Sergiusz Michalski

In defence of the BBC: A personal recollection

The BBC is now going through a very difficult period. Its many enemies, spearheaded by Trump, are in a jubilant mood, its support in the political class and among the public is steadily eroding. Nonetheless I shall attempt a plaidoyer for dear old auntie Beeb, a plea based on a personal recollection of a somewhat misguided political venture undertaken by me more than fourty years ago in Warsaw.

In April 1983 the military regime of general Jaruzelski, looking desperately for American Jewish support, decided to stage large scale official celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The anti-communist opposition, still reeling from the strictures of the martial law imposed in December 1981 and being cognizant of the role Jaruzelski had played in the antisemitic purges of 1968, decided to boycott the official festivities and stage its own, technically illegal commemorative ceremonies in the form of a public demonstration near the great Ghetto-Uprising monument.

Being a junior member of the unofficial steering committee I was charged with the task of informing Western correspondents in Warsaw. In the days before, I made thus the round of maybe a dozen journalists, including, as I vividly remember, the BBCs formidable Tim Sebastian. Almost all of them asked me about the supposed number of participants. With youthful exuberance and utter disregard for the deep cleavages in the Polish opposition vis a vis the „Jewish question“ I uttered the wildly optimist projection of something between 5000 and 10 000 participants.

Needless to say, I was proved wrong and the memory of it still hurts. Only 800 to maybe 1000 protesters did appear, surrounded by many uniformed and plainclothes policemen and members of the security service, dozens of arrests – however mostly short term ones – were made. When I finally made a successful retreat to the flat of my parents, I found my father with two radiosets on the table, avidly noting the details.

From the five stations he followed – the BBC, Radio France International, the Deutsche Welle, Free Europe and the Voice of America – four used initially my mindboggling projections of 5000 and more, only the BBC started with „approximately 2000“ protesters and soon corrected itself to something between 1200 to 1500, this still being a benign estimate. The BBC was also the only station, that characterized the demonstration as a praiseworthy and courageous attempt, that did not however attract the support of the wider anti-communist opposition.

The rest of the stations soon stopped mentioning the number of the demonstrators and tried to obfuscate the fact, that my erstwhile optimistic projections were totally off the mark. Thus only the BBC, though it certainly also sympathized with the Polish opposition, described this particular Warsaw demonstration in all its complexity, avoiding cheap anticommunist propaganda undertones. The rest sinned by an unreflected hero worship of the „valiant Polish people“.

In the more than 40 years that followed I always have turned – when in doubt – to the cold realism and objectivity of the BBC. Pourvu que ca dure….