TVP World’s Benjamin Lee met with Professor Ryszard Legutko at the “Poland, the Great Project” Congress. Prof. Legutko received the Lech Kaczyński award on the last day of the congress.

Prof. Legutko was asked why does Europe seem to have an unhealthy affinity to totalitarianism. He believes that there is something wrong with the western European spirit, which appears to have a need for revolutions, whether they be political or moral. But in the 20th century, political revolutions have led to the emergence of communism, fascism, and national socialism. And moral revolutions led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Now, not just Europe but the western world in general, is experiencing what Prof Legutko terms a “woke revolution”.

He identifies the major problem as the tendency of “social engineers” to restructure the society, to try to change people, their minds and souls. What is worse, the most powerful international institutions: the EU, UNESCO, and international corporations. As an example, he lists the fight to abolish the division into men and women. And these ideas are imposed on people who, if they speak out, if they commit “thought crimes”, as Orwell would say, they face losing their job or are sent to be “re-educated”. Not unlike it was done in Soviet Russia, where dissidents would be identified as mentally ill.

To remedy this, Prof. Legutko advises that people have to learn to think and to speak properly: openly and truthfully, and “call a spade a spade”. And if anybody tells us that in order to secure freedom we have to “shut up or otherwise”, then they must be called out for being a despot. He says that such people do not misunderstand the meaning of words, but they are deliberately twisting them.