Tak jak po drugiej wojnie swiatowej i rozpoczeciu (pierwszej) zimnej wojny USA musialoby pomoc Polsce, jak pomoglo RFN sie odbudowac i stworzyc najsilniejsze i najbogatsze panstwo w Europie. Poniewaz tym razem, Polska a nie Niemcy w konfrontacji z mongolsko-barbarzynska Rosja stalaby na pierwszym froncie wraz z Amerykanami.
"US accuses Iran over Iraq bombs" (BBC NEWS - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6351257.stm).
Wczoraj jeszcze obejrzalem do konca "Na luzie". Ada i Bernardetta nadawaly z Klubu Mink (Mink Night Club - http://www.clubzone.com/c/Toronto/Nightclub/MINK_NightClub_and_lounge.html). A progrm skonczyl sie: "Ty chcesz dla ciebie czuje, ze moge biec po niebie" Wykonawcy, ktorego nazwiska nie zdazylem przeczytac na vidio.
Pozniej (20:00-22:00) obejrzalem na CNN wspanialy dokument pt. "The Journalist and the Jihadi". Dwie sylwetki osob. Pierwszy, Daniel Pearl, Amerykanin zydowskiego pochodzenia. Korespondent The Wall Street Journal. Zakochany w cywilizacji arabskiej i Islamie. Zwany "Daniel of Arbia". Drugi, Omar Sheikh, Brytyjczyk pakistanskiego pochodzenia. Fanatyczny islamista wypowiadajacy wojne Izraelowi i USA. Agent pakistanskich sluzb specjalnych ISI. Pearl zostaje porwany przez Sheikha, sprzedany Arabom z al Kaidy i sciety na oczach calego swiata.
Daniel Pearl byl dobrym zurnalista dochodzeniowym. Jego mottem, jako reportera politycznego, bylo: "always fallow the money".
Tropem pieniedzy doszedl do Islamabadu i ISI wspierajacych Islamistow. Pearl zostal brutalnie zamordowany. Omar Sheik zlapany przez FBI i pakistanska policje. Skazany jak bandzior i terrorysta na powieszenie.
Dwie sylwetki. Godnego i honorowego Amerykanina, ktory zostal w koncu bohaterem na wszechczasy i Brytyjczyka. Inteligentnego osilka. Reprezentyjacego cywilizacje smierci. Chaos i zniszczenie. Amerykanin przyniosl chwale i glorie dla narodu zydowskiego, Brytyjczyk wstyd i hanbe dla narodu pakistanskiego, z ktorych sie wywodzili.
Kopenhaga - Krolowa Danii Malgorzata II poddala sie w czwartek w kopenhaskiej klinice operacji wstawienia endoprotezy prawego kolana - podaly zrodla szpitalne. Po tygodniowej hospitalizacji krolowa odpoczywac bedzie w palacu Amalienborg w Kopenhadze "Z dalekopisow Polskiej Agencji Prasowej...", GAZETA 29, 9 - 11 lutego 2007).
Pisalem juz kilka razy, ze warszawski palac Stalina powinno sie poslac do wszystkich diablow. Tymczasem obiekt uznano za zabytek chroniony ustawami, jako "polskie dziedzictwo narodowe".
W zyciu narodu nie ma wazniejszej rzeczy niz duch. Jesli jest silny - gory sie przenosi, gdy karleje - narod caly schodzi na psy. Rozumieli to dobrze nasi dziadowie, ktorzy rozebrali pozostajaca po czasach carskich cerkiew w Warszawie - symbol rosyjskiej lapy nad stolica Polski. Palac Stalina jest symbolem sowieckiego podboju naszego kraju. Wolni ludzie nie moga zyc w cieniu symbolu podboju ich narodu. To mniej wiecej tak, jakbysmy sobie zawiesili na scianie fotografie gwalconej matki. Ludzie, ktorzy podjeli decyzje o zrobieniu z palacu zabytku, nie maja dobrze pod sklepieniem, a jesli maja, to nie sa Polakami (Andrzej Kumor, "Nie ma wazniejszej rzeczy niz duch", GONIEC, 9-15 lutego 2007).
THE INVESTIGATORS GROUP
Toronto Private Investigators
Be very wary of Russia's spreading 'Putinism,'
warns noted historian Anne Applebaum
'Best-Dressed brain'
BY PETER GOODSPEED
The night communism died in Germany Anne Applebaum and two Polish journalists jumped into her tiny car in Warsaw and drove all night to reach Berlin.
A young freelance reporter who had just spent a year covering the triumph of Solidarity in Poland for Britain's Economist magazine, Ms. Applebaum was determined to witness history.
But little did she and her friends know, as they raced through the night along the crowded two-lane roads of Poland and East Germany, past Russian army trucks spewing black smoke and sputtering Trabant cars, that the world was about to be transformed.
Waved through checkpoints in East Berlin by sullen armed guards who had no clear orders what to do, the journalists drove through the near-deserted streets past the Brandenburg Gate and found a crowd of thousands sitting atop the Berlin Wall.
"There are only so many champagne bottles that you can open and there are only so many times you can sing Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber alles," Ms. Applebaum says now. "It must have been 4 a.m. and the people on top of the wall were bored and restless. Some started to chip away at the wall and to tease the guards and shout at them. Others tried to jump across into East Berlin and were rounded up by the guards and pushed back.
"It was actually tense and scary," she recalls. "It was really uncertain what would happen. We remember it now as peaceful revolution, but it could have gone differently."
In the end, the young American reporter who had landed in journalism in a bid to avoid writing her PhD thesis in history at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, got the story of her life. "It was like the French Revolution," the 43-year-old Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Washington Post columnist says, "It was a moment of change after which everything was different - certainly in European politics and to some extent everywhere. It affected the Middle East and China as well. "That's when my career really began," she adds. "It was fun and uplifting and the people involved were interesting. It was a great story."
In the weeks and years that followed, Ms. Applebaum earned a reputation as outstanding journalist, covering the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.
She spent nearly a decade writing for premier British publications such as The Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard and the Spectator magazine.
A first book, Between East and West: Accross the Borderlands of Europe, described a journey through Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. A second, Gulag: A History, was 677-page account of the origins and development of Soviet concentration camps that drew upon archival material released after the collapse of the Soviet system. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and was described as "landmark work of historical scholarship."
Last year Ms. Applebaum was ranked No. 13 on the British newspaper The Observer's "Best-Dressed Brains List of 2006," described as "a Stalin expert with a severe elegance."
She ended up marrying one of the Polish journalists who accompanied her to the Berlin Wall - Radek Sikorski, a former student leader of Solidarity who had sought refuge in Britain in the early 1980s, attended Oxford and worked briefly as a war correspondent in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and Angola.
He's now a member of Poland's parliament and Defence Minister - until last Monday when he suddenly resigned after a confrontation with Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - responsible for sending 1,000 Polish troops to southern Afghanistan, while simultaneously withdrawing troops from Iraq.
"1989 changed my life," Ms. Applebaum says. "I was technically supposed to be writing a PhD at Oxford. But it was clear to me I wasn't going to write it, and I decided to do something else for a while. I began travelling with the idea I could write articles and people would pay me for them and I could keep travelling."
But once the Berlin Wall came down, the old world was transformed into Old Europe and New Europe. Ms. Applebaum, a Yale graduate who studied at the London School of Economics and Oxford and a Marshall Scholarship, was ideally positioned to interpret and comment on the change. Fluent in English, French, Polish and Russian, she moved through Europe's new landscape with ease, writing about the death of dictators and dictatorships, Eastern Europe's aspirations and the old continent's ambitions.
"If you have lived in a lot of places and have political and professional and emotional ties to different countries, you end up seeing the world differently," she says. "Once you've seen your own civilization from the outside, it looks different. I don't think I had any interesting opinions until I could see America from the outside, until I confronted actual problems that people were having in other countries."
This week, Ms. Applebaum travelled to Toronto, where she shared her opinions with some of the city's leading intellectuals at the Grano Speaker Series organized by Rudyard Griffiths and Patric Luciani of the Dominion Institute.
One point she drove home repeatedly was that "the past continues to matter in contemporary politics and lives on in all kinds of ways." While Europe no longer lives in the shadow of the Cold War's ideological confrontations, it endures the uncertainty of an emerging authoritarianism in Russia.
"The communist ideology is definitely gone. Nobody pays much attention anymore. Nobody takes it seriously. "But the system and the institutions remain and they have transmogrified themselves into something new, which I call Putinism or managed democracy."
The old KGB lives on in new guises and the harassment of modern dissidents grows harsher. Russia, flush with cash from its oil and gas industry, is now better positioned than at any time since the 1970s to throw its weight around in Europe. "Putinism, with its managed democracy of false political parties and fake institutions, is becoming a model for other countries," Ms. Applebaum says. "It has been adopted by Venezuela and the Iranians are very interested in it. Russia's political elite have become clearly anti-American and anti-Western, and they are setting themselves up as a sort of alternative to the West, an alternative power centre to the United States."
Russia is also trying to export its system of "managed democracy" to other countries that surround it and continues to undermine democratic revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.
"Over the next year or two, watch Russian behaviour in central Europe, because as they are beginning to have success in their old empire, they are beginning to be more aggresive in targeting social groups and politicians in central Europe," she says.
In many ways, she is still reporting on the changes that swept Europe on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, when she watched the crowd begin to tear down the Wall under the gaze of nervous border guards (NATIONAL POST, Saturday, February 10, 2007).
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