Kultura liberalna wobec wyzwań współczesności
Debates / Debaty: Prof. Piotr Bartula, Prof. Andrzej Szahaj and Prof. Janusz Majcherek.
More...We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Debates / Debaty: Prof. Piotr Bartula, Prof. Andrzej Szahaj and Prof. Janusz Majcherek.
More...
The article addresses the issue of functioning in the literary criticism of the second half of the 19th century of the category of „national spirit”, which is an expression of belief in the existence of the phenomenon of national characters in the world. For Tarnowski, the relationship between literature and the „spirit” of the nation is indisputable and remains in connection with his concept of history (as God’s domain) and the place of individuals in society. Art comes from the need for ideals, especially the ideal of beauty, which were inscribed in human nature by God. For Tarnowski, the artist is both an individual and a product of the national „spirit”. By creating, it expresses the character and moral condition of the nation at a given historical moment. Works (especially masterpieces) can, in turn, affect the shape of the socio-spiritual life of the nation, and thus to some extent and shape its character. In his thinking about the relationship between literature and literary criticism and the nation, Tarnowski remains faithful to idealistic aesthetics.
More...
The article presents the everyday life of occupied Wilno in 1939–1945 based on an analysis of the underground press published in the city. The problem-chronological text describes both the invaders’ terror, here the issue of mass murders in Ponary on both the Polish population and the liquidated ghetto, as well as the daily activities of the occupation authorities directed against the Polish population. The underground press devoted a lot of space to the liquidation of the Wilno ghetto, which was also reflected in the text. The difficult economic situation of the residents of Wilno and the villages of the Wilno region as a consequence of the occupation authorities’ policy was also presented. The city’s everyday life was also presented in various aspects, including activities licensed by the occupier of institutions such as the “Ali Baba” revue theater and propaganda struggle waged by underground editors in this respect. The text closes with a description of the image of Wilno occupied by the Soviet army after Operation Burza.
More...
In this study, we intend to reveal the modification of the identity of Bălți locality with the historical-political changes, so to achieve an evolutionary historical panorama of urban identity change. At the beginning, we synthesized all the theories that define the concept of "urban identity", in order to diachronically analyze the urban image of Bălți and to gather all the important components in the formation of identity: both those referring to natural elements (topography, climate, geology, location) and those referring to social identity (demographic structure, institutional structure and cultural structure) and to the human landscape, the artificial built environment, because the series of attributes identified with the city can add symbolic value to the identity of the Balti urban space, modified over time. Bălți has the most spectacular urban evolution compared to other localities in Bessarabia, starting from the uncertain hypostasis of a fair, it becomes an urban locality with a fragile identity, subordinated to the subjective factor, to the entrepreneurial spirit of Alexandru Panaite, the owner of the city; becoming the capital of a county, by chance, and a municipality. Over time, it changed its identity depending on the change of the political regime: tsarist, Romanian, Soviet, neocommunist, and urban function: commercial and economic communications center important for the northern area of the country, episcopal, industrial, university center.
More...
For a long time, the Indian subcontinent was under British rule, but more and more Indians fought for independence in the twentieth century, and the British were forced to renounce their rule. In 1947, the British offered independence to two different states, Pakistan and India, which provoked only violence, as the two peoples had lived together for a long period of time and were suddenly being made to choose a side according to their religion; thus began a time of death and sorrow. The traumatic experience of the partition of India from Pakistan is not only recorded by historians, but also by writers, and the current paper will present both the way in which this event is reflected by history and in novels.
More...
Researchers have long drawn attention to the deep conviction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth nobility about the uniqueness of their country and its freedoms. Contrary to what is sometimes believed, it was not an expression of Sarmatian megalomania, which made itself felt in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this opinion was propagated at least from the middle of the sixteenth century. Nor was it some kind of Polish peculiarity, citizens of other free commonwealths said and probably thought about their freedoms in a similar way. Already in the 15th century, the inhabitants of Florence considered their republic to be unique and extraordinary, precisely because of its freedom. The Venetians, and later the Dutch and the English, assessed their country and freedom in a similar way. The sentence: “there is only one kingdom on earth where freedom has found a home” contrary to appearances does not refer to the Sarmatian Commonwealth, but to Hanoverian England, and its author believed that his homeland was the only country and the British were the only people who can truly say about himself: “we are free.” Noble citizens of Polish Republic entered this discourse early, even before the first free election. The author discusses the history of this discourse in the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, stating that, contrary to the references in the 16th century, and even at the beginning of the 17th century, later references to republics other than the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or ancient republics (especially Rome) were not numerous and quite superficial, their authors generally did not know much about the mentioned countries, but they had no doubts that they share a certain similarity with the Commonwealth, which could be described as a community of freedom. Because this very motif, also important earlier, became dominant in the 17th century and the first half of the 18 century. The crisis and ossification of political reflection, combined with a decrease in interest in the outside world, meant that more extensive references to other countries and their political solutions no longer appeared in noble political discussions. Their participants, however, continued to include their country in a fairly elite community of European republics and still, regardless of all social, religious and political differences, of which they were often unaware, they still considered them their “companions.”
More...
In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944– 1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroyed the personal value system of the prison staff. I study the behavior of wardens in a situation of constant pressure and ideological control. I ask who were the people who created the prison system in Poland and how the penal system absorbed and shaped them. I use documents from the collection of the Prison Management Department of the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Prison Administration of the Ministry of Interior. I confront the emerging picture of attitudes and behaviors of prison officers with behavioral models developed by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo based on their experiments conducted in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first section, I present the legal and organizational issues of the prison system and the recruitment process for its employees. Next, I present the scope of professional and ideological formation of new staff and analyze the consequences of such preparation for the functions of a prison officer. In the following paragraphs, I reflect on what strategies of discomfort repression did the officers in Stalinist penal institutions assume. Moreover, I consider the scope and sources of their violence toward prisoners.
More...
Despite the significant body of literature on migrations after the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, including on social remittances, a subcategory—political remittances—is only now starting to receive attention. This article, based on thirty-four interviews with Poles active in the transnational space between Poland and Ireland, supplemented by a survey of Poles in Ireland (n = 503) and a press query, aims to investigate (broadly defined) political remittances. It explores the conditions in the country of origin and destination which facilitate or hinder political remittances, the areas of political remittances Polish migrants to or from Ireland transfer, and how these are transmitted. The remittances are found to concern three main areas: (1) the perception of minorities (ethnic, national, sexual); (2) the transparency of government and closeness of representatives to citizens; and (3) the cooperation between the authorities and other actors to achieve local economic development. The article argues that political remitting in the Polish-Irish transnational space can be treated as an example of much broader phenomena taking place between countries of the European Union, especially those linked by large migration waves. It demonstrates that, contrary to what much of the literature suggests, political remitting does not only take place between countries at very different stages of economic and political development.
More...
The secret police, along with the political apparatus of a ruling party or administration, created the backbone of communist regimes and constituted the main tool of State violence. The state of the art within studies on the Polish security apparatus—albeit extremely rich—is entirely focused on archival documents. What is missing from the research on the secret police in Poland is an oral history approach. This article is a pioneer attempt at revealing the operative methods of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) through interviews with former officers. It aims at reconstructing the mechanism that led the officers to victimize dissidents and how they created moral justifications for their deeds. Asking about their career track, successes and failures, relationships with other officers, private life, and details of daily duty, I tried to glean what made the interviewees become perpetrators.
More...
The article deals with the process of the reception of the so called “Sudetengermans”, who have been expelled form Czechoslovakia in 1945 and arrived completely without means to (Lower-)Austria. This aggravated the situation in the country occupied by the Allies and scarred by war and Nazi terror, where about 1.6 million so-called "displaced persons" were staying, almost 25% of the whole population However, Austrian policy was also hostile to the persons concerned because they regarded them as "Germans" in the course of now strongly emphasising an independent Austrian identity. The article deals with the actions of politics and authorities as well as the reactions of those affected and the civilian population. Therefore the article used a combination of archival sources as well as narrative interviews with people, who were children or adolescents at the time.
More...
Soviet policy towards its Kurdish minority shifted from supporting their cultural development during the 1920s and early 1930s to a more repressive policy from 1937-1956 and then back again to a more favorable position. Soviet repression of its Kurdish population reached its height in November 1944 with the deportation of a significant number of them from the areas of Georgia bordering Turkey to Central Asia. Here they were placed under special settlement restrictions limiting their movement and suffered from material deprivations resulting in a significant number of deaths. This article focuses on Soviet policy towards its Kurdish minority from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until several years after the death of Stalin in 1956 when the Kurds in Central Asia were released from the special settlement restrictions.
More...
Soviet policy towards its Kurdish minority shifted from supporting their cultural development during the 1920s and early 1930s to a more repressive policy from 1937-1956 and then back again to a more favorable position. Soviet repression of its Kurdish population reached its height in November 1944 with the deportation of a significant number of them from the areas of Georgia bordering Turkey to Central Asia. Here they were placed under special settlement restrictions limiting their movement and suffered from material deprivations resulting in a significant number of deaths. This article focuses on Soviet policy towards its Kurdish minority from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until several years after the death of Stalin in 1956 when the Kurds in Central Asia were released from the special settlement restrictions.
More...
The specificity and conjugation of discursive pragmatics and classical rhetoric manifests itself when politicians are faced with the need for evasive formulations to mitigate a potential threat to their face. To substantiate the conceptual basis of discursive argumentation, the article differentiates between “topoi-integrators” and “topoi-arguments”. The topos-integrator "responsibility", actualized at the local and global discursive levels, appeal to ethos, supporting the logos-based argumentation by involving the ethos-based moral foundations of the speaker's position. Topoi-arguments "responsibility", “threat”, “reliability” and “law’ are rhetorically based on enthymeme as figures of reasoning that appeal to logos as well as on auxiliary figures of digressio, Past Fact / Future Fact, exergasia, climax, congeries, hyperbole and apagoresis, appealing to logos, ethos, and pathos. Pragmatically, the restoration of implicit premises and conclusions of enthymemes corresponds to explicatures, which become the basis for the generation of implicatures, provided that the speakers flout cooperative maxims. Disobeying the maxim of quantity of information is based on the figures of exergasia, climax, congeries, the maxim of relevance - on digressio, Past Fact / Future Fact, and the maxim of quality - on hyperbole and apagoresis. Through rhetorical figures and the corresponding pragmatics, the speakers implement the strategies of transferring and reducing responsibility, substitution of arguments, mitigation, partial distortion by exaggeration, simplification, etc.
More...
Among many other problems remained unsolved after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 there is the issue of the Romanians living in north-eastern Serbia, specifically between the valleys of the rivers Morava and Timok. A large population numbered in hundreds of thousands received very little attention during the conference that aimed at solving the ethnical problems of Europe. The ambiguous result of the Paris Peace Conference regarding the Romanians of the Timok Valley had dire consequences on long term for this population, hence the origins of this situation deserve a closer evaluation.
More...
Contemporary media instruments that are mainly fuelled by the internet and the social media are critical in constructing robust political constructs or platforms and should they fail to achieve this undertaking, they can undoubtedly, at least, put forward a modified perception of that political element. In other words, if the media does not have enough power to construct a solid political movement, it can, at least, make it appear to be solid and imbedded with legitimacy and representativity. The generative infrastructure required to assemble and coagulate a coherent political public image draws its strength from within an interactional paradigm that creates a bond between the political communicator and the target audience for which the political message of that communicator is designated.
More...
The Russian-Ukrainian conflict that succeeded the Covid 19 pandemic marks the end of the winter of 2022 and continues to deepen Europe's socio-economic fragility. Whatever the causes of its outbreak, any armed conflict has immeasurable effects on combatants, allies and opponents alike. The leveraging of financial resources in support of one side and the triggering of pecuniary sanctions for the other implies an enormous consumption of resources with global economic effects. These are compounded by the social effects of war: loss of life, family segregation, refugee crisis, severe material deprivation, unemployment, crime, etc. As an EU and NATO member state, Romania has had to reinforce its responsibilities of support (as a geopolitical supporter of Ukraine) and responsibility towards war refugees. However, it is precisely Romania's geographical proximity to Ukraine that has led to an increase in the population's fear of the risks of conflict close to the country's borders, but also to a natural solidarity of citizens with its innocent victims: the civilian refugees in our country. Based on an analysis of the scientific literature, at the heart of which will be placed the theory of conflict (Marx, Weber, Lake, Woon, Sharma, etc.), the communication aims to present the results of a quantitative research carried out by means of an opinion survey based on a questionnaire administered to a nationally representative sample. The sociological study aims to identify Romanians' perceptions and fears regarding the social and economic effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war and to find out the mechanisms that determined the spontaneous cohesion that was at the basis of the mobilisation of citizens to support temporary refugee migrants or those seeking asylum in our country. of law specialization, aiming to highlight their views on the perspectives offered by migration.
More...
Human trafficking is a crime against humanity that was and is still being committed by one person against another person for the sake of money and achieving material benefit by making the human victim a commodity or something that can be sold, bought and traded, and the forms of this crime have varied from trading for sex purposes to selling human organs and forced labor and others one of the images that the governments of countries and the United Nations are working to reduce and combat through national laws and international conventions with the aim of criminalizing this act and punishing its perpetrators even with the consent of the victim. However, the world is now witnessing a new image that can be added to these images, which is the case of human trafficking for political purposes Which is the subject of my paper, which is based on the idea that some political parties or owners of money in the countries of the world are working to support a specific candidate or to agree with a specific person for the purpose of applying for candidacy for the parliamentary elections, and in the event of his victory, he is obligated to implement the decisions and requests that are rejected by that partisan body or a group of men the money they supported in his electoral campaign. As for the other form, it is the case of supporting a person to reach a position in the government, he may be a minister or may like that. This situation can occur in all countries of the world when its elements are met, and the most important of these elements is the presence of a party that owns money and financing. The paper also identified the seriousness of this situation for societies in general, because its damage affects the lives of members of society more than its impact on one person. The paper It proposes to address the situation by penalizing it in national laws, especially those related to elections, and also by activating popular oversight of the work of a representative in parliament or an official in the government.
More...
The article deals with the celebration of the sixtieth birthday of the leaders of the Polish and Hungarian communist parties – Bolesław Bierut and Mátyás Rákosi. The festivities took place almost at the same time (9 March and 18 April 1952). The study is based on the Polish and Hungarian press. The most crucial goal of the press campaign accompanying the celebrations was to build a cult of the leaders unpopular among compatriots, forcing Poles and Hungarians to participate in the socialist competition and to improve the image of Stalin and the Soviet Union.
More...
This article contains a multifaceted cognitive, pragmatic and verbal analysis of anti-Ukrainian discourse in the Russian media from the point of view of its eliminative features. The main argument is that the discourse-forming concepts of ‘Ukronatists’, ‘understate’ and the far peripheral concept of the ‘fraternal people’ underpins multilevel eliminative strategies and the manipulative techniques of their implementation. The article argues that the identified discourse-forming concepts correspond to the three types of the narrative modelling of events according to the scenarios ‘The Story of a Just War’ and ‘Fathers and Sons’, and based on the metaphors of ‘mental disorder’, ‘predatory, scientific abstraction’, ‘drugs/alcohol addiction’ and ‘a house for NATO’. These are used to conceptualise Ukraine and Ukraine-associated matters leading to the construction of eliminative strategies for denying Ukrainian national identity and statehood, polarisation, symbolisation based on group stigmatisation, extermination, explicit and implicit dehumanisation through animalisation, deindividualisation and impersonalisation, as well as delegitimisation and masking actions as counteraction and self-defence.
More...
This article seeks to answer the question what ideas formed in the field of history theory can help de-velop a new interpretation of 20th century history, people facing difficult situations, the decisions they made, and, finally, traumatic individual and collective memory. The turbulent 20th century history and the memories about it is controversial; therefore, when contemporary Lithuanian society endeavors to discuss certain events, phenomena, and personalities and tries to come to a consensus on their immortalization – disagreements inevitably arise. In the process of research, it transpired that in contemporary historiography concerning the purpose and meaning of a historian’s work, as well as the responsibility to society of researchers of the past, several points are emphasized: (1) in the 21st century, historians have to find a new way of dealing with the complex issues of history; (2) scholars must recognize a responsibility for people who lived in the past and live the present, as well as to strive to show in the present perspective the fates of those who lived in the past; (3) the study of the past should contribute to the development of “intercultural competencies” which contemporary man lacks and which help him to understand The Other (past and present man); (4) to achieve these goals, historians need to transform their discipline into a “profes-sion of understanding” that promotes inquisitiveness and openness to the world; (5) researchers of the past, when confronted with attempts to turn them into politicians or judges, have to leave the past open to new questions and interpretations; (6) those who study the past must engage in theoretical (self-)reflection that is necessary to perform the function of a critic that is so vital to society; and (7) historians need to think about the importance of the pres-ent dimension confronting complex historical issues. Historians work with collective memory to address the issues of self-awareness in time which face society. Researchers into the past also seek to initiate a dialogue between the people of the past and present. The conduct of the dialogue and its quality depend to a large extent on the level of the empathy that has been developed. Introducing empathy as a method for exploring knowledge about history and the present, this article draws on the ideas of George R. Collingwood, a British historian, archaeologist, and philosopher.
More...