Ryszard Kapuscinski in 1969; image ©Forum Polska Agencja
To the Editors:
A note about a review by Carl Rollyson (The New Criterion, January 2013) of Artur Domoslawski’s biography of Ryszard Kapuscinski. Your reviewer uncritically accepts the biographer’s opinions on a number of extremely controversial issues, among them lustration, Kapuscinski himself, the Polish secret services, and how we should judge those who informed for them. He is aware, as he himself admits, of how controversial these issues are, which makes his failure to examine critically the book’s claims all the more surprising.
The question of whether Kapuscinski was an informer is not an open one; we know that he was. Admittedly, as foreign correspondent for an official newspaper in a communist country, Kapuscinski may have had no choice but to cooperate with the secret police if he wanted to go abroad. But it is worth noting that no one forced him to become a foreign correspondent in the first place; he made a choice. Many talented writers preferred to remain poor, jobless, unlionized, and untraveled. Your reviewer’s only comment on this choice, however, is the bizarre “You have to give up something to get something.” I am not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it seems disingenuous at best, and unpleasantly reminiscent of talk of breaking eggs to make omelets. And to say that “certain American journalists followed much
