Remix News

Tag: Tolerance

  • Poland’s long history of tolerance

    Lubach writes that the believers in the multiculturalism of the First Polish Republic, including my father who raised me in the spirit of respect for others, rightly underlined the religious tolerance written into state law in the Warsaw Confederation Act of January 28th, 1573.

    Owing to this, the Poland of old was a country without stakes, and many non-Catholic believers living in the Catholic kingdom, such as Orthodox and Protestant nobility, Armenians, Tatars and Karaims, who enjoyed full rights as citizens. Jews weren’t persecuted and were allowed to govern themselves according to their own laws.

    Today’s screamers, who accuse Poland of eternal radical non-tolerance, should be reminded that the Warsaw Confederation’s text was written into the UNESCO Memory of the World. Rightly so, as during the time of establishing the act of tolerance in Poland, Western Europe, which was ruled by absolutist monarchs, the rule of “cuius regio, eius religio” reigned, which meant that the subjects had to worship the same religion as the king, which led to terrible wars.

    Today, uneducated fools put forward as an example of tolerance, the inheritors of those bloody nations – the French, Germans and Dutch. Two hundred years ago, the enemy of all despotism and great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov said, “this would be amusing, if it weren’t so terrifying!”

    Macron and Timmermans are to be our moral authorities! Why shouldn’t Robespierre and his admirer Pol Pot also play that role?

    I learned to appreciate true Polish tolerance in the spirit of the First Polish Republic on my own skin. And it wasn’t thanks to the “enlightened” high lords, but ordinary people, often not really educated, but following basic Christian rules, which have been ingrained in their genes or souls. This manifested itself during the martial law period in Poland.

  • Criticism may not be considered illegitimate

    An angry father wrote an email to the director of the kindergarten his child attends, saying he “refuses to tolerate multi-culture propaganda” because he noticed that in the kindergarten, children have a doll whose skin is not white. He said that if the nursery does not get rid of the doll, he will post photos on social media and make a negative ad about it.

    Despite the parent’s reaction or his moral status, it is the court’s reaction, which dismissed the complaint against his prosecution, that is worth the attention. It is an expression of today’s policy that a parent should be punished for threatening public criticism.

    The father’s behavior was certainly not clever. However, considering the legal context, he has not committed a crime. The question is, did he threaten anyone with a bomb, burning the nursery or at least throwing stones? Such threats could be considered illegitimate.

    But none of those; the only threat was the threat of public criticism. They say that the pen is mightier than the sword, but everyone has to bear with criticism. If someone told me to “stop writing legal commentaries, or they will cruelly criticize them in public,” I would be a fool if I ran to call the police. It is my right to write comments, and it is a critic’s right to criticize them. They cannot forbid me, and I cannot forbid them; nor can I complain that they threaten me with criticism. This is part of my freedom as well as theirs.

    Threatening someone with a bomb is forbidden because blowing something up is an illegitimate expression of disagreement. But a threat of criticism must be allowed. When we ban the threat of criticism, then we ban criticism as an allegedly illegitimate disagreement. We thus limit our freedom of criticism and our freedom of speech.

    The acts of the father was not a crime, and the authorities´ approach to the “criminal threat of criticism of the multi-culturalism” was as shameful as writing such an email. One would like to call it a judicial error, but unfortunately, it was probably not a regrettable mistake, but an expression of current policy.

    It will be interesting to see how the criminal law practice will further develop and whether it will be consistent.