Today’s Rzeczpospolita has a mercifully short report on a conference organised by the Szkoła Główna Handlowa (literally: Main School of Trade) in Warsaw. A picture of its former rector Marek Rocki is captioned “Free Education is a Fiction” – a quote from the man himself. What does this intellectual titan mean? “Two thirds of students […]
I know little about Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz but he seems to think along my lines so he is clearly a genius. Here is an article he wrote about intellectuals and ignoramuses for those readers who speak Polish. I’ll just translate (clumsily) one sentence: Lepper is the effect, not the cause, of the blurring of the […]
You would think that with their glorious and recent history of trade unionism the Poles would know a thing or two about striking. Today’s Dziennik carries a story about the doctors’ strike. It seems that the good doctors are manning the picket lines in their public hospitals in the morning and then, in the balmy […]
Sometimes you have to laugh (or if you’re Henryk Grynberg, sneer) at decadent Westerners who have never experienced totalitarianism. In Gazeta Wyborcza (May 6th) a page (actually, many pages) is given over to the threat to democracy posed by ignoramuses Andrzej Lepper and Roman Giertych, the coalition partners. Some choice quotes from Lepper and Giertych […]
A coalition government for Poland has finally been agreed. This time it even has a majority, as the LPR (League of Polish Families) got onside when (because?) an extra three ministries were created to ensure jobs for the boys – errr, a meaningful input from the coalition partners into matters of national policy. Thus, Roman […]
Media Lens has a good article about Chavez coverage in Britain. Meanwhile in Poland Rzeczpospolita makes a much better attempt than Gazeta Wyborcza to disguise its disdain for Chavez in today’s paper.
A coalition government has been formed in Poland. Well, not really. At the last moment someone pulled out so the coalition is still in a minority. It’s just that now it has lost every last shred and tatter of repsectability. Here’s the BBC on the subject. How the writer refrained from adding the words “by […]
Chavez is an object lesson in the way the mainstream media works. Consider this article in the Sunday Times by Sarah Baxter. Firstly, there’s the title, with its reference to Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief: “Mischief stirs for Bush in the ‘axis of good’.” Perhaps if Baxter knew more about Waugh than the titles of his […]
Saturday’s Gazeta Wyborcza carries a report by Maciej Stasinski about Teodoro Petkoff, the 74-year-old challenger to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This newspaper, please note, is regarded with deep suspicion for its left-wing and liberal sympathies by the right wing political establishment in Poland. On a couple of things, though, this newspaper, the American media and […]
This month’s issue of Lampa (Lamp) has a few features on Stanisław Lem, who passed away recently. Radek Knapp writes in one of them “One day I told the Master that I had written a story, to which Lem replied: ‘don’t write. You’ll starve to death’.” It’s a tough old profession alright but not for […]
