Krótka relacja z procesu autolustracji polskich środowisk akademickich (II) Z materiałów prasowych wybrał i opracował

Abstract

The paper, based on the materials from both national and local press of last few months, reports the Polish debate around a controversial vetting law. The vetting law covered over half a million of public officials and required them to reveal (on the pain of being banned from their profession for a decade) whether they cooperated with communist-era secret police and intelligence services. The author focuses on the examples, individual and collective ones, of civil disobedience, on the protests of intellectual circles, in particular of the universities. Later, he discusses the functioning of Poland's Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), changed – in the hands of political revanchists – into a kind of Remembrance Police; he also describes the hopes of people subject to the new vetting law that the Constitutional Tribunal rule so-called vetting law to be inconsistent with the constitution – which finally came off and turned out to be a heavy blow to the supporters of the authoritarian governmental system. The Tribunal’s verdict stopped – at least temporarily – the kind of “witch hunt” initiated – with the intent of replacing the old elites – by PiS (Law and Justice) and its political supporters (such as Radio Maria led by father Tadeusz Rydzyk), ready to cross the achievements of political transformation begun in 1989 off the collective memory and to replace it with the watchword of moral revolution – the main slogan of the Poland’s “Fourth Republic” (invented by the Kaczyński brothers).