On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish democracy movement, said the following.
> What should we make of this?
This is pretty normal Michnik, and normal for his cohort.
You might be thinking of Michnik of the 1970s -- 25 to 30 years ago -- when he still thought there was good in Marx and that the Soviet Union was not the only possible expression of Marxism. But that was before the crackdown and martial law and him being sent to jail. That seemed to confirm to him (and most of his cohort) that reform of that system was impossible and everything bad that had been said about it was true. Thereafter their hatred of what they thereafter called totalitarianism became pretty acid etched.
So his comments on Saddam seem to flow inevitably from his acceptance of the term totalitarian to describe him. For people like him, that's a very charged term, and he feels almost a personal duty to bear witness and denounce it like a Jeremiah.
As for his neo-liberal views on the alternative globalization movement, that's pretty standard for the contemporary descendants of Solidarity, who are all on the conservative half of the Polish political spectrum (where the other half is still defined by ex-communists). And it's reinforced in this case by the bitterness of Poles who feel that what really motivates social market progressives is racism against Eastern Europeans. Poles are still bitter about unprecedented exception Eastern Europe was forced to accept about free movement within Europe for up to 7 years. They take gibes about "the polish plumber" personally.
And lastly, it's the stock character of a disillusioned leftist denouncing leftists for their utopian/totalitarian illusions.
Michnik has lots of very idiosyncratic views (esp. on Polish Judaism), and recently got bogged down in a really baroque scandal. But these two views seem pretty much standard for his cohort.
Michael