Reporting the noise, ignoring the signal

The first of my comments on the article Polish law under siege by ministers, warns judge by Oliver Moody in The Times, 28 April 2020.


First the quote,

Since winning the 2015 election the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party has targeted the courts with measures it claims are to purge corrupt judges and relics of the communist era. Although it failed to introduce a mandatory retirement age that would have forced out Ms Gersdorf and a third of the 72 other Supreme Court justices, it has taken over the panel that appoints judges and created disciplinary hearings with the power to sack or fine them.

The West is completely clueless as to what exactly happened in Eastern Europe around 1989-90 and what is happening there now. The PiS leaders are just as Communist as the people they are pretending to oppose. They come from families privileged in various ways under Communism. They are children of Communist party members, secret police functionaries, and all sorts of beneficiaries of Communist dictatorship. The same is true of other, allegedly competing, parties. They are all friends and family, they only pretend to differ.

The Supreme Court issue is completely artificial.

Communism has not collapsed. It was restructured. The control remains firmly in the same hands as earlier. Elections are fake affairs.

I am writing this as a person removed from my university job in Poznań for political reasons. I was fired in 2015. At the same time my wife Małgorzata Głuchowska was fired from her job in the State School of Music in Zielona Góra. She is a pianist. I am a physicist with an American PhD. Having studied in Poland as an undergraduate in the 1980s and then working at a Polish university up to a rank of an associate professor, I can say there is really no difference.

Change of government means nothing in Poland because it does not change anything. It is only a change of decorations.

My wife was fired on the basis of a fabricated ‘psychological opinion’. The same Communist methods, as before.

The Times, like other newspapers, is simply a clueless observer. It duly reports the noise, while completely ignoring the signal.

@LechSBorkowski