sinister and offputting

“Politics: is secret. It crouches mysteriously in the center, and only its consequences are felt, but because only isolated people feel it, who can’t even exchange their experiences of it through a public medium, who aren’t allowed to see any kind of logic or order in it, and who cant even imagine the place and necessary order of it, because they have no experience of a sensible — transparent, cognizable, manageable — order.“ - Writes Tamás Gáspár Miklós, once and future voice of the Hungarian left, in the wake of the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland. His essay is fairly naive and even misguided (as TGM himself admits in his 2003 introduction to the republished work), but I think it’s a document emblematic of the era’s anti-soviet political opposition. TGM expresses a fear that the failure of the Solidarity movement would push this opposition to the right, which is not only a correct prediction but a phenomenon he himself would fall victim to, becoming a right-wing libertarian before eventually returning to the left as a revolutionary Marxist. The essay somewhat obliquely but correctly ascribes the failure of Solidarity to a lack of political apparatus within the movement. “Politics, like nature, abhors a vaccuum. If antiparliamentary and extraparliamentary worker’s parties did not form, Solidarity – after the so-called “communist” regime collapsed – turned into a clericalist and nationalist bourgeoisie party.”

Andrzej Sapkowski wrote his short story entiteled the Witcher in 1986, for a writing contest organized by Fantastyka magazine. It only earned him third place, but the story proved popular with readers, a popularity that has endured ever since. 14 more short stories, a series of 5 novels, comic books, tv shows, movies, two prequel novels, boardgames and several workers rights violations by CD Projekt Red would follow. Communism has ended in Poland.

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