Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
smashcompany.com
smashcompany.com
History always tells you as much about its author as it does about its subject. That narration is, a sort of british (and american) propoganda from the British colonial era.
The way they thought of history (of "Western Civilization") was (1) The "spark" starts in ancient greece. (2) It is handed Rome, who build inherit the empire (3) Rome falls (ignore the eastern empire) (4) Civilization rekindles in Italy (5) to torch passes to the British who spread it to the world.
Everything culminates in the American-British civilization, and whatever British intellectuals thought was important about Britishness. It also plays down Europe's (especially western Europe) relatively small part in the history of "civilization" until relatively recently.
The narration would be totally different depending on who wrote it.
For example, think of it from a Middle Eastern perspective. Alexander's conquests would be seen as something akin to Gengis Khan's conquest of China. An outsider barbarian that invaded and ruled the Persian empire.
That is, Cyrus created a great persian empire. Greeks captured it, and it continued. Rome captured it, and it continued. Then, western rome fell. But, these were mostly barbarian territories with roman outposts. You can't compare Roman Brtain to Roman Syria, for example. Syria was urban, literate and civilized. Britain was a barbarian island with some roman roads and forts. High status cultural influence (eg christianity) was imported from east to west, not the reverse.
I grew up in Texas. As we all know, Texans are really proud of Texas. Part of this is because the schools spend 3x as much time teaching “Texas history” as they do teaching US history or world history (lol).
Almost all of what is called “Texas history” is simply propaganda from the early to mid 1800s. Truth is, Texas was essentially American Mexico (nearly 100% Spanish-speaking) until we found oil there in the late 1800s. It was only ever it’s own independent country because the US was not militarily strong at the time and couldn’t afford a war with Mexico — which would have been the result of the annexation of Texas.
But as a result of this state-mandated focus on “local history”, kids who come out of Texas schools are often woefully uneducated as to even Western European history. You just learn this concentrated version of American Exceptionalism that’s mandated by the board of education and has only a tenuous relationship to the truth.
As a side note, it’s really weird to learn history in the context of a place that’s only had meaningful levels of population for the last 50 years.
"As a side note, it’s really weird to learn history in the context of a place that’s only had meaningful levels of population for the last 50 years."
That's an interesting side note.
I've seen clovis points that folks have dug up here that are 5K ro 10K years old... the anglos in Texas tend to think that there was literally no one here when this area has had folks living in it for millennia.
One of the thoughts I keep returning to is how little we know about the history of the peoples who were living more than 400 or so years ago.
I think about how transient even our own technology is.
Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at.
I'm assuming you're talking about in America pre European colonisation. In the rest of the world (especially China, Europe, India and the Middle East) we know about as much as we do about the history of people currently alive. We can read their diaries, what happened in their governments, poetry, stories etc (at least for the literate classes, but this is again true in the modern world).
"Considering what traces of our own culture would be available to people 10,000 years from now, I occasionally wonder if we'd be able to detect our own culture at that time scale if we didn't know what we were looking at."
We would be able to detect really quite a bit, though less than we would like. Anything electronic would be gone, but the fact that we had electronics would be obvious. As would the vast majority of print. Some writing (especially carving) would remain, as would some pictures in lucky circumstances. Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around, and you can tell a lot about a culture by the way they order their buildings, and by what stuff they had. This is all assuming we some how up and leave for 10,000 years like in Göbekli Tepe[0]
Yes, and specifically the area where I am living. That "400 years" has more to do with the specific people I live around and their view that basically anyone before them lacked What-a-Burger restaurants and Shiner beer and are have more in common with deer and possums than humans.
Thanks for the thoughts and the links.
"Most tellingly our cities and buildings would still be around"
I'm sure that my fantasies about how little we actually leave behind and the reality of how obvious it would be are probably different.
Like, I feel like humans have been around for quite a while longer than we have any sort of history about, but I am probably just motivated by fantasies that there were large-scale civilizations on earth that predate our own by millennia but which are wholly lost because we don't have the material archeological record or the linguistic tools to trace the existence of specific cultures (or whatever kinds of tooling that would be necessary to demonstrate such a history).
While I don't think there is evidence for that fantasy, I also think humans are creative, interesting folks and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that folks have been just chilling with oral histories for 20K+ years until they suddenly got motivated 600 years ago or so (or 2000 or wherever we might place those histories).
So thanks for tempering that fantasy with a specific counter factual example.
We still aren’t even sure if some written language of some of the first civilizations like the Indus Valley were languages or not since we haven’t been able to decipher them. We also have a few areas around the world where we can look for things like evidence of stable civilization and writing that were probably isolated from the rest of the world - America’s, China, and Europe, as examples. Yet all three locations so far only show writing as recent discoveries 2-4K years ago.
To me, humans not having advanced quicker doesn’t seem so far fetched. Humanoids were on two feet and making basic tools over a million years ago. Fire was controlled hundreds of thousands of years ago at the latest. Yet even with all that, we don’t have any evidence of humanoids being advanced like setting up in one location or writing text (not just drawings) down more than a couple thousand years. The modern human species I think is only a few hundred thousand years too.
Of course we could just somehow be missing tons of data. But that also wouldn’t line up with how we do see a progression of advancement from the earliest civilizations and then empires.
I'm interested in the folks who were living here before the largish empires that we know about (aztecs and myans and olmecs). But my history is super shoddy... I will have to rethink about how by my understandings are in that area.
From no existing government, to aristocratic, military government, to trade gaining power, to some sort of consensus government, eventually leading to democracy, to trade decline, to oppressive government, to self-destructing government.
Likewise and somewhat independent, society evolves from extreme liberal (like in some Greek city states, or the Roman empire, where you could rent a room in temple with a big bath where you could have sex. In the room above, a bull would be slaughtered so a stream of blood would drip down on your bodies. Note: this was marketed to women, not men, and came with an optional male partner, I think even the Kardashians would consider that going more than a bit too far), to absurdly conservative (pretty much all of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, for example), back to liberal, back to extreme conservatism.
And the amazing thing is that everyone, all these movements, from the puritans to today's women empowerment warriors, from the Roman Empire to Washington to Lichtenstein's government, see themselves as the first ones ever to do X, constantly, all the time, when in reality it seems to be a cycle that rotates around in about 1.5 to 2 centuries or so. And one the one hand that's true : there's something unique about almost everything, every movement. But 99% of what such movements stand for are duplicates of their former selves. It's just that the people in them are not at all aware of any of it.
Say, society moving away from the Church was of course, according to those who did it, the first time ever this happened (not what had happened ~80 times before, almost always in times of large economic expansion). They were smarter than everyone and "reason" was going to save the world (mostly because it had a few successes). If you go back to the time of the French revolution, of course, you'd see that the same happened, and then ... the great economy faltered ... and despite all the reason in the world (note: governments "based on reason" can easily match governments based on faith in cruelty and pettiness. In fact I would say that despite the general feeling the reason "based" governments are the worse ones. And yes, by that I mean that in times of economic desperation they're worse, far worse in fact, than things like the inquisition).
But no, the generations of the 1990s and 2000s are utterly convinced they are the first ones to ever see "the church for what it is", and that they'll just make the economy perfect and everyone happy and all will be well, because science and reason will save us all.
And when listening to grandpa you realize that the 1920s were just like that ... and the 1960s. And the 1930s and 1970s-80s ? Oh well. But those were smaller cycles, sooner or later a big shift will hit us again. It's been a while.
Coming up next: nope ... science and reason do not in fact guarantee a nice economy, do not in fact save us all. There was a nice economy, for reasons independent of religion, tolerance and this period will end, just like all other periods before it and people will flee back to faith, extreme conservatism, just like they've done so many times before.
The Roman way of thinking was also fundamentally conservative in that they though everything had been better in the olden times.
Those times were extremely progressive. And many of the social accomplishments, like the right to ignore your parents religion, equality between men and women ... were fought over and achieved in those times (well, before those times, really, but that wasn't how Cicero saw things).
I would also like to point out that Roman slavery was not at all the same as Islamic slavery (which is what we think of when saying "slavery", and even then you could rightly argue that "most" islamic slavery was different. Islamic slavery after economic collapse is the model we think of as slavery. Not pleasant). Slaves, in the Roman republic, or the Roman empire, mostly went home in the evening (and all -save slaves of the justice system- had the choice to go home). They enjoyed health care. They lived in apartment blocks (yes, really), which may or may not have had plumbing (granted, plumbing was for the very rich slaves).
Incidentally there were very rich slaves, a fact even true in Islamic times. You see, most jobs aside from market trader/"CEO" were slave jobs. Doctor ? Most likely a slave. Architect ? Slave. Factory "manager" ? Slave. Very high government administrators, like the director of the Colliseum ? Slave.
Slavery did not mean you were poor, or that you were imprisoned. Not at all. With the exception of "justice" slaves (ie. convicted -rightly or otherwise- criminals). Those were the people working in the mines and on the galleys.
And in ancient Rome, as I pointed out, you could pay for more services than you can today. I don't even necessarily mean that in a bad way. Sure, you could pay for sex acts, but equally you could pay to have fine metalwork done (in fact, doctors did that quite often). Women slaves were married, and generally not to their "owners", and had high functions themselves (negotiations for building things, for instance, were often carried out by women).
I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".
Nope. Only if so specified in the contract (of course, some slaves were explicitly hired for sexual services, just like today some people are hired for sexual services, from porn production to "hospitality services"). Also I do believe that rape was never covered, although sexual services might indeed be the expected "work" that the slave was contracted for, certainly.
Again, this is not really different for today. Would you say a porn actor/actress is "raped" ? Because in some ways you could say that their boss has them raped. How about people hired into brothels (and paid), who don't even know who they agree to have sex with when hired ?
> kids could be sold at will by the owner
Nope. Although there is some confusion. Kids were generally expected to help with their parents until a certain age, at which age they were free men/women. At that point, they could enter into a slavery contract (paid, was one of the conditions).
Generally there were various protections in slave contracts, against, for instance, large differences in job function. If an owner violated those, a slave could have the contract reviewed and gain his/her freedom.
It's not that different from the position of employee today. You can be "sold" in the sense that anyone can buy their way into becoming your boss (assuming your current boss agrees on the price, just like back then), and you cannot just immediately leave for just that.
> Slaves did not have any kind of legal rights.
Yes they did. The fundamental right any slave had was to ask for a review of their status, and whether the contract was upheld. Any and all slaves, even convicted slaves, had that right. There were various other rights that most slaves had, and generally the contracts specified extra rights. And, as I said, most slaves, especially in Rome, were not "fulltime" slaves. On remote farms, it was of customary for slaves to stay on the owner's property, for obvious reasons.
> some was able to save up buy their freedom if the owner allowed it
Roman slaves were always freed after a given amount of time. Granted, the state kept extending that time, but it was limited even at the very end (I believe to 10y for private owners, 20y for the state).
Even state slaves had "side jobs". For instance, most gladiators had a funny side income, and the state actually allowed and helped them with that. They would perform sexual services for any woman willing to pay for those (and apparently they commanded a very high price) on their off days. (note there were female gladiators too, even though not many, and yes they did the same. I believe one of the texts even points out that most of their customers were also female, and yes, any gladiator could refuse to do this, even though that was not a good way to make yourself popular).
Gladiator contracts are some of the known contracts, for instance. There were provisions that if you were killed (few non-convicted gladiators were, incidentally) the state would provide for your family or parents. You were allowed to have the above-mentioned side job, and you agreed to allow the Praetorian guard and 2 other military organizations to hire you if they wanted to, but you were allowed to limit your work there to, I believe 2 years or so (again, it is written that this is how they recruited officers, so essentially no-one ever left, though quite a few were killed along with the person they were protecting. BTW quite a few means a few dozen over 3 centuries).
> killed in gruesome ways like with crucifixion
Nope, although the state famously did that en masse to slaves (and some free men and women) in Spartacus' slave revolt, and on a smaller scale after that. I'm not saying that was OK, but I do hope you see that those were the state exercising punitive legal action on criminals, and not owners just doing that to their slaves for fun (like actually happened in the Ottoman empire, for example, killing/hunting slaves for fun)
> I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".
Extremely progressive relates to what personal (non-criminal even) actions would get you banned out of polite society, or worse. In that regard, Rome was extremely progressive.
Senators in Rome were famous for just how far they went with this. Apparently in the Senate throwing a birthday party for someone else, and inviting 250+ prostitutes was, aside from the shear number of prostitutes, not a rare occurrence in the last years of the republic. Likewise having male-male, or female-female relationships, even with prostitutes was likely to improve rather than detract from your social status.
I understand that that doesn't mean doing this was free.
Let's say Trump, or Obama, or Clinton if you like, did the same. Let's say they all get together (spouses and children included), hire every prostitute on the west coast, and make a night of it, including gay and lesbian relations with prostitutes and guests, then brag about it in congress. Do you think society would understand ? Even the French, who seem to tolerate the president having a mistress, would kick out any politician, or anyone else, for that.
That's what I mean by progressive.
“Slave” was a broad and diverse category in Rome, so let’s examine some of what you ignored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short.
Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law[2] unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced.
Sometimes slaves stood on revolving stands, and around each slave for sale hung a type of plaque describing his or her origin, health, character, intelligence, education, and other information pertinent to purchasers. Prices varied with age and quality, with the most valuable slaves fetching high prices. Because the Romans wanted to know exactly what they were buying, slaves were presented naked.
Slaves numbering in the tens of thousands were condemned to work in the mines or quarries, where conditions were notoriously brutal.[57] Damnati in metallum ("those condemned to the mine") were convicts who lost their freedom as citizens (libertas), forfeited their property (bona) to the state, and became servi poenae, slaves as a legal penalty. Their status under the law was different from that of other slaves; they could not buy their freedom, be sold, or be set free. They were expected to live and die in the mines.[60] Imperial slaves and freedmen (the familia Caesaris) worked in mine administration and management.
Of course it’s not just slaves who could have it rough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias
The laws of the Twelve Tables required the pater familias to ensure that "obviously deformed" infants were put to death.
The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas. The pater familias had the power to approve or reject marriages of his sons and daughters; however, an edict of Emperor Augustus provided that the pater familias could not withhold that permission lightly.
Adult filii remained under the authority of their pater and could not themselves acquire the rights of a pater familias while he lived. Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.
Children "emancipated" by a pater familias were effectively disinherited.
Soooo progressive...
Just see Wikipedia for a start: Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Slaves did not usually have contracts. It was possible to sell yourself or your kids into slavery, but slaves were usually taken from conquered peoples and sold on the market. They had no say in what they would be used for. They were not automatically freed, and children of slaves became slaves. I don't know if owners would kill their slaves for fun - they were expensive property after all - but under Antonius Pius it became illegal to kill slaves without "just cause". Which means until then it was fully legal to kill your slaves for fun.
As the wikipedia page explains in the early republic and before the last days of the republic most slaves were conquered slaves. However that supply dried up quite a while before the first emperor.
After that, most slaves in Rome were people that had sold themselves into slavery (or were sold by their parents) and by the time Rome was a real republic this had term limits, as well as rights, starting with the basic right to challenge their status in court. Over time, more rights were granted. Read on in the wikipedia article, it does talk about this.
> Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves.
(this is not talking about the right to challenge their status, this is about filing complaints, eventually even against "cruel treatment" and so on)
From that same page, the "conclusion" if you will, the standing slaves had by the end of the empire.
> Several emperors began to grant more rights to slaves as the empire grew. Claudius announced that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide.[71] Legal protection of slaves continued to grow as the empire expanded. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century CE to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners.[72]
I am not saying Roman society was just by modern standards, it was not. I would mention though, especially in the east, but also in the west, it was far better than what was to follow. And, as the wikipedia article mentions, in Rome at least (and presumably in most large Roman cities) it was a better fate to be a slave than to be a free urban poor. To be a (voluntary - not a convicted) "public" slave came with pretty good social standing.
The section about Asclepius mentions a few of the horrible things Rome did to slaves, especially earlier in the republic.
Come on, stop bullshitting.
It's interesting, you guys having this discussion because it's one of the perennial topics in world history. Has humanity been on a trend towards more individual liberty and compassion over time? Does "the moral arch of the universe bend towards justice"? Or do these ideas come and go, at different times in different places with an occasional combined trend? Is it all just a boisterous sea tide, rising and falling with eddies with eddies, spirals of change atop larger spirals?
That is spectacularly dishonest comparison.
Also, the crime of those crucified slaves was not wanting to he slaves anymore.
And no, my emplyer can not sell me. I can leave my employer whenever I decides to.
This is the day you're waiting for, i.e. 'when it's ok to do that'?
Yes, it is.
I know it has been popular, but that is a dangerous line of thinking these days. It is totally fair to say that an analysis of a complex historical event will be tainted by the views of the author(s). But such pieces aren't all history. It is possible to generate bias-free history pieces. For instance, we shouldn't say that every analysis of tree rings or ice cores is bias. That makes it too easy to dismiss a valid representation historical data.
People who see bias everywhere aren't satisfied until they personally test the ice cores. They feel free to deny climate science because everyone with eyes on the cores is biased and untrustworthy. They also see bias in every record of a historical event, again proclaiming them untrustworthy. Since they didn't witness the event and all records are biased, the event either didn't happen or is permanently beyond any accurate understanding. As with ice cores, such people feel free to substitute their own version of history.
It is dangerous to see bias everywhere. Doing so allows us to selectively dismiss anything and everything. We have to agree that there is such a thing as historical truth. To do otherwise is to deny history and all the lessons it has to teach.
They are everywhere and even the experts are not immune to them.
But the actions of say a parliament are a system with orders of magnitude more complexity and thus we should trust almost no one's intepretation to be unbiased. This is the cursed paradox of history. We so badly want to understand people and societies and it is almost impossible to know we have come to that understanding with any kind of certainty.
Side Rant: This is actually why I see psychology and sociology as dangerous. They often have the rigor of history and cloak themselves in the airs of science.
Really? I remember a fight about a year ago over whether or not it was hot on a particular day in DC. Half the US decided that they couldn't trust the biased weather reporting system. The perception of constant bias in all things meant we couldn't agree on a simple temperature record. A subset of these people cannot trust doctors enough to take vaccines or antibiotics. A further subset cannot even trust that the earth is round.
Also, the delivery and form was so simplified. I feel like what we were taught in school had one of 2 forms:
1) Bite size good/bad characterizations of involved nuanced processes.
2) Objectifying factoids on the material day-to-day of shallow characterizations, like the practice of associating Native American tribes primarily by the shape of their houses.
By jumping back and forth between the two, it did accomplish a surface appearance of depth, but ignored the spectrum as a whole that makes up humanity. (1) usually skipped over relational values and (2) failed to deliver on meaning.
The few times this done a little bit less had enormous impact, like black history month, trail of tears, stories like Huck Finn. But comparatively, these leaped over massively critical nuances. Of course, we were just all-out denied anything about the French Revolution. There is no question this is why America is contending with such a problematic political arena. We are learning everything the hard way.
The things that stir the pot are what make us human and understanding them are what allow us to progress. Being denied that is uncivilized.
Poland was liberal for it's time, yes, albeit only for the szlachta, a large part of the population that belonged to the privileged class of nobility. Peasants had not so much to gain access these times, especially in the former parts of Poland that are now Ukraine.
People of Jewish faith had strong privileges in Poland in the middle ages, which lead to the biggest diaspora in the world, a large fragmented community that was integrated into polish society in various degrees - as can be beautifully seen in the Jewish Museum in Warsaw.
It depends on how you define liberal. For example, Afganistan, Somalia, the Ukraine are very liberal nowadays: weak central government, weak central censorship, weak currency. Instead, warlords and gangs having the same functions – but it can be treated as liberal and democratic construction - you can always do the same and everybody has equal rights (kind of early US).
> "Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. > > – https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism
The parent comment, however, argues that all the liberties were only available to the nobility, not that it was liberal in a different sense of the word that we use nowadays.
Comparing renaissance-age Poland to any of the modern-day countries you've mentioned doesn't make sense to me (also, it's Ukraine, not "the Ukraine").
> Poland had the szlachta, a broad citizen-warrior class that can be thought of as an upper middle class. This amounted to 10% of the population. That might sound like a very limited form of democracy, but it is the same percentage of the population as voted in the famous democracy of ancient Athens
I'd suggest reading the article if you haven't already. It doesn't argue or force a definition of 'liberal' or 'democratic' but describes the period of Polish history apparently poorly highlighted in the curriculum of US schools.
Just a note on the szlachta numbers - it was about 10% of the population.
But yeah, it was ahead of time.
Men :) Only men had voting rights.
I always supposed, that the liberals ind Poland are more open towards migration to Germany or the UK, so that the ones that are staying tend to be a bit more conservative. Do you think that has something to do with it, or are other factors more important (despite all the criticism, the PIS does seem to care more about families and general social security)?
As for political explanation: basically, PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now. They introduced social programs on unprecedented scale. The part of Poland that was mostly ignored by the transformation is voting them because of that. Think Trump and Rust Belt, but if Trump actually did something.
There are some fringe leftist parties but they have like 1-3% support and aren't in the parliament.
Also, because of forced communism in 1945-1989, and right-wing propaganda everywhere for the last 29 years - "left" is very bad political brand to associate with in Poland. People seriously criticize politicians and want to jail them for "propagating a totalitarian regime" (which is a crime in Poland) when they wear Karl Marx on a t-shirt, to give you an idea how bad it is :)
So, PIS managed to persuade Poles that socialist economical policy is actually right-wing, because they associate with church and call everybody else leftists and communists.
They are also anti-business, and anti-EU. And there is also a healthy dose of xenophoby (Muslim refuges will come if you vote PO and rape you or do terrorism), and conservatism (LGBT is relatively unpopular in Poland, even among young people, compared to the west).
I try to avoid this label, because it stops all discussion, but they are basically national socialists (without the death camps).
Not exactly, you have SLD, you have Partia Razem, both of them are a lot more socialist than PIS. What makes PIS different is that they add patriotism/nationalism and church into the mix. So they are so called leftist when it comes to economy but conservative when it comes to world view.
> Also, because of forced communism in 1945-1989, and right-wing propaganda everywhere for the last 29 years - "left" is very bad political brand to associate with in Poland. People seriously criticize politicians and want to jail them for "propagating a totalitarian regime" (which is a crime in Poland) when they wear Karl Marx on a t-shirt, to give you an idea how bad it is :)
Well, SLD - leftist party, ruled Poland from 2001 to 2005.
> I try to avoid this label, because it stops all discussion, but they are basically national socialists (without the death camps)
I think you went a little too far here.
PIS is objectively more economically socialist than SLD. And not by a small margin.
1. SLD introduced no social programs when it ruled (PIS introduced 3 already and promises more)
2. SLD continued privatisation (PIS is doing the opposite - buying private companies - banks, coal mines, telecommunication companies, bus and train factories, and joining them into big national holdings)
3. SLD continued free-market reforms (except for the NFZ - national health foundation), PIS reforms the law the other way - introducing targeted anti-big-business taxes, regulating who can buy farming land (only a farmer who lives in nearby province or a church), where a new drugstores can be built, and what the prices for buying raw fruits and vegetables should be (that one is only a promise for now).
4. SLD did nothing regarding housing, PIS introduces a program where the state will build cheap houses and assign them to young families (previously PO introduced similar program but state wasn't building anything, just helped with financing the mortgage the young marriage took, PIS is changing that so that state will do everything - build the house, take the mortgage, manage it, and people are only going to live there and pay part of the rent)
5. PIS is trying to force the big national companies to build an electric car that will be the solution to all Polish problems. Despite the companies having nothing to do with electric cars, there's little Polish-owned manufacturing to speak of, never mind electric cars. To reiterate - the state is telling insurance providers and petrol rafineries to build an electric car :) How is that not socialist?
SLD (despite the name) when it was in power was more free-market and liberal oriented than even PO when it comes to economy :) PIS is far more socialist on that count.
Razem is the fringe party I mentioned. Less than 3% of support.
> I think you went a little too far here.
That's the problem. But how do you call a right-wing nationalist party that is economically socialist?
What about miners pensions? Of course you can't compare both of those parties because budgets and economy was a lot different then and Poland just entered to EU when they were ending their cadence.
Anyway, you now wrote what SLD did when they ruled but in original post you wrote:
PIS is the only economically socialist party in Poland right now, emphasis on right now. You should check current political programs of SLD and Partia Razem. They are more economically socialist than PIS.
> Less than 3% of support.
That doesn't make what I wrote any less true. It's like saying that gay people do not exists because there is only couple of percentage of them in society.
> But how do you call a right-wing nationalist party that is economically socialist?
conservative-socialist ?
And you haven't answered all the deregulation and privatization SLD did compared to the central planning PIS does now :)
> You should check current political programs of SLD and Partia Razem. They are more economically socialist than PIS.
There's no indication SLD is going to be any more socialist this time around. They were promising similar things before and never delivered (thankfully). I'm labeling them basing on what they did, not what they promise (similarly - PO promised to be a liberal right-wing party, but is actually conservative center-right, they lost many voters over that).
> It's like saying that gay people do not exists because there is only couple of percentage of them in society.
I specified I mean mainstream parties in my original post. Razem is a typical protest-party, people don't vote them because they believe they will be in parliament and do what they promised, people vote them as a "fuck you" to the mainstream parties.
They are as relevant to Polish politics as the tee party is in USA :) We also have a pro-Russian party Zmiana in Poland, but they will also never get to the parliament, so who cares.
> conservative-socialist
I guess. But there are a few ways to be conservative (for example, in any normal country PO would be called conservative center-right, and PIS is much more conservative than them, to the point of being extremists. See how they rename every institution from "public" to "national" for one example, or how they focus their propaganda on nationalist interpretation of history, and nationalist conspiracy theories about leftists, Soros, refuges, Jews, cultural marxism, gender, etc.
SLD people, albeit under different (PZPR) banner, ruled Poland since 1945.
Also - they ruled 2 times after 1989, not only in 2001-2005 but also in 90s.
Mainly, the PR and political agenda of the opposition just doesn't exist. The recent political ideas of the opposition are just the government's ideas with a small twist.
So yea, we are fighting them, we're protesting, but we don't have seriously viable well organized alternatives, which is why they'll probably win again.
Fortunately, they're becoming less anti-EU as time passes, which gives me hope, that at least we'll be heading in the overall EU-wide direction.
France is liberal place. No discussion here. Burqas ban is not changing that. In my opinion, context is important. Poland being Islamophobic, while France is not.
There have of course been illiberal but left-wing states that are willing to say exactly that. Most Communist governments have banned religion of any form on the grounds that the state knows better, but I don't think those governments are usually called "liberal."
These are the new excuses to "justify" the recent governments or anything else that people fail to accept or see around themselves.
Obviously, there are lots of liberal Poles, but from my observations they are the minority.
Wanted to write more, but perhaps I'll leave it at that...
This beginning.. points to that our history lessons are focused on resnisance / reformation times. the 'dark ages' is all a bunch of nonsense. if you look at islamic / african continent, asia and other places you can find actually a lot of history that supports the fact that also in Europe people were not in some dark evil times... that a lot of cultures were sharing (ofc there was also conflict all over the place..) a lot of knowlege and culture with eachother.
our dark ages for a lot of other cultures is in the middle of their golden ages...
like some cheesy soap series: "the rewrting of history after war by it's victors, is a war in itself."
just imagine how often that happened. just look at all the modern activities by governments and how they try to turn and twist things like 'their country is best, and others are shit' (that's the general idea they will try to put on their poplation in any case).
if you ask me they just try to hide the fact (by reforming history) to make everyone feel seperated, and opposed. instead of remembering we can share and grow all together.
/tinfoilhat
The high regard for peasants in Poland contrasted with the neighboring East Slavic countries like Russia probably because of the influence of their Mongol rulers, but in the origin Slavic cultures were quite egalitarian and benevolent.
If the plague hit Poland, then... but that's a what-if ;) I find the difference is really well explained by the description of the Refeudalization process [1].
source: being Polish, currently living in Berlin
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/16699/why-was-po...
It took a long time to die if that's really the case. The last bits of feudalism (feu duties) were removed from Scottish property law in 2004.
But half a pie in the fridge is a bit of pie, it doesn't matter that the whole thing isn't there anymore.
The black death didn't cause rises in wages. What caused wages to rises was trade. There as something called the mongol empire ( you might have heard of it ) which allowed europe to trade directly with china, india and the rest of asia. The mongol empire ( particularly the golden horde ) was central to european wealth generation. So much so that when it finally fell in 1480, wealthy merchants were desperately seeking another trade route to the east. A few years later, you have columbus ( you might have heard of him as well ).
The idea that death caused wage rises is ludicrous when you think about it for a second. If population decline causes wage increases then japan would be seeing a huge rise in income. Russia in the 90s should have seen a ridiculous rise in income.
What increases wages are increasing population and increasing trade.
The European economy at the close of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) differed fundamentally from the pre—plague economy. In the countryside, a freer peasant derived greater material benefit from his toil. Fixed rents if not outright ownership of land had largely displaced customary dues and services and, despite low grain prices, the peasant more readily fed himself and his family from his own land and produced a surplus for the market. Yields improved as reduced population permitted a greater focus on fertile lands and more frequent fallowing, a beneficial phenomenon for the peasant.
I would think that numbers, knowledge, technology and goods from the east had more to do with changing european society than a population decrease.
What do you think impacted korea more? The deaths during the korean war or trade with the west? What impacted european wages more? The deaths during WW2 or the american-led trade system?
Also, throughout history, there have been quite a few plagues ( not to mention mass killings ). Those didn't lift wages. China's wages didn't rise after tens of millions of people died during the taiping rebellion. But you are free to believe what you want.
Do you have any references to sources that support your alternative theory or discredit the usual explanations?
Life up until the industrial revolution was dominated by a single factor: the Malthusian limit. The Black Death obliterated that constraint. And, since it reoccurred every 10-15 years, it continued to make the Malthusian limit a non-issue for a long, long time.
This small republic inside the Union had economic freedom for peasants, parliament and voting right, education and medical care system - way ahead of it's time.
As one of the implications of such mix, we have very tasty food here!
I don't like all comments about government - it is always easy to complain. Please just do you your job as good as you can and everything will be perfect.
The key to understanding the dysfunction of polish political system at the time is the concept of "Liberum Veto" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto). Essentially any legislation passed by the Parliament ("Sejm") had to be passed unanimously.
This resulted in nobility securing earmarks and privileges for themselves at every turn and led to anarchy and destabilization of the political system, which culminated in partitioning of Poland between three of its largest neighbors for 123 years.
Then in one case it was abused (technically correctly) to veto a movement to lenghten the parliament session because consensus wasn't achieved. One guy vetoed that, and sejm was finished without any decisions.
Then it started to be abused illegally to finish any sejm completely at any time (even 1 day into the session which were supposed to last weeks) when even 1 nobleman vetoed. It wasn't the problem of the law, because it was illegal to do so - it was the problem of the implementation of the law - because influential people wanted it to be abused that way.
But the real reason was - Poland lost several important international struggles (over Baltics vs Sweden and over part of Ukraine vs Russia), and international economic situation changed (agricultural revolution started, decreasing grain prices on the western markets). Additionally after series of barely survived wars Poland lost a lot of population, so the grain production decreased (and it was like 99% of Polish economy).
Becausse of all of that - infulential people in Poland perceived Polish interests as unrealistic, and alligned themselves with more profitable groups - Prussia, Germany, Catholic Church. And to further their cause they were breaking the law by abusing liberum veto among others.
There were also patriots, of course, and they broke the law, too (3rd May Constitution was introduced in a coup supported by Prussia basically). But in the end Poland was already a Russian protectorate, and there was no way to fix that as long as Russia was so much stronger. Only after WW1 it became possible.
https://culture.pl/en/article/maths-madness-and-the-manhatta...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16666079
After the Polish state that was home to the Jews was crushed in '39 and Europe fell to Nazi Germany and consorts, only Sweden and the UK were liberal havens - and de facto impossible to reach. They were locked, with no escape, exposed to the industrial genocide that would happen.
A true tragedy that makes someone think again when one sees refugees on the TV screen.
Well, it's one of the reasons. The other one is that Oswiecim was(and still is) very well connected to the rest of Europe with train lines - prisoners could be brought there easily from pretty much any part of the occupied territory, from both West and East.
However, many Western, and especially American scholars, don't have a deep understanding of these issues. They simplify it as "Poles hated Jews." It was not so. Probably the best example is Zosia Kossak-Szczucka, presented in the article "Anti-Semite who saved Jews" [2] As many others, she was critical of Jews in pre-war years. And as many others, she risked her life to save them. Most people discussing the issue of Anti-Semitism in pre-war Poland don't understand this issue at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_benches
[2] https://polska.pl/arts/literature/zofia-kossak-szczucka-anti...
That's seriously stretching the definition of race tho
Baltic.
Poland did not exist for a long stretch of time, 1795-1918, it was partitioned between Prussia, the Habsburg empire and Russia. Poland had provoked those powers with a radical, modern constitution.
The Polish language was forbidden, hence only got taught in underground schools, thereby preserving its old nature. Learning it now can drive you crazy due its chaotic "rules".
The partition is also the cause of famous Poles having French names - Frederic Chopin, Marie Curie.
The partition and soon to follow WW2, Holocaust and Russian occupation have beaten a fierce paranoia and national identity into modern Poles.
Polish is probably the Slavic language with the most foreign influences, at least compared to other western Slavic languages or Balkan languages I've seen. Czech language is more "pure" exactly because it was reconstructed from peasant-speak when nationalism became fashionable and educated Czechs turned to their language.
Meanwhile Polish language was continuously used by all layers of society all through the partitions, so it accumulated lots of foreign influences as the fashions changed (from Latin/Italian/German/French/English). It's a significant cultural phenomena, to the point that people in 16th century already complained that everybody uses "makaronizm" (Italian or Latin words) to show-off that they know foreign languages.
Polish language wasn't forbidden for majority of the territory that was occupied, and in these parts where it was forbidden - it was only forbidden for a period of time, not the whole time.
> The partition is also the cause of famous Poles having French names - Frederic Chopin, Marie Curie.
No, it's not. Chopin's father was French, and Maria Skłodowska-Curie (as she preferred to be called, at least when she was in Poland) married a French guy named Curie.
Also - Polish language had small reforms every few decades, but I agree it's overdue another, big one.
Maria Skłodowska, as you know, had to study in a clandestine university in Warsaw due to the Russian occupation.
What was Russification? Germanification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Poland_and_Lithu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation_of_Poles_during_...
Same reason talented Poles now go to London or New York.
> What was Russification? Germanification?
Mostly futile attempts to make people speak different language than they speak. Language was banned in some places, for some time. And they achieved nothing - if anything, Polish Romantism movement was flourishing because of the "forbidden fruit" effect.
Say what you want about Trump, but he loves his country