As wPolityce.pl discovered, a group of professors and supporters of Donald Tusk’s government formulated and wrote the “Łódź Declaration”, which demands a number of changes in the humanities. We are currently collecting signatures and seeking political support for this initiative.
The authors – often academic professors – claim in their appeal that science was suppressed under PiS.
The increasing ideological pressure from state authorities, the resulting stigmatization, symbolic violence and administrative intimidation affected specific people and institutions.
The letter does not provide any example of this document, so we do not know what ‘administrative harassment’ or what ‘violence’ we are talking about.
In another excerpt, scholars suggest that previous authorities had based patriotism on… ethnic (sic!) criteria.
The foundation [nowych] actions there should be a different understanding of patriotism, referring to the civic formula, not the ethnic one.
I wonder how they would interpret the late’s award and promotion. Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, a writer and poet who officially emphasized that he “felt Polish”, although “he did not have a single drop of Polish blood in him”.
The document also contains some rather infantile slogans, such as a quote from the song “I love and respect freedom” or the discovery that Poland’s history had “both glorious and shameful events”. By the latter they mean Jedwabne. Historians with common sense would probably agree with some of the demands, since they are talking about the fight against “pointosis”, i.e. the assessment of the development of research work of individual scientists that is not suitable for the humanities.
But what is very surprising is the fragment in which historians claim that Poland… cannot afford many institutions and that the “non-academic” institutions should be liquidated.
We call for a comprehensive assessment, together with the scientific, museum and educational communities, of the methods, objectives and results of non-academic institutions engaged in historical research and education. As a community, we cannot afford to maintain cost-intensive and ideologized institutions that contribute little or nothing to understanding the past.. Instead of a dialogue about the past, they promote a monologue, and by spending significant public resources in a non-transparent manner, they violate the principles of equal access to them.
The authors seem to think that such a postulate also includes, for example, the Institute for National Remembrance, the Pilecki Institute or individual museums.
But when the authors demand the abolition of institutions (which they probably consider ‘PiS’), they also demand the creation of something new. It’s fate The National Center for the Humanities, which… would distribute money for research.** Instead of pluralism of institutions, they propose centralization with positions – it is not difficult to guess who would take over them.
SEE THE FULL STATEMENT:
Source: wPolityce