Did you know socialism was bad? You did? Good. Because it is, you know. Bad, that is – not good. Just thought you might need straightening out on that point, the one about socialism being bad. A lot of you westerners think it’s good, you see. But it’s not. It’s bad.

This kind of preaching mars the work of many an older Polish writer. (You don’t find it so much in the younger generation.) Along with the constant reminders that socialism is bad there often goes a chippy, complaining tone about how westerners not only don’t appreciate how bad socialism is (not even “was”) but have the cheek to complain about conditions in the west. As if any kind of attempted move by westerners in the direction of social justice was a betrayal of Sakharov, the Warsaw uprising, Katy?… there’s nothing in the shops goddammit! You can probably imagine how much sympathy they have for 1968.

Henryk Grynberg expresses his disgust for student protests in 1960s America. It’s little enough they have to complain about, the suggestion is (the Vietnam war, Jim Crow etc.) This attitude even spoils some of Mro?eks’ later writing (Uwagi osobiste, a collection of columns from, of course, Gazeta Wyborcza – they know socialism is bad) and he, before 1989 was one of the funniest and best critics. And it’s not just writers. Real flesh and blood people of a certain age and voting inclination will sometimes give you little lectures on the Bolshevik evils of progressive taxation, free education, equal rights for minorities… They will goggle in disbelief when told that people demonstrated against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax and roll their eyes at striking Frenchmen, who should just be glad they’re not in Gulags.

The Czech writer, Josef Škvorecký, touches on the subject in his The Engineer of Human Souls. Being Czech, rather than Polish, the tone is lighter (though it is a sad book) and he has much more “distance” to the subject, as Poles are fond of saying (but less so of doing). Škvorecký brings Czech immigrants into confrontations with Canadian and US malcontents showing the absurdity of both the supporters of Cuba’s intervention in Angola and well-off students insisting that America is a prison on the one hand and – on the other – the Czech musician complaining that the communists won’t let him buy a castle (“who would want to live in a castle?” asks one westerner. Well, “little castle” would really be a better translation, comes the answer) and the anti-Semitism of some of the fanatically anti-communist Czech immigrants who are also casually racist, as if they regarded the Black Civil Rights movement as some kind of a Stalinist plot. (You could accuse Škvorecký of dodging the issue: there seems to be no character, for example, who hates communism but also thinks Blacks should have the vote.)

But some years before Grynberg, H?asko, Libera, Herbert and people who think westerners should shut up and be quiet while easterners set the course of social justice back a century or two there was Jaroslav Hašek, of Good Soldier Švejk fame, who wrote in Rudé Právo newspaper (butt of Škvorecký’s jokes) about people who were petty enough to complain about social justice in Czechoslovakia:

“Take, for example, the situation in Tonkin, where MPs, after the dissolution of parliament, were whipped, executed and quartered. When a parliament sitting here is postponed, are any of our MPs quartered? Before anyone starts to complain that they are persecuted here, let him look at Siam. The government there is absolutist, which means the ruler can cut the head off anybody he likes. Here people are free to walk around with no heads.

Anyone who knows these things and complains about lack of freedom is a blackguard.”