Perspectives on Poland: The Apology Game
Jamie Stokes | 4th November 2009

fatamorgana 9th January 2010

According to a dictionary, a slip of the tongue is an accidental and trivial mistake in speaking; so in my humble opinion if one says "Jim" instead of "John" it might be classified as a slip of the tongue; but when one delivers a speech full of defamatory remarks or intentionally attempts to ridicule another it is no longer a slip of the tongue because it is deliberate.

As regards your Ukrainian experience,I wonder if your friends happened to mention that probably most of them or their predecessors had employment opportunities and earned their living thanks to Poles and that in general the two nations (and other communities like Jews as well) coexisted peacefully in the so-called western Ukraine until Russians appeared inciting antagonisms and hatred and deceiving Ukrainians with the idea of "national liberation"; they didn't have to wait long, did they, to find out that Soviets never intended to liberate anyone.

StarszyPan 30th December 2009

Let me add to this discussion if I may?
I have lived on & off in Poland since the mid 1960's and can say that I have first hand experience of the transitions of the pschy of friends & colleagues over these past 40 or so years. One thing that seems to remain more or less constant is that background fear that somehow the nation has been more systematically degraded that any other nation in the eastern european region. In the 60's the sense of outrage at the Soviet domination explained the heightenes sense and I was always happy to concede and sympathise. At the end of the '90's Poland is a chnaged Poland in many ways - but I see from recent fireside chats with many of those that I have known these 40 years to harbour a similar sense of being dominated by those 'others'. We were discussion western parts of Ukraine, Lwow and the sorroundings - I was subjected to a tirade about the misfortunes of Poles there. Talke to the Ukrainians, as I do since I am spending much time there and you get the opposite vies about how the Poles treated them!

An apology for every slip of the tongue? Well I am not sure. Present day experiences of migrating Poles to UK should bring back some lessons - even though Poles remain 'transparent' in the street - as they are white and thus do not evoke a question till they speak.. then some of those lessons of experience might be taken seriously for the less transparent people living in Poland ie the Vietnamese and others of colour. For these and for the blacks my friends and acquaintances have views not to be expressed in polite society - apologies might be handed out on all sides, me thinks!

fatamorgana 21st December 2009

It was by pure chance that I read the article by Jamie Stokes published in November release of Krakow Post, entitled: “The Apology Game”; being a Polish native speaker and thus not one of those you normally serve it was a chance in a million that I would have come across it. To tell the truth, I read it with disgust and bewilderment. First of all, I disliked the general air of the aforesaid article (which by means of ridiculing techniques applied attempts to convince the reader that maybe, after all, no one owes us (Poles) any apologies, and maybe it is we (Poles) that should apologize to others??; besides, phrases like “national obsession” are out of place here to say the least).
Mr Stokes, let me say, there is much more to it than just, what you imply, apologizing for the sake of apologizing or what you write “demanding apologies from all and sundry”.
You somehow induced me to think your sympathies are entirely with Russia which makes any discussion rather difficult; nevertheless I would like to point out a few facts which I thought were commonly known.
HISTORY
I dare say apology is the least we have the right to expect after a homicide committed on the Polish officers at Katyń in 1940 by the Soviets (the number of victims amounts to 22,000 most of whom were murdered for the mere fact of being land owners or allegedly being “intelligence agents”) and Russia’s invasion on Poland on September 17th, 1939 and annexation of half of the Poland’s pre-war territory due to Ribbentrop-Molotov pact (the fact which until recently Russia strongly denied). What followed next including almost 50 years of devastating communism and occupation of the country by the Soviet army, deportations to the prisons of Siberia (on the same grounds as above), persecution, general impoverishment of the whole nation, plundering of private property and loss of sovereignty were the immediate result of the Jalta conference where Churchill and Roosevelt proved to have absolutely no guts to oppose Stalin and sanctioned the “new division and order” in Europe leaving Poland and other central and eastern European countries in the Soviet-occupied zone.
Another thing I would like to refer to (reaction triggered by the above-referred article, sorry) is the infamous “appeasement” policy. This particular policy was “successfully” practised before World War II towards the Nazi Germany especially by the British Cabinet, which directly resulted in Anschluss of Austria in 1938, signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938 conceding a large part of the former Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany and the invasion of Hitler on Poland in 1939 (and even then Britain failed to react despite the fact the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on March 31st, 1939 pledged Britain to defend Poland’s independence if the latter were attacked).
THE PRESENT DAY
This particular policy is practised today, too with the same degree of success (apparently one lesson in history is not enough), only today the beneficiary of appeasement is Russia; here, a few examples are rather necessary in order to support my point of view:
1) decision by the American President to drop the idea of Missile Shield for Poland,
2) swallowing up a portion of Georgia by Putin (again no reaction from the Western world or am I becoming hysteric?) (who would be next Ukraine? Poland?),
3) intended construction of a gas pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea as a joint German-Russian undertaking which is definitely not prompted by economic reasons (being much more expensive than its ground equivalent) and which clearly aims at alienating Ukraine and Poland and no doubt will give way to “gas supply blackmailing”);
4) and just one hypothetical question: what will happen to the Russian Black Sea Fleet?; how far will Russia advance in its measures to ensure the convenient harbour for its units on the Ukrainian/Crimean Black Sea shore?
And yet, nobody protests, nobody seems to perceive any evil and all in the name of avoiding, at all costs, any attempt to annoy or oppose Russia or even dream of any such disobedience.
In view of the above, the tendency to depreciate things as presented in the above article (oh, it’s only “a misguided sentence”, no harm in it so what this fuss is all about?) might be considered dangerous, too.
I just want to say it is no good ridiculing facts or features and contributing opinions which are inadequate as compared with the core of the matter. I assure you we are the first of all nations that would very much like to forget all the atrocities of the World War II and its aftermath during the post-war years and not to demand any apology but, unfortunately, we can not or rather mustn’t. For only too often we are reminded by various statements delivered by honoured statesmen, manuvres with the participation of military forces (recently a combined Russia-Belarus manuvre supposedly to protect the aforesaid pipeline which does not exist as yet against the Polish attack) and other threats including those mentioned above, that danger, like in the past, is still close to us.