The Faulty Polish Third Way

Adam Krzeminski, the editor of the Polish magazine Polityka makes an eloquent but muddled case for splitting the difference between Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma's multiculturalism and what I prefer to call Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Presumption of Pure Reason. (It's much more savory to group the brave Somali with Spinoza than it is to pay heed to the meretricious term used by her detractors, "Enlightenment fundamentalist," which gives me kooties even to see it under inverted commas like that.)

Krzeminski is of the "a little from Column A, a little from Column B" mentality, but his bone of contention with Hirsi Ali's has to do with her comparison of Islamism and Communism. In a speech she delivered in Berlin in September of last year, she rightly described both isms as violent, totalitarian movements whose opponents are ridiculously labeled reactionaries by fellow travelers and feather-headed relativists. To Krezminski:

Even if one were to argue that communism – at least in the Russian-Orthodox variation, is an instrument of political theology, it would still be a gross oversimplification to compare it – this still-born theory – with a millennium old monotheistic religion. And whatever the differences between Stalinism and communism – even in the Soviet Union it was never a deeply internalised religion that was carried by the people. It was a social promise and a belief system that was imposed top down and with force. And it imploded by itself like a soap bubble after just 70 years. The reasons for this were manifold: the pressure from within – for which the dissidents and mass revolts like the Polish Solidarnosc, and the Hungarian, Czech, East German, Baltic, Ukrainian and all the other protest movements over the years deserve recognition – as well as the pressure from outside, the involvement in dialogue, the cooperation and finally through what Ulrike Ackermann so disparagingly refers to as "change through rapprochement".

The first thing to notice about this paragraph is that it suffers from a clumsiness of prose: to what does Krezminski refer when he writes, "even in the Soviet Union it was never a deeply internalised religion that was carried by the people" — Stalinism or communism? In either case, the evidence is solidly against him.

The rise of the nomenklatura, or "New Class" of bureaucratic elite, and the instantiation of Marxist-Leninist epistemology in later generations who grew up without a memory of tsardom — these aspects of Soviet life prove that ideology was a deeply internalized religion carried by the people.

After the Berlin Wall came down, misguided liberals were no less triumphalist than cold warriors. "Ah ha," they said. "So it was all bluster and brinkmanship, not ideology, since the reformists within the Kremlin always knew the Soviet experiment was operating on borrowed time." That there were reformists is not in dispute, but that ideology was not paramount is just plain wrong. Of course the plan was world revolution, right up to the very end, admitted Schevernadze and Gromyko, both foreign ministers who went on to enjoy rocky post-Soviet political careers. The socialist ideal was never for a minute discarded by those middle-ranking bureaucrats who'd had it drummed into their brains since childhood, much as a Catholic who becomes agnostic never fully forgets her catechism, or the guilt that goes along with it. It took the extraordinary shift in historical conditions to win — or, at any rate, convince — hearts and minds in Moscow.

Krezminski then goes on to say that, well, the real dissidents of Communism — Koestler, Silone, Milosz — all returned to their "European, Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment cultural roots," unlike Hirsi Ali, who has abandoned her Somali traditions altogether in favor of adopted Western ones. This is also a false dichotomy.

Koestler grew up during the "Golden Age" of Budapest, where he marched in Communist rallies as a boy, before turning to Zionism, then back to Communism, and finally ended up an apostate (there is no other adequate term for it) and a believer in crackpot paranormal theories (falling under no configuration of the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment rubric I can think of). Koestler never returned to Hungary, so nor can it be said that he came full circle, unless one is ready to believe the Danube ran through Savile Row and Clubland London in the late fifties.

Milosz gave up his native Lithuania for Poland, where he became the unofficial poet laureate, whose verses reflected a Europe that would never fully recover from the ravages of the 20th century. (We can also include Milan Kundera in this pessimistic category.)

And in a way, Silone never completely abandoned his engagement with the forces of Progress and the Future because he later declared that the battle of human existence could only be fought between the Communists and the ex-Communists — a far cry from humble mezzogiorno roots in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy, one has to admit.

So just because Hirsi Ali said goodbye to all that — where "that" was more than just the self-aggrandizing hallucinations of a seventh-century epileptic and the monotheism he founded — doesn't make her any less of a dissident in an equally wrought struggle for civilization. That a religion is a millennium old only means that trenchant criticism of it has been around longer. Hirsi Ali is doing nothing that Spinoza, Mill, even Marx haven't done before. And it should be remembered that Koestler and Silone edited a volume of ex- and anti-Communist essays entitled, The God That Failed, which might as well have been the working title for Infidel, too.

Adam Krzeminski: The view from the Vistula – signandsight