How to Scare the Poles

Our whole nation, from babies to old people, wants just one thing: to have the traitors and spies who sold our homeland to our enemies shot to death! Our whole nation demands that these cursed vipers be annihilated! Years will pass. The graves of these hated traitors will be grown over with weeds and grass, covered with the eternal contempt of the honest Soviet people."

Few texts can be compared with the special elegance of the speeches of Andrei Vishinsky, the precise executor of the great Stalin's orders. In every Russian's ears in the 1930s reverberated the words of the republic's prosecutor-an educated, cultured gentleman from a Polish noble family who showed everybody accurately and without fail where the enemy was. Vishinsky frightened people with Trotskyism. Trotskyism was hiding in every nook and cranny. Anything bad that happened in the Soviet Union, whether a meager harvest, hunger or poverty, the Trotskyites were to blame. In this way, a small political faction was turned into a bogy for the whole nation.

Traditionally, the best bogy was the Jews. Near the end of communism in Poland, in 1988, a party weekly, Sprawy i Ludzie, brought some terrifying news: "In special cafeterias for believers of Judaism in our country, 70,000 kosher lunches are distributed every day for free. The lunches are free."

Scaring people has been common always and everywhere. Rulers frightened their subjects to turn their attention away from their own failures and unite people against the enemy, even an imaginary one. People scared one another to vent their frustration and smother their anxiety. The English invented Papist conspiracies. The Jacobins disciplined the nation by showing them an enemy in the form of aristocrats. Under the czars, Russians were told about Polish conspiracies, while the perfidious Albion was used to scare the Germans. During the Cold War, communists used the Americans as a bogy. "After Coca-Cola, a gentle, pleasant sensation / For a few cents you dreamed of our annihilation," wrote Polish poet Adam Wa¿yk. For the Americans, on the other hand, the bogy was the Reds. Defense Secretary John Forrestal got so scared that he jumped out the window, convinced that the Russians were taking over Washington.

Bogies were especially popular in times of revolutions, coups d'etat and political breakthroughs, times when people knew for sure that tomorrow would be different from yesterday, but still had no idea what it would be like or what would happen to them. They were scared, so it was easy to frighten them, and they even sought out scary things themselves.

There's no doubt that today the Poles have reached such a breakthrough moment, and under the touch of a magic wand, various bogies and fears have sprung up everywhere. Some have returned after years in hiding, emerging from a bottle that the communists had corked up; others have been born spontaneously in the new situation; still others have been carefully and meticulously constructed by politicians with the ardor of Dr. Frankenstein.

Solidarity boss Marian Krzaklewski, Jan Olszewski and, to his right, former Prime Minister have maneuvered themselves into using the constitution as a bogey. Both gentlemen thought that just before the September parliamentary elections, they could rile up Catholic Poles against the liberal constitution promoted by the Sejm's center-left majority. That was their mistake. The Catholic nation watched with apathy as the right wing's knights struggled to hurl successive insults at the constitution.

Calling it a constitution for Bantustan or a Stalinist law made no impression. Nobody, except the man's shrink, was shocked by Solidarity Senator Piotr Andrzejewski, who announced on TV that because of the constitution, the world doesn't consider Poland to be a sovereign state.

The campaign launched by the right wing was supposed to make the less resilient think that the day the constitution is passed, cows will stop giving milk, dogs will start meowing, and the Catholic Polish nation will be swallowed up by the Baltic.

The right wing's propagandists claimed that the state would be able to take children away from their parents, because the constitution says that upbringing should take into account the child's freedom of conscience. They said that Poland would lose its independence and national identity, because the constitution says that some state prerogatives could be transferred to international organizations. They said that the state would introduce public atheism, even though not a word in the most boring constitution in modern Europe says anything to that effect.

Accusing supporters of the new constitution of treason, chanting "Constitution-Prosti-tution," issuing brochures with the slogan "Polish people, wake up!" charmingly copied straight from Dr. Goebbels: This is the lovely climate of fear that the right wing has been concocting for several months.

The only problem is that hardly anyone got scared. The constitution, its authors including such gentle people as democratic Poland's first prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was hopeless as a bogy.

The special charm of Polish anti-Semitism lies in the fact that it can do perfectly well without any Jews.

Juggling anti-Semitic arguments in public life produces shocking effects. It's almost amusing how every third Pole believes that in a country nearly completely devoid of Jews, the Jews still have too much power. Entire masses of people are deeply convinced that they are ruled by Jews and that Jews pose an economic threat to their interests.

This results from the fact that every major political debate in Poland-be it on the constitution, the battle against the postcommunist left wing or privatization-is inevitably directed toward the nonexistent Jews.

On the one hand, Poland's contemporary anti-Semitism has a plebeian character. It is usually the reaction of people who are confused by the new system and looking for someone they can hold responsible for their poverty and their grievances. They don't need real Jews to do that. This kind of anti-Semitism is responsible for the stupid graffiti on walls, hooligan slogans during worker protests and bigotry at the dinner table.

There is, however, anti-Semitism premeditated by politicians: One Solidarity leader makes up stories about President Aleksander Kwaœniewski going to see the rabbis. The rightist Gazeta Polska daily shows great devotion in uncovering the non-Aryan ancestors and names of its center-left opponents. The giant Radio Maryja (5 million listeners!) is obsessed with hatred of "Jews, the non-Polish minority."

But none of them has gone as far as the well-known actor and film director Ryszard Filipski, who moved to the countryside because he says he'd rather look at the horses' Slavic mouths than Jewish snouts in the city.

The problem is not the number of active anti-Semites in Poland. The problem is that you can be regarded as a decent, patriotic citizen in Poland and still openly express your anti-Semitic views.

It's not the left that uses capitalism as a bogy. It's the so-called right that celebrates the gloomy voodoo featuring the specter of capitalism that goes away from the ideal of equality where everyone has little, but the fortunate few have more.

Like the propaganda secretaries in communist times, right-wing activists of today worry most about the media. "The mass media are, to a petrifying degree, in the hands of foreigners who are completely unaware of our 1000-year-old culture," despairs Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk, the director of Radio Maryja. He's joined by Olszewski's Movement for the Reconstruction of Poland (ROP), according to which the media are one of the few strategic sectors that have to remain in Polish hands.

Capitalism is bad. And the foreign edition of it is the worst of all. ROP-man Jacek Kurski warns the American owners of the Kwidzyn paper plant that they bought the factory from a thief who had stolen it from the nation. They bought it from a thief, which means they should return it as soon as Kurski's buddies get a cut of the action. And the thief is the first minister of privatization, the legendary Janusz Lewandowski.

The privatization of Ruch, the monopolist press distributor, doesn't leave much doubt, either. Bourgeois fat cats, stay away from Ruch, says Kurski: "This property has already found an owner: the Polish nation."

The glory days for real Poles will arrive when the hegemony of foreign capitalist speculators is finally broken. Their gigantic wealth will become the property of young, independent entrepreneurs-aborigines left completely helpless today. No cash, no prospects; still, genuine Poles. This is the only type of capitalists acceptable to the right wing. Fair enough.

The glory days of the Polish bourgeoisie will come to an end as soon as they make their first half-million dollars. Then, Solidarity will get to them, confiscating everything that wasn't properly documented.

Such ideas spring to the minds of right-wing opposition leaders three months before the elections. Everyone has the right to dislike the rich, especially in a poor country.

But those who use the rich to scare the poor are more scary than the rich they use as the bogy.

It features the Church, the communists, the Freemasons and Russia, a traditional bogy that is becoming more genuinely scary every day.

Still, not everyone can be used as a bogy. There is no way to make people scared of the leader of the opposition Freedom Union (UW), Leszek Balcerowicz. He is definitely the only man in Poland that nobody is scared of. Especially the government.

And because Poles are pro-American our Fat Pig, following their best manual "Divide et Impera", is a rabid anti-American politico. No wonder the American neocommies love people like him and supported their reelection big time. The more chaos the better.
Here's how our Fat Pig tried to harm President Reagan (notice which US paper was chosen to embarrass Reagan):

Urban Warfare
The world probably would never have heard of Ryszard Kuklinski if Jerzy Urban had not tried to embarrass Ronald Reagan. In 1986, Urban was press spokesman for the Military Council of National Salvation, the junta headed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski that had seized power and instituted martial law in December 1981. Known for his acerbic wit, sharp tongue, and occasional profanity, Urban stood out among the colorless bureaucrats who ruled Poland. He was always combative and never apologetic, even when defending an illegitimate government that had suppressed the first free trade union in the Soviet Bloc.
Warsaw had failed to improve or even normalize relations with Washington. Although the White House had lifted most of the sanctions it had imposed in 1981, the strongest measures, including withdrawal of Most Favored Nation status, remained in force. Even more important, Urban and his bosses knew that the United States was covertly supporting the underground opposition in order "to keep the spirit of Solidarity alive," and the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private, government-funded, public diplomacy initiative, was about to receive $1 million in congressionally appropriated funds earmarked for Solidarity.4 Jaruzelski and company were in a foul mood because they were losing the battle against the underground, and the economy was in worse shape than ever. Most important, however, Urban and his bosses could not abide Ronald Reagan. Next to Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, the American president was the most revered figure in Poland. The "evil empire" rhetoric of Reagan’s first term, while controversial at home, cheered the Poles on in their struggle against Soviet hegemony; in 1984, many prayed for his reelection.
On 3 June 1986, Urban met with Michael Dobbs, the former Washington Post bureau chief in Warsaw, then based in Paris. Urban offered Dobbs a scoop: in a few days, the Polish minister of internal affairs would reveal that CIA had had an agent inside the general staff who had drafted the operational blueprint for martial law. CIA had "evacuated" the agent and his family from Warsaw on 8 November 1981 and flown them to safety in the United States.
The scoop was a setup. Perhaps because the Kuklinski case was potentially embarrassing to the Polish Army and to state security, Urban wanted it to surface in the US media before it appeared in Poland. He also wanted the Reagan administration to confirm the story. Thus Urban insisted that his remarks were "off the record," unless the Post obtained some form of official comment on the impending revelation.
If that was Urban’s intention, he succeeded. The next day, the Post ran a front-page story under the joint byline of Dobbs and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. It repeated what Urban had told Dobbs: "The US administration could have publicly revealed these plans to the world and warned Solidarity," Urban said, "Had it done so, the implementation of martial law would have been impossible."
With his own spin on the story, Urban was in a position at a 6 June 1986 press conference to comment on Washington’s (not Warsaw’s!) revelation that CIA had been in liaison with a senior Polish Army officer involved in martial law planning.7 In his briefing, Urban elaborated the theme he had developed with Dobbs. The Polish government, he said, assumed that CIA had withdrawn Kuklinski so that Washington could alert its "friends" in Solidarity—Urban often sarcastically referred to the Polish opposition as America’s "friends" and "allies"—and thereby foil Warsaw’s martial law plans. "Washington, however, kept silent," Urban noted. "It did not warn its allies. It did not boast of its agent as it customarily does." The Reagan administration had "lied to its own people and to its friends [in Solidarity] in Poland," when it denied having prior knowledge of martial law. Kuklinski, he maintained, was living proof to the contrary.
Urban even blamed President Reagan personally for the plight of the Polish opposition, asserting that Reagan "could have prevented the arrests and internment" of Solidarity leaders but did not because the White House was hoping to provoke a "a bloodbath of European proportions." It had intended to use Solidarity as a "bloody pawn" in its "imperialist aims" and in its geopolitical rivalry with the USSR. Reagan was no friend of Poland; his policy was "morally repulsive."
As intended, Urban also stirred up trouble for the White House within the large and politically influential Polish-American community. Alojzy Mazewski, President of the Polish American Congress (PAC), fired off an open letter to the President demanding to know why Solidarity had not been warned, why Kuklinski had been kept incommunicado, and why he had not been allowed to meet with the Polish-American community or given a job. The White House delayed its reply, giving Urban another opportunity to denounce America’s alleged "disregard for the [Polish-American] community." When the response came, Polish media noted that the messenger was not a top-level official.
The brouhaha eventually died down, but Urban had caused some damage. A commentator on Poland’s state-run television gloated as he read from Mazewski’s letter asserting that the "trust and friendship of the of the Polish nation toward America has been undermined." "And not for the first time," the commentator added.8 The Washington correspondent of Trybuna Ludu, the Polish equivalent of Pravda, cited a letter from a Polish-language daily in New York warning that foreign leaders from Napoleon to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman had betrayed the trust of the Polish people. 9 Now the underground opposition was flying close "to the flame of Reagan’s candle."10 When Mazewski expressed dissatisfaction with the slow response he was getting from the White House, Urban publicly invited him to Warsaw for a meeting with Polish officials.

Entangled in History

A Meisterschtick, isn't it?
Majman is just a minor league schlemiel.

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May 25, 1997 No 21 (448)

Voice - Opinion

How to Scare the Poles