The Canadian ‘diplomatic’ journal Embassy which bills itself as Canada’s Foreign Policy Newsweekly published an article entitled Poland’s Terrible Twins by Gwynne Dyer on September 6, 2006.
The article is one of the most bigoted and intellectually absurd things I have ever read.
Embassy describes itself as follows:
International News, Opinions. Features, Culture and Lifestyle
Embassy is an unbiased and authoritative newsweekly focused on international affairs from a distinctively Canadian point of view and on the diplomatic community in Ottawa. Embassy gives its influential and prestigious readers breaking and informed news, society and cultural coverage and policy briefings to help make their work in Canada better informed and more effective.
If the following column represents the Canadian point-of-view I’d be greatly surprised.
[Heavy sarcasm warning]
“I am afraid that with Jaroslaw Kaczynski as prime minister, Poland will become more extreme, more anti-European and a more xenophobic country,” warned Bronislaw Komorowski, a member of the opposition Civic Platform party, when the second Kaczynski twin was made prime minister by his brother, President Lech Kaczynski, in July. He could have added that Poland is becoming more anti-Semitic, more homophobic, and much more vengeful towards former Communists and collaborators.
Right out of the box the author finds a self hating Pole, and a political opponent of the current administration, to set the tone. It does not appear that this is going to be a thoughtful analysis. Oh, and the anti-Semitism thing – don’t forget, all Poles get it with their mother’s milk; although we might have gotten the homophobia thing from the right breast.
The Kaczynski twins, chubby 57-year-olds whose baby faces remind everyone that they first shot to fame as child actors in the 1960s, are identical in both their appearance and their politics. They are nationalist, Catholic, and conservative (as mayor of Warsaw, Lech banned gay parades and called the organizers “perverts”), which is why they appeal to the left-behinds of Polish society, the rural, the poor and the uneducated, who provided most of the votes for their Law and Justice Party last year.
Yes, yes, the stupid Polish Catholic potato pickers are thousands of years behind the rest of civilization. I don’t know (being a Catholic potato picker myself) but I think that a person’s looks have very little to do with their political disposition (I know, the enemy is always ugly). I do know that if one is conservative and Catholic, one ought to stick with the platform they embrace. To do otherwise would make one a hypocrite or a liberal secularist —“ you know, someone without any objective standards. Everything is cool —“ just don’t hurt me.
Then they promised that they would never occupy both of the great offices of state, and Jaroslaw remained as party leader while Lech took the presidency. But the man he appointed as prime minister instead, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, showed an unexpected streak of independence, so two months ago Lech fired him and appointed Jaroslaw in his place.
Since then, it has gone from bad to worse: Quarrels with Germany, with Russia, with the European Union that Poland joined only two years ago—“and above all, a determined drive to punish everybody who served or helped the Communist regime that collapsed 17 years ago.
The problem being… and this from an alleged historian.
The campaign’s most prominent victim is former president Wojciech Jaruzelski, who declared martial law in 1981 and jailed about 10,000 Solidarity members. Jaruzelski has always claimed that he did it only to forestall a Soviet invasion that would have ended in a national disaster, for the Poles would have fought back, the country would have been devastated, and all possibility of reform would have been lost for decades.
And serial murderers claim they didn’t do it either. And rapists claim it was the woman’s fault.
Most of Soldarity’s former leaders now accept Jaruzelski’s justification for his decision, though they spent years in jail because of it. Former president Lech Walesa, Solidarity’s founder, was publicly reconciled with Jaruzelski last year in a joint television appearance. But Jaruzelski is now charged with being the head of an “organized criminal group which aimed to perpetrate crimes that consisted of the deprivation of freedom by internment,” and at the age of 82 he faces a possible 11years in jail. Hundreds of thousands of other Poles also face reprisals under the new law introduced by the Kaczynskis.
Under the old rules, members of parliament, judges, and top civil servants and security officials were required to state whether they had collaborated with the Communist-era secret police, but they were not automatically banned from those jobs. Under the new law, all persons in “positions of public trust” who were over 17when Solidarity finally brought down the Communists in1989, including diplomats, local officials, school principals, lawyers and journalists, will lose their jobs if they cannot produce a certificate (to be issued by the Institute for National Remembrance) showing that they were not collaborators.
Employers who do not demand certificates from their employees will also lose their jobs. The secret police files of people who held public office under the Communists will be published on the internet, together with the names of all former secret policemen. And of course thousands of individuals will be punished in this way because of false or misleading information in those files.
Similar things happened in other countries of the former Soviet bloc just after the Communist regimes were swept away by the revolutions of 1989, though nothing so extreme. But to institute such a witch-hunt 17 years later, when most of the targets of this revenge are retired or nearing the end of their working lives, is vindictive and pointlessly destructive.
Oh, I see now. Mr. Dyer is shilling for the communists. You know, collective farms, mass starvation, work camps, disappearing family members, gulags, Siberia…
Now imagine if you will that Mr. Dyer is walking the streets of Buenos Aries and runs across Dr. Mengele. I imagine he would bow and say, look you’re old and I don’t want to be vindictive —“ here’s a free pass. No, no, don’t be silly, Gen. Jaruzelski only shot a few Poles, had some stupid Catholic clergy killed, unjustly imprisoned people —“ a small price to pay to keep the red banner waving. Let’s all sing the Internationale and get along…
It is the same resentful obsession with past wrongs that caused President Kaczynski to cancel a visit to Germany recently after a small-circulation German newspaper satirized him as a “potato-head”. It gives rise to demands that Poland erect a memorial to the 1940 massacre at Katyn, in which Soviet troops murdered at least 15,000 Polish reserve officers, directly across the street from the Russian embassy. And it turns a blind eye to anti-Semitism, gay-bashing and other relics from the darker parts of Poland’s past.
The full list of sins defined by secularists can be found at —“ now where is my little red book? Let’s take 15,000 Canadians and shoot them, dumping their remains in mass graves. Oh, and grab a few million more and deport them to death camps in Siberia (well northern Canada at least). I’m sure Canadians won’t mind —“ the Poles certainly shouldn’t mind, at least according to Mr. Dyer. And let’s be sure to stereotype whole societies by the sins of a few. All Canadians are… now where’s that little red book again?
The funny thing is that Mr. Dyer, if he were a Pole in Eastern Poland at the time, would have been one of the first to be shot at Katyn. They weren’t just military officers, they were doctors, lawyers, writers, and intellectuals.
Poland is highly nationalist because it has had a dreadful history of partition, conquest and oppression at the hands of its far bigger neighbours, Germany and Russia. It is the most Catholic country in Europe because its religion was a rallying point during the long decades of foreign occupation. It is socially conservative because almost half its people are still essentially rural. None of that is bad in itself, but the Kaczynskis know how to push all of Poland’s buttons, and they do it shamelessly and relentlessly.
Here Mr. Dyer makes a fleeting attempt to honor his PhD in History. I wonder if he played this fast a loose with the facts in his doctoral dissertation. Maybe his academic advisers were just wowed when he sang Czerwony sztandar (The Red Standard – the hymn of the Polish proletariat) in the original. Doctoral research is tough business.
Two million young Poles—“over five percent of the population—“have left the country for greener pastures in western Europe since EU membership made it easy for them to move. The 17 per cent unemployment rate, the highest in the EU, gave them a big incentive to go, but in many cases that wasn’t all that pushed them out. There is another Poland, but quite a lot of it is currently living abroad.
And Polish immigrants contribute exactly how much toward Canadian society (now checking the little red book)? Anyway, we don’t want those Catholic potato pickers polluting our liberal society – keep ’em home!
Now let me make a few needlessly stupid, uneducated, uncouth, and misleading statements —“ uh, no —“ that would put me at Mr. Dyer’s level.
What I can offer is the English translation for Czerwony Sztandar
The workers’ flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead;
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their life-blood dyed its every fold.
Then raise the scarlet standard high;
Within its shade we’ll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.
Mr. Dyer —“ keeping those red flags dyed a deep red.
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