THE LITERARY IMPACT
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OF THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
individuals. The first phase of the OpposItIOn saw a struggle of reason
against the irrational; the second was founded on a defense of natural
law against the claims of boundless reason. Was this rebellion a revolu–
tion or a counter-revolution? Whatever it was, it appealed to values
rooted in the American rather than the French Revolution. At the same
time, there has always existed a small but serious trend which criticized
Communism in the name of Communism, best exemplified by Leon
Trotsky's
Revolution Betrayed.
The entire actual anti-Communist opposition, represented by KOR,
Solidarity, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Charter 77, and the Hungarian intel–
lectual resistance, all appealed to the idea of human rights and to the
principle of natural law which was, in turn, rooted in religious tradition.
One could say that Poland's leading intellectuals - Gombrowicz and
Milosz, Kolakowski and Herbert, Cardinal Wyszynski and Cardinal
Wojtyla - consistently articulated their opposition
to
Communism in
anti- utopian terms. While not always agreeing upon the definition of
normality, they repudiated the absurd in the name of normality. What
was common to the entire opposition? I do not think it was the spirit of
the French Revolution expressed by the Jacobin principle, "Be my
brother or I'll kill you." It was rather the spirit of the American
Revolution, the spirit of freedom founded on law, on diversity guaran–
teed by equality of all religions, and on the deeply-rooted right of pri–
vate property, a right protected against the all-powerful claims of the
state.
Today, certain elements of utopian and doctrinal thinking are resur–
facing in this strange post-Communist era. This is an era whose sense we
can no more grasp than Jonah could comprehend the interior of the
whale. But let us try to name some of these new utopias. First, there is
the peculiar new syndrome combining populism with an authoritarian
temptation, xenophobic nationalism with religious fundamentalism. We
have here the ideal of a nationalistic Catholic Polish state. Such a state
would be founded on privileges granted to the Catholic Church and on
legislating Catholic principles into the law of the land. In such a society,
only racially pure Poles could obtain citizenship; for only the racially
pure Pole could be considered a real Catholic, and only the faithful and
obedient Catholic could be a real Pole.
The utopia of the racially pure state, however, can assume a variety
of forms. As old Vladimir Lenin might have said, we need to distinguish
between the nationalisms of large and small nations. A large nation is
one that, even at times of the worst oppression, has never felt that its
very existence was in jeopardy. Not for a moment have Russians or Serbs
suspected that they might be forced to relinquish their national identity.
