Weimar without Nazis
Repeat after me: America today is not like Germany in the 1930s. The Republicans are not Nazis. Trump is not Hitler. To say, as so many otherwise seemingly intelligent and …
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A View from the High Castle
December 1942. The Imperial Japanese Army, having cleared the Allied resistance across Papua New Guinea, invades the Australian mainland. Japanese armies land in Darwin, Cairns and Townsville. There is a …
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The Genesis Event
A new, fascinating study suggests that all modern humans descend from an “Adam and Eve” couple who lived sometime between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago – but also that 90 …
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Low CO2 killed the megafauna star
As with the present day fauna and flora extinctions, humans have been traditionally blamed for the extinction events over the past several tens of thousands of years. Maybe not so …
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The nun who saved a Jewish hero
Last week, a 110-year old Dominican nun, Sister Cecilia Roszak, passed away in my home town of Krakow, in the same convent she first walked into almost 90 years before. …
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The strange attraction of communist brutalism
Last month “The New York Times Style Magazine” asked the question that no one has really been asking anywhere: “Can Poland’s Faded Brutalist Architecture Be Redeemed?” My short answer was …
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Happy 100th birthday Poland
My grandmother Irena passed away a few weeks ago, having recently, without much fanfare, turned 100. She was my grandfather’s second wife, after my mother’s mother passed away when my …
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This was my Poland
Make sure to check out this stunning collection of photographs: In the early 1980s, while Gdansk and Warsaw were in the midst of a sociopolitical upheaval of great impact on …
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Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue …
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Generals of the damned
Over the past few days two public figures have received flak for acknowledging the military talents of historically incorrect generals. The first case was a typical fake news beat-up, the …
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Unhappy Columbus Day
In a world where quoting Winston Churchill now gets you socially mobbed and forced into a grovelling apology (if you’re wondering what I’m referring to:) Did not mean to offend …
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Can you draw as well as the oldest humans?
The oldest yet drawing by a modern human has been discovered in South Africa and it’s more than 30,000 years older than the previous oldest ones in Spain and Indonesia: …
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The Polish Enigma
Dermot Turing, the nephew of the famous code breaker and one of the fathers of the computer, Alan (“The Imitation Game”, pretty good movie) writes about a very little known …
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The passing world of 1 September
Today is the 79th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, and as I was pondering on that date, I realised that with one exception, there is no …
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Ramsey Bolton becomes a Polish pilot
For the sake of the movie I hope that Iwan Rheon who played the arch-bastard (literally and metaphorically) Ramsey Bolton in “Game of Thrones” is good enough actor to go …
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Serfing holidays
Would you rather be a medieval European peasant or a modern American worker? Well, it depends on how much you value your free time: Life for the medieval peasant was …
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New Roman library to open in Cologne
A nice archaeological discovery in the heart of the beautiful Cologne: The remains of the oldest public library in Germany, a building erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed …
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Guest Post: Nazism and Fascism: Left or Right?
Today’s guest post is by another friend of The Daily Chrenk, Dr Lee Cox, who sheds more light on the ideological tar baby that is fascism/Nazism, unwanted by both sides …
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A giant, Star of David-shaped hole in the heart
There are two tragedies of the Polish-Jewish relations. The first one is that through the centuries of coexistence with each other we did not make for better neighbours and friends. …
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