Wojciech Roszkowski Post-Communist Lustration in Poland: a Political and Moral Dilemma Congress of the Societas Ethica, Warsaw 22 August 2009 Draft Not to Be Quoted
Wojciech Roszkowski Post-Communist Lustration in Poland: a Political and Moral Dilemma Congress of the Societas Ethica, Warsaw 22 August 2009 Draft not to be quoted 1. Introduction Quite recently a well-known Polish writer stated that the major dividing line in the Polish society runs across the attitude towards lustration. Some Poles, he said, have been secret security agents or collaborators or, for some reasons, defend this cooperation, others have not and want to make things clear1. Even if this statement is a bit exaggerated, it shows how heated the debates on lustration in Poland are. Secret services in democratic countries are a different story than security services in totalitarian states. Timothy Garton Ash even calls this comparison “absurd”2. A democratic state is, by definition, a common good of its citizens. Some of them are professionals dealing with the protection of state in police, armed forces and special services, all of them being subordinated to civilian, constitutional organs of the state. Other citizens are recruited by these services extremely rarely and not without their consent. In totalitarian states secret services are the backbone of despotic power of the ruling party and serve not the security of a country but the security of the ruling elites. Therefore they should rather be given the name of security services. They tend to bring under their control all aspects of political, social, economic, and cultural life of the subjects of the totalitarian state, becoming, along with uniformed police and armed forces, a pillar of state coercion. Apart from propaganda, which is to make people believe in the ideological goals of the totalitarian state, terror is the main vehicle of power, aiming at discouraging people from any thoughts and deeds contrary to the said goals and even from any activity independent of the party-state.
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