Tag: Poland

Does History Operate on a Long Fuse? Evidence from Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Manor orbits two Polish rebellions (1830 and 1863).

Author’s Note to the Original Edition

The Manor was written between 1953 and 1955. As with many of my stories and all my novels (with the exception of Satan in Goray, which I wrote while still in Warsaw), it was first serialized in The Jewish Daily Forward. Although The Manor was published many years after The Family Moskat, it portrays an earlier period—the epoch between the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the end of the nineteenth century. It was the era of gas lamps, the time when the Poles had finally become resigned to their loss of independence and turned to a kind of national positivism. Poland now began to emerge as an industrial country; railroads were built, factories were opened, and the cities grew rapidly. The Jews, who until 1863 for the most part still lived in a ghetto atmosphere, now began to play an important role in Polish industry, commerce, the arts and sciences. All the spiritual and intellectual ideas that triumphed in the modern era had their roots in the world of that time—socialism and nationalism, Zionism and assimilationism, nihilism and anarchism, suffragettism, atheism, the weakening of the family bond, free love, and even the beginnings of Fascism.

The Estate, a sequel to and the conclusion of The Manor, ends in the last years of the nineteenth century—an epoch when humanism undertook to practice what it had preached for generations. What happened in the village of Jampol, and what was discussed by a small group of self-educated youths in furnished rooms in Warsaw, became the basis of the social upheavals and the terrible disillusions of our present time.

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979.

If you look at his sentence above describing “All the spiritual and intellectual ideas”, you may start to see what we describe as the long fuse of history. When we are in the present, a lot of the issues from the past emerge again in the future. Reality is such that there is no permanent yesterday.

The novel is also haunted by another kind of deep change, the rise of the world market or globalization.

The novel’s protagonist, Jacoby, acquires a hill, which allows him to begin his fortune with a quarry:

The peasants complained that the Jew was contaminating the Polish countryside, putrefying the air, but the authorities ignored them. Poland, after the insurrection, was full of activity, as if awakened from a long slumber. Workshops sprang up, mines were dug, forests cut down, and railroads built. Polish products, textiles, leather goods, brushes, sieves, sheepskin coats, glassware appeared on the world market. As soon as the Jews were granted permission to reside freely in the cities, the country began to grow.

It was said that Calman had been blessed by a holy man. A building boom was in progress, and his lime quarry yielded immense profits. Scores of Jews and Gentiles earned their livelihood from it. Calman purchased horses and wagons and built a smithy. As if all this were not enough, the Russian government decided to build a railway line through Jampol. …

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979. p. 9.

Accompanying the rebellions and the commerce are a set of perpetual questions that have yet to be definitively answered.

Does a live carp suffer agonies when it is scaled and cut to pieces for the Sabbath meal? Why are some people poor and others rich? What was there before the universe? Does a goat have a soul? Was Adam a Jew? Did Eve wear a bonnet? And he was constantly finding contradictions in the Holy Writ, pointing out that in one place it is stated that a man is punished only for his own sins, but in another, that the third and fourth generations must suffer for them; and first the Lord is said to be invisible, then it is written that the elders while they ate and drank saw the Lord. For another thing, Ezriel criticized the prophet Elisha for causing the children to be attacked by bears; the boy felt bitterly reproachful toward King David for slaying Uriah the Hittite, and he wept and blasphemed when he read how Abraham sent his concubine Hagar into the desert with nothing but a jug of water, and how she almost perished of thirst.

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979. pp. 23-24.

Consider specifically the question of what was before the universe. Today our greatest cosmologists and physicists continue to ask this very question. This confirms a famous quote from William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Henry Huiyao Wang: A Xi-Trump-Putin summit in Shenzhen could kick-start peace in Ukraine

CCG’s President says there will be no diplomatic masterstroke in Ukraine’s absence, but serious consideration of a ceasefire can lay the groundwork for peace

[from the Center for China & Globalization, 31 October 2026]

Below is the latest opinion column by Henry Huiyao Wang [王辉耀], founder and President, Center for China and Globalization, published in the South China Morning Post.

At the recent Valdai Discussion Club, I asked Russian President Vladimir Putin if he would be open to meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Shenzhen. I also asked, more broadly, what role China could play in promoting peace in Ukraine, mediating and contributing to peacekeeping.

Putin was receptive, warmly welcoming the idea of a China-hosted meeting. Trump, too, has expressed a willingness to meet Xi and Putin. These expressions of openness offer an opportunity we must seize in pursuit of peace.

Some in the United States and Europe question the value of such a summit. They may fear restoring Putin’s standing or normalising the conflict without yielding any real progress towards an end to the war. That risk is still real but these largely Western fears must be tempered by the very real, very human cost of letting the war continue unabated.

From the very beginning of the war, I have been arguing that China has a constructive role to play. In March 2022, less than three weeks into Russia’s invasion, I wrote an article in The New York Times titled “It’s Time to Offer Russia an Offramp. China Can Help With That.”

In August last year, I extended that train of logic in Foreign Policy, where I proposed a seven-party format for peace negotiations and suggested that a peacekeeping force include troops from European and BRICS countries. A meeting of the three leaders in Shenzhen could help lay the groundwork for these broader diplomatic and peacekeeping efforts.

Without Ukraine’s participation, such a meeting is unlikely to produce a diplomatic masterstroke that ends the war. But the three leaders need not put the war to rest at a table in Shenzhen to make progress. Serious consideration of a ceasefire along the current line of contact—an approach Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has supported—could give peace efforts fresh momentum, leaving the final status of disputed territories for subsequent negotiations.

Further agreement could be sought on the protection of nuclear facilities, or a mutual end to strikes on energy infrastructure, new prisoner exchanges or improved humanitarian access. Of course, issues of sovereignty, security guarantees, Russia’s security concerns and Europe’s security commitments would remain. But these need not all be resolved at once before a ceasefire can begin.

Already, years of war have inflicted immense suffering on both Russia and Ukraine. Neither side achieved its objectives, and both need a dignified way out that protects their core interests. Thus, we must open a path towards peace without requiring either side to concede defeat. China could help bridge this gap by bringing Xi, Trump and Putin together in Shenzhen to explore how a ceasefire and wider negotiations involving Ukraine might work.

The United Nations could stand at the core of such an arrangement by monitoring any ceasefire and preventing a return to fighting by physical peacekeeping if the parties are so inclined.

For a broader negotiation on settlement, I find myself returning to a seven-party format that would bring together the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, France, Russia, Britain and the U.S.—alongside Ukraine and the European Union. An understanding reached in Shenzhen could give momentum to this broader negotiating process and free up the Security Council for action.

A peacekeeping force composed entirely of NATO or European troops might be unacceptable to Russia. Yet a mission without European participation would struggle to reassure Ukraine and its neighbours. Any workable arrangement would need to address both concerns.

In my Foreign Policy article, I proposed a peacekeeping force drawing troops from five European countries—Germany, France, Britain, Poland and Italy—and five members of the BRICS grouping, such as China, India and Brazil. And while the exact formulation, from the composition and mandate to the terms of deployment, would need to be negotiated with the consent of Russia and Ukraine, and the agreement of the contributing countries, the core idea remains sound.

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the largest contributor of peacekeeping personnel among the five permanent members, China is well positioned to help. Its distinctive role in the global economy and dialogue with Russia, Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe, give it channels through which to coax the parties towards peace. But this process must begin somewhere, and that somewhere could be Shenzhen.

Nor should APEC be the end of the diplomatic effort. With an understanding reached by the leaders in Shenzhen, the Security Council may pick up the momentum by advancing ceasefire and peacekeeping proposals. The Group of 20 could then join the effort to rally support from major economies with an interest in maintaining the deal. Each would play a different role and would not be tasked with settling the entire conflict.

China’s role in the Saudi Arabia-Iran rapprochement in 2023 showed Beijing’s ability to open a door after years of enmity. The Ukraine war is different, and there can be no guarantee of a similar outcome. But diplomacy must begin somewhere, particularly when fighting has brought such destruction.

The central question is whether such a meeting could help bring the war to an end. In that light, any gain in prestige for an individual leader is almost irrelevant. And if the three leaders could agree on practical steps towards peace, they would give the United Nations and the wider international community a material basis upon which peace could be built.

Education and the Historical Swirl: Part II

We concluded Part I on this topic with the following comments which we wish students to incorporate into their educations, irrespective of the major, field or concentration:

The gold standard itself, dominated from London led to intricate problems: Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (published in 1992) by Barry Eichengreen, the leading historian of monetary systems, shows the downstream pitfalls of the gold standard.

In other words, the de facto emergence of Britain/London as the world commercial and policy center and the relation of this emergence to empire and international tensions and rivalries, means it is very problematical for any country to steer a course other than staying in tandem with British moods and ideologies, such as free trade. Any country by itself would find it difficult to have a more independent policy. (Friedrich List of Germany, who died in 1846, wrestles with these difficulties somewhat.) The attempts to find “autonomy and autarky” in the interwar years (Germany, Japan, Italy) led to worse nightmares. The world seems like a “no exit” arena of ideologies and rivalries.

The “crazy dynamics” and the semi-anarchy of the system, which continues to this day and is even worse, means that policy-making is always seen through a “dark windshield.”

History in the globalizing capitalist centuries, the nineteenth and the twentieth, is a kind of turbulent swirl and not a rational “walk.”

Here’s a bizarre but necessary comment on this sense of turbulent and surprising swirl propelling history forwards and backwards and sidewards at the same time:

The historian, Barry Eichengreen (mentioned above), is a distinguished analyst of world monetary systems at U.C. Berkeley and perhaps the leading expert today on the evolution of such systems.

From movies such as Shoah and Last of the Unjust by the great filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, we know that Barry Eichengreen’s mother was Lucille Eichengreen, a Jew born in Hamburg, Germany (1925) and deported to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland during World War II. She survived through many miraculous accidents and contingencies, then wrote about her experiences.

We get a deeper insight into “the way of the world” by seeing that the Holocaust itself has as a backdrop the anarcho-craziness of the world. The Fascists and Nazis were jumping from the “frying pan into the fire” by imagining that world conquest and world-murdering could “stop the world.” They and their favored populations could “get off” and step into a racial dreamworld. They were taking today’s concept of “gated community” and applying it to the “racial community” (Volksgemeinschaft, in German).

This led to the phenomenon depicted in Goya’s famous aquatint: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

The perceived madness of the world and the madness of leaders that this perception leads to have never been analyzed together.

The fact that the behavior of world leaders could be “crazy like a fox” (half-insane, half-opportunistic, or Machiavellian “clever”) is a complicating factor or twist from Mussolini until today.

Memes, Tropes and “Signs” in the “University” That Surrounds Us

A famous face or tune or quip or saying or photo constitutes the raw material for a shared cultural understanding around the world. Everybody somehow knows “James Bond” or “Mercedes” or “Big Ben” in London or the “Eiffel Tower” in Paris.

Think of the Polish movie masterpiece from the mid-fifties, Kanał by Wajda. It shows the doomed resistance story of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against the Germans, which followed the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion of a year earlier.

“Kanał” means sewer, and the story takes place in the sewers of Warsaw as this band of resistance fighters tries to avoid being killed by the Germans who still have overwhelming military superiority in weapons, ammunition, etc.

At one point these fighters enter a Polish “bourgeois” home (i.e., great wealth is on display) and one of them, Michal, the classical musician, played by Sheybal (whom you will have seen as a villain in James Bond movies) goes over to the piano they find, a Bechstein, and “plays around” including the famous tango from Uruguay and Argentina, “La cumparsita” (the little parade) which went “viral” (for its time) around 1916-1917 “radiating out” from Uruguay and Argentina.

Famous versions of this tango include Carlos Gardel’s and performances by orchestras led by Juan d’Arienzo, Osvaldo Pugliese and Astor Piazzolla. “La cumparsita” is very popular at milongas; it is a common tradition for it to be played as the last dance of the evening.

The song was named cultural and popular anthem of Uruguay by law in 1997.

Appearances in Movies

Gene Kelly dances to “La cumparsita” in the film Anchors Aweigh (1945). The song was included in a ballroom scene of the film Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which Gloria Swanson and William Holden danced the tango. In the 2006 dance movie Take the Lead, Jenna Dewan, Dante Basco and Elijah Kelley danced to a remixed version.

In the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, “La cumparsita” is played by a blindfolded Cuban band during a scene in which Jack Lemmon dressed in drag dances with overstated flair in the arms of Joe E. Brown who thinks Lemmon is a woman (“Daphne—you’re leading again”). During the filming in 1958, actor George Raft taught the other two men to dance the tango for this scene.

Miscellaneous

In the Olympic Games of Sydney 2000, the Argentine team marched with the Uruguayan music “La cumparsita.” This originated protests and official claims from the Uruguayan government. The work was also an opening part of an infamous radio drama: The War of the Worlds was broadcast as an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. This was directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles.

Many artistic gymnasts have used variations of the song as their floor routine soundtracks including Vanessa Atler (1998–99), Jamie Dantzscher (2000), Oana Petrovschi (2001–02), Elvire Teza (1998), Elise Ray (1997–98), Natalia Ziganshina (2000), Maria Kharenkova (2013) and MyKayla Skinner (2011–12). Joannie Rochette skated to the song for her short program during the 2009–2010 season, most famously skating a clean performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics after the sudden death of her mother.

Students should realize as part of an education, thought of in the sense we are introducing here, that the world is an “ambient” ecosystem of these cultural icons, memes and tropes and one should be attune to them and how they connect the world into something like a semi-shared experience.

Notice, say, that the Bechstein piano, played by Michal (Vladek Sheybal) in the movie Kanał (he later goes mad and playing an ocarina, starts reciting lines from Dante and loses his mind) is the name of the Bechstein family which were instrumental in the rise of Hitler. The irony should be part of the student’s viewing experience and should show how “screwy” the world is.

Notice too that there’s an ocarina-playing character in the movie Stalag 17 who’s described as mentally unwell.

All of these aspects are part of the material world and the iconic world and the world of “signs” that are part of our education, understood as ambience of which the campus is one part only.

The Captive Mind Book and Intellectual Danger

The Captive Mind, by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, is a classic work in the domain of “mental freedom” and resistance to propaganda and every kind of brainwashing. Every nation state is to some extent a “lie factory” and a “deception machine.” A person has to “fend off” this manipulative or ideological power grab.

This very handbook of mini-essays, “Meta Intelligence,” is itself partly a defense of the non-captive mind, in the tradition of the Miłosz book. On the other hand, there’s a danger here “on the other side” since there’s a “free floating intellectual” temptation to take a sneering attitude towards all belief systems and to look down on the average person. There are dangers on all sides of this “non-captivity” of the mind. By embracing globalized and cosmopolitan education and by looking for knowledge connections in lectures, fields, universities, we look for a mental stance which is non-captive but not dismissive of believers. The French have a saying for this sense of intellectual superiority, “de haut en bas,” talking from “high to low,” from top to bottom.

Our purpose is to promote educational understanding, re-enchantment and “homemade” exercises in holism and not to promote superiority attitudes. Herman Melville’s Ishmael, the only survivor in Moby-Dick is tolerant and cosmopolitan and not exclusionary or monomaniacal like Ahab or Starbuck. Ishmael’s receptivity to things is a good model for such improved education, whether by life, whaling ships, academe.

The Captive Mind (Polish: Zniewolony umysł) is a 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.

It was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author’s defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. While writing The Captive Mind, Miłosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland. The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, the thought processes of those who believe in it, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the post-war Soviet Bloc. Miłosz describes the book as having been written “under great inner conflict.”

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born: June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania
Died: August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland
Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature