Nathan’s Musings

One the most annoying things about the world is that most of the oil and gas reserves are in nasty places. The world’s oil reserves are mostly in the Persian Gulf countries, with much of the rest in the various Stans in Central Asia, and in Russia. This is especially serious for Western Europe which, besides the dwindling reserves in the North Sea, is completely dependent on imports. The US is in better shape since it has reserves of its own and Canada next door, and the Canadians have large reserves and are not likely to become Islamic fundamentalists or otherwise authoritarian any time soon. Nevertheless, even the US is increasingly dependent on Middle Eastern energy. With India and China and other large developing countries now industrializing rapidly, the outlook is not good. It means that to ensure our energy supplies the civilised world will continue to have to do business with nasty, dictatorial regimes like those in Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Until now, Russia has seemed a bit less nasty than the Arabs. But as the recent attempts at blackmailing Ukraine show, Moscow is capable of being every bit as nasty as Teheran. Fortunately, some sort of compromise has apparently been reached quickly, since Russia needs to sell their energy to Europe in order to be anything but a third world country that is of interest only because it has nuclear weapons. Can you think of any other Russian products besides oil and vodka that anybody in the outside world wants to buy in quantity?

All this points out the importance of energy conservation and the need to reduce our energy imports by switching to alternative energy sources, nuclear power, anything that does not come out of the ground in places ruled by unsavoury regimes. I have a dream…that some day, before the oil runs out, the US and the rest of the West will have put in sufficient conservation measures to not need oil from nasty places anymore. And then the governments of those places can drink their oil and f**k their camels and try to explain to their peoples why they live in backward, dictatorial societies while the rest of the world moves on. A naive dream, perhaps, but we surely must move in that direction.

What do the United States and Poland have in common? Several things, of course; both are now Western democracies, members of NATO etc. etc. But the strongest similarity I see, having spent the past 10 days in Poland, is the extreme influence of religion on politics and society in general. If anything, this is even stronger in Poland than in the US, simply because the dominant sect here, the Roman Catholic church, is by its nature centralistic while the US, while overwhelmingly Christian, is divided among many strands of Christianity.

When I lived in Florida 20 years ago, some of my favourite entertainment programmes on TV were the televangelists–the likes of Swaggart, Falwell and others. In today’s Poland one can be equally entertained by the country’s most influential radio station, Radio Maryja, and its newly launched TV channel, Trwam (meaning “I last” or “I am forever”, presumably referring to Jesus or God). Some of the shows are really very funny for a heretic like me. But there is a serious, and scary, side to all this. Just as in the US the right-wing Christians are the base of the ruling party, so here in Poland the newly elected government is deeply in hock to the church. The new president, Lech Kaczynski, and the prime minister, Marcinkiewicz, are regular guests on the Christian talk shows.

At least in the US there is enough pluralism and sufficient checks and balances to ensure that the currently ascendant Christian right will not get its way completely. Witness the recent court defeats by those who wish to replace science with creationist superstition in public schools. Or look at how the pedofile priests are being exposed and brought to justice–way too late but at least it is happening. In Poland no such revelations are happening, even though it is safe to assume that Polish priests have the same sexual urges as their American colleagues and so presumably a similar percentage act on those urges. But no Polish prosecutor is going to bring a case against a local priest. The church will steadfastly sweep things under the rug in its time-honoured tradition.

The other difference is that the US is a rich and a big country. It can afford a certain amount of idiocy because there is enough wealth and enough enlightened people to still run the country properly (at least one hopes so). Poland, on the other hand, is still emerging from decades of misrule. Many of its best educated people are leaving the country to take advantage of the opportunities offered abroad, while the domestic political scene is dominated by morons who waste scarce resources by competing to see who is the most pious among them. It is striking to walk around the city of Wroclaw, home to about 700,000 people. Most residential buildings, most hospitals, schools and other public buildings are delapidated to a greater or lesser extent. The streets are a disaster, with potholes that put New York City to shame. There only two kinds of buildings that are nice and well-kept: the new shopping malls which have sprung up in the past few years, and all manner of church properties. A country that does not have enough money to build badly needed infrastructure apparently has no problem finding the funds to restore yet another church or monastery or build yet another statue of the late Pope.

I’ll take Dutch godlessness over this nonsense any time.

As usual, I am spending the holidays visiting my sister in Poland—specifically, in Wroclaw (Breslau), a city of about 700,000 people in the Lower Silesia, the south-western region of Poland which was restored to Polish rule in 1945 following more than 200 years as part of Germany. In fact, the entire western part of Poland was under German rule until the end of World War II. Following the war, the entire country was effectively moved westwards; the eastern parts were ceded to the then Soviet Union (and today form parts of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) while the eastern parts of Germany were ceded to Poland. There was a corresponding movement of people: what became western Poland was emptied of its German population which was resettled in the new East Germany, while the newly Polish lands were settled by Polish refugees from the lost eastern parts.

Of course, this is not how history was taught when I was a child in Communist Poland in the 1960s. Back then, we were taught the official party line that Wroclaw and the surrounding region was ancient Polish land which was returned to its rightful owners. No mention was made of the Germans forcibly resettled to our “democratic” neighbours DDR. Aside from the occasional Protestant church and the architecture of old Wroclaw there were hardly any traces left of the city’s German heritage. Given what happened between 1939 and 1945 this is perhaps not surprising. Likewise, no traces were left of the large Jewish and Czech populations. The official propaganda was simply that Wroclaw had always been a Polish city and nothing else. For those who want to learn about the history of this city and indeed this entire corner of Central Europe, Norman Davies’s excellent book “Microcosm—A History of a European City” is highly recommended.

Since the fall of Communism in 1989 the picture has become much more nuanced. While the issue of the German heritage is still very touchy (Poland is a strongly nationalistic country), the Jewish heritage is being stressed much more—there is even a Jewish school, although I wonder who goes there given the small number of Jews remaining in Poland. And even the German origins of Wroclaw are now much more important in the official picture of the city—one suspects this has as much to do with capitalizing on the many elderly German tourists who come here as with an desire to redress historical inaccuracies. But whatever the motive, this more nuanced image has made Wroclaw a much more interesting, and frankly more attractive city during the past 15 years.

However, here is one decidedly unattractive remnant of German architecture: the Jahrhunderhalle was built in 1913 to commemorate the centenary of the liberation of the city from a brief occupation by Napoleon. Even though the building is from long before the Nazi period, I am sure the Nazis loved it. Indeed, Hitler gave a major speech there before 10,000 enthusiastic supporters during a campaign rally in 1932.

Amazingly, the building survived the war and the Communists renamed it Hala Ludowa, or People’s Hall. Today, it is partly a concert arena, partly office space.

On this trip, I also visited Gdansk (Danzig) for the first time in my life. This is quite a city. It has a rich past as a member of the Hanseatic League. More recently, the first shots of World War II were fired here on 1st September 1939; and still more recently, this is the city that more than any other place is associated with successive worker revolts, the rise of the Solidarity trade union at the Gdansk Shipyard and the whole chain of subsequent events that culminated in 1989-90 with the fall of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe.

Interestingly, in Gdansk there is a similar trend to re-emphasize the city’s international heritage, probably for both internal consumption and for the tourists. In several restaurants and other public places, old German maps of the city are used as decorations. Definitely a place worth a visit!

The fantasy of an 11-year old girl is amazing. Here is a poem my daughter Monica wrote this week:

The great lemon cave-in
A time to remember
When there was one too many lemons in a truck
And of course a cucumber

The cucumber fell
The lemons rolled
When the truck finally realized
There was too much to hold

People thought
The cucumber got mad
The lemons flooded the town
There were more lemns than the people could’ve had!

The people drowned in lemon juice
The cucumber was on full siege
But they started screaming “Homicide!”
When the cucumber took off its costume and was actually Mr. Steege!

Mr. Steege went to jail
And suffered for his rude behavin’
And alas, we shall never forget
The great lemon cave-in