My comment on As Polish abortion laws tighten women fear an impossible choice by Kasia Strek and Peter Conradi in The Sunday Times, 8 November 2020, online on 7 November 2020. Polish version: Dynamika rewolucyjna.
This affair is being played as a typical Communist polit-soap opera. Hyper-activism of thousands of ‘protesters’ in a country without any social capital, some holding signs with foul language. Emotions seemingly run high. What you see is what you get? Well, not quite.
Some of these rallies took place in Warsaw in front of the monument to the Communist rule in Poland, the so-called Palace of Culture and Science, erected in the early 1950s, as shown in the article’s leading picture.
The address of this monstrous building is Palace of Culture and Science, Plac Defilad 1, 00-901 Warsaw, Poland. It houses the HQ of the Polish Academy of Sciences. During the thirty years that passed since the alleged fall of Communism the Academy of Sciences remained faithful to its totalitarian origin in 1951 and its totalitarian location. The Communist baton dominating Warsaw has not been demolished.
We are told that now it is the Catholic church which holds sway over the public life in Poland and its political affairs. This claim, however, does not hold water. Communists got the Catholic church firmly under their control in the first years of their rule post-WWII. The Vatican itself sought to appease Communists. The Hungarian primate Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who staunchly resisted the Communist control of the Catholic church in Hungary was stripped of his Cardinal title by the pope Paul VI in 1973.
The Polish pope John Paul II, referred to in an accompanying Times article as ‘the late Polish pope who provided the spiritual authority behind the overthrow of communism’, did not provide any spiritual authority because there was no such thing as an overthrow of Communism. It was a Communist-designed transition from an open dictatorship to dictatorship below the line, disguised as a simulated and managed democracy.
John Paul II celebrated the 26th anniversary of his papacy in 2004 with the Red Army Choir concert in the Papal Audience Hall. The last song of the evening was ‘Oka’, the anthem of the first Polish Communist division formed in the Soviet Union in 1943. The concert was broadcast to Italy and Russia. The Russians are telling you in bold letters: ‘dear comrades, he is our man’.
There was no chance for an anti-Communist priest to rise through the ranks of clergy without the regime stopping it. No chance. This could happen only in fairy tales.
Unfortunately, The Times contributes to this contemporary mythology by uncritically publishing these articles, whose entire framework is incorrect.
You also need to understand that the concept of law in Poland is largely abstract. Its meaning is similar to that pre-1990. What matters is not the dry letter of the law but the ‘revolutionary dynamics’ in the sense described by Stanisław Mackiewicz in his book “Russian Minds in Fetters” (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932). The state is essentially criminal and it does not depend on an advertised political profile of a government. It was equally criminal twenty years ago or ten years ago as it is now.
Poland is an evolved Communist dictatorship in disguise. Dictatorship adapts and evolves.
@LechSBorkowski
This text is also supported by my wife Małgorzata Głuchowska, pianist and piano teacher, removed from her job in a state institution in 2015 by unlawful actions of the state apparatus.