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slaviclore · 11 months

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who was the last king of Poland?

King Stanisław II August Poniatowski

Was the last legitimate king of Poland from 1764 to 1795. Under his rule, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned by surrounding empires (Russia Prussia and Austria) into extinction. King of a state that no longer existed, SAP abdicated in 1795, and eventually the russian tsars started calling themselves King of Poland.

Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I

Most Poles don't consider them legitimate kings because their crown was taken by partition (ie by force). But! The Polish legislative body the Sejm only formally dethroned Nicholas I in 1831 following the November Uprising of 1830 (the attempted and failed assassination of Nikkis brother Konstantin, the head of the tsarist government in Warsaw). In January, the Sejm voted to depose Nikki and sent him a pink slip which really pissed him off and started a 9 month war that Poland ultimately lost. So if you call Nicholas I the last holder of the Polish crown since he was officially and formally fired from that position, you technically wouldn't be wrong.

Now if you want to get saucy

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski

Was elected head of the Polish government in 1831 when Nikki got deposed. Over the course of the following war, he ended up in exile in Paris. He would eventually be voted as the de facto king of Poland in exile by a Polish right wing political group. Tho other Polish political factions did not support this, and AJC himself did not claim the crown, he dedicated his life to restoring the Polish state and did also have some prominent supporters including our boys Adam Mickiewicz and Fryderyk Chopin.

Tsar Nicholas II

The Russians of course did not consider the deposition of Nikki I as legitimate and went ahead and called 3 more of their tsars king of Poland (2 Alexanders and another Nicholas) -- until Nikki ii abdicated in 1917, ie the implosion of the monarchy during the boleshevik revolution -- tho no self respecting Pole would be caught dead calling them kings.

#i did write this from memory so if i got something wrong pls do correct me #history #poland #polish history #faq

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zwischenstadt · 4 years

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“The Atlanta situation adds to the general picture of difficult times we face. Frankly, I do not expect much in the way of encouraging developments for the next couple of years. In political discussions I have had recently there seems to be a fairly uniform distinction between folks like me who were politically/ideologically formed during the fifties and folks from your generation of the sixties. The sixties folks expect a rather quick, somewhat spontaneous, response to the Reagan economic squeeze and the rightwing political offense. We oldtimers fear at least a partial reaction on the order of the McCarthy era when most of the centrist and liberal forces collapsed. Militant forces were largely isolated and at best were able to carry out defensive strategies.

As I assess our work in the 1950’s, one of our problems was that we moved to the defensive too quickly without contesting the terrain at every point. Too little attention was paid to developing limited offensives, for only in offensives can you raise new questions. After 1949-50 the spector of what happened in Nazi Germany drove many people further underground than was warranted by the actual conditions. Too many networks were dissolved when what was called for was a programmatic updating and re-orientation. In the midst of defending political and economic terrain that was important, the old left lost the capacity to project a vision of a viable alternative society. The only alternatives they put forth were cast in terms of the thirties and the great depression – revive the New Deal coalition and defend the Boleshevik revolution.

The question of projecting alternatives in the 1980’s might be more crucial than it was for the 1950’s. The possibility of barbarism in the U.S. is much greater today, for in the 1950’s American capitalism could solve many of its problems through growth rather than through social and political reorganization. Lots of things came together during that era: world hegemony through victory in World War II; possession of a newly fashioned a vigorous welfare state at home; major technological break throughs in transportation, communications and information processing, plus 20 years of declining energy costs. The 1980’s look quite different: international hegemony is hedged in by national liberation developments, capitalist competition and OPEC; the welfare state has lost its dynamism; energy costs are zooming. The solutions to the problems of the 1950’s and 1960’s that the ruling class were able to work out were all cast in the mainstream of capitalist development. With the exception of McCarthyism, which they eventually curbed, the domestic political solutions operated within the framework of bourgeois democracy. With this room for creative maneuvering they most likely could have preempted even a more aggressive left, as they did in Europe. Now that growth solutions are several (sic) restricted, the ruling class has a diminished capacity for creativity. One illustration of this point is that ideologically they are thrown back to a stale rehash of 19th century economics for public policy debates. The big danger lies in a situation in which the ruling class becomes trapped in a set of problems for which they cannot work out a creative solution. At that point they might embark upon a program of dangerous destructiveness. If the opposition forces only respond with a strategy of defense, there will be no alterative vision of a good society around which to energize and mobilize people. We would then have a society bereft of any hope, even the hope of bourgeois expansionism. If the ruling class is desperate and the popular forces are hopeless, we have a recipe for barbarism.

I guess that I have been dwelling on this point by way of trying to answer a question you have posed to me many times: Are we menaced by a real fascist threat, especially with the rising prominence of the KKK and the Nazis? As dangerous and odious as these groups are, I do not think that they constitute the main danger, nor should they be the focus of major programmatic efforts. Fascism requires a restructuring of the state, wiping out much of the grounds of legitimacy as it is constituted within the bourgeois parliamentary state. Violence that is illegitimate, even if it is officially winked at, is not the nub of fascism. The key political factor of fascism is violence that is legitimated and organized through an authoritarian state.

In the U.S.A. the main danger appears to be a kind of authoritarian populism that can operate through the currently constituted state and political apparatus. Bertram Gross has neatly coined the phrase for it of “friendly fascism”. Our major problem is not that if getting the state to stop the outrages of the Klan and the Nazis (sic). The state and the multinationals with legality and legitimacy are destroying the fabric of our society. And they are now incapable of providing the grounds for a renewed wholesome society. At best they can give us more of the corrosive individualism of the marketplace. At the other extreme – or maybe it is only the other side of the same coin – the (sic) present us with increased hierarchical domination through their bureaucratic structures. Ironically we are now getting a combined dose of the worst of both tendencies, with domination masqueraded as freedom of consumption for the better off and as “helping” services for those without the bucks to operate freely in the marketplace.

When you take the racial realities of America into account, this situation requires a more complex analysis because the norms of bourgeois democracy have never been fully applied in the black community. Even when the state has retreated from making formal governmental and constitutional distinctions of race, within civil society, as distinct from the state, the repression and oppression of black society by white society is still considered normal to one degree or another. What we have happening today is an increase in degree as to what is considered normal racial oppression. The tolerance for the Klan might be the most glaring aspect of this development, but it is only one aspect. While this tolerated violence bears strong resemblance to the pre-fascist developments in Europe of the 1920’s, we can easily overstress the analogy. For the black community the major controls are still exercised through the traditional state and corporate methods. For the coming period we can expect the bludgeoning blows to come in very legitimate ways from General Motors, Chrysler, and Ronnie Reagan. Punctionally, the violence works to generate quiescence from fear among those sections of the population in which the quiescence cannot be generated through appeals to the consumerist marketplace.

I am enclosing a couple of articles which have helped me clarify some of my thinking. While they are based upon an analysis of British conditions, they shed considerable light for us. In Great Britain the National Front has been more aggressive and organized in their upfront, on the streets racism than any group in the States. The Front has even been able to develop a significant electoral presence in some urban centers. Nevertheless, Sivanandan for the black left and Hall for the white left brilliantly show why the main danger lies within the legitimately constituted operations of the state. They hold that the left has overemphasized the political potential in counteracting the National Front, partially because the target is so tactically appealing and capable of arousing a lot of folks. However, the concentration on tactics has worked to divert attention from developing program targeted a the decisive issue.

At a later date, if the economic crisis really becomes unmanageable, extra-legal terror might become a more significant threat and even foreshadow a regressive restructuring of legality. Right now jingoism and attacks upon liberal bureaucracy seem to be sufficient political mobilizers for the ruling class. They can candle these ploys through the established mechanisms – witness Carter on Iran and Reagan on the budget. They can still run things well enough that they do not have to run the risk of reconstituting the state.“

- Letter from Harold Baron, a “Silent Generation” (born in the 1930s) Jewish Marxist to Akbar Muhammad Ahmad, a young Black Power activist. 1979 or 1980. From the personal papers of Muhammad Ahmad.

#marxism #black power #white supremacy #reagan #history #politics #reaganism #socialism #organizing #fascism #antifascism #antifa #hal baron #harold m. baron #muhammad ahmad

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