The past, the East learns, is always present

International Herald Tribune ^ | THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2006 | Judy Dempsey

[lizol]

The past, the East learns, is always present By Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2006

BERLIN After Poland's new conservative government took office late last year, one of its first decisions was to recall 10 ambassadors because of their communist past.

Then last week, a Hungarian weekly magazine published charges that the film director Istvan Szabo was an informer during the late 1950s, a particularly depressing era after Soviet-led tanks crushed the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

It also disclosed that the retired Catholic primate, Cardinal Laszlo Paskai, imprisoned by the communist regime from 1949 to 1956, had cooperated with the secret police by compiling reports on Catholic church activists in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Polish and Hungarian cases show how the ghost of the communist past continues to haunt the countries of Eastern Europe 16 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Marianne Birthler, Germany's federal commissioner in charge of the files of the former East German Stasi secret police, said Wednesday that no one should be surprised over how the past keeps coming back or why countries find it so difficult to deal with it.

"Sixteen years may seem a long time, but it is a very short time after a dictatorship," Birthler said on German television.

"The past is always there. Sometimes it recedes from awareness. Sometimes it rushes to the front."

Szabo confirmed that he was an informer during his student days and had cooperated with the secret police "in order to save the life of a classmate." Paskai did not deny the allegations about him, but said he was not prepared to comment until he had seen all the details.

[lizol]

Eastern European ping list

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[GSlob]

According to one classification, the whole population was subdivided into full-time informers, part-time informers and potential informers. Those outside the system were hunted down like mad dogs.

[voletti]

Unimaginable. Orwell's 1984 come to life.
Life in totalatarian Iran is no less deadly. Dubya's democracy thing may have something to it after all, despite occasional hiccups like hamas coming to power etc.

[GSlob]

Orwell was a wide-eyed optimist of Romanticist hue. [So is Dubya]. The reality is tedious, routine and extremely, unimaginably, boring. And to change it one needs nothing less than transculturation - i.e. a radical shift in the whole civilizational outlook of the population, at the hierarchical level of Huntington's civilizations. Transculturations in history are extremely rare and have always included epic bloodbaths.
Poland, the Baltic states, Czech republic and Hungary are succeeding precisely because they have always belonged to the Western civ, and thus they needed only democratization - transculturation was NOT needed, since the basic civilizational material of the society conducive to political democracy was already present. Compare their [by no means easy] experience with that of the lands further East, and you will see what I am trying to speak about. Compare, say, the neighboring states of Poland and Belarus.

[Thunder90]

Putin won't be very happy.

[Freelance Warrior]

Why should The President of Russia care about a former Polish bishop or about former Polish ambassadors?

He has enough work to care about Russia's interests, which aren't involved in any way here.

Sorry, but this issue wouldn't have the effect you desire that much.

[Camel Joe]

Ham-arse come to power because there was no Constitution of any value in place at the time of elections resulting in mob rule. Democracy in raw form is never anything more and we got a good dose of it last month. I believe we made an error in giving the Iraqi's complete autonomy in the construction of their own Constitution. I suppose it had to be so.