[Marxism] Ignacio Ramonet on the Polish witchhunt

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Some Poles feel very strongly about human rights... in Cuba, 
but when it comes to their very own native homeland, less so and
note also that "coming out" in a university is also now illegal.)

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Poland, or A Socialism That Never Was
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1184.html
Lech Walesa: Letter to the Cuban People
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/63446
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LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE

Polish witchhunt
By Ignacio Ramonet

http://mondediplo.com/2007/04/01poland

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual
purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and
penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely
intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force
on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any
collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior
civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and
journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15
May.

They must all fill in a form and answer the question: "Did you
secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security
services?" The forms must be handed to their immediate superiors, 
Who will forward them to the Institute of National Memory in Warsaw,
which will check its records and issue a certificate of political
purity. Journalists employed in any public service will be dismissed
automatically if they collaborated. Anyone who refuses to answer the
question or who is proved to have lied may be banned from their
profession for 10 years.

This mad law, which is causing uproar in the European Union, makes
the McCarthyites of the United States in the 1950s look like amateurs
at the practise of anti-communism. It is the main feature of a
witchhunt launched by the authorities after the conservative
president, Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother, prime minister
Jaroskaw Kaczynski, came to power in Poland in October 2005.

Many Poles consider the law to be unconstitutional because it
requires citizens to prove that they did not do something. It may be
quashed by the Constitutional Court, which will deliver its verdict
in May.

The ruling rightwing, Catholic and nationalist coalition (the
Kaczynski brothers' Law and Justice party, the agrarian Self Defence
party and the League of Polish Families) is pursuing a disturbing
policy of tough enforcement of moral values. Roman Giertych, deputy
prime minister, minister of education and leader of the League, has
just tabled a homophobic bill, causing more international uproar and
protests from human rights organisations. Under the bill, which 
could be presented within a month, any person disclosing their
homosexuality "or any other sexual deviation" in a university or
scholastic establishment would be liable to a fine, dismissal or a
term of imprisonment.

The minister's father, the League MEP Maciej Giertych, caused
protests in February when he published an antisemitic pamphlet, paid
for by the European parliament and issued under its logo, containing
such statements as "the Jews create their own ghettos" and
"antisemitism is not racism".

These anti-communist purges and attempts to reimpose an authoritarian
moral order in Poland - and also to some extent in Ukraine, Lithuania
and other countries formerly in the eastern bloc - conceal a worrying
nostalgia for the period before the second world war, when racism was
blatant. Some of those caught up in the current wave of revisionism
go as far as extolling collaboration with the Third Reich against the
Soviet Union.

The idea, so popular with the media, that Putin's Russia is merely a
covert extension of the old USSR inspires the spirit that prompted
Warsaw to agree to instal on Polish territory the anti-missile shield
designed by the Pentagon to protect the United States. It did that
without deigning to consult its partners in the EU and Nato. Which
goes to show that paranoia in politics can lead not only to spiritual
atrophy but also to a special form of treachery.


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