One year into the full scale invasion of Russia on Ukraine,
@JournalGenocide
reminds you some articles from its special issue on the war, among them mine. Take a look at all of them, including
@irgarner
one!
One of the saddest and long-term consequences of the Russian invasion on Ukraine is the attitude of most of the Western leftwing intellectuals. Which is, in short, a disgrace. And this is a suitable response to that disgrace.
Crazy war stories: Apparently 8 Russian soldiers died after a Ukrainian babushka treated them with some pastries. They turned out to be (intentionally) poisonous.
Reader, you probably don't know this, but in Poland the biggest scandal rn is the fact that on 16th of December a Russian missile fell 15 km from the NATO training centre in Bydgoszcz and the government decided to quiet it out of embarrassment. 1/6
Harsh truth of working in Polish academia (in humanities at least): the best university in Poland, Assistant Professorship in 20th century history.
5400 PLN (1242 EUR) brut.
4011 PLN (922,26 EUR) net.
These days, renting a flat in Warsaw costs approximately 600 EUR.
#phdlife
We wouldn't have known all this if a random person hadn't found it in the forest late April and reported this to the police. All the govt officials and forces of order were so tight-lipped about it that media started conducting their own investigations, and it turned out that 2/6
Winters in Paris make me long for the Eastern European central heating systems. Against the cold-white-bears-snow stereotype of that part of the continent, I have never been that cold in Poland as I have been cold either in Florence or in Paris 🥶🥶🥶
the wrongdoing and said that they *did* report this incident to their supervisors in MoD. I am really curious to see who is gonna end up fired, and I hope that it will be the chief of defence for covering it up. 6/6
not only was it a missile, but also the one used only by Russians these days: Ch-55 (Kh-55 in English). According to the Polish Air Force Institute of Technology had to come from the east, as there is no place in Poland that either stores or has those missiles. Apparently, as 3/6
to anyone, and the entire thing came out 3 weeks ago, when a random person reported seeing parts of the missile. Like, the PM didn't know anything about that. So now in the govt there's a blaming game, and Minister of Defence is trying to put the blame on generals who deny 5/6
Today in Warsaw unfolds the last anti-governmental demonstration before the upcoming elections (in 2 weeks already!), organized by the liberal opposition, the Civic Coalition (Civic Platform + former smaller parties). I'd say there's good 200k people there.
Fot. Sławomir Kamiński
the RMF FM radio reports, the Polish forces were observing the missile but lost it out of sight and even tried to find it, but after a couple days abandoned the search. What's even more interesting, they, according to the Ministry of Defence, haven't reported the incident 4/6
Just wanted to underline I'm very much leftwing myself: hence I expect people with whom I seem to share values to stand a proper moral ground, not to be blinded by moral superiority that does not exist in real life. 🤷🏻♀️
12 days, over 1 million refugees fled to Poland. WE NEED HELP with the humanitarian crisis. Volunteers and citizens alone won't be able to carry the entire weight of relief.
Since I unexpectedly got a good hundred of new followers because of sharing an excellent response to Chomsky et consortes:
Hi, I'm Olga, PhD researcher in 1944-48 European intellectual history. Usually tweeting about series, theatre, writing (mine and others!) and history. 👋
Source:
It's been found in an intercepted conversation of a Russian soldier with his girlfriend, and published by Anton Gerashchenko (
@Gerashchenko7
). Link to the conversation here:
Today in Warsaw unfolds the last anti-governmental demonstration before the upcoming elections (in 2 weeks already!), organized by the liberal opposition, the Civic Coalition (Civic Platform + former smaller parties). I'd say there's good 200k people there.
Fot. Sławomir Kamiński
Happy birthday, Hannah Arendt, born
#otd
in 1906. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction [...] and the distinction between true and false [...] no longer exist.”
If you are wondering whether to come from afar and help volunteers, I would suggest: spend the money you'd spend on your flight on donation to an NGO. This is a long-term crisis, and regular people won't handle its financial aspect. We need to help. But we heed to help wisely.
Today is the anniversary of murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. And it seems to me that while she is very well-known among the Western Left, as a person from Poland, it is shocking how little she has been present in the collective consciousness (t)here. 🧵
Ah, to teach at Oxford for 1300 pounds per month... But don't worry, thanks to free lunches you will be able to spend all those money on a shitty room! 🤡💔🫥
"Twitter became the place where I could gather with academics beyond my institution and discipline, a kind of invisible college."
This is the key point re: levels of damage done by Eoln after buying this platform. Twitter used to be a place of production of knowledge that 1/
Dear
#twitterstorians
and others, if any of your Ukrainian or Ukrainian-based friends needs a place to stay in Poland, a transport from the border, or from Lviv - let me know. I can help with my network (and back to Warsaw on Tue to help more). Please feel free to RT.
So it seems that
#Ukraine
will introduce same-sex civil partnerships. AMAZING news, congratulations!
But I can't help but think bitterly:
#Poland
, my home country, could not have done this for the past 20 or so years. And a country that is *at war* and *under siege* can.
Ugh.
I severely underestimated how relieved, at least until the next hot mess, I will be when PiS loses the elections. And yet, despite the world on fire, there's this tiiiny little hope that perhaps not everything will go downhill immediately. 🤞
#PolandElection
It's a big one. 80 years after the Warsaw Getto Uprising a new photo roll with pictures made by a young firefighter was found. It is going to be a very important addition to quite scarce amount of visual sources we have.
Wyjątkowe odkrycie! Po blisko 80 latach, na początku grudnia 2022 r. w rodzinnych zbiorach zostały znalezione oryginalne, kompletne klisze fotograficzne z powstania w getcie warszawskim ze zdjęciami strażaka Zbigniewa Leszka Grzywaczewskiego.
Więcej: 👉
Before I leave this place that became an insufferable playground for the far-right, I wanted to say that I am looking for a job in Paris: think tanks, policy making, NGOs, academia, too, but ideally something more tangible. Some interviews are lined up, but open to conversations.
To all who criticize the
#Vogue
photoshoot of Zelenski and Zelenska: get off your high horse and leave moral superiority elsewhere. These people try to remind people about thewar by any possible means and we can't see 10% of their efforts. Really, just support
#Ukraine
instead.
For
#twitterstorians
who read German and are interested in
#queerstudies
, a great book by Joanna Ostrowska has been translated from Polish:
"Jene. Homosexuelle während des Zweiten Weltkriegs".
Check it out!
I know that the English-language media picked up on the Polish PM assessment of the
#Wagner
group possibly infiltrating Poland soon, but I would be *very* cautious in believing this. Do remember that Poland is in the midst of an electoral campaign, and Law and Justice uses 1/4
One of the photos that inspired me to choose immediate post-WW2 history in 🇵🇱, 🇫🇷, 🇬🇧 and 🇩🇪was that made by Michael Nash from
@AP
in Warsaw in 1946. It shows everything I have been writing about: the destruction, the hope, the need to rebuild lives, the contrast between the two.
"I’m obsessed with punctuation. I am interested in commas, semicolons, full stops, indents, blank spaces [...]", says in his very compelling (only too short!) interview for
@VersoBooks
Carlo Ginzburg. Check it out,
#twitterstorians
.
Got an ERC grant from
@EUI_EU
to make a quantitative text analysis of post-WW2 intellectual discourse! Very excited (and open to suggestions of readings to polish my methodology in QTA!)
PMQs: Starmer draws on the impact of the cost of living...
"The average family in Britain will be poorer than the average family in Poland. We're going to see a generation of young people learning to say 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' in Polish", says Starmer
Many of you ask me where to direct donations in Poland. Here it is, then: a thread of NGOses who are legit and have been doing an amazing job not only now, but for years
#Ukraine
#IStandWithUkraine
️
1/
On a more positive note, today signed up my contract for an adaptation of 'Orlando' by Virginia Woolf. Premiere: 25th June (if world events won't disturb it). Can't wait to work with a brilliant director Aga Błońska, actors and guests!
I.Just.Can't. As a left-wing person, this myopia is heart-breaking. Now I'm even prouder of the Polish
@partiarazem
party who unequivocally opposes Russian war on Ukraine while not losing contact with reality we're in. We need to provide Ukraine with aid. It's the least we can do
Labour’s former leader Jeremy Corbyn condemning Britain’s crucial military aid to Ukraine in an interview he granted to a pro-Russian, pro-Assad, pro-Hezbollah, Iranian-linked propaganda media outlet. Yikes.
@bctallis
I had to take a double-check of a date of this tweet, because I could not believe there would be someone talking like this 9 months into the war.
Can't wait for the day I will be writing the acknowledgement section of my PhD. Not even because it will mean an end of the
#PhD
writing process, but because I can't wait to show the whole world how grateful I am to so many people for being so supportive during this time.
Refugee stories in 🇵🇱 now are becoming heavier and heavier: more arriving people need special help (high risk pregnancies, cancer treatments, need for mental health medications). Yet, systemic help dedicated to 🇺🇦 in 🇵🇱 is still nowhere to be seen. Everything is voluntary-based.
To see so much antisemitism on pro-Palestinian, and therefore also anti-hate and anti-violence demonstrations, is sickening. How can one credibly support a cause if a person next to them carries out a hateful poster? Please, if you're demonstrating on whichever side, react.
Just passed two young men who came to Warsaw to spread the Latter-day Saints word (for some reason, there are many of those in Poland). With opened beer bottles. I'm afraid they have experienced Polonisation more than Poland experienced their evangelisation 😅
On the other hand, the Polish science institution called NAWA (National Agency for Academic Exchange) offers Poles with non-Polish PhDs special program called "Polish Returns", offering quite decent money and work environment. But I can't help but think that it is somehow unfair.
As I am watching the news about demonstration in Prague that turned from a protest about the cost of living into an anti-Ukrainian happening, I cannot help but wonder how will this autumn and winter look like in Poland. 1/5