Category Archives: philosophy

by | 2 May 2026 · 10:11 am

Majówka: Poland’s Golden Week

The Outliers spent a beautiful spring weekend visiting Toruń and Malbork. It reminded us of Japan’s Golden Week holidays. This week’s Culture.pl explains:

Majówka – the long weekend of 1–3 May – is one of those moments when Poland seems to collectively exhale. Anchored by Labour Day (1 May) and Constitution Day (3 May), with Flag Day (2 May) stuffed in the middle, it marks the first real opening of the year: grills reappear, trains fill up, and cities quietly empty out. Even in years like 2026, when the calendar doesn’t quite align into a seamless long weekend, the impulse remains the same – a brief, almost instinctive shift towards rest, travel, and being outdoors after the long winter months.

There is also something distinctly Polish in how this time is spent. Majówka is rarely about spectacle; it is about proximity – to nature, to family, to a slower pace. People head to lakes in Masuria, hike in the Tatra Mountains, or retreat to działki – small garden plots that have long served as modest escapes from urban life. The tradition of the działka itself dates back to the late 19th century and expanded under socialism, when access to private leisure space was limited; today, it remains a quietly cherished part of everyday culture. Even something as simple as lighting a grill becomes ritualised – a shared, almost symbolic act of stepping into the warmer season.

At the same time, majówka carries a subtle historical layering. The proximity of its dates is not accidental: 1 May, once defined by state parades, now sits alongside 3 May, commemorating the Constitution of 3 May 1791 – a symbol of political aspiration and national identity. Between them, a space has opened up that is neither entirely official nor entirely private. Perhaps this is why majówka feels so particular: it is leisure, but also continuity – a few days when history, season, and everyday life briefly align, and when doing very little becomes, in its own way, meaningful.

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Filed under Japan, labor, nationalism, philosophy, Poland

by | 1 May 2026 · 4:02 am

MLK Jr. Funeral Service, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 284-286:

IN THE HISTORIC quadrangle at Morehouse College, the mule-drawn wagon wound its way to the steps of Harkness Hall, and the large public requiem began. Some 150,000 people crammed onto the campus green and stood for hours in the oppressive heat beneath jumbled canopies of parasols. Mahalia Jackson sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” the spiritual King had asked Ben Branch to play “real pretty” moments before he was shot on the Lorraine balcony. So many old ladies fainted in the crowd that the lengthy schedule of eulogies had to be radically truncated. The final speaker, and the marquee attraction, was Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the president emeritus of Morehouse, a distinguished lion of an orator and King’s most beloved mentor. The grizzled theologian, whose parents had been former slaves, spoke plainly, with a measured indignation in his voice.

“I make bold to assert,” Mays said, “that it took more courage for King to practice nonviolence than it took his assassin to fire the fatal shot. The assassin is a coward; he committed his foul act, and fled. But make no mistake, the American people are in part responsible. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and of Negroes to feel that he had public support. He knew that millions hated King.”

Mays went on to deliver a majestic eulogy in the black Baptist tradition, leaving bitterness behind and building toward a triumphant crescendo. “He believed especially that he was sent to champion the cause of the man furthest down. He would probably say that if death had to come, there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors. He was supra-race, supra-nation, supra-class, supra-culture. He belonged to the world and to mankind. Now he belongs to posterity.”

The great funeral broke up, and a smaller crowd of family and friends followed the hearse in a slow motorcade to South View Cemetery, a grand old place that had been created in the 1860s when Atlanta’s blacks grew weary of burying their dead through the rear entrance of the city graveyard. This would not be King’s final resting place—he was to be only temporarily buried here with his maternal grandparents until a permanent memorial could be built beside Ebenezer Church. Beneath flowering dogwoods, Ralph Abernathy rose to address the winnowed crowd. Drawn and weak, Abernathy had not eaten since the assassination. Like the old days when he and King went to jail together, he was fasting, to purify himself for the trials ahead.

“The grave is too narrow for his soul,” Abernathy said, tears streaming down his face. “But we commit his body to the ground. We thank God for giving us a leader who was willing to die, but not willing to kill.” Then a retinue of attendants rolled the mahogany casket into a crypt of white Georgia marble that was inscribed:

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
JANUARY 15, 1929–APRIL 4, 1968
“FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY I’M FREE AT LAST”

As the last of the crowds fell away, Martin Luther King Sr. laid his head on the cool stone of his son’s mausoleum and openly wept.

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by | 14 March 2026 · 8:37 am

Gierek’s Poland Redefines Socialism

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle  pp. 225-227:

Kapuściński does not watch the Polish drama from close up, because at the time he is in Mexico. When he comes home from his posting, he finds a totally different atmosphere in Poland.

There is not a trace remaining of Gomułka’s plebeian socialism. At the beginning of the new decade it is far easier than in previous years to get basic goods: food, clothing, household equipment. Life for the Poles becomes more bearable, and Gierek’s slogan in the first years of his government – ‘May Poland grow in strength and may people live more affluently’ – is not far from the daily experience of the decided majority. The miners are thrilled, because they are getting fabulous salaries and bonuses; the farmers complain less, because Gierek does away with compulsory annual supplies of agricultural products to the state at fixed prices.

The Gierek era is also a time when the PRL opens up to the West. It is easier to get a passport, and if someone goes off on a journey to the other side of the Iron Curtain he can officially buy a hundred dollars (earlier this was possible only on the black market, and was a hundred times more expensive). Previously condemned or ridiculed Western popular culture gains ‘civic rights’ – American films and serials on television are virtually one of the trademarks of the decade. Home-grown entertainment of a fairly good standard also appears; a boom in popular songs begins, and a couple of excellent cabarets open. Poland is having a good time drinking and dancing.

His Highness showed particular vivacity and keenness. He received processions of planners, economists, and financial specialists, talking, asking questions, encouraging, and praising.

As the new leader, Gierek has ambitious plans. On the advice of Party experts he considers some sort of semi–market reform but quickly drops these complicated ideas. Why bother? Poland can live on the reserves saved up by the previous first secretary, and shortly afterwards a miracle occurs – Western credits start to pour in.

The capitalist countries of the West are experiencing a boom, there is cheap money looking for an outlet, and socialist Poland willingly accepts loans of any size. There is no need to rationalize anything: abracadabra, and goods which previously you could only dream about appear in the shops. Salaries go up, and the hope returns that finally the affluent life everyone has been waiting for is just around the corner.

If you use foreign capital to build the factories, you don’t need to reform. So there you are – His Majesty didn’t allow reform, yet the factories were going up, they were built. That means development.

Prefabricated concrete construction takes off; people still have to wait for flats, but they are relatively cheap. Young couples get special credits, they buy fridges, washing machines, television sets and furniture – all on hire purchase, and if someone’s really lucky he’ll also get hold of a coupon for a car (still a deficit item).

One was planning, another was building, and so, in a word, development had started.

After a year of hard work there are cheap holidays and, for those who can manage it, even trips abroad – to Bulgaria, Romania or the Crimea. Youth organizations which in the years when the foundations of socialism were being built stood for ideological zeal, altruism and personal sacrifice are now concerned with ‘fixing’: first to arrange the supply of some deficit, hard-to-acquire goods for their activists, then some foreign travel.

Something like a socialist middle class emerges – a broad group consisting of most Poles, geared to consumerism. One of the leading dissidents of the era admits years later that this was the only period when he really did fear society and felt marginalized. Because almost all Poland approves of Gierek’s socialism at the beginning of the decade, very few people are bothered by the lack of elections, the rule of a single party, or the limited freedom of speech. To live and not to die! Long live socialism and Comrade Gierek! Bravo, bravo, bravo!

[H]e even liked progress – his most honourably benevolent desire for action manifested itself in the unconcealed desire to have a satiated and happy people cry for years after, with full approval, ‘Hey! Did he ever develop us!’

Kapuściński comes back from a world where socialism means a heroic struggle, the sacrifice of one’s personal peace and quiet. Latin America is a revolutionary volcano: Cuba sí, yanquis no; the idol of the young is the recently assassinated Che Guevara; Salvador Allende is conducting a peaceful socialist revolution in Chile, which the Americans, the local oligarchs and the middle class want to overthrow.

Over there: For their belief in socialism, the young idealists are ending up in prison, being tortured, or dying in the jungle, and are often completely misunderstood by those whose rights they are demanding. Over here: For their belief in socialism, the young wheeler-dealers are the first to get a flat, a car and a trip to Sochi. There: great ideas, the clank of rifles; here: fairly OK cash, idle gawping at the TV, having a ball. There: rebellion, nonconformism, adrenaline; here: fake smiles, making the right faces for the authorities. If that is socialism, is this socialism too? Where can a man go, where can he find a place, how can he fit into life on this other planet?

Now he is a star on a national scale. During the past few years, while he has been away, several of his books have come out, strengthening the position of the talented reporter and expert on Africa and Latin America. Despite the limitations imposed by the system, it is much easier to write significant texts about the Third World; censorship is not as sensitive to an ‘incorrect’ tone in these as it is in articles and books on national topics or the West.

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by | 9 March 2026 · 6:49 am

Forsaking Poland for Africa

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 119-120:

The expedition to Congo is a crucial element in the formation of Kapuściński’s world outlook, his view of the Cold War conflict and of the dilemmas and dramas of the times from the perspective of the Third World countries attempting to gain their liberty.

In an entry in his Political Diaries dated 23 June 1961, Polityka’s editor-in-chief, Mieczysław Rakowski notes: ‘Rysiek has finished a series entitled ‘‘Congo Close Up’’. We published twelve reports. Rysiek is a fantastic reporter. This is no ordinary journalism. This is political literature produced by a devilishly talented writer. We collected 2,687,138 zloty for the Lumumba Fund.’

A year later, in a popularity contest for Polityka’s writers, Kapuściński comes first. His reports from Ghana and Congo play their role in gaining him fame and public recognition, but this is not the only way he displays his talents. In less than two years of working at Polityka, Kapuściński has created his own language, a new literary style, with a poetic rhythm to his sentences and an original way of depicting things – free of the wooden, propagandistic phraseology of his early years as a journalist at Sztandar Młodych. It is this new language and new tone that make the then cub reporter Małgorzata Szejnert (later co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza and head of its reportage department for fifteen years) think on reading one of his reports: ‘He writes as he wants to.’

‘He flourished at Polityka,’ says Daniel Passent. ‘He wrote articles that showed what was really happening in Poland, warts and all.’

Between the African trips, Kapuściński travels to the Polish provinces, but he is not yet aware that his current visits will be his farewell – as a reporter – to Poland. A curious farewell, because he had just begun to shine as an incisive observer of the Poles during the ‘minor stabilization’ when he went off on a completely different path.

‘He deserted,’ some people would say.

Kapuściński refutes the charges: ‘Africa and the Third World were a continuation of the heroic period of reportage in Poland.’

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by | 8 March 2026 · 9:10 am

Polityka Replaces Po Prostu, 1957

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 103-104:

The place on the political and cultural map of People’s Poland where this intellectual can find a safe haven is the newly founded weekly Polityka (Politics). Sacked from his job as managing editor of Sztandar Młodych, Marian Turski has moved to Polityka, bringing with him the group of journalists who resigned in a gesture of solidarity against his dismissal. Among them is Kapuściński.

Polityka had a terrible start. It was established in January 1957 by the Central Committee secretariat. Stefan Żółkiewski – Marxist scholar of the humanities, and minister of higher education (years later, to show solidarity, he would support the Warsaw University students demonstrating against the authorities) – was put in charge. This happened before the closure of the revisionist weekly Po Prostu – Polityka was meant to be a whip to beat the revisionists, an anti–Po Prostu publication. It was seen as heralding the departure of First Secretary Gomułka from the ideals of October ’56, and as a desire to exercise full control over intellectual life and thought, which had been relatively free during the years of the thaw and the October movement.

The revisionists from Po Prostu – ‘the rabid’, as their opponents call them – regard Polityka as a ‘despot’s organ’, a paper that on Gomułka’s orders is to determine the political line for the entire press. Both editorial offices are located within the Palace of Culture and Science, Po Prostu on the fifth floor and Polityka on the eleventh. The Po Prostu people are so allergic to the Polityka people that when they don’t have enough glasses in their office, and the head of administration amicably wants to borrow some from Polityka six floors above, the Po Prostu staff have a meeting, debate the idea, hold a vote and reject it.

When Gomułka closes down Po Prostu in the autumn of 1957, the editors of Polityka welcome the move. Many people assume that once the revisionists’ weekly has been eliminated, Polityka will have carried out Party orders and may leave the press scene. Meanwhile, under the management of its new chief, Mieczysław Rakowski, a former political officer and Party apparatus man, Polityka is changing from a dull, sermonizing newspaper into the most interesting weekly with a Party stamp. It will train the journalistic stars of the generation, create the Polish school of reportage and become a notorious thorn in the side of the government, a disparaging and sometimes ironic internal critic of the Party and the realities of People’s Poland. Marian Turski will say that Polityka began by being branded anti–Po Prostu but ended up becoming a sequel to its revisionist predecessor.

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by | 7 March 2026 · 8:48 am

The Thaw Hits Poland, 1956

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 83-85:

When did the cultural dissent, later known as revisionism, cease to be partly fashion and become front-line politics?

It starts with a secret speech by Khrushchev, given in February 1956 in Moscow at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Its content creates a sensation in Poland: here is the Soviet Party admitting to murder, to the destruction of its political opponents, to fabricated trials. Knowledge of similar methods used by the authorities in People’s Poland has already reached certain segments of public opinion: almost two years earlier, Józef Światło, deputy director of Department X at the Ministry of Public Security, defected to the West and exposed crimes committed by the Polish apparatus of repression (his department was involved in eradicating ideological deviations within the Party). The Poles hear these revelations on Radio Free Europe; those who are glued to their wireless sets manage to catch bits of these nightmarish stories despite the jamming devices working at full steam.

Khrushchev’s speech initiates a political earthquake throughout the socialist bloc, most of all in Poland and Hungary. It is discussed at Party meetings, in cultural circles and on the streets. Duplicated using crude methods, the key points of the speech can be bought for an astronomical sum at flea markets and bazaars. At exactly the same time, Polish Party leader Bolesław Bierut dies in mysterious circumstances, prompting a wave of speculation: Was he murdered? Soon there’s a popular saying: ‘He went out in a fur overcoat and came home in a wooden overcoat.’ Straight after that the Party’s number two, Jakub Berman, is thrown out of his job. The Party is bursting from the inside.

There is a clash between two tendencies, later called fractions. One group is known as the ‘Puławians’ – people who seek more civic freedom, relative autonomy in cultural life, more democracy within the Party, less central planning within the economy, and more independence for enterprises. They have the sympathy of opinion-forming circles and of many people in the press and the cultural world. (It is interesting to note that they meet at the flat of Ignacy Loga-Sowiński, secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions, and Irena Tarłowska, still editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych). The other group is called the ‘Natolinians’. They are believed to have connections with the Soviet embassy; they’re not keen on democratization, but they’re not against sacrificing a few scapegoats, preferably of Jewish origin, on the altar of squaring accounts with Stalinism.

The political prisoners are released, including people from the post-war anti-communist underground as well as followers of the ‘new faith’, who were locked up for being critical or as a result of internal power struggles. Functionaries within the apparatus of repression who have been particularly cruel to the prisoners lose their jobs and are accused of abusing their power. The Stalinist system is collapsing . . .

In June the workers’ rebellion in Poznań occurs. After several days of strikes and street demonstrations, the army and the secret police fire on the protestors. Several dozen people are killed, and many are wounded. A Party plenum calls the Poznań revolt ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a campaign by ‘imperialist circles’. Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz warns that any hand raised against the people’s power will be cut off. The entire movement for renewal finds itself under threat. A day after the massacre, on the orders of the Party leadership, Sztandar Młodych – like other papers – writes about the tragedy in a tone ringing with Stalinist propaganda:

…

The Poznań tragedy is a shock, especially for those who still believe in socialism but want it to be thoroughly reformed. As a result, the workers’ protest, the massacre and the Party leadership’s conservative attitude to the tragedy accelerate the impetus for change. At the production plants, workers councils are established, and pro-democratization rallies are held at schools and colleges. The culmination of the political turmoil is a Party plenum held in October. Comrades from Moscow fly to Warsaw, headed by Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Khrushchev, and Soviet troops move towards the capital. There is a fear that their tanks will run down the Polish movement for the renewal of socialism.

The crisis ends with the election of a new Party chief, Władysław Gomułka, who led the communists during the war and who has recently been released from prison. He was sent to jail in the early 1950s for so-called rightist–nationalist leanings. Gomułka – who installed the Stalinist system in post-war Poland, took part in the elimination of the opposition, and agreed to Poland’s becoming subordinate to the Soviet Union – did, however, want Polish socialism to retain some specific national features. He was not a fan of collectivization; he was in no rush to condemn the ‘Yugoslav path to socialism’, which was independent of Stalin; and he was fond of the national features of Polish Socialist Party tradition.

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by | 6 March 2026 · 7:15 am

Kapuściński Exposes Nowa Huta

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 81-83:

Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.

In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’. The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’

What won’t get through?

The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).

A worker friend tells Kapuściński that he will never marry, because in these conditions he would be bound to ‘have no respect for his wife’.

[A]t Huta the bureaucracy reaches a degree of barbarity. For example, a woman living in a workers’ hotel is going to give birth. There are six other girls living in the same room. After three months she is supposed to go back to work. She doesn’t: she works at Huta, several kilometres from the hotel, but she has to feed her baby four times a day. Nevertheless, they tell her to bring a certificate proving that she is working. Yes, but she cannot get one. Then along comes the hotel man, takes away her bedding, takes away everything that is not her property, and the woman and her baby are left on the bare floor-boards.

Kapuściński hears about the fortunes of his friends from a few years earlier who have had enough and refuse to put up with ‘all these obscenities’. One has written complaints and petitions, for which he has been punished by having his accommodation allotment withheld, despite the fact that he has a sick mother and his wife lives out in the countryside because they have no home of their own in the town. Another critic has been sacked from his job. Still another has been stymied by lethal rumours that ‘he is a shirker and troublemaker. Not the worst method either!’ he writes. ‘People can see what’s going on. It is as if some monstrous bureaucratic fungus has sprung up here, which is proliferating and crushing everything, but no one seems at all concerned.’ In his report, Kapuściński reveals that complaints about what is going on at Nowa Huta have reached the ZMP authorities in Warsaw, but no one cares and they have gone unanswered.

Instead of painting the world of Ważyk’s poem in rosy colours, Kapuściński adds even more black to it. He is on the side of the workers, who feel hurt by the poet’s words: ‘rabble’, ‘semi-deranged soul’, ‘inhuman Poland’, ‘a shambles’. ‘To them these expressions,’ writes Kapuściński, ‘are wrongful, untrue and insulting’; they feel as if ‘they are of no use to anyone, as if they are invisible’. ‘But they admit that many of the images in the poem are true, all the more since they all too rarely read the whole truth about themselves.’

Kapuściński ends with a challenge to the Party and the ZMP: ‘At Nowa Huta they must see that we are on the side of the working man every day of the week . . . The people at Nowa Huta are waiting for justice. They cannot wait for long. We have to go there and dig up everything that has been carefully hidden from human sight, and respond to a very large number of different questions.’

…

Now the Party reformers go on the counter-offensive. Jerzy Morawski, one of the leading lights of the thaw (and soon to become Tarłowska’s second husband), devises a Central Committee commission to investigate the situation at Nowa Huta. The commission goes to the site and sees . . . the same things as Kapuściński. The ‘commissars’ try to get in touch with the reporter, but the ZMP members at Nowa Huta, who have given him shelter, say they won’t give up their colleague until the Party provides a guarantee that nothing bad will happen to him. The Party not only provides the guarantee but gives him a national decoration – the Gold Cross of Merit. Tarłowska and the friendly censor return to their jobs. Soon Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune), the organ of the Central Committee, is writing about the social ills at Nowa Huta. The paper brands the local Party organization as the culprits, the board of the conglomerate is replaced, and the local Party authorities offer their resignation.

Kapuściński learns three lessons from this story. He discovers that writing is a risky business and that written words carry consequences. He also becomes convinced that the written word can change reality. Finally, as he learns from the story with the censor, success in the public sphere also depends on taking care of things through informal channels, and on building a network of personal contacts with people in power. If you have friends here and there, they will help you in times of need.

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by | 5 March 2026 · 3:54 am

Kapuściński Joins the Party, 1953

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012), Kindle pp. 55-57:

In 1952 Kapuściński writes an application requesting to be ‘admitted as a candidate for the Polish United Worker’s Party’.

It is my greatest need and desire to join the ranks of our beloved Party. This necessity is on a par with my greatest aspiration, which is to serve the cause of our Party with all my strength and my entire being. Throughout my life, ever since I understood to whom I should devote it, I have felt how every victory brings me closer to the Party, and how every defeat or mistake demands that I make an even greater effort not to turn back on the road I have taken – the road to the Party.

Being admitted as a candidate for our Party will be a very great reward and honour for me, and also a very high obligation. I want even more and even better to live the Party life, to work and fight to fulfil the tasks set by the Party for the best Party comrades. I pledge to safeguard the recommendations which Comrade Stalin has vowed to protect and fortify in the name of all ‘people of a special cut’.

My guiding light shall be total dedication to becoming worthy of that title, and to remaining so for the rest of my life.

On the next few pages of his application to join the Party, Kapuściński provides a self-critical report, saying that the young communist in him did not awaken quickly enough: ‘My world outlook was still burdened by remnants of petty bourgeois ideology, there were many things I did not understand, and I did not feel the need to get involved.’

Among his mentors at this time he mentions Wiktor Woroszylski, a young socialist-realist poet and the editor of the culture section of the ZMP newspaper Sztandar Młodych, as well as several other poets and writers, above all Władysław Broniewski. (Someone later tells me that as president of the Young Writers’ Circle affiliated with the Polish Writers’ Union, Kapuściński made sure that the notoriously drunken Broniewski drank a bit less.)

In support of his application, Bronisław Geremek, Kapuściński’s fellow student in the year above, writes him a letter of recommendation: ‘I have known Comrade Ryszard Kapuściński since October 1951 from work within the ZMP organization at our college.’ As well as praising his ‘dedication and devotion, youthful enthusiasm and eagerness, militant attitude’, and also his ‘political sophistication’ and ‘exemplary moral attitude’, Geremek informs the Party of the candidate’s ‘serious mistakes and shortcomings’:

1) failure to understand the role of the Party organization within the faculty, an inappropriate, ill-considered attitude to his Party comrades in Year One,

2) an immature attitude to his studies, continuing from the previous year, which recently Comrade Kapuściński has managed to overcome, as evidenced by his good results in the summer session,

3) a not fully collective style for his work in managing the faculty organization, originating mainly from a lack of confidence in people and in the collective,

4) reluctance to accept criticism, and also too little self-criticism,

5) immaturity of decisions often involving youthful bluster and leftism.

‘That was the lyrical style required for recommending candidates to join the Party,’ explains the famous historian. ‘It wasn’t appropriate to give nothing but praise.’

Despite his critical words, Geremek supports Kapuściński’s request, ‘in the belief that our Party will gain a member worthy of it’.

On 30 June 1952 a meeting of the PZPR executive at the history faculty is held to discuss admitting Kapuściński to the Party. The participants include Bronisław Geremek, Adam Kersten, Jerzy Holzer and a few other activists. The candidate is present too.

Comrade Kersten takes the floor:

‘Comrade Kapuściński shows evidence of a certain failure to appreciate the value of academic studies. For Comrade Kapuściński, the chief measure of an activist is social work.’

Another comrade polemicizes:

‘Comrade Kersten is somewhat overcritical of Comrade Kapuściński’s academic situation. This issue came up in the winter session. Comrade Kapuściński’s attitude to his studies has now changed for the better.’

Comrade Geremek stipulates:

‘Comrade Kapuściński should be cut off from organizational work so that he can put more emphasis on his studies. Comrade Kapuściński does not always know how to work with colleagues who are not committed.’

Comrade Kapuściński defends himself:

‘What has been said in the discussion is fair, but I am sorry it has been limited to academic issues. I did indeed have a non-Party attitude to my studies, and I have not yet fully overcome that attitude.’

Comrade Holzer rushes to Comrade Kapuściński’s rescue.

‘He has done good work on the ZMP Faculty Board. He has a strong emotional attachment to the Party. He is highly enthusiastic and eager to work. He has not entirely overcome the following defects: an insufficiently serious attitude to his studies, not always fully considered decisions, and a not always self-critical approach. Being admitted as a candidate for the Party will help Comrade Kapuściński to overcome these faults.’

From the stenographic record: ‘Comrade Kapuściński was unanimously accepted as a candidate for the PZPR’; he becomes a Party member on 11 April 1953.

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by | 3 March 2026 · 8:42 am

Pole Useless in China, 1956

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 61-62, 71-72:

With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).

Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eighty English translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage.

…

I returned to Warsaw. The reasons for my bizarre situation in China, my lack of real purpose, my senseless suspension in a vacuum, quickly became clear. The idea of sending me to China arose in the aftermath of two thaws: that of October 1956 in Poland, and in China, that of Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers. Even before I arrived in China, an upheaval was under way in Warsaw and in Peking. The head of the Polish Communist Party, Władyslaw Gomułka, initiated a campaign against the liberals, and Mao Tse-tung was launching the draconian politics of the Great Leap Forward.

Practically speaking, I should have left Peking the day after I arrived. But my newspaper was mum—fearful and fighting for its survival, it had forgotten about me. Or perhaps the editors had my interests in mind—perhaps they reckoned that away in China I would somehow be safe? In any event, I now think that the editors of Chungkuo were being informed by the Chinese embassy in Warsaw that the correspondent of Sztandar Młodych is the envoy of a newspaper hanging by a thread and it is only a matter of time before it goes under the ax. I think, too, that it was traditional Chinese principles of hospitality, the importance the Chinese ascribe to saving face, as well as their highly cultivated politeness, that kept me from being summarily expelled. Instead, they created conditions which they assumed would lead me to guess that the models of cooperation that had been agreed to earlier no longer obtained. And that I would say of my own accord: I am leaving.

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by | 1 March 2026 · 10:12 pm

Herodotus as a Child?

From Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Vintage,  2009), Kindle pp. 44-46:

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480 B.C.E., perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480 B.C.E., Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

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