Bernard-Henri Lévy

It was right at the beginning, in the heat of the moment of events developing in Poland, that this text was written. It was 1982. Seven years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a people rose up against the iron will of a communist regime. And Bernard-Henri Lévy had the double merit of saluting the movement and supporting it uncategorically and of immediately taking in the spiritual, actually Catholic, dimension of the affair. The title alludes to the famous slogan of French students who supported Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968: “We are all German Jews”. Written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and taking into consideration the name he bears, this play on words is obviously not without significance or impact.
Liliane Lazar

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We are All Polish Catholics

Yes, it is no doubt not absurd to say that France, in the final analysis, and given the current cowardice, had a less ignominious attitude in reaction to the dramatic events in Poland than most of its neighbors.
First of all, there was public opinion and the undeniable current of solidarity that, coming from the base, gave us a fore-taste, still fragile and precarious, of what might one day be a real mass movement of anti-totalitarianism.
Then there were the intellectuals who, one by one at the beginning, and then very soon collectively, determined to speak, casting reserve aside and, in the same action, up, breaking this fools’ bargain called a state of grace. . .
Our political classes themselves, harassed by the electorate, often managed to get past their habitual Munichois tendencies and take stands one might rightly judge less disgraceful than what we might have expected.
Better still, I had waited too long, hoped too fervently for a statement on the part of the President of the Republic not to acknowledge a loftiness of tone and a firmness of analysis that honoured not only the man himself, but the entire country.
And yet, in spite of that, in spite of all these motives for relative satisfaction, I cannot quite really rejoice, for there is something in the prattle of our socialist France that I continue to find vaguely troubling.

***

Why? There is the slowness, already, of the mobilization, and this foot-dragging, constrained, even a bit sheepish character it has often displayed.
These four or five ministers who, although disowned by the president’s remarks, continue at their posts in the government of a Republic whereas common decency would have demanded their dismissal. All these speeches that, as a result, cross each other, answer each other, overlap and finally cancel each other out in the great disorder of a Left that is at sea, one of doubtful signs and multiple language. The very manner, admittedly rather unusual, in which the secretary of France’s leading political party manages to drag the past of Yves Montand through the mud in order to settle, on the pretext of Poland, who knows what obscure and sick personal accounts.
Just yesterday, and right here, the sinister effect a Minister of Culture’s remarks could not help but provoke when, at the end of his tether, he no longer hesitated to insult—still using the Polish pretext—all those this country counts as committed intellectuals.
But the essential, I believe, is still elsewhere. Beyond the polemics and this little Franco-French war. For what moves and troubles me the most is that the classic Left, despite its touching good will and its none less touching support for the Warsaw revolt, has, paradoxically, failed to understand the reality of what is at stake.

***

For, listen, .
Aren’t you just a little surprised, for example, at these men of the Left who were once jumping the gun to find traces of the CIA beneath Pinochet’s footprints, and who, now, are being so fussy about looking for the Red Army under Jaruzelski’s boots?
What is the source, where does it come from, this amazing fog of words, like a fantasy screen separating us from reality, that prevents one from simply stating, without niceties or reticence, interference or none, that Poland is living in the grip of a fascist regime?
What can one even think of this group of intellectuals who, once again last Sunday, dared to speak of the «tradition of Russian revolutionaries” as the supreme hope of a people for whom the very words “1917” or “revolution” will never again mean anything, we can well imagine, but an odious, atrocious, unbearable sting?
One must consider their words, I think, knowing that, forty years ago, the intellectuals in question never would have dared to offer as a guarantee of support to the victims of Nazi concentration camps the memory of Gregor Strasser, founding member of the Nazi party, and the “revolutionary traditions” of National Socialism in 1925.
Otherwise put, there exists proof, albeit particular and slightly less revolting than life-size, that the French Left is still governed by a «double standard» and that it can only agree to protest against the blatant reality of the “coup” on the condition that it may lie about the totalitarian nature of the State that is responsible for it.

***

All the moreso—and even more significant—since the Left doesn’t understand much about what is happening on the other side, that is to say in the minds of the workers of Warsaw, either.
Really, isn’t it extraordinary that, in all the debates concerning this affair, this Catholic dimension that is nonetheless at the heart of the spirit of Solidarity is so infrequently mentioned?
That there is no one on the Left to declare this simple truth, that in present-day Poland, the executioners speak the language of Marxism, the Holy Virgin helps the oppressed and, for the first time in two thousand years, immense crowds of Christians find themselves persecuted?
Instead of that, Mauroy comes to tell us that the men of Gdansk are the heirs of “the ideals of 89”? Jospin adds that they have «the same values, the same objectives, the same demands” as the union members of Billancourt? All of them, after all, valiant little recruiting sergeants for our national brand of socialism, Lech Walesa in their camp, for our common programs, for our dear old religion of Frenchness?
The truth is that there is something in the faith of Lech Walesa which is fundamentally foreign to the pathetic brew of secularism, materialism, ill-digested Marxism and a vague philosophy of the Enlightenment that constitutes the entirety of the baggage of our apparatchiks.
And it is also that behind all that, behind the extraordinary vitality of this Christian faith, in the advent of this ardent spirituality that is the armour of resistance, a colossal metaphysical element is at stake, one that is infinitely beyond the capacity of secular understanding and might well be the catalyst of tempests we cannot at this time begin to imagine.

***

What, then, hangs in the balance?
I think we have not paid enough attention to the fact that the Polish Church is the only force capable today of offering an alternative of civilization to that of the Socialist bloc.
I do not think we have adequately sized up the fight to the death, the hand-to-hand spiritual combat the other Church, its rival, that of the idolaters of the Kremlin and elsewhere, will face from now on either.
It has not registered with us, either, that when General Jaruzelski launches his antisemitic campaign, the important element is less the «satisfaction» offered public opinion than the gesture in which, for the first time in a long time, he associates Christians and Jews in identical persecution.
Better still, how can one not be reminded that, in imprisoning forty-five thousand Christians guilty of collusion with the “Jewish International», he is taking up, in reverse, and making it dreadfully contemporary, Hitler’s action of burning six million Jews guilty of having invented the Christian International?
The scene takes place, of course, in the country of ghettos, of pogroms, of pyres. The natural and dreadfully present décor is the intense memory of the camps. But this is Poland as well, where a Polish pope once came to pray and contemplate in silence the ground of Auschwitz. And where this Judeo-Catholic front can only inaugurate an earthquake, an unprecedented upheaval, an incredible promise of subversion.
Scandalous, stunning, with its cortege of murders and abominations, the metaphysical war of the late 20th century has just begun in Warsaw.

***

That means that coming to the aid of the Polish people can no longer equal rambling on about this «socialism» whose renewal its little European masters feverishly await but about which the Polish, from the depths of their revolt, do not give a damn.
It is also the reason this great persecution to come, in which the Catholics will be on the front line, no longer has much to do with the universe of the Cold War, the old logic of Yalta, or East-West relations.
I am not even very sure that it should really be recorded, as it is here and there, as a part of this long history that began in Berlin in 1953, ended temporarily in Prague in the spring of 1968, and may find there, on the banks of the Vistula, its humble and bloody ending.
For where did we get the idea, then, that this Polish uprising would “end” anything? How can one fail to hear, at once both familiar and terrifying, the muted rumblings of a radical beginning? Isn’t this beginning the rendez-vous that the Left, our Left, stupid and dazed as usual, has chosen to miss?
In any case, for my part, in these hours of great destitution, the echoes of which occasionally reach us, but in amazingly muffled tones, I have only one phrase to truly honor this martyred, rebel people: «We are all Polish Catholics.»

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Published by Le Matin de Paris, 1982.
(excerpt from Questions de Principe 1, pages 121 à 127 – Bibliothèque Médiations, Denoël, 1983)

Photo 1 : B.H.Lévy, 1980, (c) D.R.
Photo 2 : 1980 – Polish priests with the strikers of the Gdansk shipyards. Lech Walesa in the foreground. (c) D.R.