Adam Michnik: The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution. Elzbieta Matynia, Agnieszka Marczysk, and Roman Czarny translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
A worrisome thing that’ll cause you to sing the blues in the night: That’s history, all right, and Adam Michnik knows it like a Pole—in his bones. Part of the troublesomeness of history derives not only from the history we mean when we think of the course of human events—often more a slaughter-bench than a stream—but from history held up as a source of moral and political authority, as a dialectical unfolding of some form of ‘Absolute Spirit,’ of class- or race-consciousness which acts rather in the manner of Biblical Providence, revealing truth to all who have ears to hear and rubbishing those graceless souls who don’t. Situated squarely between Germany and Russia and its sometime imperial provinces, Belarus and Ukraine, Poles have witnessed and suffered the consequences of those ideologies for a century.
In inaugurating a series of books exploring “democracy and its discontents,” Yale University Press chose one of the best of the secularist Poles. A red-diaper baby born in 1946, in the aftermath of the Soviet-enforced ascension of the Polish Communist Party, he proved one of those rare persons who thinks his way free from the idols of the cave, perhaps with some help from the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, whom he met as a university student in Warsaw. His political activities earned him expulsion from Warsaw University in that unrestful year, 1968, and the next two decades found him sometimes in prison, sometimes in exile, but never removed from engagement in the efforts of Poles to liberate themselves. As those efforts gained traction in the early 1980s, Michnik founded Gazeta Wyborcza at the behest of Polish Solidarity labor union leader Lech Walesa; the newspaper quickly established itself as more than just the voice of the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee but as a serious source of reliable news and political analysis. Briefly a member of the first real Polish parliament of the postwar era, Michnik settled into his true vocation as a writer and editor, which he fills to this day.
Michnik divides his book into two parts. In Part One he looks at the 1989 revolution against the Soviet-imposed oligarchy prospectively—concerning West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the 1970s and its status as a proximate cause of that revolution—and prospectively—showing how, in the aftermath of that revolution, politicians in Poland and the other “young democracies” have manipulated historical truth in ways that injure the newly-founded regimes in which they operate. In Part Two he thinks about how history might be used instead of abused by looking at the aftermath of the French Revolution through the eyes of a non-historian, Stendhal, that Napoleon of French novelists who came both to extend and finish the Revolution. Extending and finishing a revolution requires of politicians and of writers the imagination of a realist novelist; trained as a historian and tried in politics revolutionary and post-revolutionary, Michnik finds a path to truth in a certain well-measured use of the imagination.
Michnik titles his essay on Brandt “Morality in Politics,” involving his readers in the dilemmas confronted by both Brandt and the Central European dissidents who watched him, dilemmas of compromise between what one wants and what one can do, “between the voice of conscience and the pragmatic dictate of common sense.” What Aristotle calls “moral courage”—remarked by Michnik—proves necessary but not sufficient in politics, as Aristotle himself knew and taught in his account of phronēsis or “practical wisdom.” Holding moral courage and practical wisdom together comes hard. Michnik admires those who do, criticizing them with sympathetic firmness when they fail.
Brandt visited Poland as the newly-elected president of West Germany in 1970. As a social democrat, he represented a party with its own troubled history with the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat Marxists of East Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe generally, but such partisan tensions on the ‘Left’ seemed insignificant compared to the gestures he made in his capacity not as a socialist but as a German head of state. In Poland to sign the Treaty of Warsaw, officially recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border, Brandt laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Ghetto Heroes Monument—memorials to the victims of Nazi aggression against Poles generally and against Polish Jews, respectively. At the Monument, he startled his hosts, his own people, and the world at large by kneeling in remorse for German war crimes. Closely related to this act of national contrition, Brandt implemented Ostpolitik—his diplomatic opening to the Soviet bloc—as a signal that West Germany politely asserted itself as “a fully independent political actor on the European scene”—independent, that is, of the quarter-century of Allied domination of his country that had begun with its occupation and partition after the defeat of the Nazi regime. As Brandt riposted to his critics in West Germany who objection to his recognition of the border, which transferred nearly one-quarter of territories ruled by pre-Hitler Germany to Poland, the Federal Republic of Germany didn’t lose those lands; the “criminal National Socialist regime did”—a regime, it might be added, that Germans of the hapless Weimar Republic had effectively voted to establish when the elected Hitler as Reich Chancellor in 1933, a regime that Brandt had opposed from the day of its founding until its welcome destruction.
Further, given the anti-Jewish animus of some within the existing Polish communist regime in 1970, a sentiment shared by certain Polish nationalists who detested that regime, Brandt had emphatically pointed to a moral limit to Ostpolitik: He would not allow it to serve as an occasion for any recrudescence of xenophobia, then or in the future. And finally, by disproving the Polish communist regime’s claim that republican West Germany somehow wanted to attack Poland, in imitation of the Hitler tyranny, and to seize the lost territory, Brandt opened political space for the anti-communist resistance that would culminate in Poland’s own independence by freeing that movement from charges of intentional or unintentional collaboration with German revanchism. “Brandt’s Ostpolitik was directed not only against the ruling communists, but also toward the society that was standing up to the dictatorship.” It had been, after all, the Soviet Union which had destroyed hopes of a ‘popular-front’ coalition of communist and non-communist workers in the 1930s, when it signed the 1939 pact with Hitler as a prelude to dividing Poland between the two tyrannies, and of course it had been the Soviet Union that had betrayed the Allies’ agreement at the Yalta Conference of 1945, pledging free and fair elections in Poland after the war.
Like de Gaulle before him, Brandt wanted a Europe free of both American and Soviet military occupation. As the former mayor of West Berlin, he knew very well the reluctance of the NATO allies to “die for Berlin,” despite the resolution shown in the 1948-49 airlift and the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961. He wanted to break the impasse between West and East, between democratic and commercial-republican Europe and the states of the Soviet empire.
While admiring Brandt’s courage and prudence at Warsaw in 1970, Michnik criticizes the Ostpolitik as it came to be developed, throughout the decade. Like the Nixon/Kissinger policy of détente, “the politics of consistent rapprochement with Moscow and East Berlin and the language of ‘concern for peace’ practically drove out concern for human rights in Central and Eastern Europe.” The era of what American detentists called “quiet diplomacy” too often meant neglect of the very feature of the communist oligarchies which made them tyrannical: their rejection of human rights in principle and in practice. “When he accepted the Oder-Neisse border in the name of the Federal Republic, Brandt had spoken to all Poles. Later he spoke only to Poland’s communist governing elite”—and none too effectively, at that. ‘Top-down’ reform just wasn’t going to happen. At the same time the Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel “wrote about ‘the power of the powerless,’ Willy Brandt demonstrated the moral powerlessness of the powerful.” Only revolution ‘from below’ would work, and that was where Poland’s Solidarity trade union came in, allied with a new generation of Polish intellectuals and also with Polish farmers who detested the system of collectivized agriculture. (It would be well to observe that those classes were supported by the Roman Catholic Church to which no small number of Poles belonged, and its Polish pope, John-Paul II; the Church and its pontiff are oddly absent from Michnik’s account, here—perhaps a token of his secularism.)
The new revolutionaries in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Central Europe, supported across the political spectrum in many of the commercial republics—from Ronald Reagan on the ‘Right’ in America to François Mitterand on the ‘Left’ in France—insisted that while the Soviet Union and its empire “was no longer a system of Stalinist-totalitarian oppression… it retained the institutions of a totalitarian state.” The time of “ideology” had not passed; the time of an interests-based, allegedly pragmatic politics of peace—often masking moral cowardice and imprudence—had not begun. While détente and Ostpolitik “contributed to the destabilization of communist regimes… that was not either Kissinger’s or Brandt’s goal.” It was the goal of Reagan and Mitterand, of Michnik, Walesa, and Havel, and they set a different course to arrive at that different goal. The forthright assertion of human rights by all of these statesmen and statesmen-in-waiting “did not trigger war,” as their alarmist critics feared.
Michnik thus begins his book with an essay exhibiting both a sober acknowledgement of the realities of politics and a firm adherence to the humane, genuinely liberal principles that policies and political regimes should secure. A ‘man of the Left’ himself, he has always refused to say, ‘No enemies on the Left’ or ‘No friends on the Right.’ He understands and appreciates international politics, especially geopolitics, as any sensible Pole must do. At the same time, he sees the importance of what Aristotle calls the politeia or regime, both within a countries and in relations among countries. Aristotle describes the regime in four dimensions: the person who rule (one, few, or many and also, crucially, good or bad); the forms or institutions by which those rulers rule; the Bios ti, the way of life rulers and institutions encourage and sustain; the telos or purpose of the rulers, the forms of rule, and the way of life. Michnik keeps track of them all, with special attention to the conditions and consequences of regime change, or revolution.
As seen in the essay on Brandt, political revolutions involve us in profound moral, theological, and even epistemological questions. Fascist and communist tyrannies alike not only committed he worst crimes ‘against humanity,’ as the saying goes; by being what they were and therefore acting as they did, the marked the souls of both victims and predators long after the regimes themselves had undergone revolution. This is part of “The Trouble with History,” the title of Michnik’s second chapter, concluding Part One. Characteristically, Michnik sympathetically identifies the constraints imposed upon heads of state like Brandt while unflinchingly pointing also to their failures to see when and where those constraints were more apparent than real—understandable failure, but still failures of courage and of prudence. At the same time, he points to the much more salutary constraints that ought to prevail among the revolutionaries and the beneficiaries of the revolutions against the communist regimes. This sympathy, combined with such criticism, distinguishes Michnik’s writing from those of the majority of journalists and scholars of his own, and of any generation.
One of the illusions prevailing among well-meaning communist moderates (as it were) during the Cold War was the notion of “socialism with a human face”—a slogan coined by the Czech communist reformer Alexander Dubçek during the Prague Spring of 1968. Considering an apologia for McCarthyism written by a Polish right-winger in the aftermath of the far more successful Central European ‘Spring’ of 1989, Michnik calls this new turn “anti-communism with a Bolshevik face.” He means that such neo-McCarthyism in Central Europe rests on “the belief that by using the techniques of intimidating public opinion one can build a world without sin.” This amounts to a sort of millennialism of the ‘Right’ matching that of the ‘Left.’ Although this Rightist campaign had not (yet) moved against the lives or personal liberties of its targets, and hardly aimed at the enormities of Nazism, it did move against their livelihoods, aiming to disqualify ex-communists from all government positions and moreover to discredit their participation in democratic political life. It treated all members of the previous, justly defeated regimes as irreconcilables.
The Polish Right was beginning to use history as a means of persecution. Under the new regime envisioned by the Right, only those entirely free of association with communism might wield public authority, can and should take a different turn from the purges that followed the revolution of 1945.
As compromised and polluted beings, the others must shut up and go away. In this anti-Bolshevik appropriation of Bolshevik-like practices, Michnik sees another deformation of historical dialectic: “It is clear that communism created as its antithesis not only an attitude of dialogue and pluralism”—underground men and women who established a civil society unseen by their uncivil, would-be totalitarian rulers—”but also a philosophy of replacing communist monologue with an anti-communist monologue.”
Exercising the freedom to write guaranteed by the 1989 revolution, Michnik interrupts the new monologists by making some reasonable distinctions. As Aristotle would argue, circumstances alter cases: The harshness of Nazi rule in Poland had far exceeded the harshness of the Soviet and Polish communist rule that followed it there, although Hitler had nothing on Stalin when it came to genocide in other places. Similarly, the peaceful revolution that removed the communist regime “had nothing in common with the end of the Nazi occupation”—coming, as it did, during a world war and resulting in the very oppression now deplored by the new Polish Right. This means that the politics of Polish republicanism, post-1989, can and should take a different turn than the purges that followed the revolution of 1945.
“There is only one thing everybody agreed on” in 1989: “that the past had to be de-falsified.” Such de-falsification must not entail de-fenestration of those associated with the thuggish and tyrannical but not genocidal regime of Polish communism—a regime which, to its credit, collaborated in its own demise by negotiating with the revolutionary dissidents. Some on the Right in post-communist, democratic-republican Poland claimed that “all those who after 1945 took part in supporting communist rule” were quislings to be “taken to court for high treason against their own nation.” Such persecution will not tend to establish a civil society in a country still recovering from tyranny. Similarly, in the United States of the late 1940s and early 1950s it was one thing to prosecute Americans who had acted as Soviet agents, another to accuse anyone who had associated with the Reds with treason.
Michnik wants no one to mistake his intention: Communist tyranny deserved its political ‘deconstruction.’ But in its four and a half decades of misrule it had moved “from Stalinist fanaticism and terror to a dictatorship that tolerated an independent Catholic Church and private farming, and periodically allowed some margin of freedom in artistic expression and scholarly research”—the very things that eventually helped to bring about its collapse. What is more, even and especially the dissidents who lived under that regime and undermined it necessarily got some dirt on their hands by the very act of pushing back against dirty things. The dissidents what every sane person does, and not only in politics; they won gains by making compromises. They too had to think ‘dialectically’ in one sense: the sense (moreover, the common sense) of the communists’ old slogan, “Two steps forward, one step back.” “Can one mechanistically classify all of those people”—surely including Michnik himself and his colleagues—”as traitors to Poland?” By that standard, only those who did nothing at all could now qualify for full participation in Poland’s new civic life.
Michnik coins a word to describe the partisan, self-serving abuse of history: “historiosophy.” Historiosophists attempt to exploit the understandable passion to avenge past injustices by precluding all the ‘impure’—in this case anyone who held a government position in the old regime and indeed anyone identified in the police records of that regime as a collaborator with it—from any form of government position, now and in the future. This is a Right which imitates the very partisans the Right has long (and properly) condemned: the Jacobins of France and the Bolsheviks of Russia, who claimed that the proverbial slate needed cleaning (by themselves) and that only then, “with them” ruling, a “new era of national history begins.” The sophistry of historiosophy consists in believing that such a thing is possible and, if possible, just. What begins with an attempt to prevent an old, historical regime from returning risks the founding of a new tyranny.
Michnik admires Aristotle, and he evidently appreciates Aristotle’s approach to politics. Aristotle famously identified three kinds of rule in the household and thus in the polis, that community consisting of households. There is parental rule—one-way rule of command and obedience, rightly exercised for the good of those ruled. There is masterly rule—one way rule of command and obedience, exercised for the good of the master. And there is marital rule, reciprocal rule, “ruling and being ruled,” as Aristotle describes it. Only the latter is political rule in Aristotle’s strict sense of the word. Michnik wants Polish politics to be political in that strict sense. Beginning with “a democratic opposition [that] confronted the monologue of the communists’ version of history with a polyphonic voice”—a real dialectic, not a pseudo-scientific or sophistical one—Polish democratic republicans understood history as “the real teacher of life,” of a life with a purpose, namely, “a persistent striving after truth.” This means (and not incidentally) that the founders of Polish democracy rejected not only the grand narratives of the Left, with their dubious claims of having discovered a ‘scientific’ socialism that made further civic discussion unnecessary in principle, but equally the Nietzschean or quasi-Nietzschean claims of the Right, which subordinated the quest for truth to the will to live, conceived as the ‘will to power.’
To understand one’s husband or wife, to understand one’s fellow-citizens, indeed to understand any human being, one must enter into the kind of dialogue Aristotle and Michnik esteem. “One cannot understand the French Revolution or the American Civil War,” Michnik writes, “by adopting only one perspective, whether monarchist or Jacobin, that of Lincoln or the southern generals.” One needs to listen to them all, attentively. Leaving it at that would indeed bring on the moral relativism or soft nihilism deplored by the historiosophists of the Right. But of course one need not leave it there. Having studied the writings of both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee (or better, John C. Calhoun), one can still in the end conclude that Lincoln was nearer to the truth. Still, only those who listen to the testimony presented by all sides may honestly judge with (as that eminently civil saying goes) malice towards none and charity towards all.
A historian’s responsibility “is to cultivate a spirit of heresy” with regard to all claims, but especially those that reinforce claims to rule in the present or the future. Such heresy may extract a lesson from piety. The historian “has to believe that the truth is worth caring for, and that only the truth has the power to liberate”—to set you free, as the Polish pope would have been quick to add. Free from what, and from whom? From those who would parent adults and master the un-slavish. Freed from those who overestimate their own virtue and underestimate yours.
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