SPIEGEL ONLINE - June 6, 2007, 02:34 PM URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,487037,00.html KACZYNSKI OVERRULES MINISTER IN SYLLABUS ROW Goethe and Dostoyevsky Escape Poland's Literary Cull
Poland's education minister wanted to replace classic works of literature on the school syllabus with patriotic and Catholic authors. But Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has overruled him, reassuring the Poles that their children will be taught Goethe, Dostoyevsky and Conrad. Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has reassured the nation that schools will continue to teach classic works of literature, both Polish and foreign. He was stepping in to overrule his own education minister, Roman Giertych, who had announced last week that classics includig the works of Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and the Polish-born Josef Conrad were to be dumped in favor of nationalist or Catholic authors like Henryk Sienkiewicz and the late Pope John Paul II. The aim was to instil patriotism in Polish youngsters. But Giertych's boss has now called him to heel. "Of course there will be no abolishing the classic Polish and foreign literature of the 19th and 20th centuries," Kaczynski said on Polish radio earlier this week. "The classics are staying." And he added: "If this was supposed to be a joke, it wasn't a good one." Culture Minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski of the Kazynski twins' national conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) even criticized his cabinet colleague and said that plans to also remove icons of Polish modernism such as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanislaw Witkiewicz, should also be shelved. "Excluding authors who show the weak side of Poland doesn't do anything for real patriotism," he said. Giertych seems to like courting controversy. He has called for a complete abortion ban in Poland and spoken of banning "homosexual culture" in schools. According to Germany's Die Tageszeitung newspaper, the minister reacted badly to his boss's intervention on the school reading list: "The coalition partners don't show the slightest loyalty." Giertych is the leader of the ultra-conservative League of Polish Families (LPR), part of the Polish governing coalition. When he announced his new improved reading list for school kids last week, there was immediate outrage in Poland, not just among the cultural elite but also from teachers, parents and schoolchildren. Several bookstores planned to fill their shop windows with the works to be banned from schools in protest. The Polish PEN club and several intellectuals accused the minister of a literary-cultural cull and complained that the move was reminiscent of communist-era censorship. **** NOTE: According to a lengthy article published in the Finnish Left Alliance newspaper Viikkolehti last Friday: Poland is very much ideologically a dual family-led state. The Kaczynskis keep very close to themselves. Jaroslaw, who is unmarried and lives with his mother, always brings his salary home to his mother, because he has never had his own bank account. The Giertychs are again shovelling family ideology for a fourth generation. Roman Giertych, leader of the smaller coalition party LPR (Polish Families League), openly regards himself as a future prime minister and his father as a future president. Roman's great grandfather Franciszek Giertych was a rich businessman, who financially backed Poland's patriotic league [possibly the forerunner of the current All-Polish Youth, founded by Roman in 1989 - MK] between the wars. Franciszek's son Jedrzej Giertych was also a leading extreme rightwinger during the 1930s. He was nationalistic, but could cooperate across borders: "Together with Italian fascism, German Hitlerism, Portugal's Salazarism, Spanish carlism and falangism our movement is going to bring down the old freemason-plutocrat-socialist-jewish cabal from power and build a new patriotic state." He demanded the expulsion of Jews from Poland. Jedrzej Giertych in person works still today in the LPR's youth organisation MW, whose skinhead members use the Hitler salute and attack homosexuals. During the 1930s this organisation tried to drive away as many Jews as possible from universities. Jedrzej's son Wojciech has worked as a professor of moral theology at the papal university in Rome and he was named Pope Benedict XVI's personal theologian in December 2005. Also his second son Maciej is a europarliamentarian in Brussels and there excites attention and disgust with his opinions. He has published pamphlets furnished with the logo of the European parliament, in which he has demanded of other civilisations - especially Jewish - expulsion from Europe and the suppression of homosexuality. In the same way he has organised in parliament rooms a seminar in which Darwin's doctrine was denied. Roman Giertych is in no way content to stand in the shadow of his forebears. He is not satisfied with demanding a tightening of Poland's existing abortion laws, insisting instead upon a complete ban EU-wide. This occurred at an EU education ministers' meeting in March, at which the primary focus was to discuss the new EU constitution. Giertych was not interested in that, however, only wanting on record that which emphasised member states' national values, the importance of family life and the banning of abortion and homosexual propaganda. If our present course continues our continent's christian civilisation has no future, and in its place will come islam, Giertych stressed to his erring brothers and sisters. He has also initiated in his home country an effort to criminalise speech about any kinds of marriage other than that between man and woman. Roman Giertych is a member of the extreme catholic Opus Dei organisation, but so are many other Polish government members. He is very active also in his own fields. He has for example ordered for Polish schools computers fitted with a filter named "Beniamin", which prevents contact with unsuitable pages, in the manner of China and Belarus. There are thousands of these unsuitable addresses, not only pornographic, but also for example the Green Party, left organisations and a certain human rights organisation's pages. Fascist and anti-semitic pages are not in any way blocked. This programme is recommended also for loading onto home computers - it is of course free. **** >From "Poland lives in its own time" by Peter Lodenius, Kansan Uutiset Viikkolehti, 1 June 2007. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
