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How to make a good teacher
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Poland’s anti-government rallies
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WARSAW
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Kijowski: much Liked
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A new mass movement is proving more effective than the official opposition
Kijowski: much Liked
AT THE head of a march of thousands in Warsaw on June 4th, Mateusz Kijowski cut a striking figure. The red jeans, ponytail and earrings of the leader of a new Polish mass movement contrasted with the sober suits of the two former presidents who flanked him. Since December, when he founded it, the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD) has turned the formerly obscure 47-year-old IT specialist into one of the most powerful figures in Polish politics. KOD is now in the vanguard of resistance to Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), filling a void left by a weak and divided political opposition.
KOD has brought large numbers of Poles onto ...
Poland’s anti-government rallies: From Facebook to the streets
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The manosphere: Balls to all that
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Divided we fall
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The manosphere
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The rebalancing of the sexes has spawned 21st-century misogyny
W. BRADFORD WILCOX, an academic at the University of Virginia who holds robust views on the benefits of marriage for adults and children, is used to sparking debates. But, after publishing a video about the economics of marriage, he was surprised to field criticism online from a character called “Turd Flinging Monkey”. In his own 15-minute broadcast, the chimp equated marriage to slavery. TFM, as he’s sometimes called for short, is a YouTube character created by a disciple of the Men Going Their Own Way movement. An online fraternity, MGTOW believe that marriage fails basic cost-benefit analysis. Why sacrifice sexual freedom for a wife who may later divorce you and take your children and assets? Better to eschew “gynocentric” conventions in favour of self-sovereignty, the logic goes.
“Save a male and stop a wedding™” is an unregistered trademark of MGTOW.com, one of many websites and blogs that ...
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Globalisation and politics: Drawbridges up
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The new political divide
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Globalisation and politics
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CLEVELAND, LINZ, PARIS, ROME, TOKYO AND WARSAW
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20160730_FBD001_0.jpg
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The new divide in rich countries is not between left and right but between open and closed
IS POLAND’S government right-wing or left-wing? Its leaders revere the Catholic church, vow to protect Poles from terrorism by not accepting any Muslim refugees and fulminate against “gender ideology” (by which they mean the notion that men can become women or marry other men).
Yet the ruling Law and Justice party also rails against banks and foreign-owned businesses, and wants to cut the retirement age despite a rapidly ageing population. It offers budget-busting handouts to parents who have more than one child. These will partly be paid for with a tax on big supermarkets, which it insists will somehow not raise the ...
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Catholic youth in Poland: Cross purposes
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The new political divide
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Catholic youth in Poland
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KRAKOW
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Tough crowd
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As the global church trends liberal, the Polish church is not following
Tough crowd
THE window over the main door of the Bishop’s Palace in Krakow is known as the Pope’s Window. It was from here that John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla, used to address his followers when visiting the city where he had served as archbishop during the communist regime. This week, a different pontiff is occupying the window. Pope Francis is in Poland for the church’s World Youth Day festival (actually a week, between July 25th and 31st), which is expected to draw over 1m visitors. Although the more conservative pope died in 2005, it is not clear whose is the greater presence. Asked by Polish television on Monday night about security at the event, a government official said there was a ...
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Catholicism and violence: Time for some new religious thinking about war and peace
POPE FRANCIS is getting an enthusiastic reception from Catholic youngsters from all over the world as he presides over World Youth Day, a Catholic festival that actually lasts a week, in Poland. But some people are not so pleased with him. Both secularists and Christians of a more militant cast of mind than his own feel that he struck the wrong note when responding to the murder of an elderly Catholic priest in France and to other recent atrocities claimed by Islamic State. What the pontiff said, in sum, was that these ghastly deeds are symptomatic of a wider global conflict, whose root causes are not religious.We must not be afraid to say the truth, the world is at war because it has lost peace. When I speak of war, I speak of war over interests, money, resources, not religion. All religions want peace, it's the others who want war.For some Christians, it was disappointing that the Pope missed an opportunity to defend the peacefulness of his own faith. In these critics' view he should have vowed to protect his flock from violence-ridden beliefs, like those which apparently motivated the assassins of the priest. Thus Rod Dreher, a conservative American blogger, responded to the pope's words by saying:This is absurd. No, it's not absurd: this is a lie. It may not be a conscious lie...but it is a dangerous untruth. He is misleading the Chistian people. One shouldn't ...
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Central European cinema: Love and longing after the fall of the Iron Curtain
THE FALL of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened the door to newfound abundance and freedom, from supermarket shelves bursting with variety to the easing of travel restrictions. Yet for millions in the former communist bloc, life did not change overnight. “United States of Love”, a new Polish film directed by Tomasz Wasilewski, enters the private worlds of four women in 1990 whose lives continue much as usual. Audiences will find none of the elation of “Good Bye Lenin!”, a 2003 film set in East Berlin as the wall is toppled. Rather, the historic is muffled by the everyday. Acutely observed and bleakly erotic, the film is less a judgement of that era than an exploration of the human need for intimacy, whatever the current regime.
20160817 12:10:00
Comment Expiry Date:
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Polish businesses: Staying put
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Uberworld
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Polish businesses
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20160903_brp005_0.jpg
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The prospect of Brexit is not putting off Britain’s Polish entrepreneurs
TALKING behind his grocery shop’s generously stocked sausage-counter, a gloomy Daniel Przybylowski says it is time to sell up. Yet those who voted for Brexit on June 23rd in the hope of reducing the number of European migrants may be disappointed to learn that Mr Przybylowski is not going home to Poland as a consequence of the referendum. Far from it: it is the business rates that have defeated him. He hopes to recoup all his investment, at least, and is determined to start another business—in Britain.
Mr Przybylowski typifies the attitude of the 90,000 Polish entrepreneurs and self-employed who make up a growing share of Britain’s economy. Last year Poles overtook Indians as the largest foreign-born group in the country, at an estimated 831,000. Consequently they became a target for ...
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Politics this week
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Art of the lie
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Hong Kong held elections for its 70-member Legislative Council, known as Legco. Six of the successful candidates were “localists”, as those who support greater independence for the territory are often described. It is their first presence in Legco and is sure to anger China, which fears they will use their new positions to push for a referendum on Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland. See here and here.
Uzbekistan buried Islam Karimov, the blood-drenched despot who ruled the country since independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. His death was announced after days of feverish speculation about his health. Vladimir Putin laid flowers on his grave.
The Taliban launched a series of attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital. The defence ministry and the offices of a charity were among the targets. At least 35 people were killed.
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, responded to a bombing in his home town of Davao by deploying the army to help in his current crackdown on drug-dealing ...
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New film: Man of the moment
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Britain’s one-party state
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New film
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Remembering the struggle
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At 90, Andrzej Wajda has made a poignant new film
Remembering the struggle
HE WAS a friend of Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall, champions of Russia’s avant-garde, and he founded Poland’s foremost museum of modern art, in Lodz. But that didn’t save Wladyslaw Strzeminski from humiliation, persecution and destitution when he refused to toe the party line during Stalin’s Sovietisation of Poland. Now, focusing on the years between 1949 and 1952, the country’s greatest film-maker, Andrzej Wajda, has told the visionary art theorist’s story in “Afterimage”, one of a new crop of biopics dealing with great artists.
The film, shot by Pawel Edelman (whose previous works include “The Pianist”), is a haunting depiction of a tragic life. Pictures are smashed; so are illusions. Strzeminski was missing an arm and a leg—he was wounded in the first world war—and ...
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Post-communist chic: You must remember this
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Britain’s one-party state
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Post-communist chic
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BRATISLAVA
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Second time as farce
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In central and eastern Europe, socialist beer is hip again
Second time as farce
IN THE giddy capitalist dawn of the 1990s, many of the tawdry products that stocked Soviet-bloc stores (when you could find them) were driven out by better-made, better-packaged foreign ones. Milk in plastic bags, canned “luncheon meat” and Pitralon aftershave (which, as readers of old samizdat know, doubled as an aperitif among vodka-deprived prisoners) disappeared from the shelves.
Lately, these old products have been making a comeback. Polish hipsters are buying retro furniture in the pupil-dilating browns and oranges of the Jaruzelski era. Proletarian beer brands have been resurrected from Belgrade to Bratislava. In Germany the popular television series “Deutschland ...
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Back in black: Polish women skip work to protest against an abortion ban
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EDYTA, a project manager at a telecoms company, put on her black work outfit on October 3rd just as she would on any Monday morning, but she did not go to work. Instead she joined a crowd of an estimated 30,000 people, mainly women, on Warsaw’s Castle Square to demonstrate against a proposed tightening of Poland’s restrictions on abortion. The protest was part of a one-day women’s strike that brought black-clad female marchers into the streets in cities across the country. The so-called “black protest” was one of the most striking signs yet of resistance to the cultural conservatism that has taken hold in Poland since the installation last year of a government led by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Poland already has some of Europe’s toughest restrictions on abortion; indeed, Edyta first protested against the adoption of the current law in the early 1990s. (The existing law bans abortion except in cases of rape, severe congenital defects or a threat to the mother’s health. Some women obtain abortions illegally, ...
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Poland’s populist government: Ladies in black
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The government loses a battle, but remains popular and illiberal
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Ladies in black
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Poland’s populist government
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The debasing of American politics
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Poland’s populist government
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AUGUSTOW AND WARSAW
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THE Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has governed Poland for the past year, does not scare easily. But the tens of thousands of black-clad women who filled city centres across the country on October 3rd seem to have shaken it. They were protesting against a bill to tighten Poland’s restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal in most cases. The bill would have banned it even in cases of rape and incest (but not when needed to save the ...
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The week ahead: Farewell, King B
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The week ahead
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Economist.com
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The death of Thailand's long-serving monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, has spawned worries about the country's stability. The last presidential debate might be Donald Trump's political swan song. So-called 'localists' in Hong Kong challenge Beijing's rule. And female protesters in Poland pressured the government to back down from an abortion bill. Rob Gifford hosts.
Published:
20161014
Source:
Online extra
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The conscience keeper: Obituary: Andrzej Wajda died on October 9th
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Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s greatest film-maker, died on October 9th, aged 90
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Obituary: Conscience-keeper
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Andrzej Wajda
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Liberty moves north
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The conscience keeper
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THE life’s work of Andrzej Wajda was to tell Poles forbidden truths about their country and explain simpler ones to foreigners. Neither should have been necessary. Nazis and communists smothered Poland in fear and lies. The country of Chopin, Conrad and Copernicus was cut off from the European cultural mainstream, to be patronised, misunderstood and forgotten.
He would have loved to make films about something else, to have dumped the tragic national themes and their well-worn symbols—sabres, white horses, red poppies—for something more exotic, such as “a ...
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Charlemagne: For our freedom and yours
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Poland’s illiberal turn poses a wicked dilemma for the European Union
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For our freedom and yours
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Charlemagne
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America’s best hope
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Charlemagne
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IF EUROPEAN history once seemed to have arrived at its terminus in 1989, it has sped off in a new direction in Poland. After winning the country’s first post-1989 outright majority in elections one year ago, the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) immediately set about undermining independent checks on its power, from the constitutional court to public media. Such antics would disqualify an aspirant from membership of the European Union, but it is harder to punish miscreants once they are inside. Surrounded by problems outside its borders, from Russia to Turkey to Libya, ...
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On central banks, Poland, farming, Denmark, companies, Frida Kahlo, democracy: Letters to the editor
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On central banks, Poland, Denmark, companies, Frida Kahlo, democracy
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The Trump era
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On central banks, Poland, farming, Denmark, companies, Frida Kahlo, democracy
Handling central banks
The issue of central-bank independence is a complex and difficult one (“Hands off”, October 29th). Monetary policy has significant social and political effects and as such should be subject to some form of political accountability. The artificial institutional separation between fiscal and monetary policy is unhealthy. In Britain it allowed George Osborne to pursue a policy of fiscal austerity through the Treasury while leaving the Bank of England to do all the heavy lifting in monetary policy. The same has happened in the euro zone.
The vast majority of central banks across the world do not have operational independence. Neither did most of the European central banks until the launch of the euro. In the Netherlands, for example, the final decision on monetary policy rested with the minister of ...
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The Smolensk disaster: Poland plans to exhume plane-crash victims to prove a Russian conspiracy
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Exhuming a president to prove a conspiracy
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Tales from the crypt
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Polish paranoia
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The Trump era
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The Smolensk disaster
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WARSAW
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20161112_EUP003_0.jpg
EVER since a plane carrying then-president Lech Kaczynski crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk on April 10th, 2010, killing all 96 people on board, Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) has been consumed by conspiracy theories. Now in power, it is led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president’s twin brother, who believes that Russia brought the plane down—perhaps with the connivance of PiS’s Polish political enemies. So the government is having the bodies exhumed. An international team of experts will examine ...
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Birth control: How to make abortion rarer
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In many countries abortion is the main form of birth control. The easiest, least controversial way to reduce it is often neglected
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How to make it rarer
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Abortion
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Why a strengthening dollar is bad for the world economy
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Birth control
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ATHENS AND SEOUL
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20161203_IRP003.jpg
ABORTION, says Theodora, a Greek civil servant, was “an absolute necessity” when she became pregnant last year. Her husband had lost his job and money was too tight for a third child. The procedure, at a private clinic, was “efficient”; she was in and out in three hours. Hers was a typical experience for a middle-class Athenian woman. It is not uncommon for one to have four or five abortions, ...
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Winter of discontent: Protests grow against Poland’s nationalist government
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Protests grow as Poland’s nationalist government gets nastier
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Winter of discontent
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Polish politics
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How to make sense of 2016
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Winter of discontent
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WARSAW
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More hacks please, we’re Polish
More hacks please, we’re Polish
POLAND’S populist government, led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, has seen its fair share of protests since coming to power in late 2015. Demonstrators gathered on the streets of Warsaw when the government sought to weaken the constitutional tribunal and pack it with loyalists. They did so again when it purged more than 130 journalists from the state media. Thousands of black-clad women took to the streets against a plan to make it even ...
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Sniffing the breezes: Obituary: Clare Hollingworth died on January 10th
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Clare Hollingworth, foreign correspondent, died on January 10th, aged 105
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Sniffing the breezes
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Clare Hollingworth
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The 45th president
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Sniffing the breezes
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WELL into her 80s Clare Hollingworth would sleep on the floor every week or so, just to prevent her body from getting “too soft”. Her passport was to hand, with visas up to date, just in case the foreign desk rang. She liked to have two packed suitcases, one for hot climates, one for cold, though her wardrobe was notoriously sparse: in later life she was seldom seen in anything but a safari suit and cloth shoes. And all you really needed, she said, were the “T & T”—typewriter and toothbrush.
Hardiness and bravery were her hallmarks. Neither shot nor shell ...
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