Theocrats in Poland

Books & Culture has an interesting profile of Polish human rights activist Adam Michnik and his respect for the political thought of Pope Benedict and resistance to Catholic fundamentalism in his home country:

"We are witnessing an alliance between a significant part of the clergy and those forces the democrat-skeptic calls 'the new populism.' The rhetoric of the new populists is Manichaean. They claim to be serving the absolute good rooted in the Church's teachings and fighting the absolute evil present in the theories and practices of their adversaries. They intoxicate themselves with the cult of their own sinlessness, narcotizing the public opinion with campaigns against ever new threats, with attacks on ever new scapegoats, with ever new witch-hunts."

"They often declare their ardent anti-communism, and yet they are genuine children of the communist mentality, with its obsessive suspiciousness and its contempt for truth and the law. There lives in the 'new populists' the spirit of homo sovieticus, with its primitive egalitarianism, its collectivistic aversion toward the heretics, its belief that the state should regulate all mechanisms of social life and that the state's will is the source of morality and truth about the world. This becomes particularly powerful when the state—that is, the ruling élite—refers to the Chruch's teachings, and the Church consents to that."

Rob