The salons of the Third Polish Republic have been denouncing the Polish nobility for years because they despise the peasants, but when a Polish peasant protests today, they use the same, or even worse, arguments as the former elite they hated. And yet recently the didactic poem about the misery of the lowest class (Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak’s bestseller “Chłopki” is only a derivative of previous research) even reached the level of cabaret and appeared on Netflix in the form of the series “1670 “.
One of the hypocritical concerns of the intellectuals of the Third Polish Republic is the pity and contempt with which the nobility treated the peasants.
Contempt of the former nobility or of the current elites?
For example, in “Defense of Serfdom” Leszczyński looks at the village about which the nobleman Józef Gołuchowski wrote:
“So the farmer first wastes food that should have been enough for him, and then asks for it to be given to him.”
Kacper Pobłocki, who put the old “rudeness” on a pedestal, tried to move the reader with Didier Eribon’s reflection on the treatment by “gentlemen”
“Around me people spoke contemptuously or disrespectfully about simple people, their way of life.”
In Leszczyński’s books, in Pobłocki’s works, in Radek Rak’s works, in interviews, journalism and hymns, it is the same everywhere: let’s exterminate the nobility because they despised the peasants.
Meanwhile, friends and readers of these paeans to rudeness today spit on farmers, mocking the protests and accusing them of being “unknown perpetrators.” The mildest term attributes farmers to ‘political naivety’
Meanwhile, readers of these authors on internet forums and social media spit at farmers for coming on expensive tractors, for having KRUS benefits, allowances and subsidies. ‘Tractors worth millions’, ‘political protests’, ‘aggressive’, ‘drunk’. So why is that? You stigmatize contempt for farmers, and you put it into practice yourself? The mainstream interpretations about the despicable arrogance of the elite towards the common man seem unconvincing.
Rebel, but not against the elegant men of the Third Polish Republic
And in these interpretations there is also admiration for all the peasant uprisings – and not with the protest of tractors driving through the city, but with the protests in which houses were burned and murdered, when Szeli’s men cut off the hands and heads of the gentlemen , because the imperial officials each paid a few coins for such a delivery. What is clear from these mainstream stories is that if the village went against the lords, it was right, because the exploited class is always right. Unless it is the agricultural class that is angry at an enlightened Europe and a loyal government, sensitive people from the cafes in Warsaw can quickly turn into bloodthirsty peasants who suddenly don’t even need food from the countryside.
Masters from the lodges around Czersk also wrote about the validity of the peasant uprising. In his ‘Fairy Tale with a Serpent’s Heart’, Radek Rak turned the leaders of Rabacja into healthy rationalists opposed to gentlemen who were riveted in unreality.
Radek Rak even canonized Jakub Szela and felt that he understood the massacre of the nobility during the Galician raid. Leszczyński passionately lists all the objections of the peasants, he treats the slightest mention in the ancient chronicle as a biblical revelation, Pobłocki is happy when
“peasants dropped the masks of docile subjects and stood face to face with their lords.”
But now that the peasants are truly throwing off the masks of the meek and coming face to face not only with the lords, but even with the lords of lords, the great critics of the nobility suddenly turn into their worst, debauched version.
Source: wPolityce