Poland

How Can We Send the Rascals Packing?

Professor Jerzy Przystawa, Wroclaw

For a patriotic Pole, and I hope I have a right to consider myself one, the idea of Poland being a part of a European Superstate is unacceptable and, in fact, abhorrent. It goes against all my education and upbringing, it invalidates everything dear to me since I began reading books and learning my country’s history.

Because I happen to know that history, I feel entitled to say that such an adherence to national sovereignty and independence has nothing to do with xenophobia or nationalistic chauvinism. Since the dawn of history, the monarchs of the first Polish Royal Piast Dynasty married German princesses. The year 1000 was noted in our chronicles as the year of the Emperor Otto III’s great pilgrimage to Gniezno—by then the capital of Poland—to pray at the tomb of the Polish patron saint Wojciech (Adalbertus), and to bring to Boleslaus the Brave the insignia of sovereign power: the spear of St.Mauritius and a royal diadem. German historians claim even today that another royal prince of the Piast Dynasty, Henry the Pious, who fell during the battle of Legnica (Leignitz), defending Europe against the Mongol hordes, had already more than 75% German blood in his veins.

When the last of the Piasts died, the Poles offered the crown to Jagiello, the Great Prince of Lithuania, who started the Jagiellonian dynasty, and Poland with Lithuania created the Kingdom of Two Nations. After the Jagiellonians, in the second half of the XVI century, Poland had become a constitutional monarchy, with monarchs being elected and the Polish State proudly became the Republic of Two Nations. The first elected king happened to be a Frenchman, Henri de Valois. Then we had a great Hungarian, Stephen Batoryas king, then three gentlemen of Swedish origin of the Vasa Dynasty. Despite all those foreigners as the royal heads of the Polish State, national sovereignty and independence was never in question.

By the end of the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Army brought to Poland a group of traitors, mostly direct employees of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and, with the general consent of the Allied Governments of the USA and the UK, installed them as rulers of the so-called independent Polish People’s Republic. Any resistance was crushed by ruthless, cruel and bloody measures. For nearly half a century, any idea of Poland being a sovereign state had to be kept well buried.

In 1989 the successors of those Soviet rascals, on the orders from Kremlin, sat down with carefully selected members of the opposition movement at the so-called Round Table. The result was a declaration that Poland was now really and truly a sovereign and independent state. However, a precondition was that selected members of the ruling communist elite would stay in power, in a strange coalition with selected members of the ‘democratic opposition’. Two thirds of parliamentary seats were to be reserved for yesterday’s communists. The post of the Head of State had to be offered to General Jaruzelski, the former Secretary General of the Communist Party, who, incidentally, was one of the military commanders brought to Poland by the Soviet Army. Up to a few years ago, in published biographies of General Jaruzelski, among his special deeds of distinction and merit there were always mentioned his outstanding achievements in fighting ‘the bandit organisations of reactionary underground forces’ (read: those determined to pay with their lives for an independent and sovereign Poland). In 1989, by fraudulent election, Jaruzelski was ‘elected’ President of the new, democratic Poland.

Since that time, the Polish people went to the polls three times to elect their representatives via free, democratic elections. The results of those elections are that former communist apparatchiks still form a major part of the political establishment, and one representative of their nomenklatura, Aleksander Kwasniewski, occupies the post of Head of State. The whole political establishment is in direct succession to those ‘invited’ to take part in the 1989 Round Table Agreement. The chief objective, since that time, the ultimate political goal of Poland, is to surrender her sovereignity to a new European superpower, i.e. to the EU, and become a European vassal state. The new Constitution of Poland, in its art. 90.1 declares: ‘The Republic of Poland can surrender, as a result of an international agreement, some part of its sovereign power to an international organisation or an international body’. And the full power of the State is directed towards persuading the Polish population that the idea of being an independent and sovereign state is not only old and unfashionable, incompatible with the modern world, but is just ridiculous and foolish.

But what do the Polish people think about all that? It is difficult to answer this question for how one could get an answer? In the middle of last June, in a provincial town of Swidnica (ca. 70,000 inhabitants), a ‘referendum’ took place, where the inhabitants were asked a simple question: are you for or against joining the EU? A massive, expensive, propaganda show had been staged, with the best country entertainers brought into town, and with enormous TV and other media coverage. The result was rather unwelcome: barely 17% of voters bothered to enter the polling stations. What could be the meaning of that?

Polish people, with each passing day, are getting more disillusioned with the newly-acquired democracy and dissociate themselves from the affairs of their state. More and more they feel that they have nothing to say. They feel manipulated and cheated.

For the Polish people, to decide on our own fate, to decide on the question whether we are to become a member of the EU or not, the first and the most important question to answer is how can we send the successors of the Round Table Agreement packing, how can we cut off for good the umbilical cord which ties us to the communist past and the communist establishment of power? How can we free the Polish State from people for whom any idea of sovereignty is totally alien? They have merely changed their masters: before, they travelled to the Kremlin for instructions, now they have found a much better and more enjoyable route: to Brussels.