[trwired]

> As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"

Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.

[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_October

[2] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gierek

[msanlop]

I'm reminded of Test Pilota Pirx, a polish movie, filmed in part in the US. There's some car chase scenes in american roads, and one scene where the main character gets a beer at a McDonald's[0] while looking around in a mall. I don't know much about the history of censorship but I was surprised as I imagined that would be out of line then

[0] https://youtu.be/20-dt24F6sM?t=1641

[p0w3n3d]

What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the iron hand of authorities was loosening and more and more forbidden words were tolerated, up to the 1989 Round Table event when Poland was freed (not before strong military repression happening in 1981)

[paganel]

> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west.

That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).

[tehjoker]

In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks. You have to call everything a "dictatorship". You are (maybe not anymore soon?) allowed to publish things at the margins of society that few will read or watch, hence the claim of free speech within a wider propaganda system.

Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.

[BrandoElFollito]

Not to mention that people were traveling to the west quite a bit (especially to France and the US), VCR tapes were broadly shared and they had this dichotomy of communism and the church reigning each one on everyone.