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Aleksander Smolar - How ideology can stifle discourse (145/201)

98 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 2:16 · Indexed 27 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: It was a marvellous year but it was also difficult because of the leftist group around me, and the sympathy everyone, even some of the professors, had for terrorists. There was a rather well-known political scientist there, a German, Krippendorff – who was a leftist from '68. He was a close friend of Rudi Dutschke and so on. I remember meeting him much later in some airport and talking with him there. We were talking – this was before '89 – we obviously had different outlooks – he was very fiery and he said, 'Listen, [El] Salvador or Nicaragua are much closer to me than East Germany'. I looked at him and said, 'You're mad. You've gone mad. This is… you're not being true to yourself'. And that was the end of that conversation.

Later, I met him when I was invited by the same university. I'd been invited by Johns Hopkins University many, many years after this; it was about three years ago for some significant anniversary of the founding of the university. And there was a discussion attended by students of that year and many professors some of whom I knew. I was telling them about Italy and what being there and attending the university had meant to me. Many people found this profoundly disturbing. Krippendorff participated in this round table discussion and so I said, publicly, 'Listen, you presumably don't remember this conversation we had'. For me, it was an alien world. On the one hand there were many people there whose culture and sensitivity I appreciated, while at the same time, the things they said and the way they were stifled by ideology I found absolutely unbearable. I related various facts about the students, conversations, professor and so on. So in some sense I was doing here at this university something similar to what I'd spent a year doing and for which I was enormously grateful.

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