up with.