It was a very weird moment when 'the bags' were published. On one hand it had to be done as there were conspiracy theories abound regarding who's in them. Intially pretty much everyone would log in to check if there's someone they know. Journalists would scour the records and then try to get the ones mentioned tell their story.
At the end of the day though everyone understands that:
1. Having a record there doesn't necessarily imply active and willing cooperation with the regime, due to how the whole thing functioned.
2. Someone not being there doesn't imply they were not active and willing collaborators.
3. It is almost a given that the most interesting records are long gone.
So, nothing has really changed. You still don't know for sure who were the scum amongst us.
I think the difference is probably in the fact that Poland was a USSR satellite nation, much like DDR, while in Latvia after occupation they didn't set up a puppet state, but directly integrated us into the USSR.
The implication here is that the regime secret services in Latvia not just collaborated extensively with Moscow, but were in fact part of the same organization. Meaning, that it is very likely that there existed instructions for emergency situations in which the most sensitive documentation needs to be shipped to Moscow.
I wonder how in a situation like that you can check the authenticity of archives. It must have been tempting for the KGB to plant incriminating material once they realised they were going to lose control of an archive - though they probably didn't have a huge amount of time to do that.
In Poland the transition happened quite quickly (the authorities barely had time to burn a lot of the documents) so I don't think there was time to do any widespread document planting. Plus, if you plant some documents they'd had to be consistent with all other records or it would be found out upon investigation (there's a special state-run institute in Poland which hires a bunch of historians who analyze those records, so it's a real possibility).
Yeah, I can't imagine that the KGB or the local security services ever thought they would really lose control of their archives. Though I imagine there would have been some effort to pull the files on anyone they wanted to keep as an intelligence asset in the long term.
Sadly the institute (IPN) became a political weapon for fighting between all the factions that grew from Solidarity movement (You're in bed with the communists! No - you!). These factions later became PO and PIS - the 2 biggest parties that rule Poland interchangeably since 2006.
There's been some archives that were hidden for decades (for example Kazimierz Kujda or Lech Wałęsa), there's been manipulation of which exact offices require check with the archives, there were blackmails and misleading lists of "communist agents" published by politicians and journalists (lista Macierewicza, lista Wildsteina).
Fun fact - mother of Kaczyński (who currently rules Poland and is famous for McCarthy-like policies and calling everybody a communist) - is in IPN lists.
If they treated her like political enemies they should already declare her a public enemy/traitor/spy/etc. And just like they declare any political enemy with communists in family tree "regime's children" - that should be enough to remove Kaczyński from politics by his own logic.
But they didn't (and probably correctly - lots of people were on these lists without actually being a spy, it could just mean you were considered or interesting to communist security for a variety of reasons - like being related to opposition activists, being a homosexual, a priest, having family abroad, whatever).
In the end I think we should just have had full transparency since day 1, because smart people realize being in the documents doesn't prove anything without interrelated evidence, and stupid people believe it's all a huge conspiracy anyway, no matter how many proofs you show them.
I have to admit, when I read that a pole (old enough to have firsthand experience with both) claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism, it made me reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland.
> claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism
They basically believe (or pretend to - it's hard to distinguish what is paranoia and what is political calculation at this point) that are the alt-right conspiracy theories are true.
Gender/feminism/lgbt is cultural marxism, Soros wants to replace Europeans with Muslims from Africa, Jews and Germans want to change history and make Poles responsible for Holocaust, LGBT is a conspiracy to destroy the church and turn our kids gay (so that these leftist pedophiles may get them), ecology is a conspiracy to destroy our economy by renewable energy equipment producers and leftists in Brussels. And besides global warming is bullshit of course. Recently government promised miners that we will mine coal till 2060 (despite having to store more than 2-years' worth of it already because our coal is much more expansive than imported coal and nobody buys it except for national powerplants that are forced to buy it :) ).
Even pedophilia in Catholic church is leftist's fault because most of it is male priest to male child so they are actually members of LGBT ideology. Hard to argue with such "logic"...
Sad thing is - it's not just politicians and tinfoilers, decent people start believing parts of that after years of propaganda in state media and church.
Basically there's 30% who believe all of it, 10% who believe parts o it, and about 20% who don't but vote them anyway because of social spending. And it's been that way since 2015...
> reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland
that's the fact not many people want to speak about :) 5% of population was in the communist party. In 70s few people were protesting - economy was ok and who cares about these crazy oppositionists.
Communism sucked for people who wanted to be free or cared about historic truth or wanted to have a career, or to achieve something in life without becoming a spy. But for your average person that only wanted to have a job, a flat, and a family it was OK for most of the period. So what if it killed 20 000 people that didn't wanted communism? As long as you're behaving like everybody else it's very unlikely you'll have any problems.
Solidarity was formed because the regulated prices for many kinds of food went up (because they weren't sustainable with the inefficient economy).
Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez are characters in High Noon. As the whole movie is less two-dimensional than most westerns, their characters go beyond the typical blonde vs brunette.
(Russia is not subtle about encouraging deep rural population growth! The Subaru w/ spoiler and well-depreciated tractor are stereotypical village rides here, but we, being more densely populated, also have monoaxes. And you remind me I ought to explore "disco polo" sometime. Or do you have any recommendations for a more refined genre?)
I don't know Russian, the sound and ending changes are very predictable for a Pole that heard the language several times, but there's lots of false friends and they often use different root words than we do. But I'm pretty sure it is the same in this case.
In Polish "brać" = "to take" and prefix "wy-" adds aspect of movement out of some place so "wybierać" is literally sth like "to take out" and means "to choose".
"Wybór" is noun made from that verb, and "wybory" is the plural of that noun, so it literally means "choices", but is most often used to mean "elections".
"wybier mienia" from that song would be "wybierz mnie" in Polish.
As for disco polo it's basically Polish country - few people listen to it unironically and say so publicly (epecially outside countryside), but play it during any party and everybody will dance. There's no wedding in Poland without disco polo.
As for recommendation sorry for wall of text in advance :) I didn't know how to choose so I went chronologically.
In 70s-80s there was this weird genre that I like called "poetic song" that turned into "student's song"/"touristic song".
It's started with Kaczmarski as something like Vladimir Vysocky or Bob Dylan - lyrics are more important than music, one guy and a guitar. I especially like Jacek Kaczmarski songs, there's also Łapiński, Gintrowski, Kleyff and others, and then the touristic songs took over and instead of politics and angst students started singing about how pretty the mountains are and how nice it is to camp in them, but the music style is still similar. The best examples are Wolna Grupa Bukowina and Stare Dobre Małżeństwo, but there's many more. It's very obscure genre, by the way, except for a few songs by Kaczmarski that turned into anthems because of politics in late 70s early 80s.
Kaczmarski story is very interesting. He wrote a song called "Mury" in late 70s (inpired by Lluis Llach protest song about Catalonia freedom) which was supposed to be about political movements taking over art from artists with good intentions and turning on artists and anybody who isn't with them eventually. That's the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwD6i9eOiYE
Solidarity took that song as its anthem and changed the last verses because it was "too pessimistic". Few people realize now what it was even about, mostly they think it was only about destroying communism. Basically it's a song that predicted what will happen with it :)
The first song refrain is "Chcemy być sobą" (we want to be ourselves) but people sung "Chcemy bić ZOMO" (we want to beat up ZOMO). ZOMO was communist political milita that beat up A LOT of people to pacify protests and shut down concerts.
Best Polish female singer of all time also made career in 90s - Edyta Górniak. It's criminal that she didn't won Eurovision in 1994 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5rmmpiHp8
Recently Polish hip-hop is pretty good (but it's 90% in the lyrics so you'd have to have translations and I don't know how well it translates). I recommend Paktofonika, Kaliber 44, Łona, Quebonafide, Taco Hemmingway, Mata. Paktofonika was the band that started serious hip-hop in Poland, they are till considered the best, especially "Jestem Bogiem" (I am god). Important culturally too. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2paBCLSSc
It's a shame that hip-hop really needs reasonable language skills. I'll give it a listen (while working down the rest of your wonderful suggestions!) but probably won't get any more out of it than the Gaeilge of:
I've heard something similar at folk concert but I don't know from which region of Poland it was and it's generally not stuff that people know or sing (except for folk bands, recontruction groups etc.) Maybe it was translated from a russian song.
Besides górale there are a few folk songs that everybody knows and sings at campfires or on weddings or other gatherings (they are called "piosenka biesiadna" because you usually sing them when you're eating).
It's in regional dialect that nobody really speaks anymore in daily life.
Another kind of folk music that's still alive is przyśpiewki (orchestra plays same tune and people switch and sing to diss everybody else on weddings :)). It's basically folk rap battles :)
BTW in one Kaczmarski song there's a Russian folk song included. I always wondered if it's true folk song or something he invented. Have you ever heard it?
And доню and собі́ would also be ukrainian. So it looks like I have to transliterate from polish to ukrainian, neither of which I have any experience with...
(Incidentally, wesele seems to be one of the false friends you mentioned. Part of the chorus in
Edit2: The instrumentation for Głęboka studzienka reminded me of my favourite bavarian cover band (for anyone that doesn't know they need to hear oom-pah metal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI
Yes. I'd imagined something along the lines of "c'mon, c'mon, party!"
And I'd anglicise "Wiesiołyje Rebiata" as "Party Dudes"[1], but take that with a lot of salt[2], as my command of californian is much stronger than my sense of slavic...
(I'm pretty confident about it though, because pop music tends to gravitate to a certain vocabulary. Just as corazon is one of the first words one learns when listening to mexican radio, and сердце occurs often in russian, I assume I'll be hearing serce frequently, along with appropriate first and second person possessives, in disco polo...)
True folk song: ukrainian, "Even though he lost interest in the cock"[1]
Послала мене мати
к хлопців погуляти:
"Погуляй собі, доню,
Я ж тобі не бороню".
А я собі гуляю,
Як рибка по Дунаю,
Як рибка з окунцями,
Я, молода, з хлопцями.
====
My mother sent me
to go for a walk with the guys:
"Take a walk, daughter,
I'm not tilling[2] you."
I'm walking[3] around,
Like a fish in the Danube,
Like a fish with perches[4],
Youthful me, with the guys.
[1] The rest of the song is about planting and furrows and peas in pods and other agricultural topics, so it should be no surprise the young man of the title had a rooster along. As roosters will do, it had awakened her in the morning, after a night of very little sleep.
I'm not sure if this verb is referring to the pre-seeding earthwork (which makes a fertile soil receptive to the seeds) or the post-seeding earthwork (which covers up the generative potential, protecting them from the outside environment). Either way, mama ain't doin' it.
[3] I don't know if this is a difference between folk song usage and modern, or ukrainian and russian dialects, but "walk around" pretty much means "party" in russian hiphop lyrics.
(and unless I've been listening to the wrong ones, wells and riverbanks in slavic folk songs often lead to trouble — and seat wetting.)
[4] Perches are carnivores. (Well-danced tango is said to have a bit of stalking predator play?) Perch are also fairly indiscriminate: they'll go for just about any bait, whether it wriggles or not.
The false friends are interesting, I though "hulaty" was the same word as Polish "hulać" which means to have fun/to party.
The other quirky word is "boroniu", which I thought was the same word as Polish "bronić" which means "to defend", but in this context (ja tobie nie bronię) it would mean (I don't forbid you). It comes from the noun "broń" (a weapon).
The agricultural stuff would be "bronować" in comparison from the plural noun "brony" (harrows).
I wonder if the Ukrainian is maybe closer to Polish in this case? Cause it would make more sense that way.
Even "ukonce" have Polish equivalent "okonie".
That's why I suspected Kaczmarski invented it - the song was completely understandable to me without any knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian except for knowing how the sounds change usually.
As [3] indicated, have fun/to party is a perfectly cromulent reading. (and from many of the folk songs I've bothered translating, "walking around" tends to produce grass-stained clothing, so I guess we need an etymological reference here.)
(I don't forbid you) makes much more sense. That was what I was reaching for in the post-seeding covering over as protection in [2]. Going pl->ua in wikipedia, I still do get https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broń to https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Зброя , but logic almost demands that's the reading.
I'd figure that google and yandex translate (and their image searches) are not tuned to folk song usages, so your guesses are probably way more accurate than mine.
You can get similar records for deceased people, which will give you a sense of what's in there.
Isaac Asimov's FBI file is a case study [1, 2].
People fabricate stories out of jealousy, a desire for retribution, and generic Karen reasons [3]. Isaac Asimov seems to have had a neighbor or colleague in the latter category.
People should study these files to develop robust procedural safeguards.
> From then on, most of them have been kept under lock and key, first in a secure room in the Latvian parliament, and then in the Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism.
In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance, and against what)?
The Center is essentially a history research institute that's subordinate to an intelligence agency. They research KGB activities in Latvia, and are involved in background checks for security clearances.
There's not too much public sentiment around the Center itself. The question of whether to publish the archives or not was a controversial one as the article points out.
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated.
For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions.
Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth.
Walking back from poor decisions is super-hard. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different."
Tolerance and a sense of shared responsibility, perhaps?
If all the participants feel like they took part of the educated decision regardless of outcome - they might be more tolerant towards walking it back. One could argue that would be part of the culture.
Goldstein explicitly states the mission of Minitru is to enable (c) without the observed disincentive.
I've found a number of correspondences between Oceania and Plato's Republic, but am unsure if there was any direct correspondence intended, or if Orwell's tragic satire of society at his boarding school[1] only indirectly implies them, due to ancient greek influence on edwardian mores.
Being a second rate boarding school, they never read greek or latin works whole (and thus presumably were spared the most cynical, least copybook, bits about power, e.g. δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν?) but were merely "taught to the test."
The answer is democracy. If a policy doesn't work out, elect a new government with no political investment in the old failed policy, and in fact maybe even a platform to fix it, and have them fix it. Prohibition in the US is a classic case in point.
"Economic elites" here being approximated by the "affluent", namely 90th income (why not wealth?) percentile.
> "To be sure, people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only about $146,000 in annual household income."
> But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything.
We know of a similar structure - the stasi [1]. So just because there was more time in Latvia to destroy the actual evidence does not mean similar stuff was going on.
> "By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60."
For contrast, 45% of the world's population owns a smartphone.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, the comparison seems completely appropriate. Today's governments (and other entities with a lot of power) have orders of magnitude more private data than Stasi or KGB ever dreamed of. An non-targeted informant network of that scale would be simply redundant and hard to maintain for their lookalikes these days.
It is a quantitative comparison of alternatives with a very different quality. Apples and oranges, if you will. The fact that both spy on private information does not mean that the information is roughly equivalent, nor the level of betrayal.
Apart from the first sentence, I agree with your statement though.
I did say 'contrast', not 'compare'. I agree the information is not roughly equivalent (the smartphone gathers much more data) and agree the level of betrayal is not there (as with the line about the advantages of making the landlord and the tenant the same person, there are also advantages to making the informer and the informee the same person).
For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1] conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2]
Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices (or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all?
As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4] eventually come up with some social ones.
[2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of mine was excited to work on https://eos.com due to the (for the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets.
Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain parameters).
> Today's governments (and other entities with a lot of power) have orders of magnitude more private data than Stasi or KGB ever dreamed of.
Unless you believe in a conspiracy where "the government" has turned all smart phones into bugs and is constantly listening to everbody's conversations: no, they don't.
They have much more data in general though, but at the same time, you're producing much more data as well. Back then, they'd know every book you've ever read in school or lent from the library, today they don't even know that, much less every webpage you've visited. If you were of interest to the Stasi, they'd recruit neighbors, "friends" and family to report on you. There's nothing even close in most governments today.
Privacy issues are bad enough, there's really no need to make silly arguments like these. It's not just not the same, it's not even similar.
Yes, they actually do. Have you not read about even a fraction of the data storage and mining tools that Snowden revealed? Have you not heard about the massive data storage being done from known and very likely secret sources at the Data Center in Utah? This is not to mention what we probably don't know about.
Governments indeed have more data or at least the ability to access more data about us than they ever have before and can do so remotely in many cases, unlike the reams of paper and slogging they'd have had to go through several decades ago. That the vast majority of this data about any random civilian is never looked at by human eyes is secondary.
The bottom line is that so much of it is being stored somewhere on corporate, or government, or corporate but accessible to government servers, and if you ever came to the attention of the government of the country you live in, it would be extremely naive to think that these vast troves of accumulated information about your entire digital life up to that point could not be accessed with little effort.
It is no longer necessary to recruit their friends, family or neighbors for watching so much of most people do. These people themselves post the details of their daily lives, or if not, their own intimate circle does, or chats about them through digital mediums that are only dubiously secure from prying eyes. (To name just one example, can you concretely say that the content of your entire Gmail inbox is rigorously impervious to government intrusion?)
The theoretical situation "if they completely remove all laws and just take all the data and break everyone's thumbs that doesn't give up encryption passwords" doesn't equal "they have more data on you today than the Stasi collected in East Germany".
Similarly, just because we have better weapons now doesn't mean that your life is more threatened than a Jew's life in Nazi Germany.
There's a huge difference between you uploading pictures of your dog to Facebook and your neighbor/friend becoming a secret agent reporting on private conversations to the intelligence services.
My comment was specifically directed at the mistaken notion that governments now have less information about individuals than they did before, not about the repressive acts they're willing to perform on any individual of interest to them. I agree,virtually no modern citizen of a western nation is at anywhere near the same risk of being beaten, tortured or murdered by his or her government as was a jew living in Nazi Germany, but I argue that yes, this modern individual has more of their daily life under passive surveillance and with the data being gathered up than the average German or even Jew had known about their daily life in the 1930's and early 40's. I don't see how you could argue against this idea given all the revelations of the last few years.
That most of today's most advanced governments don't use their data collection capabilities to brutally repress their people as Nazi Germany was always willing to do is only a question of time, place and social politics, not of technical capability.
If any currently more or less liberal government should change into a repressive dictatorship, the mechanisms for surveillance already in place would let them do a lot of repressing without even having to hire the neighbor or friend to be a secret agent.
I'd say it is. The number of countries that want to go super-authoritarian and are able to do so via control of information and data gathering (instead of simply putting a police guy with an AK47 on each corner and install an inquisitor) is small. China seems to be the only one that's capable of doing it and really wants to. Russia might at some point in the future if the establishment's grip on power lessens, but their issues are different.
Other countries would certainly like to, but lack the abilities. Maybe China will supply them, but I don't know whether the Chinese system of surveillance and control would work in e.g. Turkey or Saudi-Arabia with very different cultures.
What you describe is only circumstantially the case for the time being. These technologies are only becoming more affordable to a wider range of governments that previously wouldn't have dreamed of the resources necessary for them.
But, just as almost all computing becomes cheaper per unit of data processed or any other basic measure, so too does the apparatus for widespread digital surveillance.
What China and only a few others can do now is something that more countries will be able to do in the coming decades unless some major technological or social shift occurs. That's an idea that bears much closer consideration
The above works institutionally in the same way that you as an average person can today use a tiny device that's affordable to billions of people and fits in your pocket for doing things that 30 to 40 years ago would have been available only to very wealthy individuals and organizations.
What's different about these files and those of tech platforms is that the information itself didn't matter. It was the system of government itself to maintain the impression that there were secret informants everywhere and there was no way of knowing who was or wasn't. The point was to instill terror for its own sake, and to politically paralyze individuals, or "atomize," people into inaction. The randomness and absurdity of the system was by design, as the arbitrary nature of it had the effect of creating uncertainty and paranoia in every individual relationship. This secured the power of the party and the regime.
The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being "good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi scheme for terror.
Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was, you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of magnitude less data.
There's a story that the soviet Communist Party actually circulated copies of George Orwell's 1984, not as a warning against how totalitarianism could go wrong, but as a manual for how to implement it more effectively. I'm not sure if there's any truth to it.
Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the "working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.
A big difference and what hurt the most about this type of archives was that the powers that be mostly collected their data on you based on your close friends/work colleagues.
I was too young to have any Securitate records (I was 9 when the regime fell in '89) but I'm pretty sure both my parents have records in there. I wouldn't want to check them if I were to be in their shoes because I wouldn't want to know who of my friends or close work colleagues betrayed me to the Securitate.
No idea where that figure is from, but Google photos must have about 100 to 200 gb of photos and videos I've taken, plus the meta data - and I am not an avid photographer.
Fb will then have another chunk, in the UK they used to also have an auto photo backup service at one point but I don't think I used it for long.
Assuming the meta data they have on me won't be that big, but who knows - all my search and other data in the last 13 years will come to a fair size - but would guess that would be more 10s of gb - total finger in the air.
With advances in AI and digital image analysis, I'd guess that long term these photos could provide lots of information too. Especially if google attempted to extract information from aggregated media of all users.
At the end of the day though everyone understands that:
1. Having a record there doesn't necessarily imply active and willing cooperation with the regime, due to how the whole thing functioned.
2. Someone not being there doesn't imply they were not active and willing collaborators.
3. It is almost a given that the most interesting records are long gone.
So, nothing has really changed. You still don't know for sure who were the scum amongst us.
The implication here is that the regime secret services in Latvia not just collaborated extensively with Moscow, but were in fact part of the same organization. Meaning, that it is very likely that there existed instructions for emergency situations in which the most sensitive documentation needs to be shipped to Moscow.
There's been some archives that were hidden for decades (for example Kazimierz Kujda or Lech Wałęsa), there's been manipulation of which exact offices require check with the archives, there were blackmails and misleading lists of "communist agents" published by politicians and journalists (lista Macierewicza, lista Wildsteina).
Fun fact - mother of Kaczyński (who currently rules Poland and is famous for McCarthy-like policies and calling everybody a communist) - is in IPN lists.
If they treated her like political enemies they should already declare her a public enemy/traitor/spy/etc. And just like they declare any political enemy with communists in family tree "regime's children" - that should be enough to remove Kaczyński from politics by his own logic.
But they didn't (and probably correctly - lots of people were on these lists without actually being a spy, it could just mean you were considered or interesting to communist security for a variety of reasons - like being related to opposition activists, being a homosexual, a priest, having family abroad, whatever).
In the end I think we should just have had full transparency since day 1, because smart people realize being in the documents doesn't prove anything without interrelated evidence, and stupid people believe it's all a huge conspiracy anyway, no matter how many proofs you show them.
I have to admit, when I read that a pole (old enough to have firsthand experience with both) claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism, it made me reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/06/20/gay-ideology-is-...
PS. thinking of the Solidarity poster: Amy Kane, or Helen Ramirez?
No idea who these people are? The only famous Solidarity poster I remember was with High Noon: https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/1d/96/5cefdcae73cef_p.jpg?155...
> claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism
They basically believe (or pretend to - it's hard to distinguish what is paranoia and what is political calculation at this point) that are the alt-right conspiracy theories are true.
Gender/feminism/lgbt is cultural marxism, Soros wants to replace Europeans with Muslims from Africa, Jews and Germans want to change history and make Poles responsible for Holocaust, LGBT is a conspiracy to destroy the church and turn our kids gay (so that these leftist pedophiles may get them), ecology is a conspiracy to destroy our economy by renewable energy equipment producers and leftists in Brussels. And besides global warming is bullshit of course. Recently government promised miners that we will mine coal till 2060 (despite having to store more than 2-years' worth of it already because our coal is much more expansive than imported coal and nobody buys it except for national powerplants that are forced to buy it :) ).
Even pedophilia in Catholic church is leftist's fault because most of it is male priest to male child so they are actually members of LGBT ideology. Hard to argue with such "logic"...
Sad thing is - it's not just politicians and tinfoilers, decent people start believing parts of that after years of propaganda in state media and church.
Basically there's 30% who believe all of it, 10% who believe parts o it, and about 20% who don't but vote them anyway because of social spending. And it's been that way since 2015...
> reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland
that's the fact not many people want to speak about :) 5% of population was in the communist party. In 70s few people were protesting - economy was ok and who cares about these crazy oppositionists.
Communism sucked for people who wanted to be free or cared about historic truth or wanted to have a career, or to achieve something in life without becoming a spy. But for your average person that only wanted to have a job, a flat, and a family it was OK for most of the period. So what if it killed 20 000 people that didn't wanted communism? As long as you're behaving like everybody else it's very unlikely you'll have any problems.
Solidarity was formed because the regulated prices for many kinds of food went up (because they weren't sustainable with the inefficient economy).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSf1UcFRq0 ?
(Russia is not subtle about encouraging deep rural population growth! The Subaru w/ spoiler and well-depreciated tractor are stereotypical village rides here, but we, being more densely populated, also have monoaxes. And you remind me I ought to explore "disco polo" sometime. Or do you have any recommendations for a more refined genre?)
In Polish "brać" = "to take" and prefix "wy-" adds aspect of movement out of some place so "wybierać" is literally sth like "to take out" and means "to choose".
"Wybór" is noun made from that verb, and "wybory" is the plural of that noun, so it literally means "choices", but is most often used to mean "elections".
"wybier mienia" from that song would be "wybierz mnie" in Polish.
As for disco polo it's basically Polish country - few people listen to it unironically and say so publicly (epecially outside countryside), but play it during any party and everybody will dance. There's no wedding in Poland without disco polo.
As for recommendation sorry for wall of text in advance :) I didn't know how to choose so I went chronologically.
60s and 70s were all about "big beat" which was basically Polish rock'n'roll. Some recommendations: Czerwone Gitary, Czesław Niemen, Skaldowie, Karin Stanek. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjLZwpmufw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1CM68Z3z0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WtBpMkxz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW_XYk-Xc94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVFvIK7IRkw
In 70s-80s there was this weird genre that I like called "poetic song" that turned into "student's song"/"touristic song".
It's started with Kaczmarski as something like Vladimir Vysocky or Bob Dylan - lyrics are more important than music, one guy and a guitar. I especially like Jacek Kaczmarski songs, there's also Łapiński, Gintrowski, Kleyff and others, and then the touristic songs took over and instead of politics and angst students started singing about how pretty the mountains are and how nice it is to camp in them, but the music style is still similar. The best examples are Wolna Grupa Bukowina and Stare Dobre Małżeństwo, but there's many more. It's very obscure genre, by the way, except for a few songs by Kaczmarski that turned into anthems because of politics in late 70s early 80s.
Kaczmarski story is very interesting. He wrote a song called "Mury" in late 70s (inpired by Lluis Llach protest song about Catalonia freedom) which was supposed to be about political movements taking over art from artists with good intentions and turning on artists and anybody who isn't with them eventually. That's the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwD6i9eOiYE Solidarity took that song as its anthem and changed the last verses because it was "too pessimistic". Few people realize now what it was even about, mostly they think it was only about destroying communism. Basically it's a song that predicted what will happen with it :)
Other "poetic songs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38k_Jom2eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmfE9PkNpA
The touristic subgenre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt03Q4EDHYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxpdLbw3zM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1q80-m-yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfp-DRAUN8E
80s and early 90s was all rock (because it's a protest genre and there were lots of things to be raging against). Perfekt, Maanam, Lady Punk, Budka Suflera, Kombi, Lombard, Kazik. Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661sTP275nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7OgVpWQs5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd3Yp4aUU7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Nxamh3-t0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kicEsx7g0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqVcDyOAoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esu5UYDFBew
The first song refrain is "Chcemy być sobą" (we want to be ourselves) but people sung "Chcemy bić ZOMO" (we want to beat up ZOMO). ZOMO was communist political milita that beat up A LOT of people to pacify protests and shut down concerts.
90s-00s was mostly about pop and rock-lite by bands like Wilki, Varius Manx, De Mono, T.Love, Elektryczne Gitary. It's my youth so I'm nostalgic about these but they aren't that good in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xby1imQDs3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leYyu4wH4dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SN_ZH75e68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guJ25FxCwmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghh0ttnRdiQ
Best Polish female singer of all time also made career in 90s - Edyta Górniak. It's criminal that she didn't won Eurovision in 1994 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5rmmpiHp8
Recently Polish hip-hop is pretty good (but it's 90% in the lyrics so you'd have to have translations and I don't know how well it translates). I recommend Paktofonika, Kaliber 44, Łona, Quebonafide, Taco Hemmingway, Mata. Paktofonika was the band that started serious hip-hop in Poland, they are till considered the best, especially "Jestem Bogiem" (I am god). Important culturally too. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2paBCLSSc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk
Does poland have any folk tradition similar to the russian chastushki?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastushka
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_ppG_G2s9g
I think the most alive folk music is the one from górale (Tatra highlanders). It's very distinctive, after 2 chords you know it's from them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2qaeoQ4po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o-Mh_ang4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCTwL14-T8
Besides górale there are a few folk songs that everybody knows and sings at campfires or on weddings or other gatherings (they are called "piosenka biesiadna" because you usually sing them when you're eating).
Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q0-bT6H7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug2YJGqca4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjY88qmsbDg
I'm not sure they are 100% authentic folk music though, because most versions nowadays are disco-polo :)
Example of true folk song I've heard a few times in my region (on weddings or concerts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bY7J3KTx1w
It's in regional dialect that nobody really speaks anymore in daily life.
Another kind of folk music that's still alive is przyśpiewki (orchestra plays same tune and people switch and sing to diss everybody else on weddings :)). It's basically folk rap battles :)
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDABYBOXaAg
BTW in one Kaczmarski song there's a Russian folk song included. I always wondered if it's true folk song or something he invented. Have you ever heard it?
The inner song starts here: https://youtu.be/7cxciyZEBkE?t=151
https://nashe.com.ua/song/15379
another version (gaily gown-greening):
https://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/461535.html
And доню and собі́ would also be ukrainian. So it looks like I have to transliterate from polish to ukrainian, neither of which I have any experience with...
(Incidentally, wesele seems to be one of the false friends you mentioned. Part of the chorus in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPovcLSEfS4
is Давай, давай веселей, but somehow I doubt the context has much to do with weddings.)
Edit: and speaking of weddings, YT just gave me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOc0s0OXV0Q
I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth... probably had something to do with the distribution of the song?
Edit2: The instrumentation for Głęboka studzienka reminded me of my favourite bavarian cover band (for anyone that doesn't know they need to hear oom-pah metal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI
Edit3: TIL poland is a civilised country. You all also have carnaval! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clr9gqqZ6jg
"Wesele" means "wedding", "weselej" means "more happily" (wesoło, weselej, najweselej = happily, happili-er, happili-est - as adverbs not adjectives).
So "dawaj, dawaj, weselej" would mean something like "let's go, let's go, happier now", right?
And I'd anglicise "Wiesiołyje Rebiata" as "Party Dudes"[1], but take that with a lot of salt[2], as my command of californian is much stronger than my sense of slavic...
(I'm pretty confident about it though, because pop music tends to gravitate to a certain vocabulary. Just as corazon is one of the first words one learns when listening to mexican radio, and сердце occurs often in russian, I assume I'll be hearing serce frequently, along with appropriate first and second person possessives, in disco polo...)
[1] Here's that band rocking their 80's style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZxpmohOlk
[2] i chlebem?
Edit: one of these days I still need to play with the Kogut programming language, http://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtR4szp1CB0
For a similar story in an anglophone context:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ0mxQXmLsk
[1] The rest of the song is about planting and furrows and peas in pods and other agricultural topics, so it should be no surprise the young man of the title had a rooster along. As roosters will do, it had awakened her in the morning, after a night of very little sleep.
[2] Compare https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...
I'm not sure if this verb is referring to the pre-seeding earthwork (which makes a fertile soil receptive to the seeds) or the post-seeding earthwork (which covers up the generative potential, protecting them from the outside environment). Either way, mama ain't doin' it.
[3] I don't know if this is a difference between folk song usage and modern, or ukrainian and russian dialects, but "walk around" pretty much means "party" in russian hiphop lyrics.
Compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU-XAxBkEaE
(and unless I've been listening to the wrong ones, wells and riverbanks in slavic folk songs often lead to trouble — and seat wetting.)
[4] Perches are carnivores. (Well-danced tango is said to have a bit of stalking predator play?) Perch are also fairly indiscriminate: they'll go for just about any bait, whether it wriggles or not.
The false friends are interesting, I though "hulaty" was the same word as Polish "hulać" which means to have fun/to party.
The other quirky word is "boroniu", which I thought was the same word as Polish "bronić" which means "to defend", but in this context (ja tobie nie bronię) it would mean (I don't forbid you). It comes from the noun "broń" (a weapon).
The agricultural stuff would be "bronować" in comparison from the plural noun "brony" (harrows).
I wonder if the Ukrainian is maybe closer to Polish in this case? Cause it would make more sense that way.
Even "ukonce" have Polish equivalent "okonie".
That's why I suspected Kaczmarski invented it - the song was completely understandable to me without any knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian except for knowing how the sounds change usually.
(I don't forbid you) makes much more sense. That was what I was reaching for in the post-seeding covering over as protection in [2]. Going pl->ua in wikipedia, I still do get https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broń to https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Зброя , but logic almost demands that's the reading.
I'd figure that google and yandex translate (and their image searches) are not tuned to folk song usages, so your guesses are probably way more accurate than mine.
I wonder if these verses are of highly-conserved vocabulary (then again, being in verse would tend to conserve vocabulary on its own), so they'd be a slavic equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable ? Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667506
False friends again, "zbroja" is armor in Polish :)
Isaac Asimov's FBI file is a case study [1, 2].
People fabricate stories out of jealousy, a desire for retribution, and generic Karen reasons [3]. Isaac Asimov seems to have had a neighbor or colleague in the latter category.
People should study these files to develop robust procedural safeguards.
[1] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...
[2] https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/nov/07/isaac-asi...
[3] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/careless-whispers-h...
In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance, and against what)?
There's not too much public sentiment around the Center itself. The question of whether to publish the archives or not was a controversial one as the article points out.
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated.
For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions.
Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth.
Walking back from poor decisions is super-hard. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different."
Not sure what the answers are here, though.
If all the participants feel like they took part of the educated decision regardless of outcome - they might be more tolerant towards walking it back. One could argue that would be part of the culture.
I've found a number of correspondences between Oceania and Plato's Republic, but am unsure if there was any direct correspondence intended, or if Orwell's tragic satire of society at his boarding school[1] only indirectly implies them, due to ancient greek influence on edwardian mores.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys
Being a second rate boarding school, they never read greek or latin works whole (and thus presumably were spared the most cynical, least copybook, bits about power, e.g. δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν?) but were merely "taught to the test."
Figure 1 on pdf page 10 [1].
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
> "To be sure, people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only about $146,000 in annual household income."
But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything.
We know of a similar structure - the stasi [1]. So just because there was more time in Latvia to destroy the actual evidence does not mean similar stuff was going on.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
For contrast, 45% of the world's population owns a smartphone.
Apart from the first sentence, I agree with your statement though.
For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1] conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2]
Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices (or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all?
As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4] eventually come up with some social ones.
[1] In the early 1960's, watch lists were only a few thousand words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage
[2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of mine was excited to work on https://eos.com due to the (for the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets.
Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain parameters).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824
[3] cf p.88 "5.A.1.j. does not apply to systems or equipment, specially designed for any of the following: a. Marketing purpose; ..."
https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-DOC-19-PUB-...
[4] "What you mean we, kemo sabe?"
Unless you believe in a conspiracy where "the government" has turned all smart phones into bugs and is constantly listening to everbody's conversations: no, they don't.
They have much more data in general though, but at the same time, you're producing much more data as well. Back then, they'd know every book you've ever read in school or lent from the library, today they don't even know that, much less every webpage you've visited. If you were of interest to the Stasi, they'd recruit neighbors, "friends" and family to report on you. There's nothing even close in most governments today.
Privacy issues are bad enough, there's really no need to make silly arguments like these. It's not just not the same, it's not even similar.
Governments indeed have more data or at least the ability to access more data about us than they ever have before and can do so remotely in many cases, unlike the reams of paper and slogging they'd have had to go through several decades ago. That the vast majority of this data about any random civilian is never looked at by human eyes is secondary.
The bottom line is that so much of it is being stored somewhere on corporate, or government, or corporate but accessible to government servers, and if you ever came to the attention of the government of the country you live in, it would be extremely naive to think that these vast troves of accumulated information about your entire digital life up to that point could not be accessed with little effort.
It is no longer necessary to recruit their friends, family or neighbors for watching so much of most people do. These people themselves post the details of their daily lives, or if not, their own intimate circle does, or chats about them through digital mediums that are only dubiously secure from prying eyes. (To name just one example, can you concretely say that the content of your entire Gmail inbox is rigorously impervious to government intrusion?)
Similarly, just because we have better weapons now doesn't mean that your life is more threatened than a Jew's life in Nazi Germany.
There's a huge difference between you uploading pictures of your dog to Facebook and your neighbor/friend becoming a secret agent reporting on private conversations to the intelligence services.
That most of today's most advanced governments don't use their data collection capabilities to brutally repress their people as Nazi Germany was always willing to do is only a question of time, place and social politics, not of technical capability.
If any currently more or less liberal government should change into a repressive dictatorship, the mechanisms for surveillance already in place would let them do a lot of repressing without even having to hire the neighbor or friend to be a secret agent.
Other countries would certainly like to, but lack the abilities. Maybe China will supply them, but I don't know whether the Chinese system of surveillance and control would work in e.g. Turkey or Saudi-Arabia with very different cultures.
But, just as almost all computing becomes cheaper per unit of data processed or any other basic measure, so too does the apparatus for widespread digital surveillance.
What China and only a few others can do now is something that more countries will be able to do in the coming decades unless some major technological or social shift occurs. That's an idea that bears much closer consideration
The above works institutionally in the same way that you as an average person can today use a tiny device that's affordable to billions of people and fits in your pocket for doing things that 30 to 40 years ago would have been available only to very wealthy individuals and organizations.
The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being "good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi scheme for terror.
Don't take my word for it, it's covered in the final chapter of "The Origins of Totalitarianism," (http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...)
Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was, you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of magnitude less data.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.ht...
Fun fact: only about 13% of the world of 1984 lives under constant observation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900
Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the "working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.
I was too young to have any Securitate records (I was 9 when the regime fell in '89) but I'm pretty sure both my parents have records in there. I wouldn't want to check them if I were to be in their shoes because I wouldn't want to know who of my friends or close work colleagues betrayed me to the Securitate.
Fb will then have another chunk, in the UK they used to also have an auto photo backup service at one point but I don't think I used it for long.
Assuming the meta data they have on me won't be that big, but who knows - all my search and other data in the last 13 years will come to a fair size - but would guess that would be more 10s of gb - total finger in the air.
Very offtopic, there's a sci-fi novella, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague , where one of the plot elements is a search for information through old photos and movies.
If anything you should worry what the NSA has on you.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/12903846737896734...