LENIN

Lenin na Fremont Place North w Seattle (fot.)

For English version, please scroll down 

Rzadko ostatnio oglądam telewizję, ale kilka dni temu jakiś kaprys wcisnął mi do ręki pilota i nagle przede mną rozpostarł się pejzaż centrum miasta Seattle w stanie Waszyngton. Kamera właśnie zawęziła pole widzenia do postaci reportera stojącego na tle jakiegoś pomnika. Na łączach mojej szarej masy doszło wówczas do starcia między poczuciem niedowierzania i procesowanym obrazem. Milczałem. Zmysł wzroku informował o dostrzeżeniu postaci Lenina, podczas gdy zasoby wiedzy ogólnej negowały kompletnie to co gały widziały. „To przecież pomnik Lenina” powiedziała siedząca obok mnie Bożena, zadając dotkliwy cios mojemu przekonaniu iż towarzysza Ulianowa nigdy w tym mieście nie było, ani żywego ani pomnikowego. A jednak był! Był wielki, z brązu, w postawie emanujacej nieskończoną miłość do pracującego ludu miast i wsi, z twarzą wyrażającą bezdenną wiarę w świetlaną przyszłość towarzyszy w uszankach, kufajkach i walonkach. Zresztą sami zobaczcie! Piękny, prawda?

Zanim opowiem o Leninie w Seattle, skąd i dlaczego tam się wziął, kilka słów refleksji nad aktualnymi wydarzeniami, a dzieje się mnóstwo, i to niekoniecznie po tej najlepszej stronie naszego istnienia. Ogrom paskudztwa jakie szerzy się w świecie od początku tego roku, sprawia że dotknę wybiórczo tylko kilku zdarzeń wplatających się mniej lub bardziej w tematykę pomnikową.

Mamy w USA, tak w całym wielkim kraju, pomnikofobię. Stan lęków przed pomnikami oraz nazewnictwem miast, organizacji, klubów sportowych, et cetera. Bulgotało tutaj to już od dawna, ale w zasadzie było to ot takie sobie pyrkanie na malutkim gazie, bez emanacji na szerszą skalę. W czerwcu zadrgało, a następnie zaczęła się erupcja lawy nienawiści wszystkimi możliwymi kanałami. Co istotne, siły niszczycielskie wystąpiły z brzegów słusznego poniekąd oburzenia społecznego, ale tylko po to aby przybrać barwy walki politycznej. Dzisiaj, pod koniec tego miesiąca wrzawy i wrzenia, nie ma już wątpliwości, że powolna indoktrynacja młodego pokolenia dokonała zapalenia lontu, którego płomień ma zdetonować fundament naszego istnienia, to znaczy świadomość narodową.

Póki co, detonacja ta obejmuje obszary klasycznie zawładnięte przez skrajnie socjalizujące pędy chwastów społecznych, do jakich przed ponad stu laty z solidnym okładem zaliczali się nawet bracia Piłsudscy. Rzecz w tym, że oni „zapłacili” za to aresztowaniami i wycieczkami po rozum, ale czy obecni „pseudo-rewolucjoniści” doczekają choćby obrączek na przegubach dłoni, solidnie wątpię. Jak sądzę, w swej próbie budowania republiki ludowej, liczą oni na pomoc Seattle-ańskiego Lenina – ozdoby miasta, które od lat warczy na Amerykę.

A z Leninem było tak:

W 1988 roku, w mieście Poprad, u podnóży Tatr, na Słowackim (wówczas Czechosłowackim) Spiszu, stanął pięciometrowy Lenin z brązu, zamówiony siedem lat wcześniej przez Komunistyczną Partię Czechosłowacji. Rok później nastąpiła Aksamitna Rewolucja, która obalając „ludowa demokrację”,  wprowadziła ten kraj na drogę budowy demokracji parlamentarnej. Ta natychmiast zbanowała Lenina na lokalne złomowisko. Tak więc, dzieło powstałe z inspiracji KP Czechosłowacji i artystycznego trudu bułgarskiego rzeźbiarza Emila Venkova, miało wkrótce zostać pocięte na kawałki w ramach odzyskiwania cennego metalu, I oto wtedy, pewnego zimowego dnia w 1993 roku, na złomowisku zawitał dżentelmen o nazwisku Lewis E. Carpenter, nauczyciel języka angielskiego w lokalnej szkole. 

Onże, wiedząc może czego szuka, zoczył Lenina wykonanego z grubej blachy mosiężnej, leżącego na grzbiecie niczym jego cielesny pierwowzór, z tym że wewnatrz Lenina mieszkał pewien bezdomny człek zupełnie niezależnej już Republiki Słowackiej, która właśnie wyodrębniła się z Československa. Nie wiem ile piw popłyneło, ale bezdomny się wyprowadził. Zresztą i tak musiałby to zrobić gdyby towarzysza Ulianowa zaczęto na poważnie rżnąć. Pan Carpenter, oryginalnie z miasta Issaquah w stanie Waszyngton, nieco na wschód od Seattle, dogadał się następnie także zarówno z rzeźbiarzem jak i z Radą Miasta Poprad, i 16 marca 1993 roku, za sumę 13 000 dolarów (na dzisiaj, jakieś 20 000 USD) kupił leninowskiej statule nowy żywot.

Nauczyciel kombinował dosyć szybko i po zastawieniu w banku swojego amerykańskiego domu, zyskał środki na transport brązowego truchła do Rotterdamu, a nastepnie do Issaquah, dokąd dzieło sztuki dotarło już pięć miesięcy później, za niebagatelną cenę 75 000 USD, wedle dzisiejszej taryfy. Miłośnik Lenina zamierzał postawić go przed lokalną słowacką restauracją, ale zanim do tego doszło, zginął pół roku później w wypadku samochodowym. Zrozpaczona rodzina postanowiła odsprzedać masywną statuę do odlewni metali w Seattle, co i uczynili jak sądzę z ulgą, odzyskując kasę wydaną na dziwny kaprys seniora rodu. 

Właściciel odlewni zamiast upłynnić Lenina i wykorzystać metal na inne wyroby z brązu, dogadał się z władzami dzielnicy Fremont i 3-go czerwca 1995 roku rzeźba „ożyła” na prywatnym terenie przy skrzyżowaniu dwóch lokalnych ulic. Rok później Lenin powędrował kilka przecznic dalej i od tego czasu patronuje lokalnym biznesom czekając na kupca. Tak, tak, Lenin jest na sprzedaż za 250 000 dolarów. Póki co towariszcz bywa często przedmiotem licznych zabiegów skrwawiania rąk posągu dla upamiętniania kilku milionów ofiar jego rządów, czasami zaś na daszku „leninówki” pojawia się solidnych rozmiarów czerwona gwiazda. 

 Od kilku tygodni zaś Lenin przygląda się radośnie komunizującym masom, które w centrum miasta zaprowadzają „porządki” w stylu sprzed 103 lat. Kontrowersję dotyczącą sprowadzenia i ustawienia w amerykańskim mieście wizerunku miłośnika sierpa i młota skwitował mocnym słowem lokalny artysta Frederick Edelblut, tuż po wtórnym odsłonięciu dzieła Venkova, mówiąc „To nie jest dzieło sztuki. To hańba, symbol poniżenia milionów ludzi, którzy zginęli w Europie Wschodniej z powodu dominacji komunistycznej. Jest to wysoce niestosowne w naszej społeczności. Co będzie następne? Pomnik Hitlera?”

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LENIN

Avoiding TV has been my habit for a relatively long time now, but a few days ago some whim stuck a remote control in my hand, and suddenly the landscape of downtown Seattle in Washington State spread out in front of me. The camera just focused on a figure of the reporter standing in front of a monument. On the circuitry of my gray matter there was a sudden clash between the feeling of disbelief and the image that was being processed.  I was silent.  My sense of sight informed me about appearance of the figure of Lenin on the screen, while all resources of my general knowledge completely negated what I saw. "This is a monument of Vladimir Lenin," said Bożena quietly, inflicting a severe blow to my conviction that comrade Ulianow was never in this city, neither living nor monumental. And yet there he was! Oh yes, he was great, made of bronze, in an attitude emanating infinite love for working people of towns and villages, with a face expressing a bottomless faith in a bright future of comrades in ushankas, stained donkey jackets, and felt boots. Sceptics, please look above - on the the top  it’s him - beautiful, isn't he?

Before I tell you more about Lenin in Seattle - where and why he got there, let me drop in a few words of reflection on current events.  A lot is happening, and not necessarily on the best side of our existence. The huge amount of filth that has been spreading around the world since the beginning of this year, makes me touch selectively on a few events only that are more or less interwoven with the theme of the strange monument.

We have reached in America a terrible monument-phobia – yes, in the whole great country of the USA. The state of fear of monuments as well as the names of cities, organizations, sports clubs, et cetera has surfaced recently with force. It has been bubbling here for a long time, but basically like a pot on a low flame burner, without any emanation on a larger scale. In June, it trembled, and then the lava eruption of hatred began oozing through all possible channels. The destructive forces spilled over the banks of everyday order in a justifiable social outrage, but only to take on the colors of political struggle. Today, at the end of this month of turmoil and boiling, there is no doubt that the slow indoctrination of the young generation has ignited a fuse, which flame is to detonate the foundation of our existence, that is, national consciousness.

For now, this explosion covers areas typically infested by extremely left-wing shoots of social weeds, which hundred and forty years ago included even the Pilsudski brothers. However, it is important to remember that they "paid" for their actions with arrests and coming to their senses, but whether the current "pseudo-revolutionaries" will see any handcuffs on their wrists, I doubt it. I think that in their attempt to build a people's republic, they count on the help of Seattle-Lenin – an ornament of the city that has been growling at America for years.

And with Lenin it was like this:

In 1988, a five-meter bronze Lenin, ordered seven years earlier by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was set and unveiled in the city of Poprad, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, in the Slovak (then Czechoslovakian) region of Spisz. A year later there was the Velvet Revolution, which by overthrowing "people's democracy", set the country on the path to building parliamentary democracy. The new Republic immediately sent Lenin to the local junkyard. That meant, the work, inspired by the KP of Czechoslovakia and the artistic effort of the Bulgarian sculptor Emil Venkov, was soon to be cut into pieces to recover precious metal that could be used for other purposes. However, one winter day in 1993, before it came to that, a gentleman named Lewis E. Carpenter, an English language teacher at the local school, visited the junkyard,

Knowing, perhaps, what he was looking for, Mr. Carpenter found Lenin made of thick brass sheet metal, lying on its back like his bodily prototype, except that inside a hollow Lenin lived a homeless citizen of the very independent Slovak Republic, which had just separated from Československo. I don't know how many bottles of beer went down, but the homeless man moved out. He would have to do that anyway if comrade Ulianov would begin to be seriously chopped. As a next step, Mr. Carpenter, originally from the city of Issaquah, Washington, just east of Seattle, made quick arrangements with both the sculptor and the City Council of Poprad, and on March 16, 1993, for a sum of $13,000 ($20,000 today), he bought a new life for his statue.

The teacher acted quickly and after mortgaging his American home in the bank, he obtained funds for transporting the bronze body to Rotterdam, and then to Issaquah, where the work of art arrived five months later, for a considerable cost of $75,000, in today's dollars. The lover of Lenin intended to put the statue in front of a local Slovak restaurant, but before this happened, he expired in an unfortunate car accident. The distressed family quickly decided to sell the massive statue to the Seattle metal foundry, which they did with a relief, I think, recovering the money, spent by the family senior on his strange caprice.

Instead of liquefying Lenin and using metal for other bronze products, the foundry owner got along with the authorities of the Fremont district in Seattle and on June 3, 1995 the sculpture "came alive" in a private area at the intersection of two local streets. A year later, Lenin wandered a few blocks further and has been patronizing local businesses since then, while patiently waiting for a buyer. Yes, yes, Lenin is for sale for $250,000. The story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that ever since the placement of the comrade in its current location, it has been the subject of frequent red painting of the statue's hands to commemorate several million victims of his reign, and sometimes a solid red star appears on the front of his hat (leninovka).

Currently, for several weeks, Lenin has been cheerfully watching communist-like masses that are bringing "order" in the center of Seattle after the style introduced in 1917 by the Bolshevik Revolution. The controversy over bringing in and displaying in the American city the statue of "a hammer and sickle" lover was strongly condemned by local artist Frederick Edelblut, just shortly after the second unveiling of Venkov's work. He said, "This is not a work of art. It is a disgrace, a symbol of humiliation of millions of people who died in Eastern Europe because of communist domination. This is highly inappropriate in our community. What will be next? A statue of Hitler?"

SLAVERY

SLAVERY

NIEWOLNICTWO

Tippu Tip - a slave hunter from Zanzibar, Tanzania, owner of 10 000 slaves (source)

155 years ago, on June 19, 1865 soldiers of the Union, led by Major General Gordon Granger, arrived at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. The day became known as Juneteenth, a blend of sounds of two words in the form of a new word, which signifies the emancipation of those who had been enslaved. It became the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. 

I am presenting a short history of modern age slavery in my translation of a text published originally in June 2016 by Polish author Wojciech Lada in ciekawostkihistpryczne.pl | The Polish speaking readers may access the original text here.

***

155 lat temu, 19 czerwca 1865 roku żołnierze Unii, pod dowództwem generała majora Gordona Grangera, przybyli do Galveston w Teksasie z wiadomością, że wojna się skończyła, i że zniewoleni są teraz wolni. Dzień ten stał się znany jako Juneteenth, mieszanka dźwięków dwóch słów w postaci nowego słowa, które stało się synonimem emancypacji niewolników w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Juneteenth jest jest obchodzone jako jednodniowy, słabo upowszechniony festiwal w USA, ale obecnie trwa dyskusja nad ewentualnym ustanowieniem tego dnia świętem federalnym.
Oryginalny tekst w języku polskim jest do przeczytania tutaj.

The Uncomfortable Secret of Slavery. 

Negroes were Selling Negroes!

Contrary to popular belief, it was not Europeans who hunted for black slaves in Africa. They were only driving the demand. Africans were captured and sold ... by their neighbors and brothers. When fabulous fortune loomed on the horizon, no one cared about human dignity.

Sir John Hawkins had many virtues. For one, he developed a completely new model of a warship that not only improved navigation and provided the British fleet with an advantage at sea, but also completely changed the strategy of naval warfare. Furthermore, he was a very efficient agent of the British crown and outstanding navigator who, among others marked out, a roundabout trade route across the Atlantic. All these qualities gave him the rank of admiral and considerable influence at court.

It was an entirely different talent however, which brought him his fortune; a talent which revealed itself in the early 1660s. Namely, he was able to provoke tribal wars in Africa like no other man. For effective brokerage and cooperation in obtaining slaves, he later accepted some of them as payment.

If during his first African expedition in 1562, he did not shun using force and managed to capture three hundred slaves - as he wrote - with the help of a sword and partly by other means, then come four years time there was no more mention nor need of a sword.

On the coast of Sierra Leone, by inciting tribal wars of one African ruler against another, he nearly doubled his inventory of “black merchandise,” all for the glory of England and conveniently his own purse. This simple system of acquiring free labor for the plantations of the Americas became the most common method of doing so, until the end of the of 19th century.

Monopoly on "black goods"

Slavery wasn’t anything special in Africa. As in all other parts of the world, slavery could have been the result of losing a war, debt or due to a serious crime. But this was not slavery in the sense that planters in the United States developed later - it was more like serfdom in feudal Europe rather, than chains and a whip in Alabama.

There was also nothing peculiar in transatlantic slave trade with Arab and European countries. Europeans began this process as early as the fifteenth century, and the Portuguese being its initiators, remained monopolists for almost a century.

Similarly to what Hawkins did later, they also began with using force, namely by abducting in a pirate style the people of the Gold Coast in the Gulf of Guinea, where the modern Ghana is and the so-called Slave Coast existed (today's Nigeria, Benin and Togo).

Further exploration deep into the continent was prevented, however, by relatively strong countries of the region - flourishing then kingdoms of Songhaj, Mali and the highly developed Congo. The rulers of these countries were not concerned by the mere kidnapping of members of the smaller tribes, but they were troubled by the fact that they did not gain anything from it.

Their armed resistance and the commercial sense of the Portuguese led very quickly to creation of a proficiently functioning human trafficking, in which the role of suppliers provided highly specialized trading companies of dark-skinned merchants, some smaller groups of hunters greedy for quick profit, and the African kingdoms themselves.

We have no data for this period, but the proportions look interesting. Even though the customers changed in the eighteenth century, the mechanics of the market remained the same. For example, out of six hundred slaves delivered to the Slave Coast, as much as seventy percent were provided by large sale organizations, twenty percent by smaller hunters, and only the remaining ten percent officially by the state.

As a result of that strategic change, on the west coast of Africa existed for several centuries organizations exclusively for dealing in the business of capturing and selling the local people into slavery. Besides that, the word "coast" does not fully reflect the scale of penetration of the African interior. If, in the 17th century, in the region around Senegal, the average distance that slaves had to walk to the European ships, anchored in harbors, was sixty miles, then a century later, it was often three hundred fifty miles or more.

Of course, they could not function without the permission of the local rulers, what the Europeans understood very well. Congo, the most Europeanized of these monarchies, has even made an official alliance with Portugal. Nzinga, the ruling there ‘mani’ - as his official title was called - became even baptized and ruled later under the name of Alfonso.

Then, a bishopric was established in Congo, and the sons of the local elite were often sent to Portugal to study and obtain there their formal education. After returning to the country they served as intermediaries, guides and translators. The new state on the map of the Christian world did not forget about its benefactors. In 1520s, in the port of Kabinda, two thousand slaves waited for them every year at the mouth of the Zaire River, and a decade later the amount even doubled.

For beads and weapons

It was a common belief that one African was worth four Indians writes Adam Węgłowski in his book "Living Dead". - In addition, the use of already Christianized Indian tribes was opposed Jesuits at that time. Black Africans, > pagans < (animists, Muslims, etc.) when bought from slave traders, could not count on similar considerations.

The profitability of trade with Europeans caused a sort of race for monopoly in human trafficking of the local population. The people of Hueda, Allada, Oyo, Dahomey and Akwamu kingdoms were particularly active. When the latter conquered the important port of Accra in 1681, merchants were officially banned from operating inside the country to prevent them from hunting for slaves; the goal of the law was to ensure the exclusive right of the state in this regard.

The rulers of Dahomey did the same by establishing a monopoly on their territories and selling from twelve to twenty thousand slaves a year. Slightly more to the east of the continent – within the zones of Arabic influence, whose methods were absolutely no different from those of European powers - we can find the roots of today’s bloody and ongoing conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes.

Slave hunts have become increasingly violent over the years. The political destabilization of the continent has reached the level of anarchy. This was, of course, very convenient for European powers - they fueled this process by increasing the demand for "live commodities" from year to year. Not only that, however. Henryk Zins wrote:

In the slave trade between African intermediaries and European buyers, the means of payment were iron bars, which became a form of money from Senegal to Ivory Coast. In a region around Ghana, the same role was played by bracelets, Indian cloth, shells, beads, and gold sand.
Along with the development of business, however, more and more often guns and gunpowder would become the money, which in time brutalized the primitive war tactics of African countries. Much has also changed on the European side.

Until the end of the 16th century, Portugal was a monopolist in the trade of African slaves - reselling them to America, but also willingly using them in their own estates. It was there, specifically on Portugal island of Madeira, that the experiment with the plantation system based on slave labor was developed and used for the first time - a precursor to what later became widely used in the USA.

However, at the beginning of the 17th century, the Netherlands entered the slave trade and quickly gained the advantage. Amsterdam became the largest "transshipment" port of captured Africans. This situation lasted approximately until the middle of the century, when the huge profitability of this business draws in other European countries - not only England and France, which since then constantly fight for the first place on the podium, but also Sweden, Denmark and even Brandenburg-Prussia.

The scale of the phenomenon is so serious that in both France and England special African Companies are established, which are granted a monopoly in the trade of black slaves. The crowned heads of these countries and a large part of aristocracy participate in them. A bit of piquancy adds here the fact that a great advocate of freedom, the philosopher John Locke, also had shares in the Royal African Company.

It is not known how many Africans were taken captive. Extreme estimates range between ten and one hundred million, with the latter figure seemingly too exaggerated. For the African continent, the case was so catastrophic that all participating states formally abolished slavery at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Of course, one should not assume the excessive humanitarianism of the European elites – that was more or less when the era of African colonialism began. Nobody needed depopulated colonies. Regardless of the formal acts, the business was too good to be stopped with one document.

In practice, black slaves were traded several dozen years longer, until the end of the 19th century. Only the suppliers changed - they were not, as for four hundred years, African countries, but the largest European powers. However undoubtedly, they used the help of local "businessmen".