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Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political, ,

The far right can’t get it right

It’s an older story, back from March of this year. I came across it because it has been making its way through the Polish Press in the U.S. of late. Note that the BNP is Britain’s far right political party.

From Lancaster Unity (also here): BNP use POLISH plane in campaign poster despite plans to ban East European migrants

The British National Party was ridiculed last night for fronting its anti-immigration campaign with a picture of a Polish Spitfire.

Its poster for the European elections, for which its manifesto includes a ban on Eastern European migrant workers, shows the Second World War plane above the slogan ‘Battle for Britain’. But Air Force history experts have identified that the aircraft was actually flown by the RAF’s 303 Squadron —“ made up of expatriate Poles rescued from France shortly before Nazi occupation.

BNP party chiefs defended their use of the image and insisted they knew all about the background. But John Hemming, MP for Yardley, Birmingham, ridiculed this claim. He also condemned the far-Right party for using the image of Polish heroism in a campaign that includes stemming immigration from Poland.

He said: ‘The BNP often get confused and this happens because they haven’t done their research. This is just another example of them getting it wrong. They have a policy to send Polish people back to Poland —“ yet they are fronting their latest campaign using this plane. It is absurd to make claims about Englishness and Britishness fronted by this image. It’s obvious they just picked an image at random and they are really clutching at straws if they say this was deliberate.’

The 303 Squadron was the most effective Polish squadron during the Second World War. During the Battle of Britain Polish pilots shot down 203 Luftwaffe aircraft which stood for 12 per cent of total German losses in the battle.

A Royal Air Force museum spokesman said: ‘The Spitfire in the poster can be identified as belonging to 303 Squadron of the Polish Air Force by the code letters ‘RF’ painted in front of the RAF roundel. 303 Squadron operated Spitfires from Northolt, Kirton- in-Lindsey, Coltishall and other RAF stations in the UK between 1941 and 1945 after flying Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain.’

No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron-song

I cannot say how proud I am to have been privileged to help form and lead No. 303 squadron and later to lead such a magnificent fighting force as the Polish Wing. There formed within me in those days an admiration, respect and genuine affection for these really remarkable men which I have never lost. I formed friendship that are as firm as they were those twenty-five years ago and this I find most gratifying. We who were privileged to fly and fight with them will never forget and Britain must never forget how much she owes to the loyalty indomitable spirit and sacrifice of those Polish fliers. They were our staunchest Allies in our darkest days; may they always be remembered as such! — Group Captain John A. Kent DFC, AFC, Virtuti Militari.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , ,

CNN – Autumn of Change, The New Poland

A huge retrospective on the fall of Communism led by Poland’s Solidarity revolution. Stories include:

Blog: Poles thrive in new Europe

Starting tomorrow, June 1st, CNN will present a week of programming focused on the changes in Poland over the past 20 years.

Perspective, PNCC, ,

A class on the cusp

From the Buffalo News: For Class of 1969, a priestly era fades

After 40 years of seismic shifts in Catholic Church,once-plentiful shepherds reflect on what they’ll leave

It took two Buffalo cathedrals and a basilica in Lackawanna to accommodate the ordination Class of 1969. On a bright spring morning 40 years ago this week, 25 young men made solemn vows to serve as Catholic priests in the Diocese of Buffalo.

Afterward, they stood for photos shoulder to shoulder in their pressed white vestments, looking with pious expressions at the camera, as if peering into the future.

Little did they know at the time what was in store.

Most of them ended up as respected pastors and are now approaching retirement. A few left the priesthood and got married. One of them was elevated to bishop and Tuesday will be installed in the Diocese of Syracuse.

The Class of 1969 was one of the largest ever in the Buffalo diocese —” and a stark contrast to the state of priestly vocations now. In many ways, it was a class on the cusp.

Its members were called into a whole different priesthood than the one they ended up learning and practicing. Not that they minded.

—We really did think there was going to be a major change in the direction of the church,— said the Rev. George L. Reger, pastor of Blessed Trinity Church.

The country was in upheaval over the Vietnam War, inner-city riots and campus protests, and the Catholic Church in the United States was in the midst of its own drama, adjusting to a new Mass in English, along with other liturgical and philosophical changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council.

—The sands were shifting under our feet in the institution we were committing ourselves to,— said the Rev. John J. Leising, senior associate pastor of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Clarence.

…

The Rev. Patrick H. Elis, pastor of St. Rose of Lima, even remembers talk of more dormitories being built when he was a theology student at the East Aurora seminary, now known as Christ the King.

—We were unaware of the future dissolution of numbers. We just thought it was going to continue on,— he said…

The sad fact is that most of this class still fails to acknowledge the downside of Vatican II. They expected that they would turn the Church on its head, and that everything would change. It was pure naivete. Things did change and the change was on balance negative because the core elements that had fostered their vocations were thrown out like the proverbial baby with the bath water. The good that came out of Vatican II remains overshadowed by the destruction its purveyors wrought.

1969 R C Ordination in BuffaloThe picture (click on it for a larger version) that accompanies the article, of the portion of the class ordained by the Rt. Rev. Pius Benincasa, was likely the last of its kind, with the new ordinands in Roman chasubles. Those chasubles were thrown out as easily as were the foundations of their vocations.

I know many of these men. Many are personable, kind, and hard working. They are great administrators, great with the people, but attend one of their liturgies — well at least the lectors read what’s in Lectionary. The rest is dodgy.

Thankfully the PNCC offers the tradition that fosters vocations as well as the advances many of these men sought — which we instituted in the early twentieth century. The PNCC made necessary changes, like the abolition of mandatory celibacy, the Holy Mass in the vernacular, and enshrining the democratic rights of each member, in a natural, unforced way. It is why I can call the PNCC home as opposed to the R.C. Church in the United States. The R.C. Church is still trying to gain its footing, something likely to take generations, and not all that certain to occur.

Christian Witness, Perspective, Political, , , ,

Dr. Laurence Vance – Christianity and War, Other Aspects of the Warfare State

Dr. Laurence Vance will address the Institute On The Constitution as part of its First Friday program. The program will take place on Friday, June 5, 2009, at 7pm. As with past “First Friday” lectures, this one will be held at 8028 Ritchie Highway, Suite 315, Pasadena, Maryland 21122. Doors open at 6:30pm and the lecture will begin promptly at 7pm. The event is free but because of limited space please RSVP to 1-866-730-9796. Refreshments will be provided.

Dr. Vance’s address will be streamed live, at no cost, on the Internet, June 5 at 7pm (EST).

Dr. Laurence M. Vance is a Bible-believing Christian author, freelance writer, and book reviewer. He holds degrees in history, theology, accounting, and economics. He has written and published sixteen books on the diverse subjects of theology, biblical languages, Bible history, economics, politics, and war. Dr. Vance regularly contributes articles and book reviews to both secular and religious periodicals. He is a regular columnist for LewRockwell a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the editor of the Classic Reprints series, the director of the Francis Wayland Institute, and an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The “Institute on the Constitution (IOTC)” is an educational effort sponsored by the Law Office of Peroutka and Peroutka of Pasadena, Maryland. It is neither an instrument of, nor an advocate for, any particular political party. Rather, it advocates the restoration of our Constitutional Republic by offering classes, lectures, and products designed to re- acquaint the American people with our history, our heritage, and our Constitution, which is the very foundation of our Republic. You will not find smoke, mirrors, or political correctness filters at our presentations — just real American history, the way it was, the way it ought to be taught.

The following is a presentation by Dr. Vance on Christianity and War at the 2008 Austrian Scholars Conference:

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , , , , , , ,

Polonian events in New York’s Capital Region

Parish Festival

St. Michael’s Parish Festival, 20 Page Ave, Cohoes, NY

Polish American Food, Games & Rides, Freckles’ the Clown, Children’s Activities, Vegas Games of Chance, Raffle, Chinese Auction, Dancing to the Rymanowski Brothers Orchestra and Tony’s Polka Band, Polish & American Craft Vendors, and Dance Groups

Friday, May 29th, 5pm-10pm
Saturday, May 30th, Noon – 10pm
Sunday, May 31st, Noon – 6pm

For more information please call 518-785-9002.

Screening of Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn

At Proctors Theater in Schenectady, Friday, May 22, 2009 at 2:30pm, 5:10pm & 7:45pm

This Oscar nominated film follows the story of four Polish families whose lives are torn apart when, at the outset of WWII, a great number of Polish soldiers fall into the hands of Soviet troops and later brutally become victims of Stalinism along with citizens in the Katyn forest in 1940.

This war drama is not rated. This film is in Polish, Russian and German with English subtitles. This film has a total running time of 121 minutes. Tickets are $6.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , , , ,

Polish-Georgian veteran receives appointment as Admiral of the Polish Navy

Jerzy Tumaniszwili (Jerzy Trapper), an Oregonian living in Beavercreek, received a promotion to Rear Admiral from the President of Poland, the Hon. Lech Kaczynski. Admiral is the highest rank in the Polish Navy, equivalent to General in the Army. Admiral Jerzy Tumaniszwili is a distinguished WWII veteran of the Polish Navy, decorated with Virtuti Militari and other orders. He served as artillery officer on the Polish Navy ships (ORP) Burza, Krakowiak and Piorun, settling in the U.S. after the war.

_dsc1182_2The appointment ceremony will take place at the Polish Hall in Portland on May 31, 2009. The day’s events begin with an 11am Holy Mass for veterans of WWII at St Stanislaus Church followed by a reception and appointment ceremony at 12:15pm in the Polish Hall in Portland.

Jerzy Tumaniszwili will receive the appointment from the Polish Ambassador in Washington, Robert Kupiecki, and General Leszek Soczewica. Polonia is invited to the ceremony.

An additional note of interest is that Rear Admiral Tumaniszwili is a Pole of Georgian descent. The following video covers some of the history of Georgian officers in the Polish Army between World Wars I and II:

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , ,

Columbia University establishes Endowed Chair in Polish Studies

From Columbia University: Professorship will focus on research and education within university’s East Central European Center

Columbia University recently completed a $3 million fundraising effort to establish its first endowed chair in its Polish studies program at the university’s East Central European Center.

—The new chair in Polish studies reflects not only Poland’s historical contributions to art, literature and the sciences as the birthplace of such notable figures as Czeslaw Milosz, Frederick Chopin, Marie Curie and Pope John Paul II, but also recognizes its current prominent position as a member of the European Union,— said Nicholas Dirks, Columbia’s vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. —Students will benefit from the wide array of studies we offer that pay tribute to the remarkable achievements that Poland has realized culturally, economically and politically.—

Following an international search to fill the professorship, a scholar specializing in one of the social sciences as it pertains to Poland and its neighbors will join Columbia’s faculty.

The announcement of the endowed chair took place in Warsaw on Wednesday, March 25. A formal ceremony was organized by Poland’s Consulate General in New York and the Foundation for Polish Science. It was attended by Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Bogdan Zdrojewski, minister of culture and national heritage, and Aleksander Grad, minister of state treasury, among others.

During the ceremony, Foreign Minister Sikorski thanked the institutional and individual donors and emphasized that he was personally —touched and proud— that a project that was so important for Poland was successfully completed.

—The Polish studies chair provides a marvelous and timely opportunity to engage our Polish and central European colleagues in the university’s planned worldwide network of Columbia Global Centers, which are designed to mobilize scholarship around the globe to address the multiple challenges facing us all,— said Kenneth Prewitt, vice president for Global Centers at Columbia.

John S. Micgiel, director of the Columbia’s East Central European Center, led the five-year fundraising program that culminated in a final transfer of funds last month.

—Our ability to reach out successfully to Polish business was the direct result of the engagement of Consul General Krzysztof W. Kasprzyk of the Polish Consulate General in New York, Professor Wlodzimierz Bolecki of the Foundation for Polish Science in Warsaw, and especially Polish Consul Dr. Ewa Ger,— said Micgiel. —Their connections and determination to make links between Poland and Columbia built on our earlier efforts to establish a Polish studies professorship among Polish-American institutions and individual donors.—

The Kosciuszko Foundation, which promotes Polish culture, education and history in the United States, was one of the original proponents of the Polish studies chair at Columbia and helped facilitate fundraising, along with Warsaw’s Semper Polonia Foundation.

The Brooklyn-based Polish Slavic Federal Credit Union, headed by Bogdan Chmielewski, was the first corporate donor to the project, contributing more than $500,000. The credit union capped off the effort with an additional check for $181,000.

—This is a truly historic and prideful day for Polonians and all Polish-Americans,— said Chmielewski, who attended the ceremony in Warsaw. —Poland’s visibility within the hallowed halls of U.S. academia will increase greatly. Furthermore, there will be heightened awareness of Poland’s vast contributions to world culture.—

Other major donors include the Warsaw Stock Exchange, led by Ludwik Sobolewski; The National Depository for Securities, headed by Elzbieta Pustola; ENEA, an energy conglomerate led by Pawel Mortas; Poland Energy Group, led by Tomasz Zadroga; the Special Economic Zones of Katowice, Warmia and Mazury, Pomorska and Kostrzyn-Strubicka, and the Malopolska Agency for Regional Development, with Piotr Wojaczek, acting on behalf of the regional zones; and the Bogdan Fiszer Silesia Capital Fund, led by Bogdan Fiszer.Antoni Chroscielewski coordinated fundraising efforts on behalf of the Polish Army Veterans Association.

Poland - Polish - Polonia,

Nothing and no one should be forgotten

Robert Strybel, Warsaw Correspondent for Polish American World and other periodicals reported recently on the “Restoration of Forgotten History” project.

The project, the brainchild of Professor Andrzej S. Kaminski of Washington’s Georgetown University and Professor Daria Nałęcz, Rector of Warsaw’s Lazarski School of Commerce and Law, is aimed at correcting the omissions, misinformation, and inaccuracies about Poland as found in textbooks used in the United States.

“American textbooks are issued in millions of copies and used by all students in the U.S.. I have come to the conclusion that 29 years after the end of the cold war it’s high time for the information they contain to be truthful” Kaminski said.

The group has held a series of conferences attended by American authors, publishers and scholars, Their participants have included publishers and historians from Yale, Georgetown, and the University of California, among them British (Welsh) Professor Norman Davies, one of the most prolific non-Polish historians dealing with Polish affairs.

“Our meetings are fairly straightforward. We simply sit down and go through the relevant passages of textbooks page by page, pointing out their shortcomings and errors,” Kaminski explained.

“Corrections have already been introduced into a number of books, and others are being worked on. The program of each meeting also includes an excursion to places of historical interest in such cities as Kraków, Sandomierz or Gdańsk. Our guests are enchanted by our country which they hadn’t known before. One of the biggest impressions on Americans is made by the fact that Poland already had a parliamentary system at the turn of the 16th century, nearly 300 years before America declared its independence.”

A major reason for the present state of affairs has been the relatively low level of interest in Central and Eastern European history among English-speaking historians.

“l do not attribute this to ill-will or sloppy scholarship on the part of American authors,” said Professor Nałęcz. “They are simply unable to check every detail and have to rely on the research of others, preferably sources available in English. The works of Polish authors have not been translated into English that much.”

Professor Nałęcz advises: “We must read what others are writing and alert authors to errors so that new editions get corrected. They usually do. And we must do what other nations are doing: attend historical congresses and conferences as well as holding our own. Such personal contacts are the best way to convey one’s point of view. Unfortunately, we are not all that present at the world’s history salons.”

The title above is taken from a book published by the Czech National Archives: Nothing and Nobody Should Be Forgotten (Aby na nic a na nikoho nebylo zapomenuto).

Perspective,

Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia, Vilnius

From The Economist: Vilnius — Contested city

THE choice of name for the capital of present-day Lithuania—”Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia or now Vilnius—”shows who you are, or were. In the 20th century alone, it has been occupied or claimed by Germany, Russia, Poland and the Soviet Union, with only brief periods of Lithuanian autonomy.

Vilne, in Yiddish, was home to one of Judaism’s greatest rabbis, a saintly brainbox known as the Gaon (Genius) who gave his first sermon aged seven and kick-started the great Jewish intellectual revival in the 18th century. —Vilna is not simply a city, it is an idea,— said a speaker at a Yiddish conference in 1930. It was the virtual capital of what some call Yiddishland, a borderless realm of east European Jewish life and letters in the inter-war era. At times, the majority of the city’s population was Jewish. Their murder and the deportation of many Poles by Stalin meant that the city lost 90% of its population during the second world war. Present-day inhabitants of Vilnius may find much they did not know in Laimonas Briedis’s subtle and evocative book about their city’s history.

Poles mourn the loss of Wilno, one of their country’s great cultural and literary centres. Poland’s two great poets studied there: Adam Mickiewicz nearly two centuries ago, and in the pre-war years Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prizewinner. Yet both men saw their Lithuanian and Polish identities as complementary, not clashing.

…

In any of the dozen possible renderings of the city’s name, its roots evoke mystery. Wilda, its old German label, comes from the word wild. In Lithuanian come hints of the words for devil (velnias), the departed (velionis) and ghost (vele). That ambiguity is fitting. In its 700-odd years of recorded history, the city has been both capital city and provincial backwater. Outsiders have been struck by its filthy streets and shameless women, and also by its glorious architecture and heights of scholarship. Pilgrims flock to the Gates of Dawn, its most holy Catholic shrine. It has been the epitome of tolerance and a crucible of the Holocaust.

In a modern Europe Vilnius can seem peripheral. Mr Briedis, however, begins by noting that when French geographers recently plotted the mid-point between Europe’s cartographical extremes, they found the continent’s true centre was a derelict farmhouse just outside the city.

Foreign visitors have left few written accounts, but Mr Briedis uses them all as sources. A hapless papal delegation provides the first. In 1324 it tried and failed to persuade Lithuania’s great pagan ruler, Gediminas, to adopt Christianity. He showed no desire to forsake Perkunas the thunder god, berating his visitors for their intolerance. —Why do you always talk about Christian love?— he asked the pope’s men. —Where do you find so much misery, injustice, violence, sin and greed, if not among the Christians?—

Lithuania eventually adopted Christianity, along with a dynastic deal with Poland, in 1387. A cathedral was built on the pagan temple, the holy fires doused and the sacred groves felled. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania flourished. At its height in the 16th century it was a vast multiconfessional empire, stretching to the Black Sea, with no fewer than six legal languages, including Hebrew and Armenian. Even as that declined, the Vilnius style of Baroque architecture ripened in glory, a —splendid autumn— in one of Mr Briedis’s many well-turned phrases, that paid —a gracious farewell to its phantom golden age—…

Mr. Briedis’ book Vilnius: City of Strangers is available at Amazon.

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