Why are Poles obsessed with shame?

Never ceases to surprise me reading Polski forums and their news websites the amount of references to their national Wstyd / Shame.

It's usually the Shame of their compatriots in Exile. As a resident of the United Kingdom i can understand that. The way in which a sizable minority of Poles over here conduct themselves is quite shameful.

It goes beyond that. Poles will use any excuse to label themselves as a nation as shameful.

wiadomosci.onet.pl/szukaj/query.html?qt=wstyd

People in this country behave embarrassingly quite a lot but the BBC doesn't get into a frenzy with "National Shame" headlines.
We just don't really care to be honest.

It would be more thoughtful of you, if you were to provide a link in English. It would also fit in with the Forum Rules. Thank you .

I hardly think the BBC is in a position to criticise anyone after the Savile cover-up, tax avoidence by the so called stars and the general waste of the taxpayers money and how many more MP's have recently escaped prosecution for stealing from the public purse? You want to talk of shame?, the shame is the British public, meekly accepting this as normal behaviour. Cess pit and laughing stock of the world.

why are you obsessed with embarrassing yourself? but keep the entertainment going

Actually, it's a perceptive observation, and something I myself have noticed in the Polish media. I think those are symptoms of an inferiority complex, being constantly concerned about what people in the West are saying.

I think Polish culture is amazing. It is rich, varied and colourful, and largely unknown and vastly underappreciated at home and abroad. I find the Poles are frequently ashamed of being Slavs, of being Catholics, of having a rich folk culture and, quite simply, of being different. Many of the things wrong with Poland are historical, because of foreign, and later communist domination, and not a result of Poles being Slavs, Poles and Catholics. In fact, those very things are what once made Poland great, a synthesis of the very best of the West and the East, priding itself on the peaceful co-existence of people of various religions, nationalities and languages, oftentimes enjoying more freedom than either the East or the West. The fact that Poles nowadays don't conduct themselves well abroad is unfortunate, but it is precisely because they are ashamed of the things that make them Polish that there has been a wholesale importation of the very worst models from the West on top of the worst cultural imports from the communist East.

Russia is a counterexample. The Russians don't care. The Russians are increasingly proud of their language, culture and religion. The latter two have been all but destroyed by communism, but we see both being revived from the top-down. In a country where the population is massively secularised and churchgoers make up a tiny minority, we see increasing restrictions on abortion and highly illiberal attitudes towards many modern, Western novelties, simply because they have no place in Russian culture. One can say what they will, but the tacit implication is that these things simply aren't the Russian way, and Russia's proud of being different.

Poles needn't be ashamed, but need to recover its identity, and rediscover its virtues in synthesising the very best of Western values, which it inherited from Catholicism, with the very best of its Slavic roots, which come from the East.

I'm Polish and I'm not ashamed of my nationality. :)

Very well put.

you are very wrong, there are loads of countries in the wrold that look at themselves low, and Russia is actually a good example here

Russia sees the west as a rival and competitor. Poland looks to the west like a star struck girl with unrequited love.

goverment has nothing to do with it's population here where the majority of it is poor and disagrees with the Putin and the rest of "mafia"

From an outsiders point of view . Polish culture is:

POLSAT satellites outside homes
Polish Flags flying from windows
Loud aggressive drunkenness
Drinking tins of Lech in the street
VW Passats from 10 years ago
Old style tracksuits from the 80s style. Lonsdale, Umbro
Greasy hair

Of course some Russians don't like Putin. But to say that most do not is misleading. Yes, he has a shady past and is hardly a darling of the Western media. But most of the time he's been in government, he's been the most popular leader of any major country. And with good reason.

During the Yeltsin era, money from Russia's natural resources, namely oil, was being siphoned off by Western companies. Putin put a stop to that, and turned Russia from a bankrupt giant into one of the best-performing economies in the world. The average Russian wage has risen over 10-fold under Putin.

Russia's fertility rate, which, as in most of the post-communist countries, was catastrophically low at 1.2 has so far increased to 1.6 thanks to Putin's aggressive demographic policies, and Russia has recorded natural population growth for the first time in 20 years. Russia went from being on course to becoming a poor, desolate wasteland that would have been broken up and picked apart by vultures in 50 years' time into a country with a future.

Putin has consistently promoted the interests of Russian citizens outside its borders, including pressing for the use of the Russian language in other nations, for whom doing such a thing would be tantamount to linguistic and cultural suicide. And he has succeeded. Belarus is now irreversibly Russophone, and Ukraine has partly reversed its Ukrainisation policy, with Russian becoming a regional official language.

Whatever one can accuse Putin of, he is certainly a Russian patriot, and he has reversed many of the catastrophic Western economic reforms (such as privatisation of natural resources and strategic industries) that proved so damaging to Russia and the rest of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, and halted what looked like Russia's terminal decline. For all the accusations of being undemocratic, Russians continue to have the opportunity to vote him out at every election.

This is no consolation to Poland, which is still on course to becoming a hollowed-out carcass picked apart by its "friends" in the West and what increasingly looks to be a resurgent Russia. But there is good news in this story too - if Russia could change course to avoid sinking like the Titanic, so can other countries.

Which brings me back to the point of the thread - Poland is not going to turn around by being ashamed of being Poland. It needs to look within and use its incredible cultural heritage to build up its future.

I'm not exactly sure what it has to feel ashamed about. There are laws that need changing to make it more compatible with other EU countries, but the man on the street knows nothing about such things.


You forgot the intolerably loud trance music

Disco Polo

Beeping of horns at all hours

Drink driving

5 yr old kids shouting kurwa and more (I thought English kids were apalling. No. They are just beginners)

5 - 10 yr old kids out at 10pm at night

attractive women

attractive women that know how to dress

attractive women who know how to use make up

attractive women that can stop you dead in the street

attractive women who are approachable.

nice shoes

Strange men that if you say hello to them, look like they going to run away because they think you must be an undercover policeman.

Smoking marijuana in public

Thats a few more for your arsenal HH.

Sounds like England to me ;)

Shopping exclusively at "polski sklep"
asking advice on "benefity w uk" on Polski websites.
Moaning about British people, and our country in general - Soapy Food, Bad Health Service, Fake smiles on people
Being obsessed with ethnicity/race

attractive women?? The poor ol' Poles think they're Sweden or Norway with this. I've never understood it.
I've seen some pretty Polish women, some absolute STINKERS and average looking ones. Same as most places really.

Sounds very british to me again!

Shopping exclusively in British shops in our own country? Oh how criminal haha

Use your brain for once ;)

Or do i need to explain exactly what i meant?

Lol, I don't understand the moaners at all. If everything's so sh*tty in [insert country here], why did they go there?

The stupid thing is that those same people who moan about everything are the ones with the inferiority complex, who have foresaken everything good in their own culture and who criticise everything everywhere apart from their own petty little selves.

And quite often Polish women like to see themselves as paragons of virtue when they are anything but.

As for shame, they're ashamed of everything that's uniquely good about Polish culture and yet feel entirely entitled to take everything that's far from admirable to the worst extremes.

Of course, those are sweeping generalisations, but they are certainly accurate stereotypes of a very large number of people, and not, unfortunately, exceptions to the rule, so it's a sorry state of affairs.

hey charlie,

I don't think they b..tch n moan that much - their English ain't good enough to express themselves, right? The funny thing is that in the US you don't hear Polish b..tch at all - and most are overstayers - unless someone comes up w/ Polak jokes! In the UK you may hear here n there, but that's not a big deal. I think most Brits b..tch n moan about E Europeans coming over there n stealing their carps from ponds! And the UK econ has been headnding south for a while so you got some frictions btwn Poles and Brits, mostly about who is taking whose jobs. Then you have a slapdick, aka hudsondicks, adding more fuel to the fire by posting anti-Polish comments, even b..tching about chicks. C'mon, bro! That ain't kosher!