The experimentation with safe zones brought mixed results, but I will close this trilogy with a final episode. Let's talk about the future safely.
He gave me a lot to think about. Krastev's essayThe link Awal threw in a while ago. Krastev there answered a question that Anne Applebaum had put in each refrigerator for a time: which divided her with her old friends who celebrated with her and her spouse the Millennium fresh Year's Eve at the Chobielin residence.
Then they were a bunch of right-wing gangs, now they're in opposing political camps. Have Radek Sikorski's friends been hidden enemies of democracy from the beginning ("closed authoritarians") or have they changed over the years?
To me, it's archbolesly archiproste. The Polish right has murderism in its DNA. Adam Michnik was always right about that.
The only mystery to me was why Anne Applebaum took so long to discover it. And that's what Krastev said.
In summary: Applebaum and Sikorski belong to the generational formation for which the fall of the Berlin Wall was the end of the moralitet. Happy ending of history.
For this formation, the Berlin Wall falls all day. They divide the planet into “bad” who have put it up and “good” who have overthrown it—and wonder that the “good” would not be able to play in Chobielina today, like a tree.
I'm younger than Applebaum and Sikorski for those critical fewer years. The Cold War that shaped them was not my war for me.
In the 1980s, my precedence was to finish my studies and leave without engaging in the war of the communists. 1989 was a pleasant surprise to me, but I did not see it as “the end of history” or even “the triumph of ours on the mundial.”
In it I saw a breakthrough that nullified the Cold War divisions – as in the 16th century, reformation and counter-reformation nullified the medieval war of gabelins and gwelfs. It went on for centuries, and then all of a sudden, there's no snap.
This made me immune to any surprises of the 3rd Republic of Poland. The Polish right and the church did not disappoint me, due to the fact that from the beginning I did not anticipate any good from them. So I had no surprises from the series "how could he, after all, be Tischner's student" or "what happened to him, after all, the Kraków Conservative from a well-known Krakow family".
I've seen fresh divisions elsewhere. I was horrified to observe in the 1990s the conquest of the planet by “the Washington Consensus”. I expected the unstopped consequence of globalisation, the full reporting of all countries according to the global Monetary Fund guidelines.
I was not the only 1 who imagined the future – it was my excuse. However, in fresh years Brexit, the war in Ukraine and Trump's word of office have crossed my ideas of the future.
That cybercorps would start blocking accounts for politicians and journalists, I warned about it in a 2013 book. But I never thought they would do that to the president of the United States – I imagined that the presidents would always be “theirs” and large Tech would live in symbiosis with the utmost right (as at the top of the gamergate).
I imagined that Russia, China and the arabian countries would become like the Euro-Atlantic model of capitalism as globalized. I thought Obama's choice meant the end of racism in the United States – both were highly naive.
Did I miss the minute erstwhile this time MY War of Gibelins and Gwelfs was overturned? I'm afraid that just like Applebaum says Krastev looks at the fall of the Berlin Wall all day, so I inactive support the anti-globalists in Seattle in 1999. And that does not let me to realize the challenges of 2021.
So I would like to announce a safe space for the imagination of the future and explanation of the vernacular. I'm not going to discriminate on the island, but most of all, I'm curious about the opinions of readers younger than me.
Should we be rooting for individual in the conflict of right-wing versus cybercorps, or should we be eating popcorn? The power of China should enjoy us as a breakdown of hegemony, or scare us due to the fact that it's a dictatorship? Putin and Lukashenko "lost already", as our publicists keep writing, or will they come out of all this reinforced?
I will be open to non-orthodox visions, besides non-left and moderately conspiracy visions. To certain limits, to certain reasonable limits.
I'm besides confused to think about it myself. Or don't think so.
