[ExI] Polish Vienna and other blasphemies :-) (was: two years in the slammer for blammisphy?)

[Tomasz Rola]

Ok, guys.

You tried hard to make pieces fit and you were very brave. But there is 
still some mess to be cleaned up.

:-).

Actually, I am not really sure how many people here got fed up with my 
emails. So this one time, I will try to make it short.

With regards to our borders, I've found some nice animations on youtube. 
You may turn off the music, I find it to be annoying a little.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhkCTdSh0KU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAVVWlUywO0

Also, this relatively short film gives quite good overview of our history. 
Good. I wondered if I should write it. Now I only have to paste a link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quld5950v6w&feature=related

The music is again a bit pathetic, and so are some comments in the film. 
But overally, it is ok. Only I have the feeling, that communism started to 
fail because of Gorbatchev' perestroika rather than our Round Table. Other 
than this, the film pretty much says whatever I wanted to say, maybe even 
more. And even better, it's illustrated by pictures of many Polish 
painters. Just in case, maybe some people like this kind of stuff. Some of 
them are nice looking.

On Tue, 11 May 2010, John Grigg wrote:

> Spike wrote:
> Vienna was saved by the attitude of its people.
> That tells what kind of people the Poles are.

As much as we could like having it, Vienna belonged to the House of 
Habsburg. So, definitely out of our zone of control and too far from our 
borders for most of our history.

> >>>
> But as I recall, Poland has many times been crushed and partitioned by it's
> stronger neighbors (so much for the theory of tough Poles, but then being
> bullied long enough will make just about anyone get mean).

Actually, I see it differently. There was this problem with our enemies, 
they were wearing off too fast. This, how else, made us into thinking we 
were invincible. Think about it. In a typical battle of those times, like 
battle of Klushino

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Klushino

we had some 5000 hussars, and Russians about 35000-48000 men. We lost 
200-400, they lost 5000.

So we grew a lot of fat on us. In retrospection, it seems we grew fat on 
our brains, too. When the end finally came, there wasn't too many people 
interested in defending Poland. They were tough, however, when it came to 
accepting absolutist rulers. But you are right, the golden age had ended 
long before this.

>  They did appear
> to have a golden age, at least until the Swedes

Well, Swedes got what they came for, even if they didn't intended to be 
fed with it. They also got what we didn't wanted to give them and took it 
away, back to Sweden :-). But the whole war with them (and their numerous 
allies) was unnecessary and they weakened us a lot. Of course, finally, 
once again, we prevailed. But this time, I feel the price was high. The 
damage they did was so high that we called their invasion the Deluge.

> and Cossacks (I guess much
> tougher foes than the Ottomans...) came along and burned down & looted the
> country.

IMHO, Cossacks were very brave and formidable foe. It is a pity we could 
not agree with them (probably more our fault than theirs). They could have 
been valuable ally and in the long run, possibly great Poles too.

Ottomans, they had a big empire that was a bit crumbling under it's own 
weight. They were dangerous, but I think most of the time they were 
annoying. Those wars... They came, we crushed them. Ten years later, or 
fifty years later, they came again, we crushed them again. All of this at 
a great expense for us, even if greater for them.

I believe we had much bigger problem with Tatars. Especially that it was 
hard to engage them in a battle. But from time to time, we managed to 
catch them.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **