Politics and PR in Poland

The commodification of existence in Poland proceeds apace as it has already done elsewhere.

Yet the reduction of everything to the hallucinatory spell of money power and transaction has in some ways taken on a more pathological aspect than even in Western Europe.

For the ideological project of installing neoliberal capitalism is still seen as somewhat neurotically as part of the legacy of banishing Communism, 50 wasted years, and to prove Poland's essential belonging to 'the West'

The slavish and uncritical emulation of 'the West' has extended to adopting not only the most ruinous and wasteful forms of American style consumerism but also a political system lubricated by money, media mystification and PR.

As Radio Polskie reports today,

Polish political parties spend most of their money on self-promotion and creating a credible image instead of on the platform and programme.

Parties spend on average 100 million zloty (24 million euro) on PR and marketing, which is most of their budget, says Eryk Mistewicz, a political consultant. Mistewicz adds that parties’ expenditures are hardly ever monitored.

Civic Platform, the biggest party in the Polish parliament, spent almost 2 million zloty (480,000 euro) on self-promotion, commercials, training and media relations between January and September 2009.

The Democratic Left Alliance paid 250,000 zloty (60,400 euro) for training and experts and 78,000 zloty (19,000 euro) for PR. The Law and Justice, the main opposition party, spent just over one million zloty on PR.....

Neoliberalism destroys political choice and makes it a fake choice between competing parties which are little more than brands in the consumer market place. Politicians and their petty little creeds are positioned to occupy the correct niche market for 'beliefs'.

The only way to return to real politics where people can determine policy agendas is going to have to be a revival of extra-parliamentary agitation. In Poland the level of awareness of how 'the system' works is still relatively low

Solidarity was defeated but something similar will need to be recreated to challenge politicians who act as mere middlemen between the money markets and the public and nothing much more that re-presenting their interests to the public

PR is a smooth term for what is really propaganda, one more insidious than that under Communism, far more sophisticated at probing through depth psychology the way to manipulate the public.

The US model of political indoctrination was pioneered in the early years of the twentieth century by figures like Edward De Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, who made the transition from advocating the sale of products to the sale of politicians.

The BBC TV series The Century of the Self was very good on showing how this came about and the Americanisation of Poland will proceed upon these lines,

"Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile".

That fits in with the neoliberal creed of those in the Solidarity leadership and economists like Leszek Balcerowicz who hitched himself along with others to the movement in order to impose market ideology on Poland in two ways.

Firstly, by manipulating the rank and file in Solidarity to believe that the success of neoliberal markets depended upon having a docile and passive workforce that would not challenge the leaders decisions.

Secondly, by promising that consumer goods would fall like manna from heaven once the 'correct reforms' were installed and that the promise and practice of consumerism would dampen down political opposition and the idea of active citizenship.

Economic neoliberalism contradicted political liberalism as it does not require politicians to have to justify in detail their decisions nor to have real political debates.

Merely soundbites, peddled platitudes or else futile shouting matches from hysterical muppets on TVN and pseudo-commentary from the two sententious dolts who spout banal waffle on the show Szklo Kontaktowe.

The problem is that Polish politics is divided between unaccountable rationalistic technocrats on the one hand and idiot populists and nationalists like the League of Polish Families or PiS espousing 'identity politics'.

The stupidity of the populists is that they protest against the negative manifestations of an economic system they fundamentally support.

The populists who never criticise neoliberal markets or corporate power only fasten on to its detrimental effects to advance their careers and monetary interests and have done since Solidarity rurned to market populism in the early 1990s.

Afghanistan is about checking Russian Ambitions

That Poland is in Afghanistan for energy security is confirmed by Chris Luenen in the Guardian ( The Real Stakes in Afghanistan December 10 2009 ). Luenen supports the war and uses the fact of TAPI's centrality to argue why its strategically vital.

......aside from the need to fulfil their alliance duties – and in fact even more important – they have clear national interests at stake in this strategically located central Asian state.

This is not about just about pre-empting future terrorist attacks on European capitals by stopping the Taliban from retaking the country.

At stake in Afghanistan is the survival of the transatlantic alliance, Europe's energy security and independence, and whether the deepening ties between Europe – especially Germany – and Russia, will eventually lead to the western integration of Russia, or instead, to it gaining a stranglehold over European energy security.

In Afghanistan all three issues are interlinked. This fact remains largely ignored.

Let me explain: Afghanistan is a crucial energy transit corridor in central Asia, potentially connecting the energy-rich central Asian republics with the Arabian Sea and/or the Indian Ocean.

Stabilising Afghanistan – not just temporarily to justify withdrawal, but for good – is crucial for the anticipated Trans-Afghanistan pipeline from Turkmenistan to India (known as Tapi) to be built and its security to be guaranteed.

The construction of Tapi is essential for Europe to diversify its energy supplies and reduce its dependence on oil and gas imports from the Gulf and Russia. Failure in Afghanistan, and by extension in Pakistan, would mean abandoning the construction of Tapi and in turn, pave the way for Russia to reassert its former hegemony in the region.

Should this transpire, European dependence on Russian-controlled energy supplies would increase hugely, giving Russia unprecedented leverage over Europe, both economically and politically.

A Russia-dependent Europe would damage the transatlantic relationship beyond repair, wean the Europeans away from their former American partner, and split the west into two.

On the other hand, should the mission in Afghanistan succeed and Tapi be built, Europe could continue to deepen its economic and political ties with Russia without running the risk of falling hostage to Russia's geostrategic ambitions (which are still very much alive); it would allow Europe to progressively integrate Russia into a united west.

The Battle for Krakow's Heritage

I never thought I would be involved in a campaign group. But on Saturday Night a group of like minded people met in Kazimierz, the former Jewish part of Krakow, to discuss how to organise protest against the desecration of the city by bad new architecture and planning decisions.

For a long time I have been increasingly incensed by such architectural blights such as the hideous plate and glass monstrosity that is Galeria Krakowska. Now with the kitschy balloon and the vulgar lighted smoke stack in Bonarka it is clear that action needs to be taken.

The core of this new group includes myself, Dr Monika Bogdanowska from the Institute of Science and Art in Katowice, Christopher B Gray, an American rock musician, and Martin Tyler who works with Monika on linguistics programmes for computers.

A Polskie Radio broadcast featuring Chris Gray in July 2009 is available by clicking on the link and the Facebook campaign can be found here.

Russia, Radek Sikorski and NATO.

It has been pointed out by a Polish blogger that Radek Sikorski said Russia with regards NATO is 'more than welcome to join' .

The 'logic' goes that if NATO is a threat to Russia, joining the organization should get rid of that threat, especially when NATO requires unanimous decisions.

In March 2009 Sikorski in a lecture at the Copernican Debate at Toruń University opined ,

"We need Russia for the resolution of European and global problems. That is why I think it would be good for Russia to join NATO," Radoslaw Sikorski, a conservative who has often taken a critical stance on Russia.

"This would require not only the democratization of (Russia's) system but also the introduction of civilian control over the army and the need to calm border disputes"

Well, now Russia was offered that choice in the abstract after the end of the Cold War but the West then imposed shock therapy, ripped off its assets, supported the criminal oligarchs and the weak and alcoholic Yeltsin as leader.

Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of distrust of it ever since, though it is never portrayed like that by writers such as Anne Applebaum, Washington Post journalist, a brilliant historian of the Gulag but someone whose anti-communism leads her to portray Putin as 'Neo-Soviet'.

That's her line in the weak and unconvincing postscript to Gulag : A History and she does, of course, so happen to be the wife of the Polish Foreign Minister. What it never contains is a criticism of Western diplomacy and the IMF's shock therapy after 1991.

Indeed Sikorski's comments about Russia joining NATO have to be interpreted in the light of his public diplomacy, that is, his attempts to ingratiate himself with Obama as well as to appear magnanimous.

Sikorski has often affected moderation on Russia since 2007 as a way of promoting himself as candidate for NATO's next secretary-general and also in the light of Obama's victory and the removal of the neoconservative clique he belongs to from Washington.

Sikorski floats NATO entry as a means of portraying ill-will on the Russian side as an essential facet of Russia being Russia not Westernising along the painful trajectory set down by the IMF and neoliberal economists in the 1990s.

This is what is meant by the Orwellian use of 'democratisation' as a meaningless and decontextualised buzzword. That does not mean that democracy ought to mean that. But increasingly it has been with 'democratic geopolitics'.

Moreover, Sikorski himself has repeatedly shown a contempt for democracy by dismissing popular opinion against the Afghanistan War without addressing concerns or explaining what it is about truthfully.

Sikorski has repeatedly obfuscated what the the Missile Shield's purpose actually was with regards Poland's security and claimed that the deal in 2008 was not affected by the war in Georgia whilst Tusk hinted at the very opposite-that it was all about Russia.

The bad faith implicit in Sikorski's posture shown when he argued that,

'We won't build global peace without mutual confidence.....As recent years have shown, not all countries are ready for that.

The 9/11 attacks were symptomatic insofar that they showed that even the world's greatest power cannot feel totally safe.

Last year, Russia surprised us when it used force against Georgia. That's why we need to hammer out new terms of international cooperation and confidence.'

First, of all notice the neat conflation of Al Qaida with Russia in the next sentence as being a power that threatens the world's greatest power i.e the USA.

Having said that, this was propaganda riff played by Obama in his pre-presidential debate with McCain when he spoke of a 'resurgent Al Qaida' and a 'resurgent Russia', though Afghanistan needs to won before Russia can be the target for renewed hostility again.

That's the meaning of Obama's claim to 'reset' relations with Russia. As John Laughland comments 'Perhaps his listeners did not expect him to use the term so literally: when you reboot a computer, it starts over exactly as before'.

Sikorski's creed can dovetail quite well with Obama's vision which is similar to that of Bush, as in his speech to the National Security Strategy of September 2002 when he stated the U.S. stood for universal, not American, values

“The United States must defend liberty and justice, because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere.”

Including Georgia where Obama's key foreign policy advisor compared Russia's reaction to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia to Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Stalinism.

Anne Applebaum, who claimed that Saddam almost certainly had WMD's, also clearly thinks that Obama was the best bet for US President.

After all, apart from Iraq, there is not much difference between Obama and Bush. The overarching geostrategy is broadly the same but with a difference over the subtlety needed to acheive dominance over Eurasia.

So naturally, Sikorski also repeats the idea that Russia's action against Georgia was "surprising". It was not. From the demise of the Soviet Union it had been a consistent Russian foreign policy that Georgia should not attack South Ossetia and that it would be responded too.

Georgia's attack was the surprise and Russia acted accordingly to the act of aggression against its peacekeepers and against the South Ossetians blitzed in Tskhanvili with grad rockets. Saakashvili was supported directly by the neoconservative network Sikorski is a part.

That was confirmed by the interview he gave after the speech to Gazeta Wyborcza when he commented,

'I stand by everything I said, but that doesn't mean I'm inviting Russia to join the Nato. I simply presented a certain hypothetical vision, a reference to a debate that took place in the Nato in the mid-1990s.

Then, under the Clinton administration, there was a debate on whether, and on what terms, Russia could become a member of the Alliance.'

That was over a decade ago since when Russia has been consistently demonised for defending its interests even when it has not actually gone as far as invading another nation that had not attacked it at the time of invasion in 2003 such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

It was also before NATO attacked Serbia, after the USA had ramped up the civil War in Kosovo by supporting and arming the KLA, then setting a precedent for Russian action in South Ossetia when it ended in independence for Kosovo by 2008.

There is no chance Russia would join NATO but it helps to make such an offer if the aim is to rationalise the reason why states like Ukraine and Georgia should be: it is intended to portray Russia as being irrationally paranoid about NATO expansion.

When in fact Russia, unlike the USA, is meant to have no national or sovereign interests whilst the USA's geopolitical ambitions quite naturally and seamlessly blend with the aspirations of all humanity.

Polish Patriot Missiles Are a Defence Against Whom ?

Source Radio Polskie

Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has said that the deployment of a battery of U.S. Patriot missiles in Poland will have an entirely defensive character and will not directed against Russia.

Interviewed on France 24 news channel, he said that Polish-Russian relations have improved significantly with Donald Tusk at the helm of the government.

Poland and the US signed the “status of forces” (SOFA) accord yesterday, clearing the way for a battery of Patriot missiles to be moved from Germany to Poland.

The deal also defines the legal basis whereby US troops would be stationed in NATO’s central European state.

There is no logic to Sikorski's position. If there are no enemies from which to defend Poland from then there is no need for Patriot missiles for 'defence' or any other purpose.

If the missiles are being used for defence and millions of dollars spent on military industrial ties to the USA, then Sikorski must justify why the money is being spent when NATO does not specifically require it.

The Missile Shield was cited primarily as a 'defensive measure' against Iran. But Sikorski kept mentioning Russia in trying to sell the shield to the Polish public.

Now that Obama has 'reset' relations with Russia. Sikorski is trying to adapt Poland's War Games with Russia to the new consensus by citing 'positive changes in Russia'.

Sikorski is correct that Medvedev's condemnation of the Stalinist period is a step forward. Yet nothing Russia could do would be enough to allay the attitude of Poland's elites to Russia ( until a new generation of leaders emerges ).

The Patriots either serve a purpose over and above the collective security which is part of the NATO treaty or they do not. If they have an extra purpose that must be revealed.

Poland's unilateral hard power pretensions dating back to the support for the neoconservative project have to be taken seriously by other Western states in NATO and Russia.

It is dangerous to have an irresponsible member of NATO in Poland just as it would if Georgia were ever admitted, which after the Georgian aggression in South Ossetia has reduced its chances to zero.

Sikorski's contempt for public opinion is also a sign of irresponsibility. Whilst no foreign policy can be based on public opinion only, it has to at least take it into account in a democracy.

If some 77% are against it, it is essential that MPs in the Sejm put up forensic questioning about both the Patriot Missiles and Afghanistan. This is known as democratic accountability.

‘Mr Sikorski said that the views of the French people are probably very much the same. Foreign missions have never been popular, because they are expensive and risky, but Poland is treating seriously its obligations vis a vis its NATO partners’.

Yes, but France has not passively genuflected to everything Washington demands of them though, either in Iraq or even in Afghanistan. The reason is that it would be unpopular with the French public who have a habit of more 'active citizenship'.

Unlike the Czech Republic, the Polish public is far too docile, a view that the 'liberal' elites have of them and have encouraged as a good thing whilst the intelligensia and notables who know what's best rule.

Unless a widespread protest movement gets into gear and demands an end to the wastage of money on useless weapon projects and to spend in on healthcare and education, then nothing can change.

Poland's Great Game.

Source Polskie Radio

The Polish-American Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) has been signed in Warsaw today.

SOFA allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish territory.

During the signing ceremony, Polish Minister of Defense, Bogdan Klich, said that, for Poland, the agreement means a strengthening in the country’s national security.

“This is an important moment in current cooperation between the US and Poland,” said Klich, adding that it paves the way for a clear future for the two countries to cooperate.

The majority of the Polish population will have hardly taken any notice of this, apart from politically ware types who even then often get het up by the usual 'public diplomacy' surrounding the purchase of Patriot Missiles

One typical response is that Poland has the right to an adequate national defense and the UN Charter recognizes this. The capability to intercept attacking aircraft in its air space or some types of tactical missiles is a purely defensive measure.

This view ignores the fact that Poland can hardly invoke collective security of NATO whilst pursuing a nationalist and unilateral posture within it. An air attack on Poland would be an attack on all NATO members.

Opposition to the deployment of Patriots and SOFA is often seen as stemming from sinister motives, perhaps crypto-Communism, Kremlinoid or Russian nationalist sympathies and so on and never in the light of

Actually it ought to be the motives of those like Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski that need to be questioned and examined, not least in the light of his close connection to far right neoconservative Washington think tanks like the AEI.

However, the Cold War is long over and most on the democratic left do not have any nostalgia for Soviet totalitarianism any more than conservative realists or intelligent political liberals who do not share the messianic neoconservativism of Sikorski

As Anatol Lieven has said, Russia is responding on the whole to those tub thumping for NATO expansion right up to its borders and even then Russia has not responded to a few patriot missiles being sold.

The purpose of SOFA is mostly to do with the business of the military industrial complex and profits. It's big business. Sikorski himself does not believe that Russia is that much of a direct threat to Poland.

Russia is a threat to what Sikorski considers Polish interests, however, such as in having energy security, not relying on Russian gas too much, in getting Ukraine and Belarus back into Poland's traditional regional sphere of interest.

The Patriots in any case were negotiated just after the war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 as part of modernising Poland's "defense" capability along with the Missile Shield and to enhance Poland's "credibility" as a NATO member.

When Obama pulled the plug on the project in October 2009, Sikorski, Tusk et al had to keep with the Patriots as they had sold them along with the Missile Shield package as an essential part of Poland's "defence".

Yet they were never about that. Poland aspires to function like Israel, a frontline militarised arsenal of democracy and regional superpower vis a vis Russia and to displace Germany and France in NATO.

The Patriots, the development of the military-industrial ties with the USA are about upgrading Poland's role as an auxiliary in the USA's bid for global domination over Eurasia and decisive control over the oil and gas.

The isolation and blocking off of Iranian interests, of which the TAPI pipeline running through Afghanistan is but one measure ( preventing the IPI link to China ) in this Great Game for world hegemony. With the end of the Cold War, it was history as usual.

Indeed Radek Sikorski fancies himself as a historical figure, as a latter day Lord Curzon and being an Oxford educated Anglophile and Bullingdon Club member ( as was the neoconservative David Cameron ).

Perhaps, the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century at the very time when Britain and the USA had embarked on their imperial destinies has led to a feeling that Poland now should compensate for that historical crime by overasserting its role as a staunch US ally.

The same tendency is at work with Zbigniew Brzezinski, son of an aristocratic Pole and leading architect of US geostrategy in Central Asia who uses the very term used by Curzon in his reknowned work The Grand Chessboard.

The comparison of Poland and Russian relations, in fact international relations as a whole, with a a New Cold War is propaganda, whether it's spouted by neoliberals like Edward Lucas who covet Russia's oil and gas wealth for the West or Noam Chomsky on the left.

Better is the comparison to the period in the run up to the First World War and, as in August 1914, the match igniting conflict between huge competing power blocks could come from an area of ethnic enmities and nationalist irredentism-the Eurasian Balkans i.e. the Caucasus.

Poland expresses "Solidarity" on Global Warming.

Nothing is particulary surprising about the impending failure of the Copenhagen Talks on reducing C02 emissions nor about the attitude of Poland towards opposing EU plans whilst prating about the need for 'solidarity'.

Particulary odious is PM Tusk's abuse of the word 'solidarity' as if were some brand recognition slogan. He ceased to represent what it once stood for a long time ago.

Indeed Poland has been awarded First Prize by the Climate Action Network after Poland’s European Minister Dowgielewicz claimed that the EU’s plan to cut CO2 emissions by 30 percent does not have any possibility of being accepted by all members of the 27-member bloc

The "Fossil of the Day" non-accolade was given to CAN for Poland blocking negotiations for 30% reductions in emissions. As Polskie Radio reports,

Dowgielewicz argued at the conference in Copenhagen that most of the EU states are against raising the bar on carbon emissions, meaning that the 20 percent cut 2020 remains as the key goal.

The official aim of the twenty seven member bloc is a 20 percent reduction of such emissions by 2020. Several richer countries, the European Parliament and the European Commission appealed, however, to increase the target to 30 percent.

The reason Poland does not take global heating to be that important depends on two main factors.

Firstly, 94% of its energy comes from coal and leading consultants from the coal industry have close ties to PO or have been actual PO politicians. Reliance on coal means less reliance on gas and, of course, Russia.

Secondly, the Polish elites are full of individuals who affect "scepticism" about global heating such as the Kaczynski Twins and the 'shock therapy' economist Leszek Balcerowicz.

Balcerowicz tends to maintain scientific credentials mostly when pushing his Positivistic neoliberal dogmas, as with his Plan in 1990 which experimented with an entire people.

When it comes to real science though he remains as invincibly ignorant as many others , like those in the AEI which Sikorski belongs to and which is paid by Exxon to fabricate the relevant data denying AGW.

There is no will in Poland to do much about global warming as after 50 years of Communism rapid growth of a US style high octane car economy and hatred of Russia ensure that coal burning is an energy security issue.

Sikorski's approach also reduces C02 reductions to considerations of 'you firstism', where Poland does not see why it should reduce emissions if 'other Great Powers' do not.

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said, in Brussels, that the Union may agree to.......ambitious plans on the condition that the remaining world countries, including the US, China and India, commit to it as well.

Poland also favors a solution in which the EC calculates its future costs for member states before deciding on such reductions.

Inertia, vested interests and ideology are playing a part in Poland's relative indifference to global warming, though the reduction of AGW to cost-benefit analysis will have another aspect to it in future years.

That is, when Poland is forced to accept large numbers of African migrants from the Third World fleeing collapsed states, resource wars, climate catastrophes, famines and so on. Then the idea of 'solidarity' could be interpreted somewhat differently.

The Deracination of Krakow.

The sojourn in Bulgaria is over and I'm returning to Krakow tomorrow. I first went to Krakow back in August 1999 and have lived on and off there for the most part of the last decade. But all is not well.

The city has changed much in the last ten years and not always for the better. Despite the much needed restoration projects, the city has started to become 'Disneyfied' somwhat like Prague and has lost much of its old character.

Particularly depressing is the way the centre has been invaded by the usual bland consumer retail chains like Coffee Republic and Starbucks and an astonishing number of competing bank branches occupying sometimes four to five consecutive buildings next to one another.

The Bar Mleczny that once offered cheap and tasty-and above all healthy food-have been pushed out and replaced by fast food chains serving rancid and overpriced kebabs and sandwich chains like Subway.

Worst of all is the spectacularly vulgar shopping mall Galeria Krakowska, a super-imposed concrete mass of plate, glass kitsch, glaring neon, and tacky brand names which blots out the adjacent Austro-Hungarian period Main Station just to the right.

Whilst the old bus station was a grim shambles surrounded by seedy drinking dens and Bar Smok, what has replaced it has totally ruined the surrounding environment as well as making pedestrian entrance through Galeria Krakowska essential to reach the other side of the station.

Moreover, the rise of EasyJet flying cheap flights to Krakow Balice brought hordes of Stag Night revellers from Britain. Those who regard the city as nothing more than a quaint Baroque backdrop deliberately trying to annoy the sensibilities of the locals with their forced booziness.

As Timothy Garton Ash put it,

In Krakow, Poland's Oxford, the Brits don't have a good reputation. They pile in with easyJet for drunken hen, stag and thug weekends, carousing loudly, half-naked, through the cobbled streets of this conservative, Catholic city. And they call it "kraking".

In some bars, I was told, there are signs saying No Brits Allowed. Even the Germans are more welcome.

The reasons for this loutish behaviour might have something to do with Britain's private debt fuelled and property mortgage boom economy and the notion that the British identity is tied up with its consumer purchasing power.

In other words the 'loadsamoney' mentality, the selfish, anti-social and egotistic belief that the world is mine to exploit and enjoy because "I've got money" and they have not.

The same mentality that leads rather unpleasant males on sex trips to Thailand. They are cheap. This form of tourism reflects a prostitution of an entire culture and city and delivering it over to satisfying the wants of rapacious foreigners.

There is something psychopathological about Stag Nights and regarding the local women as a resource to be tapped, with lapdancing clubs now springing up to cater for the needs of 'the lads' in what was a traditional Catholic city.

The way Stag Nighters behave reminds me that writers like Ballard have drawn attention to similar things in novels like Kingdom Come where he writes about the ritualistic 'fun' of acting as part of a nasty enraged mob about sport and football.

Whilst some Cracovians dislike Stag Nights, the way the quick buck has triumphed at the expense of the city's once enduring character is turning it into a tacky tourist trap where it becomes a place exclusively there to satisfy the needs of 'the consumer'.

Whilst Krakow is inevitably going to be marketed as a 'brand' of stale and predictable packaged pleasures, it might at least be expected that garishly lit former pwer station smokestacks should not blare out neon light over the site of the Plaszow concentration camp.

Nor that along with Auschwitz, that Communist Tours make light of a system that, whilst it seemed rather lacklustre and laughable in its later years, can be turned into a joke when it was based on murder, show trials, the assassination of priests and repression.

Goodbye Lenin hostels have sprung up as have tours in Trabants around Nowa Huta. Gone is the idea that Krakow has its own history that it is the responsibility of the individual to explore in his own private way.

The neoliberal economic system does not want cultured and well-educated citizens but shallow, narcissistic and materialistic consumers who buy not only meaningless junk but also meaningless experiences that offer them 'something different'.

As Erich Fromm said, in a comment that captures the transition from the Communist to the neoliberal system, "The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots".

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This blog will resume in about a week. Karl Naylor

The Nord Stream Pipeline, The Baltics and Poland.

Radio Polskie has reported on Polish President Lech Kaczynski's meeting in Warsaw with his Estonian counterpart Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

The meeting concerns bilateral cooperation, energy security, Baltic Sea cooperation and regional development and the "European aspirations" of Ukraine and Georgia. The report state,

Kaczynski and Ilves are also to address concerns over the Nord Stream gas pipeline which is to run from Russia under the surface of the Baltic Sea directly to gas terminals in Germany, bypassing both Estonia and Poland.

Both presidents will be addressing matters regarding cooperation with Azerbaijan, which has gas infrastructure reaching to Turkey, from where the proposed Nabucco line would run to central Europe.

That the Nord Stream Pipeline will get built and bypass Poland and the Baltics has been a major source of annoyance for President Kaczynski and other more urbane and more sophisticated diplomats such as FM Radek Sikorski.

Poland ruined things for itself through its irresponsible diplomacy and continued and vocal support for NATO expansionism and Washington neoconservatives, of which Sikorski is the most obvious example.

There is no reason why Russia would want to build a pipeline through unreliable states ruled by nationalist revanchists and in some cases statesmen who actually served in the Waffen SS during the war.

Added to the silence of Polish statesmen on the systematic discrimination against ethnic Russians in the Baltic Republics, the destruction and vandalisation of statues commemorating the Red Army why should it ?

Those denouncing the Nord Stream pipeline hysterically as tantamount to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 fail to note the irony that members of the political elite in the Baltics had a Nazi past.

Closely connected to Bush's far right neoconservative administration, Mart Laar in Estonia is a member of think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute ( as is Sikorski ). He was also an adviser to Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia.

Laar a stauch monetarist and exponent of US style neoliberalism was also a strong supporter of those Estonian partisans who fought the Red Army, the Forest Brothers, and of the Waffen SS out of whose ranks they were created.

Polish nationalists like the clownish Kaczynskis had nothing to say when the pipeline was first mooted about that, whilst at the same time subsequenly emphasising after election in 2007 the omniprescence of Communist collaborators everywhere in Poland.

Clearly fictitious collaborators, including Lech Walesa, were more important than denouncing the presence of actual ex-Nazis in government next door such as Lithuanian president, Valdas Adamkus.

Adamkus was president until 2003 was at the time the last head of state to have fought in the Second World War-in the German army against the Red Army which he boasted about on his web site.

Silence from Poland too when the Latvian government organised the creation in the village of Lestene a massive cemetery with thousands of graves commemorating the members of the SS Latvia Legion who fought the Soviets.

The revisionist history in the 'museums of occupation' in the Baltics which show how right wing nationalist resistance was about 'defending the homeland' pass over the partisan support for Nazism and that it was a racist political ideology bent on genocide.

Russia has no interest in putting a pipeline via the Baltics and the divisions between what Rumsfeld called 'Old' and 'New' Europe did nothing to help that. Neoconservative fanaticism acheived nothing but to set back Poland and the Baltic Republics European interests.

The Nord Stream pipeline has many problems: its more expensive than the overland alternative. There are also legitimate environmental concerns that have been voiced by Greenpeace.

Yet the constant Russia baiting on nationalistic ideological grounds and fraternal messages support for Saakashvili in Georgia from the Baltics and Poland was bound to be counter productive.

Just as Poland feels Russia is using energy to 'coerce' it with a degree of plausibility so too is it true that Poland and the Baltics support for militant US neoconservatism and anti-Russian nationalism was a belligerant move.

The geopolitical cost of running a pipeline through the Baltics became too high with the incessant chorus of ethnic nationalist hatred and racism coming from the Baltics. Poland did nothing to condemn that.

After the pipeline was agreed and when Sikorski too compared it to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, ethnocentric anti-Russian racism was even more rampant in places like Estonia when Prime Minister, Andrus Ansip, ordered the removal of a Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier,

The destruction of this monument in Tallinn caused riots with Russians offended that their relatives sacrifice against a Nazi invader that regarded Slavs as untermensch was being eradicated. The equivalent is the monument to the Katyn Massacre in Belarus being bulldozed.

With such political elites in control running a pipeline through the Baltic Republics would inevitably lead to the kind of squabbling seen even in Ukraine which is not in NATO but which has been led by an unpopular pro-Washington placeman President Viktor Yushchenko.

If the Nord Stream goes ahead the responsibility lies with those politicians who played the natoionalist card in order to shore up support as the misery and poverty created by neoliberal reforms made it a handy way of diverting discontent outwards.

Poland's political elite have cultivated exactly the same nationalist 'victim mentality' vendetta against Russia by conflating it with the multinational Soviet Union and that encouraged the far right in the Baltics.

Poland's unique position as a state partitioned jointly by the Nazis and Soviets at the same time in September 1939 mean that it never had the opportunity nor the chance to develop organised Nazi collaborators.

Whilst that can act as a source of national pride, remaining silent about Baltic nationalism and its treatment of the Russian minority is not, especially when Polish politicians prate about Lukashenko's repression of Belarusan Poles in Hrodno.

The double standard is that Russians must face up to the crimes committed by their Communist forebears whilst that the Waffen SS in the Baltic States are presented as "freedom fighters" is passed over in silence.

Yukos and "Human Rights" vs the Russian state.

When it comes to Russia double standards seem to be the norm and David Clark is no exception.

In today's Guardian he writes about how Yukos investors could claw back some $50bn-$100bn from the Russian state for its expropriation of Yukos, a company founded on murder, corruption and organised crime

The rule of law meant nothing when Western investors willingly ripped off Russia's oil and gas wealth so the stipulations of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) about protecting investor rights are irrelevant'

The lesson is do not invest in companies which illegally obtained their assets in the first place. After all, neoliberals are fond of the idea that knowledge is power-at least till they ruin things for themselves through greed. Then they are 'victims'.

Just as Clark lauds an 'ethical foreign policy' he might also want to take the chance to promote an ethical investment policy where 'transparency' is a must before investing. Those who did not do their homework when investing in Yukos have lost out.

As regards the European Court of Human Rights rulings they will be treated with contempt by Russia,

... to avoid a hefty bill the Russian authorities will have to do something they have conspicuously failed to do so far: to convince an independent court that the seizure of Yukos was a legal act and not a politically inspired violation of property rights.

Well, the seizure of Yukos was a belated reversal of the criminal expropriation of assets from the Russian state.

So the real question is not about 'politics' but about what Putin terms somewhat brutally, the "dictatorship of law", where state building goes hand in hand with recovering stolen assets.

Yukos was founded on crime and maintained by crime. Oligarchs like Khodorkhovsky can complain about their trial and the expropriation of Yukos as 'politically motivated' .

Yet so to was the way Yukos manipulated a government and its officials to maintain their power and ill gotten gains

Sceptical observers might question whether any of this matters. After all, the wastepaper bins of the Kremlin are full of discarded rulings by the European court of human rights.

No, sceptical observers would regard the ECHR ruling as another example of using human rights as a pretext for undermining the power of a sovereign state which had come near to anarchy in the 1990s as oligarchs looted the nation and laundered the money globally.

The double standard again is that the money stolen by Berezovsky cannot be returned or nor can from those like Alexei Pichugin, the former Security Chief of Yukos, who now lives in luxury and safety in Israel after cheating justice for his shooting to death of Vladimir Petushkov, mayor in Yuhansk oil province.

Surely the Russian government could ignore a demand for compensation just as easily as it ignores demands for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, wanted in the UK in connection with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

Russia would be right to reject the hypocrisy of the FO, Miliband, Clark and the rest who have one standard of conduct for themselves and another for those deemed lesser breeds beneath the law. Berezovsky enjoys immunity as do other London exiles.

That makes a mockery of Clark's claim,

In the event of an eventual award against it, any property owned by the Russian state or state-owned enterprises in any of the 142 countries that have adopted the convention would be vulnerable to an enforcement order and seizure.

In theory it might but Russia has no reason to trust those like Clark who speak of Russia's 'politically motivated' forms of justice.

At least without looking at the way Berezovsky and his ex-KGB security thugs came by their wealth and which is itself a political statement and an exercise of power politics.

Misha Glenny who knows more about organised crime than most wrote in McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime,

Misha Glenny who knows more about organised crime than most wrote in McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime,

Under Putin, the Kremlin has clipped the wings of several of the most powerful oligarchs.

From exile in the West or from inside prison, oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky warn that the President is the reincarnation of Stalin.

But he isn't. He has fashioned a novel system that brings together aspects of capitalism and Soviet socialism-market authoritarianism.

The oligarchs desperate attempts to portray Putin as a new Stalin seek to conceal the primary responsibility they bear for the mess in which they now find themselves.

Revolution as a Market Brand

One of the most curious developments of contemporary history is the way the project of inaugurating Utopia and going beyond history into a new realm of universal freedom across the global has mutated from the political left to the political right.

Throughout the supposedly post-political 'noughties' across the globe the trappings of the revolutionary left and brand names are used to sell US style capitalism from Ukraine ( Orange ) to Belarus ( Jeans or Denim ), Georgia ( Rose ), Lebanon ( Cedar).

With the end of the Cold War, history had not stopped but it had come to an End as far as the truth about which model of universal freedom was the blueprint for success everywhere-the US market model. The task was not just to understand this but to now will regime change.

Even the invasion of Iraq and miltarised form of liberal humanitarian intervention was branded a Purple Revolution by Bush in 2005, though deep Scarlet might have been more appropriate as the scale of carnage unleashed in this war for oil deepened, resulting in over a million deaths.

The Iraq War was unfortunately supported by those like Vaclav Havel who led the original Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 as well as Adam Michnik who opined somewhat curiously for a person regarded as a "speaking truth to power",

"Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it".

Havel and former Polish Solidarity dissident Michnik routinely give their benediction to any supposedly liberal democracy promoters backed and funded by the USA, irrespective of whether they are democrats or not.

There is nothing particulary democratic about the incessant attempts of Washington to support a coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela through NGOs. Nor about Khodorkovsky the oligarch whose trial on corruption charges is a cause celebre for Michnik.

Yet because Chavez backs Castro and Havel correctly regards Cuba as a dictatorship, Havel has nothing to say about US actions in Venezuela where Chavez is supported by a clear majority in fair elections.

The reason for this has lain in the way some former dissidents turned into liberal mandarins refuse to criticise the USA in case it gives succour to the enemies of freedom, to remain silent as apologists for the Soviet Union once did lest it discredit 'the cause'.

Journalist Neil Clark, who has very kindly drawn attention on his website to a previous piece of mine on the Freedom and its Adversaries conference in Prague ( sponsored by Coca Cola, Deloitte etc ) .

Clark differentiates 'real socialists' from 'faux leftists' by referring to whether they support or rail against Chavez's government in Venezuela. The real point, however, is that Chavez is democratically elected and runs a sovereign state.

Nevertheless what Clark calls faux leftists can be also called designer revolutionaries, those whose espousal of a Brave New World of liberty usually means a form of unaccountable corporate capitalist power.

That is, the kind that dictates the kind of politics that a nation must have, with a choice of candidates that offer very much the same thing. Where the choice is reduced primarily to a consumer package and debate over policy reduced to hollow soundbites.

Even so I have to disagree slightly with Clark's use of 'faux leftism' because the term 'leftism' itself indicates only a tendency towards the left which is not necessarily 'false' but has a basis in all liberal and socialist politics.

In fact, the politics of Michnik or Havel has much in common with what the real left has always fought for-human rights, universal freedom, the values of the Enlightenment, secularism etc-except that it can and must be applied at a global level via US superpower.

Designer revolutionaries are essentially liberals, though liberals of a fundamentalist kind, who are even prepared to use state sanctioned violence when in power whilst denouncing it in opposition.

Designer Revolutionaries see economic liberalism, an ideological project of delegating the power of the state to large trans national corporations and abstract market forces on a global scale, as the automatic partner of political liberalism.

That has dovetailed with criticism of 'statism' during the Cold War when the choice seemed to be a polarised one between the Free World and capitalism on the one side and Communist command economies on the other, though this either or dichotomy was always oversimplistic.

Unfortunately, in what was 'Eastern Europe' the dissidents at the time have carried on that attitude from before 1989 into the very changed world of 2009. This is understandable as older people tend to be trapped in the experiences they had when they were younger.

For the dissidents Communist control over the economy made the everyday tasks of making enough money to survive dependent upon a person having correct politics will always suspect state control.

Yet dissidents such as Adam Michnik never really understood the economics of transition nor how the neoliberal model was but one alternative on offer and which would undercut the very basis for political liberalism.

As it did in Poland, though only a few like David Ost in his The Defeat of Solidarity have even felt it necessary to point this out amidst all the self congratulation and numerous awards the Solidarity elites have bestowed on one another as millions emigrate in search of jobs abroad.

All that had become clear in Poland where the Round Table agreement in 1989 ending Communist political domination was followed by the Balcerowicz Plan of 1990,"shock therapy',mass unemployment and the destruction of the trade unions that had fought for democracy.

Perhaps this 'model of transition' was a venture into the unknown at the time for many dissidents did not know how to cope with the prospect of real power but those Washington trained economists like Balcerowicz knew exactly how to impose 'extraordinary politics'.

When Tony Judt terms Michnik a 'useful idiot' in supporting Iraq it is as equally true that he acted as such in his contempt for the ordinary workers who made Solidarity possible. Michnik had only belatedly taken up the workers cause with KOR in 1976.

Before that back in 1968, Michnik had been incensed by what he regarded as the failure of the workers to oppose anti-semitic measures used by the People's Republic , an early example of the "populist" measures used to get them onside against the intellectuals ( Michnik is half-Jewish ).

As David Ost argues by 1985 Michnik was already in Takie Czasy (These Times ) in 1985 he launching an attack Polish workers for being impetuous and irrational in believing strike action could bring about change alone without being guided by those who knew what was best.

Ost writes that Michnik believed that

"Far from being the guarantor of democracy, labor activism is one of the main dangers to democracy. The rational elite, he argues, would have to take the place of workers in the Solidarity leadership if the organization was truly to be the agent of democratic transformation".

The stage was already set for casting the extras in the film version of the Great Revolution against a genenerated Communist state aside and giving due weight to the leading stars like Michnik who since 1990 has done little but boast about his role in history. As Ost puts it,

"In 1980 we might, he argues, to have thought about them as sensible and rational actors. In fact they are really irrational hot heads, hostile to reason and common sense, contemptuous of the notion of the compromise, and incapable of recognizing the 'limits and realities' of the real world.

Curiously, the idea of 'limits and realities' did not get applied to Iraq, nor has it applied to mentioning the way IMF economists impoverished Russia in immiseration throughout the 1990s by applying wholly inappropriate policies leading to the death of over a million Russians.

Nor have limits and realities been evident on the War on Terror which Michnik has also supported as a global crusade of simplistic Good versus Evil which gave the USA the right to resort to pre-emptive measures to arbitrarily imprison and torture people in Afghanistan.

Yet no limits and realities are set for the depth of the media manipulation inherent in self promotional dissidents developed one tactic used particularly amongst protestors of the 1968 "revolutions"-that of trying to goad the state into repressive measures to discredit it.

Ironically, as protest in Western states like Britain and the USA is increasingly criminalised and dissent marginalised, such states are all to willing to pour cash into NGOS organising street demos in places such as Belarus or Ukraine or Russia or Venezuela.

By convincing Chavez or his strategic ally Aleksander Lukashenko ( one seldom mentioned by somwhat too uncritically pro-Chavez journalists like John Pilger ) of foreign plots to overthrow them by the US, the hope is to provoke them into acts of ostensible repression.

Young and good looking photogenic democracy advocates are funded by the West to visibly promote the exciting new possibilities of 'success' and consumer capitalism and the US way of life open to all if only people had the power to free themselves from the dead hand of this regime.

Whilst Chavez does have some authoritarian tendencies, he is certainly not a dictator and neither is Lukashenko for all the rough and ready brutality the regime in Minsk can dish out to those who really are ostensibly calling out, as one dissident did, for him to be assassinated.

The fast track democracy promotion package consists of trying to get the police to clamp down on protestors by irritating the police, capturing it on camera, and then claiming that this shows that the regime is a nightmare dictatorship.

The fact that Georgia under Saakashvili followed a 'Colour Revolution' and proved far more authoritarian and brutal than any clampdown on protest implemented by Lukashenko is quite simply not considered news in the West.

For designer democrats are experts at managing and manipulating the global media and indeed go on training programmes to this end financed by the West, in building up a critical momentum that persuades aspirational youths to challenge the old regime.

What one of that generation of genuine generation of dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia Milan Kundera called the danger of 'kitsch' inherent in all revolutions has now become a routine and closely exploited and choreographed part of the advertisement that is a Colour Revolution.

The job of designer revolutionaries is less to spell out the future in practical terms but to use the mass media to market aspirational youths bored with "conventional "politics to join in a regime change, have fun and, by identifying with Colour Revolution pop stars, embrace consumerism.

The fact that only a minority will ever earn enough under the new regime as many slide deeper into poverty as a necessary 'transition measure' is never mentioned. For when the media moves on nobody will care.

Russophobic Racist of the Month: Tim Collett

The amount of bile directed towards Russia and its people is one of the last acceptable forms of racism left in 2009. One of the worst ever has to be this effort from Tim Collett which could be genuinely mistook for satire.

Writing in the Saily Telegraph Collett reflected on a certain Browder's description of the Russia as a 'criminal state' Collet opined in a gleeful article Let's Face it Russia is Dying, November 23rd 2009,

...Russia...On the world stage it is the equivalent of the shaven-headed and tattooed drunk who waylays you in incomprehensibly threatening terms in the centre of Wigan at two on a Saturday morning. It constitutes a permanent threat to its neighbours.

But Collet goes beyond the more usual Putin is a new Neo-Soviet apologist for Stalinism for totalitarianism was not so bad after all,

Its rampant gangsterism is actually worse than totalitarianism: whereas China’s oppression of the minorities in its border areas is at least motivated by trying to preserve order, Russia prefers to allow gangster enclaves to proliferate all around its borders (Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Transdnistria, arguably Kaliningrad).

The break up of the Soviet Union made for progress of a different sort than Collett had envisaged as this cretin attempts black humour and irony,

The Soviet Union used to be described, most aptly, as “Upper Volta with rockets”. Progress of a sort has been made, and modern Russia might best be described as Moss Side with rockets.

Collett, not content at lambasting Putin's state, then rants on,

And then they come over here, buying up nice parts of London and football clubs. Yes, they bring lots of money in, but we try not to think too hard about how some of that money was obtained.

Well, but 'we' refers to totallly ignoramuses who remain oblivious to the fact that the oligarchs who swan about in London were the West's bests friends and profitted as Russia was forced to undergo rapid neoliberal marketisation in a way that entrenched organised crime.

But can one simply give up on such a large and powerful country? The answer is that we may have to. It’s dying. The population is falling steadily; male life expectancy is already well below 60 (and considerably lower than that for anyone getting on the wrong side of the regime). The place is even more sodden with vodka than a British town centre on a Saturday morning.

Such attitudes are remiscent of the hatred of a certain kind of British Imperialists had for the people of Ireland being ape like simian creatures, sunk in drink, disease and squalor. What this , of course says about the Englishman's drink habits is also unclear.

OK, some will find this “offensive”, but don’t be too quick to start throwing the word “racist” around. It’s nothing to do with race. It’s simply that what happened there between 1917 and 1991 has poisoned an entire nation to death, as if with polonium-210. Regard for human life and dignity was permanently destroyed by Stalin et al.

To which it might be added: And what respect do you have for life you warbling incoherent dolt ?

To which Collett provides the quick answer,

No point in denial. A terminal case. Let’s just hope its demise isn’t too painful for the rest of us.

Well, quite. The Africans are doomed as well from AIDS and famines and wars so there's no point worrying over the death of these primitive niggers any more than the thuggish white niggers in the East. We can't feel to squeamish about the deaths of those living so wretchedly anyway.

The grimmest and most unintentionally funny part is this,

Tim Collard is a retired British diplomat who spent most of his career in China and Germany. He is an active member of the Labour Party.

It's curious to ponder what diplomatic skills Collett ever had.

Poland's Energy Diversification Dilemma and Afghanistan.

The timeline for Poland's troop commitment to Afghanistan, fixed by the Defence Ministry until 2013, reflects the geostrategic desperation of Poland's political leaders when faced with the need for energy diversification.

That's one of the main reasons for supporting the US war effort so vociferously when compared to Germany and France; The Nord Stream Pipeline bypasses Poland whilst the Nabucco pipeline from Azerbaijan via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and terminates in Austria.

The Nabucco pipeline is expected to begin in 2009 and end in 2012 whilst the TAPI by 2011 if the Taliban insurgency can be crushed. In which case, Polish gas company PGNiG SA in 2008 studied the possibility of building a link to the planned Nabucco.

That along with the TAPI would increase Poland's leverage with Russia over gas concessions by opening up the market for gas away from the predominant role Russia has in supplying gas to Poland from Central Asia.

What is startling that the mainstream media continue to peddle platitudes about Article 5 and Poland's role as a loyal ally of the USA as if the Cold War was still being fought against Russia and that The Bear is really threatening to target Poland with nuclear weapons or invasion.

Despite Polish rhetoric, Anatol Lieven is correct that on the whole Russia is responding to what the West is doing and is not initiating hostile acts or trying to provoke states like Georgia. This is simply a form of projection from the leaders of energy insecure states like Poland.

Poland has more of a stake in US geopolitics in Afghanistan as its inherent geographical position renders it more vulnerable to Russian control of the gas pipelines to the East a factor made worse by aggressive and bellicose postures instead of careful and pragmatic diplomacy.

The TAPI pipeline also thwarts the rival IPI pipeline scheme and provides copious gas to India which it needs to retain its role as a regional power vis a vis China, a nation that could collude with Russia to dominate the supply of Turkmenistani gas without the West having a definitive stake.

For as Nabucco goes to Austria and the Nord Stream misses Poland out Poland has to face Russia directly to the East without quick supplies from the West or South and it is also blocked off directly from the Black Sea by Ukraine and Belarus.

As Poland gets 95 percent of its crude and 48 percent of its natural gas from Russia other diversification projects have included the state-controlled gas distributor PGNiG's PGNI.WA plan to build a liquefied natural gas terminal on the Baltic coast.

Also planned has been a pipeline to Denmark to give Poland access to Norwegian and President Lech Kaczynski sought to resurrect the Odessa-Brody-Plock pipeline project reverse the flow of a Ukrainian pipeline which takes Russian crude to the Black Sea port of Odessa.

That pipeline scheme entailed return to an original aim of bringing Azerbaijani oil through Ukraine to Poland should Ukraine be brought further over to Poland through the pro-Western 'reformer' President Yushchenko

This overdependence upon Russia is why Afghanistan matters to Poland so much. Anything that reduces Russian control of the pipelines flowing West is regarded as beneficial and the TAPI pipeline is n important part of that.

As well as tying Poland together with closer with US plans to gain hegemony in Eurasia. with all the hazards that entails. Recognition of Poland's energy dillemma and why its elites dug it back into a corner because of its failed diplomacy is the question Poles ought to be asking.

It's All in the Pipeline for Poland in Afghanistan.

One of the premises upon which the democratic transition from Communism in Poland was meant to be based was access to information, that is of creating an aware citizenry fit for a 'civil society'.

However, when it comes to offering reasons for why Poland is in Afghanistan, Polish politicians use robotic statements about NATO 'credibility' when once they once parroted platitudes about 'The War on Terror'.

As Bogdan Klich put it "Without a victory in Afghanistan NATO's credibility will be put in jeopardy".

Yet with the continued high level of support from Poland in both troop numbers ( now some 2,600 ) and growing expenditure on Afghanistan, questions need to be asked about the real interests being served beyond the invocation of Article 5 of NATO's Charter

When Klich spoke of NATO 'credibility', it was only one of the four priorities he set out as facing NATO leader Rasmussen. The third which related Afghanistan's "stabilisation" by NATO to Russia which he claimed "requires great subtlety."

According to Klich, it will be Rasmussen's task to "lead to such relations between the Russian Federation and NATO which will be beneficial for the two sides and not only for one side as was the case earlier." Which bureaucratic speak for Poland's energy security.

Poland is set to become more dependent upon gas as its coal reserves decline and the nation faces an energy deficit as well as the need to avoid dependence upon Russian pipelines supplying gas from Turkmenistan for heating as well as 70% of its industrial petro-chemical needs.

This has become more of a geostrategic imperative as EU nations put pressure on Poland to reduce greenhouse gases from Poland's coal fired power stations which account for 94% of its total generating capacity with the alternatives lying with renewables and, of course, gas.

With China making inroads into Turkmenistan and Russia having become more unreliable, with pipelines having mysteriously exploded, it has seemed to make sense to check the Russian's predominant control over the gas supply to Poland

Not least when Germany has made deals directly with Russia which bypass Poland as in 2007 when Merkel agreed with Nord Stream gas pipeline. Nord Stream is due to run along the Baltic seabed, circumventing Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Hence the fury of Radek Sikorski whose utter diplomatic failure was revealed when he compared he deal somwhat idiotically with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Such extremist comparisons and rhetorical bellicosity was of the type that ensured Poland got sidelined by states to the West.

As one independent energy expert Andrzej Szczęśniak complained, Polish 'diplomacy' with regards its stake in developing co-operation with Gazprom had ramped up the noisy Cold War rhetoric to no effect,

“We have done nothing to build our position over the years. We played hardball against our supplier without any trump cards”

That is where the TAPI gas pipeline comes in from the point of view of the Polish geostrategists. PM Tusk might claim he had 'no enthusiasm for the Afghan mission' but that does not mean he and other politicians have no enthusiasm for the outcome of getting the pipeline built.

The TAPI pipeline scheduled to be built directly through Kandahar, where the Taliban insurgency is at its strongest, takes Turkmenistani gas through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and will have the function of opening up demand and reducing the cost of gas to the West.

Hence the support given to Russia for the rival IPI pipeline which would pipe Iranian gas East instead of West via the proposed Nabucco Pipeline which will run through Turkey and from there into Bulgaria and the heart of the EU.

Hence by winning in Afghanistan and getting the TAPI pipeline built, Poland's age old enemy Russia would be checked in its attempt to woo India and Iran into identifying with rival schemes to TAPI as well as bringing China on board with a potential eastern extension of the IPI.

Instead of the IPI, the U.S. wants India and Pakistan to expand liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and focus more on the proposed TAPI pipeline which will bring LNG into the Western market too and give Western companies a stake in energy exploration.

Including the Poles who identify wholly with the US goal of diminishing Russia's leverage over Europe as well as strengthening the political "independence" of the ex-Soviet republics like Georgia through which the BTC pipeline runs.

The business interests are there too as in 2008 it was reported, just around the time the Asian Development bank finalised the TAPI pipeline when the Polish business daily Parkiet revealed that,

Polish gas monopolist PGNiG ( Polskie Górnictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo ) has said it will seek exploration licenses in several countries in North Africa and Asia, reported on Tuesday. "The company's representatives plan to gain licenses in Algeria, India, Tunisia and Turkmenistan".

With Polish troops being increased to help stabilise a stategic area between Kabul and Kandahar, the construction of the TAPI pipeline will bring gas to India where the liquefied natural gas is stored and transported in liquid form by tanker ship through to the West.

It is thus in Poland's interest then to thwart Russian power through its control over gas supplies from Central Asia Westwards and to have access to LNG which can be imported, regas­ified and distributed via pipeline.

Hence the decision of PM Tusk in October 2009 to build more underground gas-storage facilities Poland is in desperate need following the gas crisis of January 2008 of more storage space and, according to Tomasz Lotz of the Adam Smith Institute, the need for diversification of supplies.

As Poland’s gas supplies would probably last for only a few weeks whereas Germany’s supplies could support the country for a year, the government decreed the creation of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Świnoujście.

The construction of the terminal should start by August 2010 and finish in time for the first deliveries from Qatar by July 2014. It is estimated that the terminal will receive around 2.5 billion cubic meters of LNG a year.

It is thus hardly a co-incidence that Radio Polskie could report just today that the Polish Defense Ministry has outlined a new 'Afghan Strategy' which envisages Polish troops being in Afghanistan until at least 2013.

The TAPI pipeline meanwhile is due to be finished by 2011 if possible and that is conveniently just before the 2012 Presidential elections in the USA when it is hoped that Obama's 'surge' will allow most of the US troops to return home along with their Polish auxiliaries.

The New Addition to Krakow's Skyline

The new lighted chimney where the old energy plant used to be in Krakow is a monstrous new symbol of the way the city, "Poland's Oxford", is being spoilt by insane planning decisions that are destroying its unique character.

It passes belief that the town authorities could allow this chimney to look like a giant Star Wars light sabre with all the resultant light pollution being blasted into into the night sky and thereby obliterating it.

Not only is it stupid innovation from an aethetic viewpoint, it is also a symbol of environmental cretinism in that Poland is said to be suffering from an energy production deficit. And so its though a great idea to place huge electric consuming lights on a former energy plant chimney.

As Reported in the Global Post on November 27th ( Poland is in an Energy Bind )

Poland has the lowest electricity use per capita in the EU, and energy demand is expected to rise by about 50 percent by 2030, meaning that the country faces the possibility of blackouts unless enormous funds are invested now in energy.

“If not for the economic crisis we would already have a deficit,” said Jerzy Markowski who also happens to be a former minister and now a coal consultant )

Although the country is much more energy efficient than it was under communism, when enormous amounts were wasted, it still uses about twice as much per unit of output than the EU average.

Energy efficiency and moving away from coal are one problem with the advent of global heating but it is also absurd that electricity conservation is not a goal, which is clearly is not if it is though a meaningless waste of electricity is a valid use in creating a 'disco chimney'.