You know that a TV show has hit a bad stretch when the producers bring in a controversial guest star to boost ratings. A reality show about a two-year-old beauty pageant star is tanking in the ratings? Bring in Sarah Palin to serve as her life coach. Saturday Night Live on a long spiral downward?… Continue reading Special Guest Star: Bibi!
It was one thing to establish an independent peace group in Poland or Hungary during the last decade of the Communist era. Freedom and Peace challenged military service in Poland, where there was a long tradition of independent organizing. In Hungary, perhaps the most liberal country in the region outside of Yugoslavia, Dialogus opposed nuclear… Continue reading The Pankow Peace Group
Until the 1970s, drug addicts didn’t exist in Poland – at least not officially. In those days, drugs were expensive and the supply was limited, so the Polish state could hide the problem by giving a different label to the small number of addicts. But then heroin became more readily available, in part as a… Continue reading Working with the Marginalized
It can be a nightmare to become entangled in the Polish legal system. You could be charged with a crime, for instance, and thrown into pre-trial detention. This detention could even last two or three years. One person was even held for nearly eight years. Abuses in the court system, lawyer Adam Bodnar with the… Continue reading Human Rights in Poland
Doing business entails certain risks. You make a big investment of money and time, and you hope that your gamble pays off. Maybe people will come to your restaurant. Maybe they will buy your product. Maybe they will contract for your services. But you can’t be sure. You’ve taken out loans on the expectation that… Continue reading The Risks of Doing Business in Poland
Neanderthals generally get a bad rap. If history is written by the winners, they are the world’s very first losers. After all, Neanderthals came out on the wrong end of the great evolutionary battle with our Homo Sapiens ancestors. Ever since, they have been portrayed as big, stupid, artless, lumbering brutes. Our smarter forebears wiped… Continue reading A Neanderthal Foreign Policy
In retrospect, it seems obvious: Polish women didn’t really have a seat at the table during the transformation 25 years ago. The Solidarity trade union movement was dominated by men. During the Martial Law period, women stepped into critical positions when the government arrested the top (male) leaders, but their contributions were largely unrecognized. Only… Continue reading Building the Women’s Movement
Before its triumph in 1989, the Solidarity trade union spent more of its existence in the shadows than as an official movement. It started in August 1980 in Gdansk and remained legal until December 1981 when the Polish government declared Martial Law. For the next seven years, Solidarity went underground. Ewa Kulik was one of… Continue reading Solidarity Underground
In the first Crusade, on their way to fight the Muslim infidels in Jerusalem, the armed pilgrims asked themselves a provocative question: Why should we trek so far to kill people we barely know when we can just as well massacre infidels closer to home? And thus the crusaders of the 11th century embarked on some… Continue reading Europe’s Coming Battle
A generational shift is slowly taking place in the politics of East-Central Europe as the figures responsible for the changes in 1989 are giving way to a younger group of politicians who were not old enough to be politically active at that time. This younger generation of politicians takes membership in the European Union for… Continue reading The Politics of Youth