Dziennik (26th January) has revealed that the nefarious soviets had atomic bombs on Polish territory. It’s a good thing no one knew about this at the time: their presence would have made Poland an obvious target in any European war. On an entirely unrelated note, an American general calling himself Henry A. Obering has assured […]
Who is to blame for all this snow? This is the question which has been tormenting journalists in local newspapers for the last few days as Poland gets a belated flurry of snow action. Who can we blame for the gigantic tail backs and traffic jams, for the hours wasted by drivers in their cars, […]
There is talk of abolishing the May 1st public holiday. Showing any respect for work here is regarded as dangerous communist deviance. There used to be a lot more streets named after the labour day holiday.
“On the surface, the Russian motives seemed most noble: they intended to introduce law and order, found schools and put an end to ancestral blood feuds and to robbery. It’s just that they wanted to do good by force and make the wild mountain tribes happy by first forcing them into submission.” Too bad GW […]
You must understand that both you and your children will have to work harder. Who could have have said such a thing to the Poles in these days of economic growth (around 5 or 6% I believe)? Who would threaten a free people so blatantly? Was it a lesser-known Dickens character? A Dark Satanic Miller? […]
Gazeta Wyborcza has launched a series called “fifteen themes” of the third (i.e. post 1989) Republic of Poland. Part one deals with censorship. There is a photo of a page from the GW of July 10th 1989 in which two cuts have been forced by the censor. In place of the censored information is [—-], […]
“To dzięki nami bogaci stają się jeszcze bogatsi” is the proud slogan of an investment bank here in Poland. It means “It’s thanks to us that the rich are getting richer.”
More from the censors’ archives: “At the start of December the editors [of the local newspaper] enthusiastically took to rehabilitating Santa Claus. At least one front page article devoted to this oh so important question was planned… The editors’ plan to completely rehabilitate Santa Claus was foiled by the censor. Two articles and three plates […]
Professor Maria Janion, a distinguished Polish scholar, is eighty this Christmas and, Poland being a country which — though it publishes interviews in Playboy with Boris Szyc (pronounced “shits”) where he gets to say rude words a lot — still takes scholarship seriously, this week’s Polityka has a tribute to her. Of the tribute-payers, only […]
The recent political sex-scandal here has brought the primitives crawling out of the woodwork. We have been reminded of such pearls of wisdom from the Polish political classes as “how can you rape a prostitute?” (In fairness to Poland’s backwoodsmen, no one has quite equalled Putin’s congratulating of the Israeli president.) But such primitivism is […]
