For a country that fought Nazism tooth and nail, this is horrifying**.
Polish Witchhunt
By Ignacio Ramonet
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.
Any wonder that Poland is one of the few coalition partners left?
Sounds like Bushs' BFF got a little ahead of the pack.
**This is not what my father fought for or his family died for.
Good Luck Poland, too bad the true patriots for Poland are all gone.
posted by Paddy @ 8:57 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Yes, and they are keen on taking the US's "missile defense shield" too, which of course is part of the bipartisan global full spectrum dominance thingy.
Where did you take those informations Ashen ? Another crap spread by some "so called" historians. Look at Righteous Among the Nations title. Most of those titles ware given to Poles. Even if there were some Poles who helped hunt down Jews during WWII, there might have been fiew of them, not many or most of Poles! Usually I do not defend Poland, as my country is not "saint" and has many sins as any other nation, but such a lie as yours, has to be oposed.
I never said all Poles collaborated, I said "I wonder if they ever did something similar for those who collaborated with the Nazis" I also used the word 'many', that in no way infers to mean 'most' or the 'majority. Read some good histories, you'll see that many Poles were just as anti-semitic as Germans were at the time, and then, more importantly, those who were otherwise innocent and feared for their lives, so 'collaborated' in helping track down Jews. The point is, ultimately, that 'collaboration' does not necessarily mean one had a choice. OK, one had a choice but that was either collaborate with those in power or be sent off to a prison camp and die. My point is one cannot just go after everyone, cannot create a law against those who collaborated with the previous regime. Often, what choice did people have?
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