(Polski) Pół wieku w „tupiku”. O 36. i 37. tomie Dzieł Józefa Mackiewicza raz jeszcze (II) [1]
6 comments Published 27 December 2025 |Part II
THE UNDERGROUND: JR Nyquist suggested that one can freely propagate communism in the US, as long as it is done under a different banner. You use the example of Rich Nagin, who couldn’t be elected as a communist but was extremely effective in organising political campaigns of others, notably John Kerry. Does the word ‘communism’ contain some sort of ‘tabu’ connotations in the US? If so, is it really still the case in the world of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib?
TREVOR LOUDON: Communism is still a tabu word in the US for the left, but not so much the right.
The left hates the word because of the stigma of the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, Venezuela etc. Even the Communist Party USA which supports both Beijing and Moscow almost changed their name a few years back. Read more ->
Part I
THE UNDERGROUND: Anticommunism is a state of mind, the only constructive stance a decent man can adopt in current political climate. As you put it: “Unless you’re an active anticommunist, you are missing the mark in today’s world.” With so many competing ideologies staking a claim for our undivided attention, it is easy for our powers of reasoning to be perturbed, for common sense and simple decency to become blurred. We all need a compass or grounding. For us, the writings of Józef Mackiewicz provided such grounding. What was your road to anticommunism?
TREVOR LOUDON: My road to anti-communism was through my high school economics teacher. I was a typical NZ socialist as a teenager. Way to the left. He taught me about free markets as a better route to prosperity than state socialism.
I then read authors like Ayn Rand (though I rejected her militant atheism), Bastiat, Leonard Reed, Ludwig von Mises etc. By then I was an anti-socialist, but I had no understanding of the communist movement. I think this is a common failing with many businessmen and free market advocates. They think communism is merely an economic system that can be defeated by better economics. Read more ->
Communism has collapsed.
The Cold War is over.
Soviet union is disintegrating.
Marxism-leninism is dead.
Or at least everyone says so.
All these dramatic changes of such historic importance have apparently been sparked off by the famous “abortive coup in Moscow”. The hardline plotters seem to have sealed the fate of the Cold War and demolished the communist party rule. They’ve killed marxism-leninism doctrine and torn the soviet union apart in one short fit of brilliantly displayed inefficiency, stupidity, drunkenness, indecisiveness and so on and so forth. Read more ->
Almost every detail of the coup was astounding. Although many claim that the very fact of it happening was not at all surprising, both Western sources and Yeltsin’s camp reluctantly admitted that there was no intelligence information about the forthcoming putsch. This astonishing fact escaped the attention of most correspondents, so it must be worth considering. History provides numerous examples of intelligence warnings being ignored; but a lack of any intelligence data before such an event demands a logical rather than historical explanation. Logically, there are three possibilities:
- All preparations were efficiently kept secret;
- All intelligence services involved proved to have been entirely useless;
- There were no preparations at all.
Why didn’t Putin and his cronies simply buy Crimea from Ukraine – at ten cents an acre, like the Americans once bought Alaska from Alexander II of Russia – rather than launch a clumsy and noisy guerrilla war whose public relations outcome was predictable at the outset? The answer, I believe – concealed, camouflaged and biding its time – lies thousands of miles away, in the desert sands of the Middle East. Read more ->
We are publishing an unusual text. In October 2010 we had approached Olavo de Carvalho with a series of questions, which was intended to form a long interview. Mr de Carvalho responded on the 8th November. As agreed earlier, we added some supplementary questions asking him to elaborate on the subject of the São Paulo Forum, as it is little known outside Latin America. By the 16th December, still not having heard from Mr de Carvalho, we proposed that “should he find these additional questions uninspiring, it would be absolutely fine by us and we would publish the interview in the previous format”.
Unfortunately, we have never heard from Mr de Carvalho again. Surprised and disappointed we had to shelf the project, thinking in desperation that our interlocutor simply lost interest. Read more ->
Masha Gessen ends her book about Putin* with an Epilogue, which consists of her diary entries covering a “week in December”. It wasn’t just any week but the week from the 3rd to the 10th December 2011, the week of The Snow Revolution in Moscow. This was the time when, almost in spite of herself, she experienced the restoration of her faith in Russian democracy. It was a time of volatile emotions for Gessen, as high hopes were mingled with fears. She worried at first that the “brewing revolution had no unifying symbol, no slogan” only to rejoice when someone coined the phrase the “snow revolution”. She fretted when a demonstration was moved from “the fabulously named Revolution Square” to a place called Bolotnaya (Swampy) Square… She applauded every good joke told during manifestations, and celebrated that “the goons who were spouting propaganda” from tv screens “started speaking a human language” but then she suddenly remembered that the same journalists sounded human about 12 years earlier, before they became Putin’s goons. Read more ->
The soviet “elections” were rigged. And bears indeed do defecate in the woods. Thousands of young soviet democrats found themselves in Moscow on the election day, as if by magic, and all voted as one and for the same one – many times. They made their camp in the stalinist palace of exhibition of people’s achievement. The polling day started with a massive cyber attack on the websites of a radio station Ekho Moskvy and an independent election monitor; and it ended with 140% turnout and 99.5% support for Putin’s party in some polling stations. Some well intentioned and unbelievably brave individuals tried to stop multiple voting and were thrown out of polling stations. None of this was surprising though, as only extremely naïve observers can attach any significance to soviet elections. And yet, I was amazed by the commentary I’ve read in the latest Economist. The London weekly is one of the best edited magazines in the world, with consistently good writing and a clear political line – clear albeit somewhat confusing for readers not acquainted with it. The Economist sees itself on the right in economic matters but is firmly on the left on social issues. In other words, it is a liberal paper. However, in the last issue we read an article headlined The long life of Homo sovieticus, which is full of unusually accurate analysis of the state of Putin’s “Russia”: Read more ->
Until recently I was of an opinion that the largest Circus performance the world has ever seen took place in December 1989 in Bucharest and in the Romanian provinces. It wasn’t just the little things, like the leader and compére of the “anticommunist” opposition, Ion Iliescu, who turned out to be Gorbachev’s schoolmate; not just the allegedly “independent” juggler and new Prime Minister of the revolutionary Romania, Petre Romanu, who was, amid some confusion, recognised as a representative of “golden communist youth” and as a regular in fashionable communist society salons, an individual painstakingly prepared to take up the mantle of a “perestroika revolutionary”; it wasn’t just the not very democratic way the Ceausescu couple were murdered to avoid any indiscretions on their part. The organisers of the Romanian Circus were so determined to stage their performance that when in mid-December of that memorable year, the populace did not show a satisfactory enthusiasm for the revolution, they decided to crank up the pressure by dragging out of the mortuaries bodies of people who died of extremely natural causes, and presenting them to the media as victims of a communist massacre. Read more ->
Once upon a time, one Czesław Miłosz wrote about Józef Mackiewicz:
We cannot treat seriously everything written by Mackiewicz, the anti-Communist. Some of his essays are obsessive and bordering on paranoia, following a well known pattern of sniffing for agents everywhere, even in the Vatican. When embarking on a compilation of his political writings one would do well to remember that he paid with fantasies and even insanity for constancy of his views.
Every part of the above is incorrect but we wouldn’t expect anything else from an apologist of “polish people’s republic”. I do not intend to dignify it with a polemic, it’s enough to say that Miłosz paid with that kind of gibberish for lack of any views whatsoever so what’s there to discuss? What interests me here is the accusation – often repeated – that Mackiewicz “looked for conspiracies”. In reality, Mackiewicz observed, compared, questioned and tried to formulate answers. Is this not a duty of every intellectual? Perhaps not of intellectuals like Miłosz – they prefer to sniff where the wind is blowing from and take up the most convenient position – but real intellectuals, those who see understanding of the world around us as a noble obligation. In line with this calling, Mackiewicz observed; he watched, for instance, how free human beings freely acted in the interests of the greatest enemy of freedom. He compared, for example, the glorification of bolshevik criminals in the free world with the infamy of the Nazis. He posed the question: how could that be? Then he formulated a hypothesis: could it be a plague? Read more ->
Jeff Nyquist replied with his No Substitute to Common Sense to my previous polemic entitled Same Old Nationalism, where I expressed serious concern regarding the substantial change of tone and shift in meaning in his recent writings. I wrote as an attentive reader of his texts but also as a translator and publisher of dozens of his articles; as a political ally and a friend who perceived that some of the paths he had taken were leading him astray. In return a bucketful of swill was thrown on my head; I received in response a load of gibberish, which is not only untrue but also dishonest. No, Jeff, we will not conduct a debate in such fashion! Read more ->
My condolences to the Polish nation following the death of President Kaczyński. It is a sad affair, and suggestive. The plane of the Polish president may one day be thought to represent Europe, which now thinks of mass murder as something belonging to the past.
Now to give an answer to Darek Rohnka. I do not understand his assertion that my thinking has undergone a “transformation, which has recently occurred.” Darek says that I’ve made some kind of irrefutable dogma out of the idea that Saakashvili is opposed to Moscow. In an article, published on his site, titled “Making the Enemy’s Strategic Objectives Intelligible,” I wrote as follows: “If we examine the Georgian events … we see that Moscow needed a reliable partner in Tbilisi who could start the war in a way that later indicated the fault was on both sides – that it wasn’t a simple case of naked Russia aggression.” Read more ->
Jeff Nyquist is not your typical American journalist. He knows Golitsyn, he’s alert to the dangers of a communist plot on a global scale, and to cap it all, he firmly believes that Eastern European revolutions of 1989-1991 were part of a long term strategy, conceived long ago under Khrushchev and Mao. Thanks to such views, Nyquist’s writing appears clear, uncompromising, original and fascinating to the point where it must be rewarding to engage him in a debate on the complexities of the modern world. And bearing in mind the transformation, which has recently occurred in his political thinking, there is indeed a lot to quarrel about. Read more ->
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nina Karsov, the head of a London-based company, Kontra, which has been publishing Polish and Russian books since 1970, including the Collected Works (19 volumes in print, but more are planned) by Józef Mackiewicz, a great Polish novelist and political writer (1902-1985).
Mackiewicz’s analytical work, The Triumph of Provocation, written in 1962, and now published in English by the Yale University Press, examines the history and nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. His unique interpretation of the differences and similarities between Communism and Nazism is highly relevant to debates about these two systems and to major contemporary issues which are of particular importance to the U.S. and Europe.
On the 10th February 2010 died Charlie Wilson, a colourful member of the House of Representatives, one of the very few American politicians who actively supported the struggle against communist aggression, first in the Seventies in Nicaragua, and then almost throughout the next decade, in Afghanistan. To honour this anticommunist, we are publishing again the article from March 2008 (in an extended version). This text was triggered by a film about Charlie Wilson.
Charlie Wilson’s War is an enjoyable film and, by Hollywood standards, historically accurate to an extent. Directed by Mike Nichols (of The Graduate fame) it tells the story of a democratic congressman from Texas who, in between rowdy parties, cocaine, alcohol, and Playboy Bunnies, thanks to exceptional determination and ingenuity, managed to gradually increase the CIA budget earmarked to help Afghan mujahidin. This in turn, was supposed to have led the soviet army in Afghanistan to such significant losses that there was nothing left for Gorbachev to do but withdraw with his tail between his legs. Read more ->
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