The third of my comments following Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum, review: a querulous and flawed analysis of Europe by Philip Johnston in The Telegraph, 26 July 2020.
Lech Borkowski
31 Jul 2020 2:07AM
In September 2011, at the time when Anne Applebaum’s husband was Foreign Minister in the Donald Tusk government, Polish authorities launched an incredibly vicious operation against our family.
We have been targeted for years, but earlier provocations, although harmful, were not entirely successful. This time they decided to launch a very intense operation aimed initially at my wife, a pianist and piano teacher in the State School of Music in Zielona Góra. We monitored the operation’s progress and recorded its details in our letters to the authorities. This was state-sponsored lawlessness in full throttle. It contradicts Applebaum’s narrative about Poland.
As a result of this operation, we wrote many letters to the country’s top authorities. We pointed out numerous violations of law and our basic human rights. The government protected the immediate perpetrators and the associated lawlessness. In other words, the state and the criminal organisation is one and the same entity in Poland. Radek Sikorski served this criminal organisation for many, many years as well. He does this now as a Member of the European Parliament.
Eventually the authorities decided to remove us from our jobs. I was an associate professor of physics at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. We were both fired at the end of 2015. In case of my wife they manufactured fake medical statement, claiming that she suffered from unspecified ‘delusions’. The best piano teacher of the school was declared by the authorities unfit for work. A typical Communist method.
It was not a question of ‘if’ but ‘how’ we were to be liquidated.
I was the only faculty member at the University’s Department of Physics with a western PhD. The key distinction between me and the rest of the faculty is the fact of my parents’ staunch resistance to Communism and my full support of it. My father deserted from the Communist army with his entire company in 1945. My mother’s family provided food and shelter to Polish non-Communist resistance in the area occupied by the Soviet Union. I was possibly the only faculty member of a university in Poland, whose parents were prisoners of Communist concentration camps.
Applebaum’s narrative about the Law and Justice Party is false as well. I was a member of that Party from 2008-2010, when it was in ‘opposition’. I saw it from inside. It conducted no discussion and activities. For all practical purposes it was dead. There were party meetings and superficial discussions, but never anything real.
The Law and Justice provocative moves are grotesque and superficial. In reality, the lawlessness of the state has been invariant under the so-called ‘transition to democracy’ and is invariant under the change of governments. The overthrow of Communism was staged. Radek Sikorski’s legend of underground activity against Communism before he came to the UK is simply not true. It was fabricated.
Has Anne Applebaum ever told you that Adam Michnik, the leading ‘dissident’ in Poland during the 1970s and 1980s, is a son of a Communist convicted in the 1930s for acting against the Polish state on behalf of the Stalin’s Soviet Union? How did he transition from being part of the most privileged Communist youth to seemingly acting against the system? Or did he? Similarly, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the allegedly first non-Communist PM in Poland in 1989, was earlier three-time member of the Communist ‘parliament, each time ‘elected’ with more than 95 percent of the vote.
Currently, I am working at a greengrocer’s in London. My wife is unemployed in Poland. Two professionals with the highest qualifications in their professions, who refused to lie, forge, and falsify, have been liquidated.
@LechSBorkowski