I'm tired of hearing it as an excuse,
Delph, if you are tired, you need to take a rest. :):)
PS. hey, apart from communism and WW2, I forgot to add: PARTITIONS!
Plus, this eternal Polish dilemma concerning the lifestyle on the crossroads of cultures: are we still Slavs or already Westerners? And if we are a mixture of both, which part is more important?
For you, a Brit, everything is so simple. You have never had such problems as Poland did. Well, yes, you had but in 11th-13th century, later you just moved on. While our problems only finished in 1989.
As I said, take a little rest from it all.
Ha!