Historians From Poland

"The main Roman contribution to the idea of property lay in the realm of law. Roman jurists were the first to formulate the concept of absolute private ownership, which they called dominium… Roman jurisprudence went to great lengths to stipulate every conceivable nuance of property rights: how acquired and how lost, how transferred, how sold. The rights implicit in dominium were so absolute that ancient Rome knew nothing of eminent domain."

"[For the Romans] an essential element of the Law of Nature is the equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which antedated the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone of Western democracy."

"A theoretical defense of private property as a feature of Natural Law, however, was not fully made until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age of Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. But that the idea occurred to Romans is evident from Cicero’s argument that government could not interfere with private property because it had been created in order to protect it."

"Nothing contributed more to the emergence of private property in the West and the rights associated with ownership than the appearance in the late Middle Ages of urban communities."

"Moscow’s insistence that ‘fascism’ was the polar opposite of ‘communism’ found wide acceptance in socialist and liberal circles in the West."

"Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did indeed allow—or, more accurately, tolerate—private property. However, it was ‘property’ in a peculiar and very restricted sense—not the virtually untrammeled private ownership of Roman law and nineteenth–century Europe, but rather conditional possession, under which the state, the owner of last resort, reserved to itself the right to interfere with and even confiscate assets which in its judgment were unsatisfactorily used."

"The economic policies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany resembled the ‘state socialism’ which Lenin wanted to institute in Soviet Union upon coming to power, under which private enterprise would work for the government—an idea Lenin was force to abandon under the pressure of the ‘Left Communists’."

"From 1920 onward, [Mussolini] depicted Italy as a ‘proletarian’ nation exploited by hostile ‘plutocratic’ countries determined to deny her her rightful place under the sun. The true class struggle, according to Fascist doctrine, was the struggle between nations. Fascism strove to surmount narrow class allegiances: all classes had to subordinate their private interests to those of the nation and collaborate against the external enemy."

"Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background... Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value... On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.’"

"On the eve of its coming to power, industrial workers composed nearly one-third of the Nazi Party membership and constituted its largest occupational groups. The party adopted the Red Flag, declared May 1 a paid national holiday, and required its members to address one another as Genossen or ‘comrades.’"

"Within a month of taking control of the German government, the Nazis suspended constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of private property. Property was to be respected, but only as long as the owner used it for the benefit of the nation and state: in the words of a Nazi theorist, ‘[P]roperty was . . . no longer a private affair but a kind of State concession, limited by the condition that it be put to ‘correct’ use.’"

"At the same time, Kissinger, Carter and détente were condemned as weakening the West by a group of conservative Democrats led by Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a critic of SALT, as well as by key Republicans who were influential in the Ford administration (1974–7), notably his Chief of Staff, Richard (Dick) Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. They drew on advice from commentators such as Richard Perle, Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz who warned about Soviet intentions. The continuity of this group, through 1990s’ opposition to Clintonian liberal internationalism, to the neo-conservative activism of the early 2000s, especially against Iraq, is notable."

"The Cold War remained a struggle for Western minds as much as a competition in weapons development. All academic institutes and political ‘think tanks’ in the USA were hostile to the Soviet Union. The same was true of most such bodies in western Europe (although a few of them produced work untouched by criticism of Soviet history and politics). The great dividing line was the question what to do about the Kremlin. One wing of opinion wanted a stronger position to be adopted in any agreements with the USSR. Soviet politicians were depicted as slippery ideologues bent on internal repression and territorial expansion. If they wanted to trade with the USA, then they should be constrained to respect human rights as agreed in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe signed in Helsinki in August 1975. But better still would be the introduction of a cordon sanitaire around the communist states. Eventually, it was predicted, communism would implode in the USSR and elsewhere. Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and Martin Malia were prominent in making the case. They argued that the communist order was doomed and that there was nothing to be gained by prolonging its death agony. The Soviet Union was the most pernicious existing example of totalitarianism, and the extension of its type of state to China, eastern Europe and other countries was the greatest tragedy of the second half of the twentieth century."

"Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, [historian] Richard Pipes and many other American politicians and publicists are frozen in a mode of thought they developed a long time ago. With unchanging blindness and stubbornness they keep repeating and repeating this theory about the supposed age-old aggressiveness of Russia, without taking into consideration today's reality."

"[Fascist ideology was] a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary. This form of socialism was also, by definition, anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois, and its opposition to historical materialism made it the natural ally of radical nationalism."

"Thus, the historical circumstance of the half century preceding the Second World War gave rise to the essence of fascism: a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism, a revolutionary ideology based on a simultaneous rejection of liberalism, Marxism, and democracy."

"Marxists could be converted to national socialism, as indeed quite a number of them were, similarly, national socialism could sign treaties with Communists, exchange ambassadors, and coexist with them, if only temporarily. Nothing like this, however, applied to the Jews."

"If the Fascist ideology cannot be described as a simple response to Marxism, its origins, on the other hand, were the direct result of very specific revision of Marxism. It was a revision of Marxism and not a variety of Marxism or a consequence of Marxism...It was the French and Italian Sorelians, the theoreticians of revolutionary who made this new and original revision of Marxism, and precisely this was their contribution to the birth of the Fascist ideology."

"In the form that it emerged at the turn of the century and developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist ideology represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist revision of Marxism. It expressed a revolutionary aspiration based on a rejection of individualism, whether liberal or Marxist, and it created the elements of a new and original political culture."

"Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an anti-revolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology."

"Thus, fascism adopted the economic aspect of liberalism but completely denied its philosophical principles and the intellectual and moral heritage of modernity."

"It was the revolutionary syndicalists, those dissidents and nonconformists of the Left, who by means of their criticism of Marxist determinism created the first elements of the Fascist synthesis in the first decade of our century."

"That is why so many Sorelians, like many people on the Left both before and after the war, slid into fascism. When these leftists of all shapes and colors came to the conclusion that the working class had definitely beaten a retreat, they did not follow it into this attitude. Their socialism remained revolutionary when that of the proletariat had ceased to be so. Having to choose between the proletariat and revolution, they chose revolution; having to choose between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a nonproletarian but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the nonproletarian revolution, the national revolution."

"Thus, it was quite natural that a synthesis would arise between this new socialism [fascism], which discovered the nation as a revolutionary agent, and the nationalist movement, which also rebelled against the old world of conservatives, against the aristocrats and the bourgeois, and against social injustices and which believed that the nation would never be complete until it had integrated the proletariat. A socialism for the whole collectivity and a nationalism that, severed from conservatism, proclaimed itself as being by definition the messenger of unity and unanimity thus came together to form an unprecedented weapon of war against the bourgeois order and liberal democracy."

"Sorel declared that Marx’s theory was ‘the greatest innovation in philosophy for centuries; it was the starting point of a fruitful transformation in our form of speculation. All our ideas must concentrate round the new principles of scientific socialism.’"

"Sorel supported this opinion and threw himself into a long and violent anti-Semitic campaign. He signed a long article in praise of Urbain Gohier, the most celebrated living anti-Semite, whom he encouraged to continue ‘maintaining that the French must defend their state, their customs, and their ideas against the Jewish invaders who want to dominate everything.’"

"The nascent Fascist ideology derived its initial basic content from the syndicalist-nationalist synthesis. This synthesis would not have been possible without the original contribution of Sorel, Sorel who had preached hatred for the heritage of the eighteenth century, for Voltaire and Rousseau, for the French Revolution, for rationalism and optimism, for liberal democracy and bourgeois society;…"

"Like all self-respecting revolutionaries, Mussolini considered himself a Marxist. He regarded Marx as the ‘greatest theoretician of socialism’ and Marxism as the ‘scientific doctrine of class revolution.’"

"At the same time as Sorel, the revolutionary syndicalists in Italy came to this conclusion: they threw themselves enthusiastically into the war not out of patriotism, as is often thought, but because they saw it as an instrument of revolution. Since war is a conflict between nations rather than between classes, the nation was seen as the foremost agent of revolution, and Italian revolutionary syndicalism became the backbone of fascist ideology."

"For several years we have witnessed climatic irregularities that prompt fear and anxiety about the conditions of our future existence. However, the climatic anomalies occurred also in the past when the blame for environmental destruction could hardly be put on humans."

"The Barbican - an element of medieval fortifications; a circular defensive structure with loop-holes, in front of the town walls. In Europe this kind of building has been preserved only at Carcassonne (southern France), Zgorzelec (Görlitz), and of course in Cracow. (...) It was at that time, that one of the largest European buildings of this kind came to to exist in Cracow, being nowadays the best preserved example of the medieval barbican."

"Sensitiveness to beauty of the world continues, and efforts to preserve it were also made in the past."

"The Tenczyn castle dates from the 14th century and it was built as a defensive edifice by Andrzej Toporczyk who after some time took the name of Tenczyński - after the name of the place. For many years the castle was a source of power of the family who played an important part in the politics of old Poland."

"In the second half of the 18th century, first residences-museums were created in Poland. Old palaces were changed to adapt them for exhibitions purposes, or new buildings were erected with separate museum annexes. First such museums in Poland was established in 1802 by Stanisław Kostka Potocki at Wilanów. The museums at Nieborów, Nieśwież, Puławy, Rogalin, Gołuchów and Kórnik followed. At first these museums were established as a response to fashion, later national and patriotic issues became prevailing reasons."

"The history of the castle at Wiśnicz Nowy is enlivened by many legends. Many well-known artists visited the castle in centuries past. Till now, many elements of old architecture (towers, chapel) have survived, together with some details of interior design."

"The importance of oaks both in the economy and in the forest ecosystem is big, but the exceptional part is that this tree plays in the old beliefs and legends."

"In Bolków there is a monumental Piast dynasty castle, one of the largest fortresses of the Świdnica Duchy. This stronghold, erected in the 13th century, defended nearby trade routes. Its monumental walls are still very impressive, stirring the imagination. This fortress is testimony to the dramatic history of this part of Central Europe."

"Nature in fact the best and wisest is an architect and urban planner. (...) The history of establishing gardens and orchards throughout the centuries in Poland is worth knowing, taking into consideration changes in fashions and the foreign influences. Unfortunately, not many objects from those days manifesting the love of nature by man have remained till the present days."

"The Krzyżtopór castle which was built in the 17th century belongs to the most splendid Polish buildings of the defensive and palatial character. The castle was famous for its design which accounted for the principles of the division of time (4 towers, 12 large halls, 52 rooms and 365 windows)."

"Can’t you approach the young worker and tell him that the way to live is to work for life and not for death? Is it beneath American scholars to try to do that?... Your only salvation is in carrying the idea of socialism to the working class and coming back to storm—to storm, yes, to storm—the bastions of capitalism."

"Outside the party, formless revolutionary frustration mingled with distinctly counter-revolutionary trends. Since the ruling group had singled out Trotsky as a target for attack he automatically attracted the spurious sympathy of many who had hitherto hated him. As he made his appearance in the streets of Moscow [in the spring of 1924], he was spontaneously applauded by crowds in which idealist communists rubbed shoulders with Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and the new bourgeoisie of the NEP, by all those indeed who, for diverse reasons hoped for a change"

"A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter might have realised that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds."

"Still we must exercise our judgment and must not allow it to be clouded by emotions and memories, however deep or haunting. We should not allow even invocations of Auschwitz to blackmail us into supporting the wrong cause."

"To justify or condone Israel's wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and to harm its own long-term interest. Israel's security, let me repeat, was not enhanced by the wars of 1956 and 1967; it was undermined and compromised by them."

"The ex-communist is the problem child of contemporary politics."

"Like universalism, secularism was important to modern Jewish social thought. "Jewish secularism is a revolt grounded in the tradition it rejects," argues David Biale, citing Isaac Deutscher's often-quoted remark about "the non-Jewish Jew," made in a 1954 speech. The "Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition, Deutscher asserted. Although Deutscher had his eye on European intellectuals, including Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, the same could be said of American radical thinkers and activists such as Emma Goldman, who celebrated the Day of Atonement, the holiest night of the Jewish year, at the anarchists' festive Yom Kippur Ball. Individuals such as these moved beyond the confines of Jewry, crossing boundaries they considered too narrow. "Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other, Deutscher wrote. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. "They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it." Like their European forebears in this tradition, pioneer Jewish women's liberationists in the U.S. were well assimilated into the culture of their times, but nevertheless, in disclosures to this author and at public events related to this project, they acknowledged a sense of difference based on their ethnicity and gender. This otherness helped take these activists "beyond the boundaries of Jewry," in Deutscher's words, enabling them to "rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations... to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.""

"Isaac Deutscher, master biographer of Leon Trotsky (or, as I like to think of him, Lev Bronstein) was one of many prophetic voices: "As long as a solution to the problem is sought in nationalist terms both Arab and Jew are condemned to move within a vicious circle of hatred and revenge.""

"The ideas of Jews like Marx and Rosa Luxemburg fired Jewish generation who were mostly non-Zionist, believing that if social revolution could ignite throughout the world there would be less and less room for anti-Semitism in a socialist international community. Many of that Eastern European generation emigrated to America to vitalize labor, antiracist, and socialist movements in the United States. But even Zionist pioneers, as the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher points out, were imprinted with revolutionary socialist ideals, which they carried to Palestine: ideas of egalitarian community, of mending the division between mental and manual labor. Writing in the 1950s and early 1960s of a very new Israel, Deutscher remarks that as a young Marxist he had been anti-Zionist; after the Final Solution he described himself as a "non-Zionist" a position he would argue with leading Israelis, including David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. Critical of nationalism, recognizing Zionism's inevitable realisation at the end of World War II, he was certainly taken with Israel's energies and contradictions; he felt the utopian, collective, secular attractions of the kibbutz and also saw its role as military outpost: "The bastions of Israel's Utopian socialism bristle with Sten-guns." He did not minimize Israeli danger; his sense of the meaning of Palestinian dispossession and displacement now seems tone-deaf for an internationalist. (As was common in the 1960s, he recognized no Palestinians, only Arabs in general.) He also noted that Israel's economy, only partly because of Arab boycotts, had virtually no base apart from American Jewish donations and U.S. aid...Rereading it in the past months, I found it mostly acute, generous, accessible-the essays of a former cheder prodigy from Poland who, intended for a rabbi, turned from religion; got expelled from the Polish Communist Party over the question of international social revolution versus "socialism in one country"; lived in exile; became an anti-Stalinist historian who eloquently made English his fourth or fifth language; wrote respected and lasting biographies of both Stalin and Trotsky; and to the end kept his eye on Jewish complexity and its relationship to the hope of international socialism. In 1954 he wrote of Middle Eastern politics: "As long as a solution... is sought in nationalistic terms both Arab and Jew are condemned to move within a vicious circle of hatred and revenge. . . . In the long run a way out may be found beyond the nation-state, perhaps within the broader framework of a Middle East federation...Isaac Deutscher ended his 1954 essay on "Israel's Spiritual Climate": "...Sometimes it is only the music of the future to which it is worth listening.""

"[Stalin] had found Russia working with wooden ploughs and leaving it equipped with atomic piles."

"[A]ll the non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the generals did indeed plan a coup d'état... The main part of the coup was to be a palace revolt in the Kremlin, culminating in the assassination of Stalin. A decisive military operation outside the Kremlin, an assault on the headquarters of the G.P.U., was also prepared. Tukhachevsky was the moving spirit of the conspiracy... He was, indeed, the only man among all the military and civilian leaders of that time who showed in many respects a resemblance to the original Bonaparte and could have played the Russian First Consul. The chief political commissar of the army, Gamarnik, who later committed suicide, was initiated into the plot. General Yakir, the commander of Leningrad, was to secure the co-operation of his garrison. Generals Uberovich, commander of the western military district, Kork, commander of the Military Academy in Moscow, Primakow, Budienny's deputy in the command of the cavalry, and a few other generals were also in the plot."