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interpret it. And it's not only a national and religious revival, as a
right wing conservative would prefer to have it. It's all that to–
gether, or, to put it more simply, it's a way from absurdity to nor–
mality-struggling for a life where a butcher shop would sell real
meat and not garbage, teachers would teach the real history of
Poland and not lies, and writers would write real books and not
pieces of propaganda. What happens today, and what is taking
shape into an amazing resistance against machine guns, water
cannons, and loyalty oaths, is only a result of the fact that it's
impossible to go back under water once one has tasted the fresh air
of freedom and truth.
It's extremely important, in my opinion, that the West
should finally understand what has really happened in Poland
between 1980 and today. Because the West, in my opinion, still
doesn't understand: we still hear about the supposed romanti–
cism of Solidarity and the realism of the generals-as if there were
anything irrational about Solidarity's vision of a rationally func–
tioning -society; as if it weren't these generals who chose the way
of sheer political lunacy, who waged the war against the whole
nation without any positive program. The same thing can be said
about the question still raised by Western political observers:
Didn' t Solidarity go too far? Didn't Solidarity bring the defeat
upon itself?
It would
be
too easy to dismiss these questions as a sign of
hypocrisy, as an excuse for a lack of sympathy with Solidarity. In
fact, the problem posed by those questions is important, and itde–
mands some serious explanations and answers. However, let's
notice one highly symptomatic thing: Everybody in the West asks
whether Solidarity went too far; nobody asks whether General
Jaruzelski went too far. Despite all its sympathy and compassion,
the West seems to accept silently the basic assumption of Eastern
propaganda: that the Communist authorities are always right
when they're defending their monopoly of power.
They never
go
too -far, even when they declare a state of war against their own
people. It's the people who go too far and who quite necessarily
bring defeat upon themselves each time they try to demand some
clean air to breathe-some of those basic liberties the West enjoys.
But, as I stated before, I don't think that the very fact of ask–
ing that question is only and always a symptom of hypocrisy and,
in a direct way, of admitting that the world
is
divided into two
