Legutko Talk Wasn’t Just About
Diversity of Thought: It Was About Lies
by Noa Gutow-Ellis
I agree with Greg Katz in his opinion piece, “The Liberal-Only Arts: A Response to Ryszard Legutko’s Talk at Colby,” that it is, frankly, not a great look for this campus that a senior member of European Parliament came to speak and only 16 students showed up. Especially not when that same speaker garnered over 700 student signatures at Middlebury protesting his talk which was ultimately cancelled by the administration due to safety concerns.
But the bigger issue I see and the glaring concern I have is that any Colby student came away from Legutko’s talk thinking that he simply presented a diversity of thought not often encountered on this campus. What Legutko presented, plain and simple, are lies.
Legutko represents Poland’s Law and Justice Party (commonly referred to by its Polish acronym ‘PiS’). I am intimately familiar with PiS because of the role they’ve played in my year-long honors thesis project: “On Writing and Righting History: The Stakes of Holocaust Interpretation and Remembrance in Poland and the United States.”
In a nutshell: PiS members and the government institutions they run such as the National Institute of Remembrance, which oversees history education, museums, archives, and more, actively revise and rewrite Polish history in pursuit of their nation- alist project, and Polish Jews are on the losing end.
What I will speak to here is the way PiS made history a political tool, how Legutko wielded that tool in his talk at Colby, and what Colby students should do about it.
PiS gained control of the Polish parliament and presidency in 2015. When this happened, they launched attacks on history as a “diplomatic weapon,” as Politico put it when saying that then-Polish President Andrzej Duda’s “efforts are part of a broader campaign by Law and Justice to use the wrongs of the past to fend off criticism of the present.”
A major example of this is how PiS and other Polish nationalists deny any sort of Polish complicity with Nazi Germany in World War II. We know from historical accounts that this is unequivocally false. Historians like Jan Gross and Jan Grabowski have published scholarship on instances of Polish collaboration with Nazis — or, in the case of Jan Gross and his book Neighbors, how some times Poles didn’t need to act in collaboration with Nazis to undertake their own persecution of Jews in wartime. PiS and accompanying organizations have launched at- tacks and campaigns on these historians to discredit their work on an international stage.
PiS has given rise to — and continues to encourage — dismissing stories of suffering of Polish Jews inWorldWarIIsoasto craft narratives about the suffering of ‘the Polish nation.’ It is telling, of course, that Polish Jews are considered “other” and not part of that na- tion. In doing so, they have stirred anti-Semitism in Poland in ways that are intensifying in this present moment.
At Legutko’s talk, I asked the following: “You say that communists and liberal democrats cast away obligations of the past, losing respect and memory for what came before them,” I began. “How do you reconcile this statement with Law and Justice casting away the past, too, by entertaining the idea to take away Jan Gross’s Order of Merit for his work with the histories of Jedwabne?” Legutko stayed silent for a few moments before turning toward Professor Reisert, who chaired the event, asking, “Should I answer that?”
Upon Professor Reisert and Yoder’s encouragement of Legutko to please, answer the question (something that never came up for anybody else’s question), he spewed lies. He claimed that Jan Gross’ book wasn’t particularly well-researched, that it was an all-out attack on the Polish nation. He said Gross isn’t a historian. In fact, the findings of Jan Gross were confirmed by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance under the control of a different government back in the early 2000s and Jan Gross was a historian at Princeton for decades.
What’s so troubling about this is that Legutko went unchecked in saying these things here. The problem is not just that Colby students did not know about, care about, or show up for his talk in which he purported a more conservative viewpoint than is typical here. The problem is that such a sentiment could be understood as the main issue of Legutko’s visit.
Here’s what Colby students can do: take history classes. Studying history teaches you how to make sense of unsettling contemporary moments as well as how to understand the people and intentions behind nations crafting their histories on an international stage (along with the crucial fact that nations haven’t been wronged or suffered: people have). History courses here expose us to a wide range of diversities of people and thought so that we are equipped to distinguish conservative vs. liberal from truth vs. lie, a skill that is valuable at Colby and beyond.
