| The Polish Community in Australia is part of the revolutionary age of communicative abundance. Sitting in a Media and Communications seminar room at Sydney University recently , I listened to Professor John Keane’s lecture on DEMOCRACY FUTURES- POST-TRUTH AND THE UNFINISHED COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION. He speaks about new information platforms, robust muckracking and cross border politics, the drift towards what is called ‘post-truth’: the burying of ‘objective facts’ by an avalanche of appeals to emotion and personal belief. He states that corporate spin, ‘fake news’ and other forms of gaslighting are indeed gaining ground. GASLIGHTING? you might well asked. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception and sanity.
The post truth plaudits also give the example of Alternative Media, or Counter-Hegemonic culture, which claims to advocate the interest of mainstream marginalization. Professor John Keane poses the question : How philosophically plausible are calls for recovering ‘Truth’ in our public lives? Does truth-telling have its limits? Is the political project of bidding ‘farewell to truth’ really obsolete?
Personally, I hope that some of us won’t fall the victim of gaslighting. Poor Ingrid Bergman in the film ‘Gaslight’ was manipulated so badly that she lost all sense of herself. And that was before 1950. When I joined the Polish Fraternity , I became interested in the Solidarność movement , and some of the Political groups representing Polonia. As a school teacher in the 80’s I dealt with Expatriate Politics. One of the consequences of this Representative Ex-patriotism is that they tend to follow Blind Party Politics. They give their allegiance to a group, and keep following like sheep, regardless of leadership actions and behavior.
The ‘Over Identification’ with displaced politics in manner and time, intolerant of other views, tends to alienate their respective Ethnic communities, who they claim to represent. We have seen this in certain groups in the Polish NSW Community. That is not to say that some of the academic programs are very informative and far reaching. Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantów (SPK) has enjoyed participating in these programs. But certainly SPK has serious concerns about the extreme secretive political doctrine. All Polish Community Interest groups need a more genuine far reaching representation.
What I propose for Polish Diaspora Representative Political Programs is no panacea. However, in order to preserve some ‘truths’ I favor an analysis through a Social Science perspective, which tends to look at the Political state of affairs more broadly. Poignantly, we might like to look at the hallmarks that academics are using all over the world in relation to Democracy. For instance, if these hallmarks are applied to current Polish politics, we should not be offended if these back-up examples are given. Its prudent that we look at some controversial moves by the relatively new Polish Government, especially the weakening of the Constitutional Tribunal and subjecting the public media to ministerial appointments and supervision, triggering mass protests in Poland and concerns among EU officials.
We can analyze these developments in the broader context of the rapid economic development, new social divisions, and the polarization within the Polish political elite combined with electoral re-alignment. Symptoms of “Political Decay" does not mean that Polish Democracy is in danger. It simply points out that many countries have this ‘weakening of liberal democracy, and gradual transition towards populist ‘leader democracy’. And we have seen many examples of this phenomenon.
Another aspect of being able to represent the Polish Community, is again from the broader discipline of Political Relations, and not from narrow targeted guest speakers pushing their own barrow. A good example of a more enlightened presentation was given the other week at Western Sydney University, by Dr Onyszkiewicz. He is a former Vice-President of the European parliament, he was Defense Minister of the Republic of Poland in 2 separate posts; he is a distinguished human rights activist. In the historic year of 1989 he was spokesperson for the Solidarity delegation to the Round Table negotiations that paved the way to the demise of communism in Poland.
He sees Russia as the new destabilizing force in International Relations e.g Georgia and Ukraine; which has developed a new military doctrine, drastically lowering the threshold for use of nuclear weapons. He places Russia and China in the broader context of International Security and Power Relations. He poses the question “Are we going to see another Yalta type agreement between a Russia dominated Collective Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?"
I would sincerely hope that we can still find TRUTH in how the Polish Community and diaspora can be best represented. However, as the title of this paper is – THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATION, I would urge
a greater critique of what is being presented to us, both from our own ranks, and from the greater world Social Science/International Relations dialogue. But, finished or not, the Communication Revolution is upon us.
Julie Ankiewicz
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