“Our freedom is increasingly being restricted, and the legal system is becoming more oppressive,” said Professor Ryszard Legutko.
Legutko, a philosophy professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, born in 1949, specializes in ancient philosophy and political theory.
He lived under Poland’s communist regime and suffered for decades, actively participating in Poland’s anti-communist “Solidarity” movement, fighting for freedom as the editor of the underground quarterly journal “Arka.” He later observed and participated in Poland’s post-communist era, serving as Minister of Education, Secretary of State in the office of the late President Lech Kaczynski, and Deputy Speaker of the Senate.
He later moved to the West and has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament for the 7th, 8th, and 9th terms since 2009, Vice-Chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
However, after living under a liberal democratic system for twenty years, he began to see things he did not anticipate. He observed that, despite being free, liberal democratic countries also exhibit some disturbing characteristics. “Some trends remind me of what happened under the communist regime. I find it truly surprising,” he said. “There is a convergence of certain trends of totalitarianism that we experienced under communism.”
As a professor, philosopher, and later a politician, Legutko explains his arguments in his book “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.”
“My main point is that this political system, the so-called liberal democratic system, whether you see it in the United States, Europe, the West, the East, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, is becoming more like what we experienced under the communist regime,” he said. “I’m not saying that these two systems are the same. That would be absurd. I would say that there is a convergence of certain trends of totalitarianism that we experienced under communism, a certain authoritarian tendency in all the countries considered to be liberal democracies.”
“Some trends remind me of what happened under the communist regime, which is very alarming and surprising. The sooner we realize the existence of these trends, the better, because if we continue to live in this illusion thinking that this is the best of all possible worlds, the chances of changing things will diminish. When we realize that things are not as they seem, it may be too late,” Legutko said.
【Program Production: Yuhsuan Lee, Weicheng Pan】