#can't believe i got to live through both of these major historical events | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chicago-geniza · 2 years

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nisht reblogn

not reblogging the post itself because i don't want to wade into Discourse (lol) but re: this post [will insert link on desktop] & miłosz's important corrective response (there is an underlying assumption in many of these narratives that historical trauma or the everyday experience of hardship in a communist state--or the "postmemory" of those things (reluctantly using hirsch's term, because i mean it psychologically, i'm taking about a psychological phenomenon)--will *automatically & as a mechanism of this process* produce in the individual an anticommunist politics. (please forgive using "politics" as a singular noun here. individual experience can quickly be generalized into collective historical truth, in the teller's mind. the practice of taking oral histories & testimonies is not, as some people think, important because those accounts are *more true*; it's not about standpoint epistemology. rather, through the amalgamation of hundreds--thousands--of individual testimonies, a collective picture of the past-as-experienced begins to emerge, with all the problematic contradictions that poses. & this is something that needs to be, hm. addressed more in both organizing spaces & in public history projects. ok rant over)

& can't speak for my friends who are communists in poland (aka: most of them lol), but what's come up in conversation re: how they got there was both an interest in internationalism (learning languages, disgust & discomfort re: right-wing catholic nationalist currents), & noticing how little their families' & friends' situations had ~improved materially; most were living they same way they had, but with less social support. nostalgia is its own can of worms (my family vacillates between soviet nostalgia & the 5 stages of grief about soviet antisemitism & a need to believe it's the same everywhere & you [the state] have to make a utilitarian tradeoff between ~minorities & providing for the majority, who are racist, which is insane to me, politically, but makes sense with their experience, affectively. likewise, i've read accounts by polonized jewish holocaust survivors who converted to catholicism & insisted that events like the ones documented in gross's 'neighbors' were exceptions, that the kielce pogrom was an exception, & that the vast majority of poles would risk their lives to save jews, because they were good people & good christians. it's a tricky thing, memory & history & politics, even--especially--for people who lived through eras/events/etc.)

also: i've been reading the london emigré press & it's very interesting to see old guard PPS-lewica people abroad (many of their comrades in poland who survived the war would go on to assume positions in the PRL gov't) writing absolutely blistering invectives in the 40s & 50s, arguing with british communists, insisting that the USSR is not bringing communism to poland but rather making of it a soviet colony & holding up kapital as a red fig leaf over an act of imperial expansion. (one remembers the censor's refrain: "antyrosyjska, antyradziecka.") it's worth reading what polish communists outside poland were saying at the time too!

#it's me rambling abt communism & poland lol #i just didn't want to rb the post itself bc Discourse

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