Saturday Morning Musings - snakes, terrorists and the future of Poland

For some reason, I had always thought the phrase "snake in the grass" to be Australian. Apparently not. According to Dictionary.com, this metaphor for treachery, alluding to a poisonous snake concealed in tall grass, was used in 37 b.c. by the Roman poet Virgil ( latet anguis in herba). It was first recorded in English in 1696 as the title of a book by Charles Leslie.

This snake was photographed at Metz east of Armidale by Gordon Smith. Gordon thought that it was probably an eastern brown snake. Reputedly the second most venomous snake in the world, these are truly big snakes with an average size of 1.1–1.8 m (3.6–5.9 ft). The maximum recorded size for the species is 2.4 m (7.9 ft)!

It has been a little while since I mentioned Gordon's blog. Subtitled a pictorial journal of life in rural Australia, lookANDsee is a rather wonderful photo blog. If you haven't visited or haven't visited for a while, you should have a browse.

I don't like brown snakes. They frighten me. We had gone out for lunch with some friends of my parents on a property to the east of Armidale. Bored, I decided to go for a walk after lunch. It was a hot, still day. As I walked though the paddock  near  the house, a large brown snake crossed the path in front of me. They really are big. I fear in this case I chose boredom over adventure and returned to the house!

Staying with the snake in the grass theme, detailed forensic investigations are slowly knitting together the details of the Brussels attacks, including the apparent links with the earlier Paris attacks. It seems clear that this was a significant group, attacks some time in the planning.

Thinking of these attacks in military terms, I think that it is helpful to remember that this type of weapon takes time to assemble and once used cannot be used again. As we saw in Bali in 2002, the logistics involved are quite significant.The first Bali bombing was followed in 2004 by the Australian embassy attack in Jakarta and then in 2005 the second Bali bombings. However, the attacks and subsequent police follow up seem, touch wood, to have blunted the capacity to carry out further attacks. I am not saying that they won't occur, but the cells involved had been some time forming  so repetition becomes more difficult each time the weapon is used.

Meantime, the repercussions drag on. In a post, Who is right?, AC reflects rather sadly on the recent political changes in Poland. To my mind, there is a nasty bigoted streak in the Polish governing Law and Justice Party, the use of rhetoric intended to divide, the focus on perceived threats.

Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło has announced that Poland will not be able to take in asylum seekers from the EU for now following the terrorist attacks in Brussels. The stated position is part of an anti-immigration rhetoric that has been running for some time now.  The Irish Times reports that the Polish shift on migration is in line with public opinion in the country: 64 per cent of Poles want their national borders closed to asylum seekers, according to a poll by the Adam Smith think tank. This type of attitude is widely held across Eastern Europe.

Many Australians and especially on the right would agree with the stated Polish position. Nevertheless, the attitude of the Law and Justice Party that the EU is there to benefit Poland, not Poland to benefit the EU is (as phrased) unsustainable. .During the twentieth century, Europe's conflicts imposed the two bloodiest wars in human history on the world. During the Second World War, an estimated 5.7 million Poles lost their life as a consequence of the German occupation. This was followed by the Soviet occupation.

Ethnicity lay at the heart of the Second World War and its associated horrors, political ideology at the base of the Soviet Occupation, state totalitarianism was common to both. The Poles themselves were not totally innocent victims.

Poland cannot have it both ways, to have its cake and eat it too.  One of the drivers in the formation of the EU was the desire to avoid another European conflict, to resolve the ethnic tensions that had divided the continent. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Yugoslav wars showed the continuing power of ethnicity, of old wounds.The language used by the right wing parties and by Eastern European leaders suggests that the lessons have still not been learned.

Two million Poles now live in Germany and the UK. The Polish economy is deeply entwined within the European economy. Poland depends upon European institutions for its very survival. The resurgence of Russia, the memory of a past in which Poland was a victim of external forces and its geographic position, makes many Poles deeply fearful.

There is, I think, a view in Poland that the Atlantic alliance and especially the US provides a shield. That of itself a rather fragile defence. The alliance is deeply linked to NATO and to the European institutions. It's actually very difficult to see the US as such becoming involved in or threatening a war to protect Poland. The Ukraine revealed the limitations of alliance power.

Both the US and the EU have been guilty of external political and diplomatic overreach. Georgia demonstrated that, as did the Ukraine. Brussels itself has been guilty of internal overreach as well..Institution building takes time. Australia has been a Federation for over 100 years and divisions remain. Like Canberra or for that matter Sydney, Brussels seems to believe in standardisation for the sake of standardisation. In doing so, in also pushing EU expansion so hard,the EU has created its own problems.

All that said, the EU needs too, and I think will, muddle through.Certainly the rise of nationalism, a nationalism based on ethnicity and riven by the divisions of the past, complicates matters. The EU is the only barrier against the re-fragmentation of Europe.

For Poland's part, EU membership is just too important in a practical sense for Poland to withdraw or to threaten EU survival. Should push come to shove, and barring an attack of political madness, the Law and Justice Party and the present Polish Government have just too much at stake including the survival of Poland itself. They may posture, and posturing is important and can push people in strange and extreme directions, but their freedom to move on critical issues is limited so long as Poland remains a member of the EU.

Finally, in considering the European political scene and others as well including Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in the US,  it pays to distinguish between particular manifestations and the underlying causes.

Law and Justice views on abortion, homosexuality and gender roles may be conservative to the point that a woman, for example, cannot get an abortion even if the law allows it. The more extreme manifestations of those views should be challenged, but it should also be recognised that there is a strong thread of social conservatism in Poland such that many feel threatened at the pace of social change. The Soviet occupation and the communist system suppressed  elements of those views, but they remained.

In economic terms, at least by European standards, Poland has done well in recent years. However, growth has been poorly distributed. In some parts of the country, living standards are the lowest in Europe, lower than in Soviet times. This is reflected in the shift within Law and Justice from something approaching a neo-conservative economic policy towards a left wing populist state intervention policy, designed to appeal to disadvantaged people and areas.
    
Then we have the law and order mantra. This appeals to those who feel threatened and who wish stability and certainty. This also appeals to the authoritarian tendency that appears to exist in Polish history and especially in the inter-war period.

The geographic divides in Polish politics are stark. I do not pretend to properly understand all the elements, but it seems clear enough. A political map shows a country divided. In the west and north the Civic Platform Party dominates. This is the area that seems to have benefited most from growth and is more cosmopolitan. Law and Justice dominates in the more socially conservatively ane economically more depressed east The map shows the votes in the 2010 presidential election,

Sitting in Australia and prognosticating on events in Europe and especially countries such as Poland that I have never visited is, of course, a dangerous occupation. Nevertheless, my view remains that the EU will muddle through, that this is just another part of the process of creating a new political entity. Given this and my assessment of Poland, I think that Poland will stay in the EU and that, consequently, Law and Justice will find its wings clipped on some key issues.

The alternatives are, I fear. too dreadful to comfortably contemplate. One is the break-up of the EU. A second is an EU controlled by the forces of the nationalistic right. A third is Poland's exit and its entry into a grey zone, a marchland between Europe and an expanding Russian sphere of influence.

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Great Silk Road - first eastbound Polish train leaves Lodz for Chengdu

In Sunday Essay - is this the Eurasian century?, I mused about the attempts by China to rebuild the old great silk road, recreating Eurasia.

This photo shows the first Polish train leaving Lodz in Poland for Chengdu.The line has mainly been used by Chinese exporters since it opened in 2013.  Now the Poles have cleared various regulatory hurdles for Polish products, leading to the launch of a twice weekly east-bound service. Polish products on the inaugural outbound service included beer, juices, mineral water and confectionery.

I have no idea what the cost parameters are for the service as compared to, say, shipping from Australia or indeed from Poland. However, once the infrastructure is there, traders will use it, and that was one of my points.

Saturday Morning Musings – the complexities of recent European history with more than a dash of Poland including Once My Mother

Australian PM and Foreign Affairs Minister Bishop have a highly developed sense of moral outrage. It comes, I think, from the desire to play to a domestic audience in circumstances where the external impact of their remarks beyond the nation’s borders has been relatively low. This attitude is not unique to them. It infected previous PM’s and the Australian media as well.

I make this point now because of MH17. Here I did  as I often do, spending some time to check press reporting in other countries. Noticeably, the official responses in other countries outside the US has been far more tempered. This includes the Dutch who, after all, have suffered the greatest loss of life and also the Malaysians whose PM lost a relative on the plane. .

I don’t know that I am very comfortable with a situation where Australia appears to be leading the global sense of international outrage. It’s not a universal sense of outrage, other stories such as Gaza are more important in some areas, but is certainly so among many countries who have been affected or where people travel. We can be as outraged as we like, but in the end it takes cool heads not domestic posturing to get results.

Mind you, my use of the words “domestic posturing” may be unfair. If my own emotional reactions are any guide, I am sure that that the PM feels very strongly. And yet, neither he nor Ms Bishop can actually afford to let emotions within a 24 hours news cycle set the Australian response.

Frankly, I find the Russian response to the whole thing unbelievable. But cold, forensic analysis is required now if we are to have any chance of getting to the truth. 

Last year I watched Remembrance, a film partly set in Poland. The film is based on the true story of      Jerzy Bielecki  and Cyla Cybulska. Jerzy was a Polish political prisoner sent to Auschwitz, Cyla a Polish Jew at the same camp. They met, fell in love, escaped, but were later separated.  Told that the other had died, they went their separate ways only to meet many years later.

The film changes key elements of the story, but provides a gripping picture of a part of Polish history. I mention this now in part because events in Ukraine reflect the historic past of that part of Europe, more because of the imminent release  of  Sophia Turkiewicz’s new documentary film, Once My Mother, another film with Polish connections.

The term New Australians has been largely forgotten now, almost discredited. It was, in fact, a public relations coup. How do you persuade an insular society still reeling from the Second World War, worried about its future and cautious of change, that  it must admit millions of new residents including refugees from countries that had recently been enemies? You make them one of us.

Assimilation is another now discredited term. However, it was also part of the necessary dialectic. These New Australians will assimilate and become one with us.

Many modern Australians have, I think, lost sight of the tragedy and complexity of European history over the first half of the twentieth century. I make this as a general comment, for at the same time many of the children and grandchildren of that first post war immigration wave are now (like Andrew Denton) seeking details of that past connection to illuminate their own life. In Andrew’s case, the story took him in part to Poland and the holocaust.  

The story of Sophia and her mother Helen is a little different, but also part of the chaos of the time.

Sophia Turkiewicz is best known in Australia for her 1984 film Silver City focused on the story a shipload of Polish refugees coming to Australia. I haven’t seen the film. I must do so now.

Sophia’s relationship with her mother was complicated, in part because Helen placed her in an orphanage for two years. Sophia never properly understood why. She decided to do her mother’s story as a student film project, collected some material and undertook some filming, but the put the matter aside. Now, with her mother sliding into dementia,she took the project up again before it was too late. In doing so, she found a little of her mother’s remarkable story, including the reasons why Helen had put her aside for a period.

The story is complex, but its start can be summarised in this way.

Following the German-Russian pact and the subsequent invasion and partition of Poland, up to 1.5 million Poles were deported from Soviet occupied Poland to Siberia. Conditions were very poor; tens of thousands died. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the exiled Polish Government and Stalin reached a peace agreement. As part of this, an “amnesty” was granted to many Polish detainees who were to be allowed to join a new Polish army to be formed under the command of General Władysław Anders. The new army was to be under the control of the exiled Polish Government.

Tens of thousands of Poles including many civilians were released from the Gulags but without food or transport to find their way to the new force. Again, thousands died trekking to the new headquarters. Sophia’s mother was one of those who had been exiled and then found their way to the Polish Army headquarters.

There were inevitable tensions between the Soviet authorities and what was, in effect, a foreign army on Soviet soil. Anders therefore decided to move his his newly formed force and the civilians who had joined them to Persia where they would come under British control. Again, there was limited transport so that people had to trek to to the Persian border. Again, thousands died.

  Helen accompanied the movement to Persia. Then when the troops went on, she was relocated to a refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia where she was to sty for the next six years.

For the first time in her life, Helen had now found now found security and peace.  She also found love in the person of an Italian POW held in an adjoining POW  camp. Sophia was born.

With the end of the war, the Italian POWs are repatriated, leaving Helen alone again. Finally, as a single mother, she arrives by boat in Australia with her baby daughter. She speaks no English, has had no formal education and knows nobody. She puts Sophia in an orphanage. This is where the story begins. I gave the link to the film above, but just repeating it. It includes the trailer and background material.