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PARTISAN REVIEW
clandestinely on cheaper paper-which prints original material
as well as essays turned down by the government.
Arka,
its editor
Ryszard Legutko told us frankly, is in American terms
"neoconservative." The journal began publication in 1983, for the
purpose of promoting a free exchange of ideas while the country
was under martial law. Seeking to oppose "the Communist
monopoly in the distribution of culture,"
Arka
editors reject both
socialism and communism, and try to "refute the still widely
held notion that Socialism... has something valuable to contribute
to the understanding of human needs and aspirations... " In eco–
nomics it stands for the free market, and in history it seeks to op–
pose "the Leftist point of view" on the Korean War, the Spanish
Civil War, and the Cold War. Seeking to integrate Western lib–
eral democracy with Polish political and religious thought,
Arka 's
editors also oppose what they call the "relativistic and nihilistic
tendencies pervading modern art. "
Arka
regularly summarizes
articles from
Commentary
and
Encounter,
and it opposes neutralism,
feminism and "the influence of the Left on the media and on
education at American colleges and universities." Its interna–
tional editorial advisory board includes Saul Bellow, Alain
Bensan~on, Fran~ois
Bondy, Leszek Kolakowski, Melvin Lasky,
and Norman Podhoretz. If such statements do not make their
stance clear enough, the Polish edition of
Commentary
is widely
distributed to readers of both publications.
Our group met at a lovely privately-owned apartment over–
looking the market square in Cracow, with the editors of both
publications, along with Adam Szostkiewicz, editor-in-chief of
Tygodik Powszechny (The Catholic Weekly of Culture and Society),
which sells the maximum number of copies they are able to print
each week, over 100,000. The editors of each publication said that
they seek to create a political climate that will enable Poland to
move towards a market society based on political democracy, the
introduction of private capitalism, and the dismantling of the
large and inefficient state-run industries, such as the Nowa Huta
steel mill.
Indeed, one Polish graduate student sitting in, one of our
translators and a youth activist, was intent on letting me know
his opinions of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I expected a criticism of the
Yalta agreements, but instead, he said, "Roosevelt was perhaps
the worst president for your country. He created the New Deal,
