We’re living in a strange times. I recall today when 25 years ago I wrote for a student magazine “Semestr”. One day Andrzej Lepper – a controversial politician – was coming to meet students in my home town of Wrocław. When the editor asked who wanted to cover it, half of the team raised their hands enthusiastically. Everyone wanted to see Lepper with their own eyes. Such an exotically behaving politician was something unheard of. We went to that meeting as a strong team.
Lepper, as he used to do, kept talking. He was not dissimilar to Trump in that he was unable to stitch a coherent, grammatically correct sentence, in that he often referred to himself in the third person and that he was calling everyone thieves. That was quite shocking to us – young readers might wonder why, as while Lepper famously said once that with him in politics, the Polish parliament would be no Versailles, his then extreme behaviour was indeed a Versaille compared to what’s happening nowadays. At the same time, however timid by today’s standard, it was something shocking. At this meeting, one of the journalists of the bigger papers asked Lepper that with him being so keen to call other names, is he not afraid that others might call him names too. Lepper replied, “It’s a free country and everyone is free to their opinion”. I then took the mic and asked “in that case, would you have anything against me writing in my paper that you are a moron”? He got a bit red-faced but managed to keep the posture and bravely responded “You can write that I am a moron if you want because everyone will be able to see for themselves if it’s true”. And so, our collectively written report from that meeting which included extensive quotes from his ramblings, ended with my sentence “Andrzej Lepper is a moron. Is that true? Judge for yourself”. Our editors had absolutely no problem with that. Nobody even thought that we could be sued for something like that. That a politician would dare to attack even a small student magazine for writing that he is a moron after extensively quoting his own words.
A dozen or so years a then-popular politician in Poland who used to be a punk rocker, known for songs in which he addressed the post-communist left politicians with words like “Oh, how I hate you, you whores” and “How I want to shot you from a Kalashnikov gun” was very annoyed by the fact that political commentators say that he has no clue, his party has no clear mandate and that he seems to be incapable of understanding of the basic facts of the politics. He was outraged – and he had great support, despite the fact, that this diagnosis was absolutely spot on. Soon after we saw a political commentator saying on live TV that “he watched women protesting for their rights and wondered – who’d fuck this?”. Soon after some second-tier politician of the right told his left-wing female adversary, that she is for taking in refugees, because she is ugly and unless “goatfuckers” will be allowed to Poland, she has no chance of being laid. My Facebook way-back machine reminded me today how surprised I was that such behaviour is met with much less condemnation than the relatively timid antics of Lepper from just a decade ago.
Today I see Sławomir Mentzen – a right politician known for the fact that he runs a legal firm that prides itself on helping its customers evade taxes in a creative way – is suing another politician for suggesting, that he had been evading taxes in a creative way. In the Facebook post, in which Mentzen announced his legal suit he says that if he wins, he will force his opponent to pay money for victims of recent floods, and “this will be the first time when a politician of that side will help any flood victim” – which is an obvious lie. And nobody cares.
It somehow got very strange, that today politicians have become very sensitive about the words describing their behaviour, but at the same time, they see no reason to limit themselves when it’s them who throw insults or fake accusations at others. To make matters worse, today’s media are more often than not burying their heads in the sand, refusing to write anything that can upset anyone in the political establishment. Even I was told recently, that it’s unacceptable to write that Elon Musk’s ideas about self-driving vehicles are stupid because he might sue us. (If you want to know why I think Elon Musk’s ideas about self-driving vehicles are stupid, you can read it here on my blog).
But, let’s get back to the topic at hand: I am worried. Because politicians are making us used to the fact that the media, or even ordinary people, need to think three times before they dare to express some criticism of their actions. At the same time, they not only brought the level of the political discourse to the ground level but are wiping the dirty floors in the basement with it. One could think, that they do it deliberately. They want us to even be disgusted with politics, so we cannot be bothered with commenting on it, or make us to scared to boldly say what’s wrong with it. And then, when they are able to get away with SAYING whatever they want, they will move to DOING whatever they want.
Elon Musk is already at this stage. And while you might not care why I am bringing some old stories from Polish politics, you should actually take a closer look at this. Because many Poles who watch what’s unfolding in the US have a deja vu moment. When PiS took power for the second time in Poland 10 years ago, we also witnessed unprecedented attacks on the state institutions, the government trying to either dismantle the institutions of the state or make them totally submissive by replacing professionals and experts with their goons. We also heard a lot about “Making our country great again” – although we knew it as “raising up from our knees”. We also heard those politicians wiping their mouths with Christian values while stomping on the rights of women and minorities and taking away funds from those most in need. 8 years of PiS rule in Poland ended up in the embezzlement of public funds at an unprecedented scale and leading institutions of our justice system in ruins. If you want to know what’s ahead for America, look at Poland from 10 years ago. And then multiply it by ten. Because Poland, despite all the flaws of our political system, is a strong parliamentary democracy. Our president – or prime minister, as the presidential role is much more limited – has nowhere near as much power as the American president does. And – however terrible and slimy they were – they weren’t deranged lunatics with overblown egos and apparent signs of mental issues. And, last but not least, they still had to deal with the European Union, which was strongly opposing the destruction of the rule of law in Poland and was able to cut our European funding as leverage. With America, not only nobody will stand in the way of Trump, but he can also tap into almost unlimited resources of the richest man on earth, who just also happen to be a deranged lunatic with a mentality of 10 years old, who – to no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention – also turned out to be openly Nazi. A Nazi, who knows the Polish playbook well – just a few days ago he promoted Dominik Tarczyński, a prominent extreme right wing hater from PiS – on his Twitter account.
A few days back I watched an interview with Bill Gates. He was as diplomatic as it was possible, and yet he was, in strong words, criticizing actions and words of his successor at the throne of the richest man of earth. And I thought to myself that this Bill Gates – who just a couple of decades ago was an archetypic example of an ultimate evil billionaire – today somehow became a nice elderly gentleman, known for that he is using his fortune to better the lives of those most in need and develop vaccines that can save millions of life. And I don’t know: maybe he really changed for the better. Or perhaps our opinion of him while he was the man behind Windows, trying to achieve a monopoly allowing him to control everything we do on our computers was simply wrong, But even if he changed dramatically, there is no chance he had changed his position even closely that much, as the window of what’s acceptable has moved over those two decades.
Suddenly, the world where Bill Gates is a commonly hated villain and Andrzej Lepper is a political scandalist looks warm and cosy. I’d never think that we’d miss the class and integrity of Andrzej Lepper. And yet, here we are.
Zdjęcie Leppera: Błażej Pajda, CC 4.0