It soon becomes clear that lustration is for Michnik something of an obsession. The essay begins by suggesting a parallel between McCarthyism ("a triumph of informers and blackmail, a culture of fear", we are told) and the Polish Right. Michnik warns darkly of the "virus of anti-Communism with a Bolshevik face" and the threat from the "virus of fundamentalism", by which he means Christians and conservatives. He then lurches into a description of what (apart from lustration) these "fundamentalists" want: this turns out to be the eradication of, among other things, "pornography, and pansexuality, abortion and homosexuality, contraception and feminism". These fundamentalists, he goes on, divide people into the "sinful" and those without sin; the former "must be destroyed and eliminated right away", while the latter "have to take over the security apparatus, the system of justice, the world of media and financial operations, police records and the education of youth, institutions of culture and the national heritage". And they think that "all of the people in power and those who worked for them [under Communism] ought to be treated as collaborators". On lustration, Michnik's disingenuousness reaches spectacular heights: can police reports be "more credible testimony about the life of a person from the opposition than the entirety of his or her life?" he asks plaintively. "The police archives are being searched in a wild and illegal way," he complains, and "in a crudely uncivil way". (Perhaps it sounds better in the original.) Those who lead the brave fight against the lustration-hungry Bolshevik fundamentalists, on the other hand — that is to say, Michnik and his friends — continue to reject "official lies" and "the culture of monologue" as they did when they were dissidents under the Communists; and they do so in "a spirit of dialogue and pluralism".

Neither pluralism nor dialogue have  been much in evidence in Michnik's attempts to silence his critics or his preference for flinging around accusations of "hate speech" and epithets like "fascists" and "Bolsheviks" instead of arguments and rational discourse. His favoured way of dealing with his critics in recent years has been to sue them for defamation. One false move and you're in court, with all the power and wealth of Agora, the publishing group behind his newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, ranged against you. One of his recent lawsuits was against a journalist who had written that Michnik's favoured way of dealing with his critics is to sue them for defamation, with the aid of corrupt judges. He was sued for defamation. (I am not making this up.) The journalist won his case, however — a rare victory. Another was sued because Michnik felt wrongly accused when he (the defendant) said that he (Michnik) had called him (the defendant) a fascist ten years previously. He lost. Yet another — an eminent and now quite elderly Polish poet — was sued when he wrote that Michnik was spiritual heir to the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg and the Polish Communist Party. He, too, was defeated. The list goes on.

There seems little point in attempting to engage seriously with the book under review; even allowing for the eccentricities of the translation, it can only be described as a rant. Yet Adam Michnik remains one of the most influential figures in Poland; though readership has dropped, his newspaper is still a powerful influence. From assuming the leading role in the media after the fall of Communism, it came to dictate public opinion; dissenting voices, especially those calling for any kind of settling of accounts with the country's Communist past, were — and still are — ruthlessly attacked and marginalised (as "extreme", "fascist", etc).