Adam Michnik Quotes
I think it's always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it's very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently.
Michnik, Adam. In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe. Edited by Irena Grudzińska Gross, University of California Press, 2011.
This is a classic libertarian position.
The nation was facing the scourge of McCarthyism. Senator Smith was the most courageous member of the Senate in denouncing the lying demagogue of her own party who was so powerful at the time—Joseph R. McCarthy. At the same time, there were some communists trying to undermine the values or the nation as well as the fascists. Smith was one of the first to recognize the danger of both.
Reacting to accusations that he was soft on communism:
Many of the leading Republicans viciously attacked President Barack Obama’s character, ability, and motives during the Ukraine-Russia Crisis. The irony if the attacks on the President is that un general the Republicans agreed with the actual policies and statements of the President on his dealing with the crisis but they were vicious in describing his as “Weak”, “Feckless”, “Not to be feared or taken seriously”. They wanted the President to be even tougher than he was and yet they told the world and the Russian leaders that he was “weak and could be pushed around,” thus undermining the President’s credibility and his likely success in implementing the tactics they wanted.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
He delivered this speech towards the end of the 1st year of President Donals Trump's Administration. Althought he never mentioned Trump by name, this speech was a rare major criticism of a sitting president by a former president. This was also one of the few speeches Bush gave after leaving office. On the same day, former President Barak Obama also gave a major speech and also castigated President Trump although neither of the ex-presidents knew that the other was about to deliver their criticism of Trump. It was one of the very unusal occurances in American history.
Adam Michnik is a Polish historian, essayist, former dissident, public intellectual, and editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.
