the beatroot

Beatroot's predictions for 2012 – Part 1

2012-01-04T20:06:00.001+01:00

Yes, it's that time of year when wise heads turn to the future, gaze into a crystal ball and make predictions about the next 365 days.

How accurately the head of a root vegetable like the beatroot could be called wise, I will leave dear reader to judge. But anyway: here's the beatroot's predictions for 2012.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski's head will spontaneously explode in a cauldron of self-righteousness.

I say this with inside knowledge that parts of the leader of Law and Justice's (PiS) person have spontaneous combusted before. In late 2007, for instance, just after PiS embarked on their peculiar odyssey through two years of government, Jaroslaw's nipples spontaneously flew from his chest and became lodged in a nearby wall. So expect regular mini-explosions during speeches about Smolensk in particular. He's becoming a one-issue politician and will stand down as leader of the party this year and form the Lech Kaczynski Institute of Truth. I predict.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk will score the winning goal for Poland in a penalty shoot-out with Germany in the finals of Euro 2012.

You can see him training in the photo above.

Poland are so short of any half-decent players – and in fear of being eliminated in the group stage of the competition, and watch TV audiences, and advertising revenue, plummet for the rest of the championships – the Polish football association has called on the services of Donald Tusk, or 'Tusko' to his footie friends, as midfield play maker.

Watch Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and others, claim the government is all media appearances and no substance.

Well, I suppose he had to get something right, on a rule of averages.

Next – er...Part 2

Is Croydon racist 'mother from hell' a criminal, or just a sad, drunk nutter?

2011-11-29T18:38:00.002+01:00

A 34 year-old woman, Emma West, from south London has been arrested after video of her ranting racist remarks about how “Poles and blacks should go back home” went viral on the internet and Twitter.

The video was taken by Kelly Hollingsworth on one of the UK's few trams, in between Croydon, close to where I grew up, and nearby New Addington.

As you can see by the video, the woman, holding her young son in her arms, is clearly drunk and what spews from her mouth is revolting.

Everyone who watches the video probably thinks the same thing: poor, poor kid having a mother like that.

I thought the same. But what happened next makes me squirm almost as much as watching the video does.

Last night, Kelly Holliongsworth, who took the video, tweeted: “Ok so this women's been arrested. I guess my video was a success. This has caused quite a bit of hype...”

It certainly caused hype – it also caused a tweeting frenzy, with many grassing the woman up to the cops. But was it a success that the rancid rants of a racist led to an arrest?

What is encouraging about the video is that people challenged this woman – they didn't do what the British often do: hide behind a newspaper and pretend this embarrassing thing isn't happening.

And challenging racist outbursts can sometimes be a good thing. But getting the cops dragged into this is not.

Never to miss a trick, politicians got in the act too. Leader of the Labour Party, Ed 'Who?' Miliband, tweeted: “Important appeal from [British Transport Police] to identify the woman shouting racist abuse on a tram in London.”

But the question must be asked: should mouthing off in public one's sad old racist prejudices be a criminal offence?

Polish football chief to get corruption red card?

2011-11-25T20:30:00.001+01:00

Just seven months before the Euro 2012 football championships, Polish football association (PZPN) chief Grzegorz Lato has been accused of corruption.

The basic story, which, if true will be seismological in its effect in Poland ahead of a championships that are meant to showcase all that is modern and progressive about the nation, is here.

New sports minister, Joanna Mucha has passed the accusations on to the attorney general.

It's too early to attribute guilt or not, but coming so close to the Poland and Ukraine-staged Euro 2012 championships, this is not going to help the image of Polish soccer one little bit.

I remember watching the TV three years ago as PZPN announced the results of the ballot among its members for who was going to be the new chief of Polish football. It was a significant moment in the history of the game here. The previous years had been mired by a widespread match fixing scandal, with tens, and then hundreds of PZPN officials, coaches and players being arrested. Polish football stank like a footballers' changing rooms on a wet Sunday morning, and the game needed new leadership, and a new image.

And then it was announced that Grzegorz Lato was to be the new head of PZPN. The person I was watching the TV with and I let out a simultaneous groan of disappointment. Lato was associated with the old guard at PZPN, the same bunch of cronies that had presided over a game reeking of corruption.

Lato was a once brilliant footballer in the 1970s but who later became a politician for the ex-communist left, a party that had been so tainted by corruption scandals during the 1990s and first half of the 2000s that they might never be in government again.

Lato was the 'no-change candidate' for the PZPN presidency.

In recent days he has been embroiled in a 'where's the eagle on our football shirts' scandal. A messy compromise has been hammered out and the eagle will be sown back onto the shirts. It left Lato looking a bit of a fool already. And now this.

If the allegations of corruption are true then to say this is an own-goal by Polish football would be understatement of the year.

Kaczynski - Do mention the war

2011-11-14T20:54:00.007+01:00

Conservative Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski was in his turbo-hyperbole mood following the Independence Day riots in Warsaw last Friday, when he managed to get “Germans … Adolf Hitler … beating … in Warsaw” into a single sentence.

“Some Germans have the psychological disposition of the militia with which Adolf Hitler came to power, who beat Poles in the middle of Warsaw for wearing [national] symbols,” Kaczynski said after 92 German 'anarchists' were arrested in Warsaw for getting into a battle with nationalists and police – and roughing up, reportedly, soldiers on a historical parade on Nowy Swiat street.

The now tired, old German WW II bit aside, I don't really blame anyone for being disgusted with the guys in the video above. They vowed to turn up last week to oppose a far-right demo that was going to begin at 3 pm that day. Their aim was to join up with Polish left wing protesters who had promised to stop the far-right marching through Warsaw.

A message, if I may, to idiot-anarchists everywhere who want to come to Warsaw for a bit of far-right bashing: wearing hoods and identical, oh-so-scary black gear does not make you anonymous and safe from the cops – it makes you look like … idiot-anarchists, and you are going to get arrested looking like that. Maybe next time come dressed up as postmen, or ice cream vendors, or something.

In the event they never were going to get to where the march was starting, because they just couldn't behave themselves, the naughty little scamps.

The media before the demo was reporting that German anarchists were recommending comrades to “bring a Molotov cocktail”. The first sign of trouble and the police were always going to jump on them. A prophesy was to become self-fulfilling.

As you can see in the video, the anarcho-imbeciles were not in Warsaw to pay a visit to the new Copernicus Science Centre, or a little light shopping. Dressed in black, with faces covered, they look more like a bank robber’s convention on a Central European away-day.

Kaczynski has said that if Law and Justice was in power then these people would never have got into Poland in the first place and would have been turned back at the border.

It's made the ruling Civic Platform look a little silly.

On a Richter scale of riots, Friday's was not a big one – in fact it was 2.5 intensity-level rioting, if you compare it to what was going on in England – including my home town of Croydon - over the summer.

But it was quite big for Poland. The German anarchists, however, were all tucked up in police detention before it all went off, on schedule at 3 pm. The worst of the rioting was done by Poles … burning of media OBU vans, smashing shop windows, fighting each other and the cops.

Far-right All-Polish Youth et al claim they were “infiltrated” by “men in masks”, who began attacking police and anyone else within range.

Left wing protesters say they were attempting to block the route of the far-right march to the statue of the patron saint of inter-war (and rather nasty) Polish nationalism, Roman Dmowski.

One law for one...

Law and Justice have also said that the counter-march to what they call the “March of Independence” by law abiding nationalists and patriots should not have been allowed. Mariusz Blaszczak, leader of the party in parliament, said that the late Lech Kaczynski (when he was mayor of Warsaw, I think he means) maintained public order by banning counter marches.

I remember when he means. Lech Kaczynski banned a counter-march to our old friends, All-Polish Youth's anti-gay demonstration in 2005.

It resulted in an hour-long bottle shower from skinheads against the few thousand people brave enough to turn up at the now illegal counter-demonstration.

Neither law, order, nor justice, was kept.

The right to assembly should not discriminate: peaceful - peaceful - protest is lawful to anyone, including Germans, who want to take part, for whatever reason. Always.

Expect, sadly, a more authoritarian attitude to protest in the future, as politicians scramble to look like they are “doing something” about what was essentially pointless violence last Friday.

Euro 2012 - England stay at bargain hotel, Krakow

2011-11-07T19:43:00.011+01:00

The English FA was in Krakow today, publicising the England football team's stay in the city during Euro 2012, which starts on June 8 – and announced that the English players were going to get close to the locals, stay at a modest hotel … before losing to Germany on penalties in the quarter finals.

Until 29 minutes ago at the time of writing there were still rooms at the Hotel Stary (Old Hotel) on the main market square available when the England players will be staying there. I tried to book online to see how much the rooms cost (only around 130 pounds a night for what they claim is a five-star hotel – cheap!!!) but someone has just snapped up the last rooms for the weekend of June 8,9 and 10.

So, a night staying at the same bargain hotel as Wayne Rooney (if he gets selected following a three match ban for an ill-timed temper tantrum), John Terry (if he doesn't get a lengthy ban following an alleged racist incident) and all the other English football mega-stars has just slipped through my fingers. Damn!

The English FA has chosen the down town, modest, hotel as a reaction to the out-of-town palace-prison they were staying at during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Coach Fabio Copello chose that location to keep the players away from all the temptations and distractions available to them and their wives (WAGs) in the city, so they could concentrate on the football.

It didn't work.

The players were reportedly bored out of their tiny minds, and went out of the World Cup after a 4 – 1 drubbing by the Germans.

Copello has had a change of heart this time and will now let the English players near the Polish natives.

So what is there for Wayne Rooney et al to look forward to at Hotel Stary in Krakow?

“Guests of the Stary hotel have free access to the on-site spa, which includes a sauna, gym, steam bath,” says the hotel web site, but adds, a little worryingly, “and a massage parlour”. Er ...

“In the morning guests can enjoy a traditional Polish breakfast. The Trzy Rybki restaurant serves traditional Polish dishes,” the web site says.

The WAGs will like it as it is near to the shops and “has a bar, café and a club”.

Adrian Bevington, director of communications for the FA, who held a joint press conference in Krakow on Monday with Mayor Jacek Majchrowski, said that, “of course our priority is to be good on the pitch” but the team is planning on “visiting historic sites” and doing a bit of general tourist sightseeing on their days off.

So what's to see? Auschwitz is close, I suppose. And not that far down the road is the Wieliczka Salt Mine (which could be a handy place to park John Terry).

“Hotel Stary is 1.1 km from the Wawel Castle. The old Jewish district, Kazimierz is 1 km away,” says the hotel web site, tempting the England players with a little culture between training sessions.

Stag parties from England have complained to me personally that “there are not enough strip clubs in Krakow,” which could be a drawback.

The sometimes stuffy atmostphere of conservative Krakow does not indeed include many naughty clubs - although it is a bit of a gay-magnet, ironically. One slightly disappointed 'reviewer' punter writes on the web of one Villa Incognito, however: “S-Studio in Warsaw was much better, but maybe perhaps because Warsaw is a bigger city. This place had some cute girls. 300 Zloty (50 pounds) for the basic, twice what I paid in Warsaw,” he squeals.

That's Wayne Rooney sorted, then.

LOT airlines makes new cuts to in-flight services – discontinues landing on wheels!

2011-11-01T20:06:00.002+01:00

Rather dramatic video here of a LOT national airlines 767 from Newark, New Jersey landing at Warsaw airport today on its belly.

Imagine the shock when the captain found out that the landing equipment had got jammed, leaving him to land the plane with no wheels.

You will note, however, that the landing appears a good deal smoother than some I have experienced on LOT with wheels attached.

BBC video here.

EU chokes on Greek debt moussaka

2011-11-01T19:01:00.012+01:00

Poland's banks are not saddled with Greek's increasingly toxic debt, like Germany's are – but the eurozone crisis has thrown plans for Poland to adopt the euro and drop the zloty into the deep freeze. (pictured: German Chancellor Angela Merkel)

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou played his final card when he announced that the EU bailout plan – which would write off 50 percent of its debt in return for savage public spending cuts, that would make what the IMF used to ask of borrowing nations look like proverbial peanuts – to a referendum in January.

Cue outrage and panic among eurocrats and the markets, who thought they had managed to solve the whole thing at the summit last week in Brussels. Stocks tumbled and the euro currency bombed on Tuesday.

It's hard to find much support for letting the Greek people have a say on how they are going to get out of the mess they are in. Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney was a lone wolf when he said that Greece's bailout commitments need broad democratic support if they are to work. He said it was up to Greece to determine how to achieve public support for what the country needed to do going forward.

I think that's correct - although a delay until January will not calm jittery nerves. The EU bailout package with strings attached would mean even deeper cuts into Greek living standards than the already eye-watering austerity measures being carried out by the government in Athens are currently doing. More unrest and general strikes would follow. Anger at the political class would boil over.

Leader of Poland's opposition Law and Justice party, the eurosceptic (ish) Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said last week that he thought Greece should find a way to drop the euro and readopt the drachma, without causing a “financial shock” to the eurozone – which would be a tricky thing to pull off, to say the least.

Poland's finance minister Jacek Rostowski retorted that for Athens to drop out of the eurozone would require changes in EU treaties, which “is a long process” and would do nothing to restore confidence in the European single currency or the European economy in general.

There has been a good deal of smugness among the Polish government that Poland has not turned into the once Celtic tiger, now Celtic pussy-cat, Ireland … or Spain, or Greece. PM Donald Tusk never gets tired of trying to claim that Poland is a “green island” of calm surrounded by choppy and shark-infested seas. Admiral Tusk has steered the Good Ship Poland to the island through those rocky waters, with able-seaman (finance minister) Jacek Rostowski's firm hands on the tiller.

Poland, if I remeber correctly, would now be set to adopt the single currency if the Civic Platform government had kept to its schedule drawn up in 2007. It was only the finance crisis that sunk those plans - the same finance crisis that is torpedoing the eurozone, with Greece in particular taking one amidships (That's the end of the nautical metaphors.)

President Komorowski said this week that Poland still intends to enter the eurozone but only someone “not in his right mind” would ditch the zloty today.

Poland shouldn't feel so smug that it is not up to its knees in debt-doo doo, however. With Germany shelling out the largest share to bail out Greece, Berlin and Paris are going to be even more resolved to insist on even deeper cuts to future EU budgets. And as up to 2 percent of Poland's annual GDP growth comes, directly or indirectly, from funds from Brussels, that could leave Tusk et al with a moribund economy.

That's why even someone like the conservative Jaroslaw Kaczynski will only ever sound lukewarm about his EU scepticism – all Polish politicians know which side the bread is buttered.

They also all should realise the Greek tragedy could turn everyone's economies into a moussaka.

Zbigniew Ziobro is no messiah – he's just a very naughty boy

2011-10-25T22:32:00.000+02:00

What does a political party do when it loses successive elections? It starts to eat itself – just like a fox eats its paws, eventually, after it has spent a while caught in a trap.

Mariusz Błaszczak was reselected today to lead the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) in parliament, amid a row which could see the expulsion of a former rising star from the party – Zbigniew Ziobro: a populist politician when he was in cabinet, but who is now seen by leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski to be a threat to his authority and the unity of the conservative Law and Justice itself.

Blaszczak, Jaroslaw Kaczynski's man, got the vote today of 141 Law and Justice MPs and senators, with just 22 voting against. But paranoia was in the air, with Jaroslaw Kaczynski supervising the count personally. There is an air of conspiracy and power-play in Law and Justice, as it faces another four years in opposition.

The defeat in the 9 October parliamentary elections – which followed successive elections where party candidates have done badly – has forced Ziobro to make his move. And he's going to get kicked out of the party for doing so.

Ziobro is currently serving time as a member of the European Parliament, where he has been trying to fashion a statesman-like image (and failing miserably to make much impact at all among the eurocrats). He has been an almost Shakespearian figure (I said 'almost') waiting in the wings for his moment of greatness to come upon him.

He was once Mr Justice in the Law and Justice party when he was justice minister, in the mould of Lech Kaczynski, when he was in the same office. He was the heir-apparent to the populist-mantle worn by the Kaczynski brothers.

And then Civic Platform toppled them from power. Ziobro, meanwhile, went to Brussels.

But now he's back, showing his hand.

After Law and Justice got trounced, again, in the elections on 9 October, Ziobro called for “more democratic” decision-making within the party, a dig at party chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski's autocratic style of leadership.

Ziobro, who was careful to distance himself from the party leadership during the recent doomed election campaign, muted the idea this week that if Law and Justice can't get elected as one party then they may as well split into constituent parts – centerist and nationalist – and develop their own electorates.

Expect Ziobro to be expelled within the next few days. Kaczynski told party members at a behind closed doors party meeting today, reports the PAP news agency, that: “The Ziobro issue must be dealt with quickly and decisively”.

In the last 12 months, bits of Law and Justice have been falling off. Moderate bits are with the now parliamentary seat-less Poland Comes First (PJN). Ziobro, with MEP Jacek Kurski and others, will become yet another PiS-splinter group, as the conservative-national party begins to flake like pastry, possibly condemning them to endless opposition.

The Beatroot's Back!

2011-10-22T16:23:00.008+02:00

From Saturday 22 October I will be reactivating this blog.

Yeah, I know I said that before but I had to get the appetite back.

Well, the appetite's back and I am HUNGRY!

This blog used to be, by far, the most widely read on the politics of Poland as it managed to break out of the English language blogging ghetto in this country. Not many do. I was asked to contribute to the EU's Open Democracy project; The Economist called the beatroot "one of the better English-language bloggers on Poland"...top left wing blogger, Norman Geras, in the UK featured me in his weekly 'profile'; top right wing blogger in the UK, Richard North, asked me to join his merry band of bloggers, was asked to cover the 2007 Polish elections for Pajamas Media...to mention but a few of the names that picked up on the beatroot.

The blog will be covering what looks like a second term for the deathly dull coalition government led by Donald Tusk and chums in the Civic Platform (PO) party and their mates in the Polish Peasant's Party (PSL).

Many Poles would say better a deathly dull Tusk than a slightly demented Jaroslaw Kaczynski at the helm. And they may be right. I don't support any party in Poland so it's not really for me to say. A plague on their houses... etc.

I will not just be covering Polish politics however: the EU and central and eastern Europe in general will be the targets for my ire.

I aim to post three times per week. See you then.

West gets twitchy conscience after Gaddafi death

2011-10-22T15:56:00.006+02:00

Calls by the UN and many in the 'international community' for an 'investigation' into the circumstances which led to the grizzly death of Col Gaddafi beggars belief.

“It would have been better if he had been tried in The Hague,” said Poland's Foreign Ministry as the body of Muammar Gaddafi was still warm, Thursday, shortly after his death was announced by the National Transitional Council (NTC).

The Polish government was not being daringly original, or independent, in its demand (whenever has it been?). The UN's commissioner for human rights, as well as Amnesty International - that self-appointed guardian of the international community's conscience – have called for the same.

Confusion surrounds the nut-ball dictator's demise.

The semi-official line taken by the NTC is that he was captured alive in his home town of Sirte, only to take an accidental bullet in the head during a fire-fight between rebels and what was left of Gaddafi's army. But mobile phone footage shows that he was probably executed.

I was going through the European Press Association's (EPA) photostream on Friday to see if there were any of the photographs of Gaddafi laid out in a meat storage facility in Misrata that I could use for another place. The caption below the photographs all warned: ATTENTION EDITORS: THIS PICTURE CONTAINS GRAPHIC CONTENT.

Indeed, the content was so 'graphic' I decided none were publishable. But I am looking at them now and I will describe them for you here.

The body on, what looks like, a mattress, is recognisably Gaddafi's. There is his trademark curly hair and his goatee beard. He has been stripped to the waist and there is, what appears to be, one large bullet hole in the centre of his stomach.

The NTC is saying that he died from a bullet to the head but that bullet to the belly would have killed him by itself. There are at least two other marks which could be bullet holes on his abdomen and blood has been coming from his head, suggesting another bullet went in there. But it could be another kind of wound as his head was bleeding in the mobile phone footage taken when he was being dragged around the streets of Sirte after capture.

Cuts cover his face and blood marks are all over his body. It is a gruesome sight.

The NTC is currently (Saturday afternoon) promising a post-mortem and then he will be buried some place – maybe out to sea, as was Osama bin Laden, so his grave cannot be turned into a shrine in memory to mad despots everywhere.

Libyans are not too concerned how Gaddafi ended up in cold-storage, they are just glad he's gone. His madcap, often brutal 42-year dictatorship is over. Finished.

But the West – the international community' – has got a little squeamish about it all. This summary execution – if that is what it was – was not in the script, which went something like this.

When the insurgency broke out in February in Libya, and Gaddafi refused to make a graceful exit and fought '”the rats” of the uprising, France, UK, US jumped at a chance to regain some international respect and authority after the débâcle of Iraq, Afghanistan. Here was a dictator with few buddies internationally – that someone like Hugo Chavez was one of the few to give him his support all the better.

So France and UK took the lead in the air support, to “protect civilians” from Gaddafi's demented anger. The US could stay behind the scenes, in case the Arab world saw another example of American militarism trying to get its way in the Middle East.

It was all going swimmingly until Gaddafi was taken out of a drain pipe, beaten and killed.

To maintain the western moral high ground, in jump human rights NGOs and the UN. “He should have stood trial in The Hague” they said, the place where the West usually lines up despots from Africa or the Balkans on charges of 'war crimes'.

No mention, of course, that the bombing of Gaddafi's forces in Sirte and elsewhere were on the border of 'legal': how was this “protecting civilians”?

Nasty things happen in wars and nasty things always happen in civil wars ... they don't play to the nice set of rules drawn up by the Geneva Convention.

If I was the NTC I would tell the 'international community' to kindly get stuffed. If someone has to hear charges for the execution of Gaddafi then it should be in a court in Tripoli, not The Hague.

The West encouraged the rebels to tear down his regime and now Libyans, and the international community, are going to have to live with the consequences.

Sunday update - doctor confirms bullets to head and stomach killed Gaddafi.

How to make a dick of yourself

2010-08-30T00:16:00.004+02:00

Prosecutors have dropped charges made against a local politician of defaming Vladimir Putin. But the local politician is not happy, as the decision to drop the case was made, not in Poland, but Russia.

On September 1 last year Vladimir Putin came to Gdansk for the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WW II. Local Law and Justice politician Michal Rachon was not pleased and decided to do what any local politician with a reputation to protect would do - he dressed up as a penis, of course.

Of course.

The protesting penis was accompanied by a sidekick and they made their displeasure with Putin coming to Gdansk evident. See video.

The seemingly - or not - obscure linking of Putin and Penis is … subtle: it’s a reference to when the Russian secret services derided a rally by the then Russian presidential candidate and former world chess champion Gary Kasparov by sending a radio-controlled model helicopter, with a dildo dangling from the undercarriage, to hover over him as he addressed supporters.

Rachon was accused of defaming a diplomat, or representative of a foreign state - a rather strange law. It's also theoretically illegal for a foreigner to insult a Polish head of state, a law that the late president Lech Kaczynski tried to use after German journalists called him a potato.

That was all a year ago. But last week prosecutors announced they were dropping the charges. Not because they thought it was impossible to get a conviction for calling Putin a prick: but because there is no reciprocal law in Russia.

Law and Justice’s Michal Rachon says on his blog that it’s an outrage that his day in court has been denied him by Russian law and not Polish.

And he’s right. Polish law, here, is an ass. Not just because if a law is not reciprocal from Russia it’s not applicable in Poland. Ridiculing politicians, from any country, by dressing up as a willy may be puerile, but should not be within the law‘s sweaty grasp to ban.

Mother Teresa - hell’s angel?

2010-08-26T19:03:00.002+02:00

It’s 100 years since her birth and there has been quite a lot in the Polish media about this woman - all saintly.

Just as a corrective, here’s Hell’s Angel by Christopher Hitchens - author of The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

This is the first part of three….you can see the other two parts at youtube here and here.

Is Law and Justice (PiS) falling apart?

2010-08-25T19:24:00.009+02:00

Two camps within Law and Justice have emerged since Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s failure in the presidential elections last month. In the Polish media they are calling them ‘the radicals’ and ‘the liberals’, the ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’: but we will refer to them as the Attack Dogs versus the HiPiS. (pic - Paweł Poncyliusz with Jaroslaw Kaczynski)

Jaroslaw's brief trip into the world of consensus, touchy-feely politics following the death of his twin brother Lech in the April 10 Smolensk air disaster, and during the election campaign which ended in his defeat, is over.

The week after his failed presidential election bid saw him reverting back to type - essentially accusing Russians of covering up evidence of their culpability in the death of his brother. And then the fire and brimstone rhetoric heated up still further over the battle of the Smolensk cross.

He is being urged onto the offensive by fellow attack dogs Jacek Kurski (pictured), MEP Zbigniew Ziobro and others who obviously think that Law and Justice’s role in life is to beat Russians, commies and fellow travellers wherever they can find them and purify Poland of menace.

The balmy days of early summer when Kaczynski was saying that all Poles must come together and bury the political hatchet seem a distant memory. His almost instinctive, snarling aggression has returned. The Attack Dogs have been straining on the leash for too long.

The HiPiS, on the other hand, we have met before. They are led by Kaczynski’s election campaign team leaders, such as Paweł Poncyliusz and Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, who we last met on this blog singing ‘Give PiS a chance’ outside a television studio, in a desperate bid to get their man into the presidential palace.

The HiPiS remerged from under a pile of prayer beads following an open letter to Jaroslaw Kaczynski from Law and Justice affiliated European member of parliament Marek Migalski, who wrote on his blog that Jaroslaw was basically a bit of a problem if the party ever wanted to taste power again. Poles are turned off by the aggressive antics and want a higher standard of political debate.

It’s at root a battle of the old and new generation of Law and Justice members: the traditionalists and founders of the party versus a younger, more pragmatic generation of politicians who don’t want to languish in opposition for ever.

There has even been whispers of trying to depose Kaczynski before crucial local elections in the autumn and general elections next spring. But this is unlikely. The Law and Justice party has been associated with the Kaczynski twins ever since they founded the party in 2001 on a wave of anti-corruption populism.

But now the gruesome twosome are a one-some, since Lech’s death in April. When Jaroslaw goes, Law and Justice will go the same way. The party is a personal vehicle for him and his remaining attack dogs. Without a Kaczynski to hold the thing together then Law and Justice will end up in the now large pile of discarded rightwing parties that have come and gone since 1989.

Their only hope is that Zbigniew Ziobro - another former arch-populist justice minister, just like Lech Kaczynski was - could resurrect the party, post Jaroslaw. But surely a Law and Justice without Kaczynski is like a duck without water.

The ruling Civic Platform - from the more liberal wing of Solidarnosc - must be licking their lips and appear in a win-win situation. If Kaczynski stays, they are going to win elections. If Kaczynski goes then they will have two opponents - Dogs and HiPiS - and they will win elections.

The prospects of a coherent opposition to Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his yawn-fest of a government look bleak.

Elderly man throws liquid poo at Smolensk plaque

2010-08-17T17:09:00.011+02:00

A 70 year old man is truly deep in do-do today after throwing a jar of the stuff over the plaque unveiled last week on the presidential palace wall in honour of the Smolensk victims.

Oh, how a tragedy has turned into a feacial farce. Protestors were outraged last week when two modest grade officials were sent out, without prior notice, to unveil a plaque which they hoped would calm down the Defenders of the Cross.

The government's Grzegorz Schetyna said that he hoped that the plaque would go some way to placating the protestors, who were still seething at the, aborted, attempt the week before to move the cross to St Anne’s church (see posts below).

But the protestors howled “outrage” and “insult” at the feeble attempt to shut them up and make them go back home.

At the time of writing it is not known who the 70 year man is (though obviously the loose-boweled old geezer is a TROTSky-ite) or what he hoped to prove by his antics this afternoon. Prison awaits him for defaming a national - some would say religious - monument, although will the authorities be so stupid to give these people another martyr? If their previous incompetence is anything to go by then probably the answer to that question is “yes”.

And then the shit really will hit the fan.

Poland boils and broils in climate change shocker

2010-08-16T21:41:00.005+02:00

My old granny used to say when offered tea, or coffee: “I don’t mind…as long as it‘s warm and wet!”

She always looked at me in incomprehension when I used to double - no, quadruple - up with laughter at that. I was 16 years old, after all.

But warm and wet is what we are seemingly stuck with here in Poland, so I suppose I should be grateful [note tenuous link between early formative experience and current affairs angle.]

It’s warm - a very warm 34 degrees centigrade as I write - or for my American readers: Really Very Hot Degrees Fahrenheit. It was even hotter in July.

It’s also very wet. Recurrent floods have been a story here since May.

It’s enough to make the This Is The End Of The World freaks rush for the streets to proclaim we are burning/drowning in our own cesspool of sin.

And, on cue, here they come. Kind of. But not from a twitching religious fanatic high on too many nights alone with Revelations and four horsies of apocalypses...

No, it’s a scientist. Poland has been warm, and wet, because of global warming.

And this is not any old weather forecaster, who relies on cows having a bit of a sit down before he sees rain coming: it’s climatologist Mirosław Miętus from the Institute of Meteorology.

He says that this year will be “the warmest for 150 years”, since record began.

In the days before records began, people just used to sit around saying: “Few…it‘s hot.” But suddenly people started to record how hot they felt and apparently, in this part of the world, folks have never been so steaming.

There was also over three times more rain in May than usual and two times more than in July. Our studio workplace - which mrs. beatroot spends hours and hours in a day - was flooded for the second time a week ago. More expense, more trauma.

“This is a manifestation of global warming,” Mirosław Miętus says, comfortingly (not) with more frequent heat waves and heavier rain fall to look forward to. Atlantic storms have penetrated deeper into mainland Europe. It could get worse.

Blimey! Can anybody cheer us up? What does the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say about this?

"One cannot conclude 100 percent that nothing like this has happened in the past 200 years, but the suspicion is there. Even if it's only a suspicion," said Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-president of the IPCC), referring to the heat wave in Russia and the floods in Pakistan, a warm and wet combo that Poland has got a taste of this summer.

Few! So there is only a “suspicion” that this could be caused by global frying, that man has brought to Earth as a form of petulance, with too many people doing just too many things.

But no! This article goes on to emphasise the suspicion, regardless of the fact that it is only “a suspicion”.

“According to the IPCC, droughts and heatwaves like those affecting Russia and 18 US states become longer and more intense in a warming planet.

"Whether in frequency or intensity, virtually every year has broken records, and sometimes several times in a week," said Omar Baddour, who tracks climate change for the World Meteorological Organization.

"In Russia, the record temperature in Moscow (38.2 degrees Celsius, 100.8 degrees Farenheit in late July) -- which had not been seen since records began 130 years ago -- was broken again at the start of August. In Pakistan, the magnitude of the floods is unheard of," he said.

"In both cases, it is an unprecedented situation. The succession of extremes
and the acceleration of records conform with IPCC projections. But one must
observe the extremes over many years to draw conclusions in terms of climate,"
he said.”

He did it again! Teasing us with doomsday then delivering the caveat.

But, of course, there are different explanations: you cannot see a trend in weather in any one event; it’s La Nina, El Nino’s inversion; it’s the beavers fault.

Beavers? , Yup: the fury dam-maker, who, up until now had had a very good PR. They even featured in Naked Gun.

As I write now, it’s evening: the wind picks up once again after a boiling hot day; trees sway in submission, the dog yaps, sirens wail and we head for the sandbags to defend the studio from the next Biblical-like flood.

And there are no beavers around this part of Warsaw.

Reasons to defend the Defenders of the Cross

2010-08-12T19:03:00.002+02:00

Last week when it was expected that the authorities were going to move The Cross from outside the Presidential Palace to St Anne’s church - and as the Defenders of the Cross often screamed their disapproval - my little office filed up with people watching the scenes on TV.

As the pushing and shoving started with the cops (see previous post) and one deperado grabbed hold of the cross, the people in my office started taunting the Defenders of the Cross. “Idiots” and “Psychos” and “Burak (redneck)” ran the commentary.

And my toes curled, a little.

They curled further still - like week-old stale bread - when President Komorowski, church officials, city authorities backed down. The cops copped out. (latest in saga here and here)

So who is the villain here? The alienated Cross Defenders, often poor, uneducated, alienated from the last two decades of Poland Inc? Victims of events they feel is beyond their control. Or the Polish State not up for a fight in what it says it believes in?

The Polish State has always had an awkward and distant relationship with its citizens in Poland. This is a historical process - partition, Soviet-isation etc…that has left the State with a desperate need to connect with the Poles. Lech Kaczynski knew this. The big displays on Army Day, the Warsaw Rising museum, the emphasis on Historical Politics. These were his way - the Law and Justice way - of trying to create a mass behind a state.

That Kaczynski was/is trying to create a Poland simply out of what it was in the past, is revealing about the relationship that type of national-conservative politics has with The Future. They really have no idea of what that kind of Poland would be. And it’s bound to fail because of that.

Civic Platform - who, now that Komorowski is safely ensconced in the Presidential Palace have a monopoly of power - have a different problem. They have to present themselves as a modernising force, with normal centre-right christian democratic type politics. Poland should be a ‘normal’ country within Europe.

Yet, when they are challenged on this - to make a statement about the separation between symbols of church and state, which this conflict over the cross has provoked - they back down. They lose stomach for the fight.

So who is the villain of the Battle for the Cross? The comparatively weak desperados of the Defenders of the Cross? Or the hapless cowards of the Tusk-Komorowski-Church establishment who are failing to gain any respect from anyone in Poland - foe, and friend, alike?

How a cross brought Poland's establishment to its knees

2010-08-07T20:38:00.017+02:00

No - President Komorowski, government, Catholic church top-frocks and cops were not on their knees in prayer. They were in such an ungainly position before a bunch of protestors outside the Presidential Palace, who said they would “defend to the death” the removal of a simple wooden cross put their in commemoration of the death of a president in western Russia.

Last Wednesday, the then president-elect, in agreement with Poland’s Roman Catholic establishment and national scout movement (responsible for the planting the wooden cross in front of the presidential residence after the Smolensk disaster) agreed that the spontaneous memorial to those who died should be moved to the nearby St Anne’s church.
Come the hour of cross removal, cometh the wroth of a couple of thousand Defenders of the Cross. They pushed against police lines; they shouted “Gestapo”, “Traitor” and “Communist” as the police pushed back. One woman grasped the cross, to be quickly disentangled from it. Cops fired tear gas from small aerosol cans when they thought the Defenders had gone a bit far.

See video by gazeta.pl of as bad as it got - which was never that bad - below.

The result of what was a bit of push-and-shove by quite a small crowd of protestors? President Komorowski et al backs down and the cross stays where it is.

Who are those guys?

The self styled Defenders of the Cross - egged on by Lech Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw’s Law and Justice party - are a motley bunch of the ultra-religious, the nationalist, the anti-Russian, the alienated, the anomic and downright deranged.

Occasionally individuals possess all the above traits simultaneously.

For instance, one of the more prominent protestors is veteran cross defender Kazimierz Switon.

If the name sounds familiar it's because Switon - a one-time Solidarity activist, catholic fundamentalist, owner of his own little workshop during communist times, middle ranked trade unionist and post-1989 oddball - hit the headlines in 1999 when he went on hunger strike in protest at the removal of a small forest of crosses which had been placed outside the gates of the Auschwitz museum during a visit by John Paul II.

When authorities decided to remove the cross forest, Switon and fellow cronies went into action, blaming…the international Jewish conspiracy, of course, for wanting the Christian symbols removed from outside the Nazi Auschwitz death camp.

A news report from 1999 reads eerily like reports this week about the Defenders of the Cross.

“Catholic activist, Kazimierz Swinton, who led the campaign to erect the crosses against the wishes of the church's leadership, had mined the area to deter attempts to remove him. Swinton will now be prosecuted for the possession of explosives and inciting racial hatred after he distributed leaflets calling on Poles 'to wage merciless war on Jewish-Communist masonry, the biggest enemies of the Polish state’.”

Fast forward to 2010 and the now 79 year old Switon is back. Switon has been working alongside Leszek Bubel for many years, the leader of the nationalist Polish National Party, another attendee at Defenders of the Cross rallies in Warsaw.

Following the argy-bargy in front of the Presidential Palace on August 3, sent a letter, and email, on behalf of Bubel and the other Defenders to Prime Minister Donald Tusk.: “Despite the many protests […] at the instigation of Satanists you started a war over the Cross on Polish soil,” he wrote. “The Cross commemorating the murders [of Lech Kaczynski and 95 others] must stay in front of the Presidential Palace. If you start another war over the Cross then prepare for the end of your government,” Switon warned, spookily.

Weak elite

Of course, if you received a letter like that from a marginalised delusionist like Switon you would probably read it, have a chuckle, then throw it in the bin. But not Tusk, not the Church, not the Polish Establishment, terrified of the likes of Switon and the Defenders of the Cross.

President Komorowski had argued that a religious symbol such as cross should be in a religious place, such as a church. And he’s right. But Komorowski and the rest don’t seem to have the courage of their convictions. Terrified that they might seem insensitive to the view that Russia and other dark forces might have been the authors of the Smolensk disaster - that they were “murdered” - and scared that they might seem insensitive to a religious symbol, they backed down. Despite the relatively low level of support for the Defenders of the Cross, they sank to their knees in submission at the sight of the protests in front of the Presidential Palace.

Consequently, they have shown that Poland’s political elite remains as weak as it ever was. And unable to show authority and leadership, they have opened themselves up to all sorts of marginal groups who want to get even with the harbingers of modernity in Poland.

As all sides haggle over the future of the Smolensk Cross, the new power monopoly of President Komorowski-Prime Minister Tusk-Civic Platform party seems more like a rickety boat, vulnerable to cross-wind.

Uncle Bronek slaughters Kaczynski with…slim majority

2010-07-06T19:46:00.014+02:00

What happened there, then? A few weeks ago Bronislaw Komorowski was around 15 percent ahead of Jaroslaw Kaczynski in opinion polls which gave respondents the choice of ten candidates. But on Sunday, Bronek squeaked home in the presidential elections head-to-head by just six percentage points, in a two-Polands-type split.

At one point, Sunday, the momentum seen in the opinion polls leading up to election day seemed to point to the unthinkable.

About 5 pm, election day on Sunday, three hours before polling stations closed, I got gossip, from two independent sources, that opinion pollsters OBOP - who was polling for public broadcaster TVP - was seeing a lead in its exit poll of 53 % Kaczynski, 47% for Komorowski. This rumour was going around all the TV and radio broadcasters.

It appears that this came from someone seeing early returns from pollsters, which had excluded many polls from urban areas. But many journalists got into their heads that Kaczynski was on for a miracle win.

In the end, after a brief lead for Kaczynski in early official vote counts, Komorowski prevailed.

At 53 percent of the vote, however, Bronislaw ‘personality by-pass’ Komorowski doesn’t really have a massive mandate to allow his mates in the government an open door policy for any legislation it wants to shove through parliament. But it must be tempting, right? I know I would!

Was the better than expected performance by Jaroslaw Kaczynski down to the ‘Smolensk balance’ - a sympathy for Jaroslaw after he lost his twin brother on a foggy day in Smolensk?

In the first round of the election 36 percent voted Kaczynski. So the ’bounce’ was more a ‘bobble’ as his total support consisted of just one-in-three Poles. It isn’t that most Poles don’t feel sorry for the poor guy. It’s just that many loath him as a politician.

But in a two way split, Jaroslaw and his type of politics will receive around half of the votes up for grabs, many from the usual reservoir of ‘hold your nose’ voters.

The fact is, the almost fifty-fifty split in votes is just where Poland was back in 1995, when it divided like a pie cut down the middle, between Lech ‘I’m a living legend’ Walesa and his nemesis, former communist party card-holder Aleksander ‘two-wins’ Kwasniewski .

(I could have used other metaphors there: in fact I put “divided like…” into google to see what would happen, being suddenly bereft of metaphors. The best it could come up with was “divided like a butt…”, but I digress).

Political maps of Poland (Komorowski in orange) have looked like the one pictured above for years.

What’s changed is that where once voters would have voted SLD, Kwasniewski’s ex/post communists, now they vote what foreign journalists refer to as ‘pro-business’ Civic Platform - or, in other words, a centre right candidate like Bronislaw Komorowski.

So this is a ’two Polands’ split, almost, on cultural, not political lines. Following the collapse of SLD, Civic Platform have taken up the urban, more secular, aspiring vote. And Kaczynski has got the eastern half of the country: the rural, many of the poor, elderly, church-going, disillusioned with capitalism.

Civic Platform, however, have been handed a metaphor-like poisoned chalice. No more excuses. They can pretty well do what they want. They can pretty much screw it up as they want.

Kaczynski knows this, and, with almost half of Poland to be potentially tapped for support, watch for his return, like (metaphor alert) the prodigal …um…twin, in the parliamentary elections scheduled for next year.

You have been warned.

Give PiS a chance

2010-06-28T20:59:00.009+02:00

As the two candidates entered the grounds of Poland’s public television, Sunday, ready for the first head-to-head presidential TV face off, a new anthropological, ethnographic sub-culture could be spotted waiting for them just outside the entrance to the TVP building.

They wore flowers in their hair, they banged their tambourines, resplendent in orange kaftans, like Polish Maharishi chanting happy slogans.

They resembled hippies but they were not. For these were supporters of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, candidate of the Law and Justice party, or PiS in the Polish acronym. They were not your usual, common and garden, peace loving hippy, high on herb and an overdose of patchouli oil.

No. These were the HiPiS. And they want to you to join them.

There were some high profile names in amongst the gaggle of hiPiS - Marek Migalski, Elżbieta Jakubiak, Paweł Poncyliusz - part of the PiS new-wave - singing John Lennon’s Give PiS a Chance. Yeah - they really were singing that.

At one point, as they descended, slowly, on the public television building, I thought they were going to repeat a stunt by one of their forbearers, 1960s Timothy Leary, who gathered a few thousand hippies - whose brains had been deep fried in too much acid - and surrounded the Whitehouse in the sincere belief that they could levitate it into the sky.

I imagined Jaroslaw Kaczynski, guru-like, wearing swirling white robes, emerge from his limo and commanding TVP to rise up into the sky, like a balloon.

LSD King Timothy Leary told us to “Turn on, tune in and drop out. ” But as Law and Justice control TVP at the moment, maybe Kaczynski would come riding into the television studios on a magic carpet, advising all who would listen to “Turn on, tune in, to TVP”.

The hiPiS are a result of Law and Justice’s lengthy internal debate on how to change their image, attract a few more younger people to vote for them. It’s also part of Jarsolaw Kaczynski’s personality make-over. It was planned that Kaczynski was going to get a new softer image some months ago - make him more cuddly, less aggressive, less conflict-inclined. And then Smolensk happened, and maybe - maybe - he actually started to believe the PR. Maybe.

So in the last few weeks Jaroslaw has turned into the Polish Ghandi. Where once he was the commie-baiting attack dog, straining at the leash for conflict, now he wants to end the fighting, he says, to unite Poland in a hiPiS paradise.

Smolensk crash and the Kook-meister

2010-05-31T19:51:00.012+02:00

There are the finest investigative journalists; there are the lowest of yellow press hacks: and then there is Jane Burgermeister.

Of all the kooks who are running around Poland and western Russia sniffing out the conspiracies that brought down the Smolensk TU 154, Burgermeister is surely one of the most ludicrous. The Swiss-Irish-Austrian (no wonder she is confused!) “investigative reporter” was fired last year, says her web site, as European Correspondent of the Renewable Energy World magazine [?] after she alleged that an international corporate syndicate is manufacturing artificial swine flu to depopulate the US (pdf)! She has since filed a law suit against the UN and WHO for their part in the dastard conspiracy. (??? - yeah, you get the idea).

Now she has got her ample set of teeth into Smolensk. Her “investigative reporting style” entails scouring the net for conspiracy theories. That’s it. And then she seems to believe them all.

This is her after Lech Kaczynski’s funeral. She has gone all the way to Krakow (from Dublin, Vienna, Bern - who knows!) to do a piece to camera, and regurgitate her conspiracy theories - but not, note, to do any investigating.

Basically, she alleges that the plane was lured away from the real runway at Smolensk by falsely situated landing beacons. There, the plane hit the trees and burst into pieces.

But she also says, ominously, that “no bodies or personal affects have been found,” and a host of other nonsense without any factual base to them at all.

Jane Kookmeister - whose supporters included Michael Jackson, an article posted on fellow super kook David Ike’s web forum claims - later refined her theories to include the assertion that there were actually only four people on board the plane when it took off from Warsaw airport on April 10; the rest of the, 92, passengers were kidnapped!

Uncensored magazine quotes this fearless journalistic lioness, and “investigative reporter”, in its new June edition.

Actually, we cannot blame Burgermeister for inventing this nonsense. She didn’t. She is just looking for this kind of thing - and willingly hoovers it all up - because she sees the world being manipulated by unseen forces beyond her - beyond our - control. The theories have been coming out of Poland and elsewhere by conspiracy theorists, determined to find one that they can actually prove was real. For Americans and others the dark forces lurk in the UN and other places. In Poland they hail from Russia.

Nonsense nurtures their feelings of impotence in a complex, modern world. I hope they get better - soon.

The election campaign, that never was

2010-05-27T21:46:00.006+02:00

Imagine: three weeks before a presidential election and no campaign posters trumpeting and sloganeering their candidate, dominating the street furniture of downtown. Welcome to Poland’s weirdest election campaign - ever.

There’s nothing. No mug shots of photo-shopped hopefuls with leering catchphrases - just two with a hope of winning, two with a hope of raising their profile, and the rest: self publicising narcissists that democracy attracts like a kid to the ice cream parlour, on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Imagine: you are a campaign manager of a presidential candidate, in hustings done in the shadow of a) the Smolensk horror, and b) the floods. You had been planning your most sophisticated campaign. And then - national mourning, and later the unimaginable stench of flooded homes and lives. Pity poor campaign manager.

The thinnest tightrope walker, of a field of 10 in the presidential elections on June 20, is Bronislaw Komorowski. He’s juggling three balls in the oddest election non-circus on Earth: being an acting president, speaker of parliament and a presidential candidate. Three roles means three opportunities of screwing up. So far, neutrals think he is just about managing to walk the rope without mishap. He’s a clear leader in the polls, too, but they may be giving a skewed picture. He’s been doing things within his current functions, but not actively campaigning.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, meanwhile, has been the most conspicuous in his absence from the campaign. Still wearing the black suits and tie of mourning for his twin brother, he holds few press conferences, a brief appearance at an election rally, and a video expressing peace and love for Russia and thanks for every tear they shed for Smolensk. It’s been called “Jaroslaw‘s metamorphosis”.

He’s saying: Jaroslaw has changed.

All the other candidates have not been pushing the campaign - many have called for the ballot to be put off till the autumn because of the disruption of the floods.

Whatever: I bet election campaign managers sleep like a baby, these days - waking up every 20 minutes, crying their eyes out.

Kaczynski death - it was the Russians wot done it

2010-04-13T23:22:00.006+02:00

The conspiracy theory that the Russians were behind the death of President Lech Kaczynski last Saturday is bubbling to surface.

The sorrowful reaction from politicians of all political colours has been genuine in the wake of the plane crash killing Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 others in Smolensk on Saturday.'

But suggestions that the pilot, maybe under pressure from President Kaczynski and others not to be late for the ceremony - and Kaczynski has a track record of hassling pilots - is the dominant explanation outside of Poland and with many inside.

But there is a right wing conservative element who thinks that this could not be simply a tragic accident, or Polish pilot error. This was sabotage.
Law and Justice MP Artur Gorski - who we have met before on this blog after he said that the election of Barack Obama as US president meant the “demise of white civilisation” - broke ranks with the PC mourning line yesterday..

“'One version of events says that the plane approached the airport four times, because every time the Russians refused it permission to land - they wanted to send the plane with the president to an airport in Moscow or Minsk,” Gorski told the ultra-conservative Nasz Dziennik newspaper.

Russian investigators, after examining the black boxes from the aircraft, say that the plane, in fact, only circled two times. But Gorski claims that the Russians were scared that Kaczynski’s visit would overshadow a similar ceremony three days before, attended by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Vladimir Putin. And that’s why air traffic control didn’t want the plane to land and suggested going to another airport in Moscow, or Minsk.

Nasz Dziennik, which has been pushing this type of theory, also published the opinion of an ‘expert’ in aviation at Szczecin Polytechnic, Ryszard Drozdowicz, who says pilot error in judging the height of the aircraft - the plane struck tress before crashing - was unlikely and that the probable cause was a mechanical failure, or that there had been deliberate sabotage of the plane.

The Soviet-built Topolov TU 154 had been serviced only a few months before…in Russia!

A man with a loud hailer embarrassed the huge queues of people lining up to pay respects in front of Kaczynski’s coffin in the presidential palace, Tuesday, claiming the deaths were part of a conspiracy involving PM Donald Tusk, Putin and Obama. See photos.

Whatever the conclusion of the Russian and Polish teams investigating the crash, this type of thinking will prevail within the right wing conservatives and ‘mohair berets’. President Kaczynski died where many before him died from Poland. That’s enough evidence to think that he died at the hands of the same people.

Israeli media bash the Polish bishop

2010-01-25T20:18:00.004+01:00

“It is so sad that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz a Polish cleric still engages in anti-Semitic rhetoric because so much Jewish blood was shed on Polish soil," said Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, reacting to Bishop Pieronek’s comments that the Holocaust had become a “propaganda weapon”.

Fozman was quoted in Haaretz after top Bishop Tadeusz Pieronik told an Italian catholic web site on Sunday that he found the appropriation of the tragedy of the Holocaust by Jewish groups “arrogant”, as they were the only ones who suffered during the during WW II “unbearable.”

Christians and others who suffered under the iron boot of communism should have a day such as Holocaust Remembrance Day, too, says the bishop. "But they, the Jews, enjoy good press because they have powerful financial means behind them, enormous power and the unconditional backing of the United States and this favours a certain arrogance that I find unbearable."

Pieronek, asked if the Holocaust had been exploited, said: "Certainly it has. It is used as a propaganda weapon to get advantages that are often unjustified."

Eeek! What was Pieronek on?

His comments come just before January 27’s Holocaust memorial day, when national leaders gather in Auschwitz in southern Poland. This year’s guests include Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Has 75 year old Pieronek taken leave of his senses?

Everyone I have talked to are surprised by Pieronek’s outburst. Pieronek is not a Rydzyk or a Jankowski - he is mainstream very senior, retired now, Polish Roman Catholic bishop, was on the executive bishop’s council, etc. He represents the status quo in Poland among the clergy.

Bishop Pieronek has hardly helped himself. His plea today on TVP television that his comments have been “taken out of context” and the even weaker “I did not authorise the article” - is he used to journos ringing him up to check quotes? (* see note below)- are lame. He denies saying that the Holocuast “was a Jewish invention,” but nowhere does he retract what many see as a tired old anti-Semitism.

"I am totally shocked by these comments, particularly if they came from a member of the Church hierarchy," said Leone Passerman, ex-president of Rome's Jewish community.

Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, said: "It is so sad that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz a Polish cleric still engages in anti-Semitic rhetoric because so much Jewish blood was shed on Polish soil."

“We find it unacceptable that an important religious figure in Poland, only a few days away from International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is capable of making such inflammatory and false remarks” stated European Jewish Council President Dr. Moshe Kantor, quoted in ynet.

Personally, I think the Italian journalist who wrote the original story was taking a liberty with the “Holocaust was a Jewish invention” bit. He says before that: “In a sense,” so he was not literally saying it was an invention. But the general sentiments he spoke of are not unusual here in Poland. Not at all. what's changed is that recently you can get away with saying these type of things - especially after the Gaza debacle.

*I was informed today that there is a “Press Law” which originated in 1984 but which has been amended several times since, which says that the journalist, if requested, must authorise quotes with the interviewee. I found that strange. Is it?

Kaczynski, Doda and the Devil

2010-01-19T21:37:00.010+01:00

Polish pink pop princess Doda stole a kiss from President Lech Kaczynski at a prestigious journalist’s ball.

President Kaczynski is obviously pleased about the experience. In fact, I think she awoken certain urges he hasn’t felt for years. Allegedly. But is the head of state aware that he has let the Dark Prince dance on his lips?

Pink to Black

Pink pop princess Doda is Poland’s Tabloid Queen, famous for being Doda and being seen to be Doda as often as possible in successive media cycles. Doda was a footballer’s wife, for a while. So the Brits will get the essence of Doda in that media stereotype.

It is said around where I live that Doda wanted to buy one of the very expensive flats on the other side of the road. But the owners blocked the sale for fear she might bring down the tone of the area (and believe me, the tone of the area is not that great as it is).

Scary

After giving football hubbie the boot, Doda fell into the hands of darker forces, in the shape of Nergal, the lead guitarist and singer of Death Metal band Behemoth. Behemoth are occultist, scary/ludicrous silly boys who dress in black and sing about goats heads and pagan rituals and naughty things designed to shock mummy.

Behemoth do things to shock on stage, too. They are currently going through court proceedings after Nergal [don’t try this at home, folks] tore up a bible on stage in Krakow.

This dark spirit has now entered Doda, who has recently been seen out and about wearing not her trade mark pink, but black, the colour of…Behemoth.

Notice that First Lady Maria Kaczynska is not as pleased as Lech was at the amorous attentions of the lover of the fallen angel from hell, as Doda, cheeky one, makes the sign of the Devil.

Spooky, isn’t it?

“Work makes you free” sign theft conspiracy theories

2009-12-21T19:43:00.006+01:00

The theft of the "Arbeit macht frei" sign from Gate I at the site of the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz showed one politician from the ruling Civic Platform party has delusions of an outside conspiracy, trying to make Poland look bad. (photo: Police image of alleged criminal working for dark international forces?)

The sign disappeared for three days before police, acting on a tip off, arrested five men up near Torun. They are accused of arriving at the Auschwitz museum site at around 03.00 CET Friday morning, unscrewing the five metre sign, hauling what weights anything up to 40 kilograms 400 metres, through a hole in the fence and into a van and then driving it up to northern Poland. There they sawed it into three bits and then hid it in the woods.

In those three days, politicians and others inside and outside Poland expressed how shocked they were, etc, and some pointed to dark motives behind the theft.

Avner Shalev, head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem was reported to have said: " This act constitutes an act of war."

A theory that neo-Nazis had set the whole thing up rapidly did the rounds. Others thought that this was a set up by those who want to do Poland down.

Civic Plarform’s Pawel Gras said the motive behind the Auschwitz sign theft could be to damage Poland’s international reputation ahead of January’s 65th anniversary celebrations of the liberation of the death camp on January 27. The timing of the theft was “no accident,” he told Radio Zet.

“If the case is not solved by [January] all of the attention will be on the theft and not the message that should be coming out of Poland,” Gras said Sunday.

That this was a criminal act, pure and simple, did not come into it in those three days when the sign was a sign of the times - when everyone sees a deep, dark motive of international scope behind everything that happens.

Today, however, everyone is saying that the gang of men, all known criminals, must have been paid by some weirdo collector. They were not neo-nazis. They were not international provocators.

But that’s a bit boring, isn’t it? I prefer what Gras might be implying: It’s the Russians wot did it!

Lech Poznan go to Bethlehem

2009-12-17T20:43:00.006+01:00

Football club releases excruciating Christmas song. Reindeers weep. So does Cliff Richard.

There have been some great Christmas songs in the past - but not many. There have been a few mediocre Christmas songs in the past - but not that many, either, What there has been, however, is a great deal of utter, utter rubbish Christmas songs. The list is almost endless.

And there have been one or two good songs by, or for, football teams - by New Order for England’s World Cup 1990 bid and, the best, Lightening Seeds for England’s Euro 1996 campaign. But mostly, football songs are just execrable noise pollution, which, cumulatively, are part of the cause, research will reveal one day, of global warming and climate change.

Lech Poznan - first division club; nicknamed the Railwaymen; used to be good until a decade a go, now not so - have gone and done a double-wammy - they have scored a brace - by being a football team which has made a Christmas song! Two crimes in one, just for you this holiday.

It gets worse. The song is a Polish Christmas carol.

The lyrics to Przybieżeli do Betlejem (Shepherds came to Bethlehem) you don’t really need to worry about. It’s the usual stuff. All you need to know to sing along is the chorus, which is “Glory on high, glory on high and peace on earth.” and the repeated phrase by the backing singers “Chwala,” glory!

So, sit back and watch a musical own goal. Merry Christmas Lech!

PS. Correction. I have listened to this a few times now and I am beginning to (cringe) like it! Call a doctor.

The Double Life of Senator Piesiewicz

2009-12-16T22:10:00.005+01:00

A politician, drugs, prostitutes, blackmail, cross-dressing and video tape. It’s the mix of a tabloid editor’s (wet) dream.

It’s the story of Krzysztof Piesiewicz - screenwriter for Krzysztof Kieslowski, a lawyer who helped in the prosecution of the murderers of Father Popieluszko, and a senator for the Civic Platform party - brought down by his own stupidity and a large dollop of growing media fascination with sleaze in Poland.

Tabloid Super Express published video of Piesiewicz taking a white substance - which appears to be of a recreational nature - in the presence of two prostitutes. Later, a half-conscious, then, even later, unconscious senator, dressed in women’s clothes, is seen having lipstick applied to his face by the gals.

The video results from revenge. Piesiewicz, after meeting one of the girls a couple of times, had promised to find her a job. When he didn’t deliver, a plan to blackmail him emerged. On past occasions, the senator was willing to pay for the women to shut up about the rendezvous, but on the third occasion he refused. So a demand of half a million zloty was made, otherwise they were going to the media.

Piesiewicz, with a late burst of wisdom, decided to go to the police. He now faces drug related charges and the girls face an extortion rap. The women - who police say are part of a gang which tries to blackmail celebrities - are facing blackmail charges.

His party, Civic Platform, has deserted him and suspended his membership. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said today: “It seems his political career is over […] His behaviour is indefensible.”

But wait a minute. The senator is guilty of, essentially, giving way to some basic urges. The fact that he risked so much was probably an added, kinky bonus. But he never gave away state secrets, he never did anything, politically, wrong.

On the other hand, he is the victim of a set up and blackmail. The collusion of this by the media in Poland - a feature of the British media which has become nauseating - is probably the most saddening thing about the whole, sad, story.

IPN - Polish for 'False Memory Syndrome'?

2009-12-10T15:11:00.011+01:00

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has accused a diplomat who spent years in a communist prison of being a communist secret agent.

The IPN’s education office released a statement yesterday accusing Maciej Kozlowski - who is currently Deputy Director of the Department of Africa and the Middle East - of being the communist collaborator code-named “Witold”, even though he was arrested for smuggling in copies of the oppositionist Kultura magazine across the Polish-Czechoslovakian border in 1969.

He was sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment for spying for the CIA. Koalowski - a former Polish ambassador to Israel (1999-2003) - but was released in 1972.

But the IPN - a body set up in the 1990s to look into Nazi and Communist crimes towards the Polish nation - has forwarded to the prosecutors claims that he falsified a vetting statement - which all public officials must sign - saying he had never collaborated with any communist agents.
The IPN says that Kozlowski worked for the communist Division II Security Service based in Krakow from 1965 to 1969, specialising in counter-British intelligence.

If it is proved that he was, in effect, a double agent, then he would have to leave his post at the Foreign Ministry.

Kozlowski said in a previous case which was dropped in 2000 that if the communist secret services have files on him then it is only because he was an opposition activist, not because he was a spy.

Kaczynski’s historical attack dogs

Since 2005, the IPN has been accused of acting as an organiser and prosecutor of witch hunts against opponents of the Kaczynski twins. The Jaroslaw Kacztynski government (2005-07) widened the institute’s powers and broadened the vetting process against not just public officials but anyone working in the public arena, including journalists (and including the beatroot, even though he is British and was drunk in a university bar in London for most of the 1980s). The Constitutional Tribunal has since ruled that this part of the IPN’s functions was unconstitutional.

But the IPN has continued to spray allegations of communist collaboration around on a daily basis. Earlier this year two historians from the institute released a book, rehashing allegations that Lech Walesa was the 1970s communist collaborator “Bolek”.

Walesa has now taken President Lech Kaczynski to court for slander, after he made the same accusation.

British historian Norman Davies wrote in the Guardian that Poles should find these constant attacks embarrassing. "Those who are once again attacking Lech Walesa's good name must not realise how they are damaging Poland's reputation abroad in doing so. People in the West, in particular, are not aware of the complex nuances of Polish politics. For this reason I hold the view that attacks against Lech Walesa are a deeply unpatriotic act. ... ”

Last week Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that he wants to de-politicise the work of the IPN. The government has submitted a draft bill which proposes a change in the IPN’s board and a speedier access to files held by them.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party (critics say the IPN is its historical attack dog) has said it will oppose the move.

Ryszard Kalisz from the ex-communist SLD said his party has repeatedly called for abolishment of the IPN. But since that proposal has little support then he would support any legislation which illuminates “pathology” from the work of the institute.

Political sclerosis

The IPN is not just an archive populated by a bunch of dusty historians. It has legal powers to prosecute. As such, it has become the modern day Polish equivalent of Joseph McCarthy. For the current board under its president Janusz Kurtyka, a communist collaborator is someone whose name was held in communist secret service files. For whatever reason. That seems enough to bar them from public service today.

Still, a name is enough for some with an axe to grind. As Salvador Dali said of memory and remembrance: “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”

Jaruzelski asked for 1981 Soviet intervention

2009-12-08T10:12:00.011+01:00

Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) is to release documents which appear to show that General Jaruzelski did indeed request support from Moscow if Solidarity protests got out of control.

Professor Antoni Dudek at the institute writes on his blog that the documents - to be released in the IPN’s December bulletin - are records of a conversation between Jaruzelski and General Viktor Kulikov, a commander to the Warsaw Pact alliance on December 9, 1981, four days before the planned Martial Law crackdown.

The communists were hoping that the reaction would be workplace sit-in strikes (as in fact happened in the places like the Wujek coalmine) as these would be containable. But what Jaruzelski feared most was that the protests would spread out onto the streets and into party headquarters.

“If [protests] spread across the country, it's you [the Soviet Union] who will have to help us,” Jaruzelski says, when discussing possible reactions by Solidarity to martial law.

Jaruzelski goes on to say that if the Soviets refuse to help then Poland would consider pulling out of the Warsaw Pact.

Jaruzelski’s demand was discussed at a Politburo meeting the day after in Moscow, where it was turned down. “It‘s too risky,” Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB is meant to have said, according to other, supportive, documents handed over to Poland by Boris Yeltsin 16 years ago.

Mikhail Suslov - who was effectively leading the Soviets at that time, as the health of Leonid Brezhnev failed - is reported to have said: "So I think we are all here agreed that sending troops in is out of the question."

This all rather contradicts Jaruzelski’s line on declaring martial law 28 years ago, which he has always claimed was an attempt to snuff out any temptation by the Soviets to roll tanks into Poland, as they did in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956.

Treason?

UPDATE - Lech Wałesa reacted to the news today that documents appear to show Jaruzelski called for Soviet assistance in case of uprisings, or whatever, by saying: “If this is how it looks then General Jaruzelski should be charged with treason….”

UPDATE 2 - Jaruzelski denies allegations

Jaruzelski was on the TV last night denying he ever called for Soviet troops to invade Poland if the Solidarity resistance became violent. “If it were not so sad it would be funny,” he said of the allegations. He then suggested that the documents, if that is what they show, were forgeries.

He repeated that martial law was declared to stop a civil war in Poland. He told the Monika Olejnik show on TVN24 that at a meeting of the Polish Episcopate (November 24/25, 1981) bishops agreed that there was a risk of feticide in Poland.

Of Marshal Viktor Kulikov he said. “I knew Kulikov…but I did not ask him for help. ”

He admitted that he had talked about the possibility of Soviet military intervention with Mikhail Suslov, de facto leader of the Soviet Union at that time. However, he claims that Suslov assured him that martial law would be an internal matter for the Polish government. “I had to make sure whether the threat of intervention was real or not,” Jaruzelski said, adding that he was very afraid that the Kremlin might order in troops. “If that happened it would be [international] war.”

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No sex please...we’re Danish?

2009-12-06T15:36:00.005+01:00

Something is rotten in the capital of Denmark. Prostitutes are offering free sex in protest against a local government campaign urging Copenhagen climate change delegates to steer clear of the city’s brothels.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk, 97 other leaders of governments, 30,000 researchers and delegates from NGOs - plus 5,000 accredited journalists - will not be the only ones showing up this week for the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen. They will be joined by scores of human trafficers and their cargo, if the Copenhagen local government is to be believed.

Copenhagen’s “don’t pay for sex” campaign is in the response - or maybe the fantasy - that the inflow of women sex slaves increases at such large events as the UN climate change conference. The brothels have hit back, saying they will offer free sex. Details of the offer are vague. How will it work? Pay for one bonk, get one free?

The fantasy of thousands of women being trafficked to Copenhagen to service a summit full of tree huggers is a strange one, though, and reminds me of a similar protest by Polish nuns on the eve of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. No such tsunami of human trafficking occurred, but what the hell. These climate change summits attract this kind of miserable-ist, misanthropic loathing of large amounts of humans in one place.

And not being content with warning climate change delegates to steer clear of the bulging brothels, the Danish government has ordered the removal of Christmas trees from the vicinity of the conference halls.

‘We have to remember that this is a UN conference and, as the centre then becomes UN territory, there can be no Christmas trees in the decor, because the UN wishes to maintain neutrality,’ said Denmark’s foreign minister Svend Olling.

Sounds like Copenhagen will be full of more hot air in the coming two weeks than a year’s worth of Poland’s carbon emission permits.

Poland’s Environment Minister resigns

Embarrassingly, Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki - who Super Express calls “Poland‘s least known minister” - has handed in his notice. According to Wprost magazine today, Nowicki claims that he actually has less power than his deputy. Unlike his underling, Nowicki is a non-partisan “expert” in the cabinet and not a Civic Platform member. PM Tusk will not announce the resignation till Tuesday at the next full cabinet meeting. Nowicki will still be going to Copenhagen - hopefully to attend the climate summit and not the brothels - on Monday, however.

Greenpeace hang Tusk in airport

Prime Minister Tusk is one of the targets of Greenpeace protestors at Copenhagen. The environmentalists have hung posters at the city airport with grey-headed heads of government apologising at some future date for not doing more to stop the global warming catastrophe. Tusk joins Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown and others as targets of Greenpeace’s ire.

“We're hoping these ads predict the wrong future -- the one where world leaders look back with a "coulda, shoulda, woulda" attitude at a Copenhagen climate summit which failed,” says the Greenpeace web site.

Poland were one of several of the poorer EU states that held out against Brussels presenting too restrictive a position on CO2 targets at a pre-Copenhagen EU summit at the end of October. Warsaw is worried about being dragged into an agreement whereby they would have to help richer EU states to contribute to developing nations to adapt to global warming.

Much to the annoyance of Gordon Brown and leaders of some of the other western European member states, Poland won the argument - getting the size of any contributions to be on a voluntary basis.

Tusk is also eager to hang to the carbon emissions permit sale scam. After Russia and Ukraine, Poland is the holder of the largest carbon emission permits’ surplus in the world, coming in at around 500 million units for the years 2008 to 2012. The country has been negotiating with other countries interested in purchasing the AAU surplus. It has sold permits to Spain and Ireland worth millions of euros which can make contributions to lowering the government budget deficit, which is going up like a hot air balloon at present.

Three out of four Poles believe that global warming is manmade; one in three believe global warming is a threat to Poland and 62 percent think that we should reduce carbon emmissions, even if this means hikes in the cost of electricity.

The survey by PBS-DGA from a sample of 500 (too small a sample of be reliable, but never mind) finds that Poles are more split on whether the government should sacrifice economic growth in the fight against climate change, however, with 53 percent saying that economic growth could be sacrificed to pay for the battle against climate change.

“The survey‘s good news,” said the now former environment minister Maciej Nowicki, pleased with the level of “awareness” of supposed anthropogenic global warming.

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2009-12-05T11:40:00.002+01:00

It's here at babybeat09

How sexy is President Lech Kaczynski?

2009-10-16T23:14:00.001+02:00

President Lech Kaczynski is the 116 hottest leader of state in the world, according to a Canadian satirical web site.

The Hottest Heads of State web site has ranked 172 leaders of state, or government, in terms of their sex appeal.

No criteria is given, or methodology. But Lech Kaczynski is ranked just nine places below Chancellor Angela Merkel - natch! - but three places above Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and 56 places above the decidedly un-sexy Chairman of the National Defence of North Korea, Kim Jong-il.

The world’s most sexiest politician, according to Hottest Heads of State, is Ukraine’s prime minister and presidential candidate, Yulia Tymoshenko. Ghhrrrrrrow!

The compiler of the list does have an idiosyncratic view of what ”hotness” entails, however. Ranked at number 12 in the ranking of the world’s hottest statesman is Belarus president. Aleksander Lukashenko.

Rydzyk’s hotline to heaven

2009-07-13T20:41:00.014+02:00

I have seen the future, and the future is...Father Tadeusz Rydzyk!

The restless, ultra conservative, media empire of the founder of Radio Maryja, TV Trwam, the newspaper Nasz Dziennik, a ‘media school’ in Torun and much more besides, is now moving where no restless, ultra conservative, media mogul has moved before: the mobile phone market!

It’s a logical business move. Take the loyal audience you have - and there is no more loyal a media audience - and push a product directly at them. It's a happy coincidence, too, that much of your target audience is one of the rare demographics in Poland that doesn’t much use mobile phones - the old and/or the deeply confused about modern life.

The product on offer is a pre-paid mobile phone with very big buttons, just perfect for those arthritic fingers to make a quick call to family, friends, the priest and even one of those infamous radio phone-in shows that are always on Radio Maryja, and make a quick anti-Semitic remark, or two?

For more information call 720 00 77 77. Numbers beginning with a “7”, in Poland, by the way, mean you pay.

Zloty from heaven!

Madonna versus the Black Madonna in Poland

2009-07-07T21:56:00.009+02:00

So outraged are some of the more religiously minded in Poland, that they are organizing a mass pray-in to keep her out of Warsaw on August 15.

She is the Material Girl who charges outrageous sums of money for concerts - the tickets here have been retailing at eye-watering prices - around 250 euro for a seated ticket. She’s a Kabbalist, exhibitionist, African baby-poacher. She is the conical - titted, self promotional genius/trickster; Nelson Mandela has been out of prison longer than the last decent song she wrote was in the charts; she can’t sing and I don’t really like her muscles.

There’s lots of things you can say about Madonna. But I never thought she was Satan in ripped fishnets.

But…thenews.pl reports:

Several forms of protest are being planned against the Madonna concert in Poland on 15 August, including mass prayer sessions.
Religious groups are outraged that the concert is being held on a Catholic feast day celebrating the Assumption of Holy Mary.

And the protestors have received the surprise support from former Solidarity leader and ex-president Lech Walesa. “It is true. I support this protest,” he told the Dziennik daily.

Head of the regional Mazowieckie council, Marian Brudzynski, is coordinating two weeks of the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy prayer on the rosary and an outdoor mass at Warsaw City Hall, all in the name of blocking the pop star’s concert in the capital.

Blimey! August 15 is also a national holiday - Army Day. Sounds rather secular. But this is the day, in 1920, when the Miracle of the Vistula occurred - when General Pilsudski’s men - with, so many think, a little help from the Man Upstairs - beat back Trotsky’s Red Army and saved the whole of Europe from the communist menace.

President Kaczynski - not, I imagine, from Madonna’s natural fan-base - has said that there is nothing constitutionally to stop the woman from giving a concert.

But Madonna - the singer - is popular here. she sold out those very expensive tickets. Easily. The battle of the Madonnas - the black one versus the white - is a delicious example of Poland’s version of the Culture Wars.

Sorry I have been away...

2009-06-23T20:12:00.003+02:00

And thanks to readers who sent emails for me to keep going, but I have been a little distracted, recently.

I won’t bore you with the details - other than to say that money - or the lack of it - is the root of all evil: especially when your employer seems to not have very much of it. Suddenly.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah...

Poland, Japan and Nazis were going to invade Soviet Union?

2009-06-23T19:31:00.008+02:00

Seventy years ago, as the dark clouds of war gathered over Europe, Poland was in secret alliance with Nazi Germany, and Japan, preparing to invade the Soviet Union. (caption on poster, above, says: Under the great leadership of Stalin, forward to communism!)

I know that your history book in school never told you that, but that’s what Russians are being told. I know your history book told you that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was the not so secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in preparation for invading Poland. But you got it all wrong.

The Soviet Union, says a documentary that was broadcast on Russian state TV this week, had to sign the non aggression pact with the Nazis, otherwise the Poles were going to march all the way to Moscow - meet up with their Japanese chums for a tray of sushi and a jolly glass of vodka - and then depose Stalin and set up a fascist regime in Uncle Joe’s place.

Preposterous? Well, maybe highly possible to a Russian audience that is seeing history being re-written by the Kremlin. We have got used to seeing reports of school text books explaining away the Great Famine and the purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union as necessary evils. Now get used to seeing Poland as the aggressor which almost single handed started WW II.

Poland’s foreign ministry is not pleased with the documentary. At all. In fact, it’s a little bit miffed. In a statement from its embassy in Moscow today, it said:

“It is sad that such a report was broadcast at prime time. Certainly, it will not improve the relationship between our two countries and will not lead to reconciliation between our nations.”

Meanwhile, as Poland starts to think about the 70th anniversary of the invasions in September 1939 of the Soviets and Nazis, Russia is remembering the 68th anniversary of the outbreak of the war.

No, this is not some Polish-Russian dispute over mathematics. For Russians - as this news report by RT, the Russian English language TV, shows - the Great Patriotic War started, not in 1939, but 1941, when Hitler went back on his non aggression agreement with Stalin.

If two sides can’t even agree on when a war broke out, what chances of burying, once and for all, the hatchet of terrible history between them?

Make June 4 Freedom Day!

2009-06-04T20:17:00.006+02:00

The media have gone wall-to-wall here in Poland celebrating, remembering, analysing the first round of the elections in 1989 that eventually brought about the first government led by non-communists for decades. A good chance to declare a national holiday! (phot0 - 20th Anniversary of Polish People's Republic Street crossed out)

But no. While prime ministers and presidents from ex-communist countries plus Angela Merkel were in Krakow and Gdansk trying to give profound speeches and meaningful handshakes to each other, the rest of us was stuck at work. It was a normal day for the masses, as our leaders got a chance to look good on CNN et al.

So, no Freedom Day for us. But last Sunday - I learned last Sunday - was a national holiday: meaning all the supermarkets were shut! That came as a shock. It was Zielone Swiatki - Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus as described in the Book of Acts... apparently.

Problem with national days that fall on a Sunday, is that I wasn’t at work, anyway. So it wasn’t a holiday for most people, except people who work in big shops. Zielone Swiatki should be called Tesco is the Anti-Christ Day.

But wouldn’t June 4 make more sense as a national holiday? That was a day that symbolises something both local - to Poles - and universal, to all of us.

The media has gone nuts about it. The TVN 24 hour round the clock news channel has been going round the clock with the story. They even had one of those ‘virtual studios’ that I first saw CNN do on election day in the US. The entire studio was decked out like the Dziennik news programme on the old TVP state channel, circa 1989. Correspondents - and this was a daft trick borrowed from CNN - that were in Gdansk or Krakow would be beamed down into the studio in Warsaw. Which was meant to impressive - except for the fact that the whole point of having a correspondent in Gdansk is that you can see him or her on the spot in Gdansk.

But the media have gone for this in such a big way because it genuinely is a day that moves people. To think of how it was then and how far Poland, and themselves, have come since.

Of course, the deal that Solidarity struck with the communists back then at the Round Table talks - effectively allowing them to become part of the governing process, even though virtually all of the seats contested in that election would be won by opposition candidates - has come to plague politics in Poland even since. It was a compromise to maintain stability, while radical economic shocks were put in place. But the compromise had a cost - and the Law and Justice party under the Kaczynskis are basically a creation of it. With no communist conspiracies and cliques to rage against, Jaroslaw Kaczynski would have to invent some.

But even so...This day seems a good time for a national holiday, to me. Make June 4 Freedom Day in Poland!

LPR alliance makes UK Libertas candidate quit

2009-05-28T22:03:00.007+02:00

A candidate for Libertas in the UK has resigned from the party because of Declan Ganley’s alliances with ultra nationalists like the League of Polish Families (LPR). (hat tip: Bueys Own)

Candidate for the North West England European election constituency, and UK policy director, Ben Tallis (pictured above), has had enough of Libertas’s contentment to ally themselves with some strange far right parties in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic. Informing of his decision this week to stand down from Libertas‘s election list, Tallis said:

"As the campaign has progressed I have come to realise that while I am committed to Libertas’ goals of reforming the EU from a pro-European perspective and admire the Libertas team in the UK, I cannot agree with certain aspects of the wider European party, notably in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Specifically, the problem seems to have been Libertas’s acceptance of candidates from the League of Polish Families, All Polish Youth and supported by presidents of public television channels on their list in Poland.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Irish Times today that Lech Walesa had told him that when he is at the Libertas Dublin rally this weekend he will tell the anti-Lisbon Treaty party to...well, support ratification of the Lisbon Treaty! This came as a “great relief” to the pro Lisbon Polish prime minister, apparently. Which is...nice.

But as Libertas lose more and more credibility as polling day approaches for the European parliamentary elections, Lech Walesa’s little Libertas odyssey (see previous post) will have done his credibility no good at all. Which is a shame. As the UK goes to the polls on June 4, Walesa will be trying to be taken seriously and bathing in the lime light of the celebrations in Poland of 20 years since the fall of communism - back in the days when people did take Walesa seriously.

Latest opinion polls put Libertas support in Poland at a measly two percent.

Poland’s strange fascination with Libertas

2009-05-24T19:42:00.006+02:00

As the European parliamentary elections loom - scheduled for Sunday, June 7 in Poland - the amount of space in the press and time taken up on air by stories about the anti-Lisbon Treaty Libertas party far outweighs the amount of votes they will get on polling day.

On February 1 this year, a few hundred delegates turned up in Warsaw for a meeting with Libertas founder, the Irish millionaire Declan Ganley, the man who helped successfully organise the “No” vote in Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. See video of Ganley in Poland in January here).

Although Ganley said, when everyone was wondering who would support them in Poland, that extremists would not be welcome in the Polish section of Libertas, a weird and extreme bunch turned up for the meeting. Mirosław Orzechowski from the catholic-nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR) was there, so was Konrad Bonisławski from the League’s old youth wing, All-Polish Youth, an organisation frequently accused of anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism.

There were also disaffected politicians from Andrzej Lepper’s Self Defence and a few drop outs from the Law and Justice party, as well. If Ganley didn’t want the marginal and the extreme - and his central message about the 'democratic deficit' in the EU is correct - 'then he certainly has got them. Who else is there in Poland? The EU is the only game in town around these parts.

Fast forward three months to the pan-European launch of the Libertas election campaign in Rome on May 1 and who is one of the star speakers? None other than Lech Walesa, who had apparently, just days before, given his support to the European People’s Party, the largest voting bloc currently in the European parliament and made up of christian-democratic parties, with members including Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi and Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Walesa told the Libertas delegates: “Declan Ganley and Libertas have the potential to change Europe for the better. This European Project has all the ingredients to become a historic force for good in the world, and grow into so much more than it is today. But for the to happen, we need to heed the Libertas message and put the people back at the heart of the project.”

Walesa told incredulous Polish journalists after the congress that he did not support Libertas but was asked to speak at the manifesto launch. So he did. He also made no secret of pocketing appearance money, thought to be as much as 100,000 euros. Since then he has made other appearances at Libertas events.

Walesa’s motives for dallying with Libertas - a party which now has the official backing of LPR’s Roman Giertych - are not merely financial. Walesa is addicted to being at the centre of controversies and desperately seeks the limelight when he can get it.

But he has embarrassed Donald Tusk - and much of the Polish political establishment - by being associated with Ganley’s ragbag of extremists, populists and chancers.

Walesa’s antics have also ensured that barely a day goes by without Libertas making the headlines in Poland. Their campaign manager, Daniel Pawlowiec (onetime journalist for Radio Maryja’s Nasz Dziennik newspaper and junior minister for the League of Polish Families in the Law and Justice government) has got hours of free publicity from the Polish media’s obsession with Libertas, way and above the support the party has in the country.

The media exposure for Libertas in Poland - Gazeta Wyborcza has calculated that it has received the third most amount of airtime on public television, despite being nowhere in the opinion polls - is helped by the apparent support of the state broadcaster TVP.

It’s speculated that this support comes from weirdo TVP president, Piotr Farfał, who has connections going back years to Libertas affiliate for the European elections, the League of Polish Families.

But the contradictions within Libertas policies - which seem to change depending on which country it is campaigning in - are beginning to suggest that this strange coalition may not stay together very much longer than the election campaign.

The central message of calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty may be easy for many to support. But Ganley’s support for internal markets within the EU - including campaigning for opening up labour markets for Poles in Austria and Germany - are in contradiction to recent comments from the Irish branch, and home, of Libertas. Party spokesperson Caroline Simmons has called for a Blue Card (visa) system to stem the tide of immigration coming to Ireland, which would, “reduce the burden to Ireland of caring for inhabitants of other member states,” she said. Libertas Ireland East candidate Raymond O Malley says we have “got to stop the tide coming in.”

The Blue Card system would limit the right of Poles and others to work in Ireland to two years and would deprive them of drawing welfare benefits, even though they would still be expected to pay taxes.

That a state broadcaster is promoting the interests of any political party - let alone one as marginal as Libertas - is, of course, a scandal. But the Polish media in general, and parts of the political establishment, seem to have a gory fascination with Ganley’s ragbag army.

And on June 7, Polish voters are going to make them all blush by ignoring all the fuss and voting for someone else - there has been no interest shown in opinion polls at all for Libertas - or more likely, voting for none at all. Recent opinion polls predict the turnout on June 7 to be under 15 percent. It was only 20 percent in the last election in 2004, just one month after Poland joined the European Union! The media might be fascinated by all this, but what the public feels about it seems to be a side issue.

Der Spiegel and Poland’s Nazi collaborators

2009-05-21T21:02:00.005+02:00

The German weekly Der Spiegel has stirred up a hornets nest in Poland by suggesting - by daring to suggest - that some Poles (they single out farmers) collaborated with the Nazis during WW II.

And not just Poles - French, Romanians, Latvians…etc - collaborated with the Nazis, says Der Spiegel’s lead story this week.

It’s really an article about Ukrainian SS officer John Demjanjuk, just extradited back to Germany from the US on war crimes dating back to when he was responsible for the death of thousands at the Sobibor Nazi death camp in southeast Poland.

But the article gives the German journalists the chance to point out what has been perfectly obvious for many years - that there were collaborators in each of the nations the Nazis occupied. Even the some residents of the British Isle of Jersey collaborated with the Nazis. This is no revelation. But…

Cue outrage in Poland! Politicians, journalists all saying the same thing. This is another example of a creeping trend - Germans trying to transfer the guilt of the Holocaust onto others.

“Ja! Ze Nazis ver German, but hey, Hans!…ja vol!…zis was not an essentially German problem…schnell, schnell…look at all ze nations zat helped us!”

The article comes in the wake of the controversy over the German Expellees Union, headed by Erika Steinbach, who wants to emphasise that some Germans suffered both under the Nazis and in the wake of WW II, when millions of Germans were forcefully expelled from regions that were now in Poland and many other countries - often brutally so.

Der Spiegel editor, Mathias Müller von Blumencron, has pointed out that it was never his intention to claim that the Nazis were not a German problem but that the cooperation of others in the occupied countries was essential to carry out their deathly, murderous project.

Which is probably true. But isn’t that obvious?

Poles, though, don’t really do the historical guilt trip very well. As a nation, Poles see themselves as victims - and that goes back to the revolutionary, Romantic period and has been reinforced ever since.

Poles are not like the British, Americans, maybe some French…they are not trembling with guilt and angst about historical crimes done by their countries in the past. Poles have been the victims of racism many times more than they have been the perpetrators. It’s an important part of the national identity.

So, Herr Spiegel: if you dare to suggest that some Poles went along with the horror - and even though you are correct - don’t act the wide-innocent when you get accused of making German-Polish relations just that little bit more difficult.

Below, BWT, is a photograph of a Polish official checking ID in the Krakow ghetto during occupied Poland.

Can Poland save UK from neo-fascists?

2009-05-11T21:38:00.004+02:00

The New Labour government in Great Britain has appealed to Poles living in the UK to register and vote in the June European elections - otherwise, says a government minister in London, “The British National Party will win!”

Last week, British trade unionists and Labour Party politicians met in the House of Commons with Polish organizations such as Poles to Polls, Poland Street and the Federation of Poles in Great Britain to try and get Poles out to vote on June 4 to 7.

The British government’s European Minister Caroline Flint said that Poles have a lot to thank the New Labour government for: it was them that let the Poles in, in the first place; it was them that introduced the minimum wage. It was them…

And if Poles don’t go out and vote? Then the British National [cue sinister music] Party will get seats in the European Parliament and will try and limit any new migration into Britain. Eek!

And they may be right that small, looney-tunes fringe parties might well do a little better than usual in the elections on June 4 in the UK. And that’s because many will not be able to stomach voting for New Labour. And tax paying Poles won’t vote for them for the same reasons as everyone else won’t vote for them.

Caught with their pants down

A month ago Home Secretary Jacqueline Smith was revealed to have claimed for an internet connection on her parliamentary expenses allowance. Nothing unusual there. Unfortunately, included on the receipt was a porn film that her husband had paid for via the Television X/Fantasy Channel subscription TV.

Apparently, Jacqueline was out at a meeting at the time her husband - Timmy Rumney, her parliamentary advisor - downloaded the movie , Raw Meat 3. The description on wholesaledropshiped.com [?] gives the movie’s tag line as : “it‘s the end of the world, and we blow it!”

Oh, yeah!

Starring a young gentleman answering to the name of “Tiger Wood” - I bet he‘s got a good long game - it appears to be a gay flick. Curiouser and curiouser…

Having your husband download gay porn when you were out, at the tax payers’ expense, is just…funny. But the Daily Telegraph has revealed that virtually the whole of the House of Commons has been shafting the British tax payer for years.

MPs have been running scams where they claim expenses on second homes in constituencies, renovating then selling the homes. And then doing it all again! Claims have been made for bizarre things like clearing moles from lawns and fixing taps under a tennis court, among other nonsense.

All parties are implicated in this - but New Labour came to power on the back of pointing at sleaze in the opposition Conservative Party. And now they show themselves s sleazy as the rest.

And these people expect Poles to come to their rescue?

I was a card carrying member of the Labour Party once, for my sins. It was in the days when Labour was getting a whipping from the Thatcher government and we were trying to revive the twitching corps that the Labour Party, and the trade union movement that had founded and sustained it last century, had become.

We failed. I failed to renew my membership when Labour became New Labour (a bit like Clinton’s New Democrats) and Tony Blair was elected to lead, not a party with roots in a movement any longer, but a shallow PR machine whose only goals were to win power and stay there.

Well, they did win power, in 1997, and they stayed there. They are there still. But not for too much longer.

Once Tony Blair stood down and Gordon “bank manager” Brown took over as prime minister, the game was up. Blair could just about pull the smoke and mirrors, and the rabbits, out of the hat. With him gone, and hapless Brown in his place, New Labour started to disintegrate. Fast. Farcically.

And now the European elections have come around again and New Labour looks like it will go into meltdown at the next general election in 2010.

So, desperate for anything and anyone to come to their rescue they have the cheek of appealing to minorities such as the Polish community in Britain to ride to their rescue. And if Poles don’t? “Then the fascists will come and get them!”

That appears to be the message of the appeal for Poles to vote in the European elections in June.

The appeal is pitiful. The idea that the BNP will win many seats in the election is fanciful. They might get one - voted there by people who want to stick a finger up at the government - but so what? And secondly, a member of the European Parliament has little or no power anyway, and certainly no influence over immigration policy. That’s done by national governments and the European Commission. And I can’t see a BNP member being chosen to be European Migration Minister anytime soon..

And saddest thing of all is that New Labour is so desperate that they have to come knocking on Poles’ doors to save them from oblivion. The Labour Party these days are like an MPs husband, caught with his pants down, and exposed for what they are: a bunch of wankers.

Poland thinks Iran’s role in Iraq has been “positive”?

2009-04-27T20:01:00.003+02:00

Here’s a strange one from the Iranian Fars news agency, reporting on the visit to Tehran at the weekend of Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Jacek Naider. He met with the Iranian foreign minister, then with his counterpart:

The Polish official […] held talks with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for European Affairs Mehdi Safari in which he said Iran's role in Afghanistan and Iraq is positive and constructive.

Um...If Naider did say that - and a call to the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw today seemed to indicate that he did: or, at least, they found nothing strange in the remark - then I wonder what they make of that in Washington, which constantly accuses Tehran of funding the Shia militants that have given the US so much trouble since they invaded Iraq in 2003.

And Afghanistan? Nobody would suggest that Iranians support the Taliban. In fact, Iran has long been disgusted by Pakistan’s kid gloves approach to them, both when they were in power in Afghanistan and since they took to the mountains after the US invaded with the help of the Northern Alliance.

But Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - the man, lest we not forget, whose presence at a recent UN conference was the official reason why Poland refused to go to the anti-racism shindig - paid a visit to Kabul last week. He said the problems in Afghanistan were caused by foreign “colonial forces” who had destabilised the region. One of those foreign forces is, of course, Poland.

So the current Polish love-in with Iran is rather odd. But maybe not.

Warsaw signed a preliminary deal with the Tehran government last year to gain access to Iran’s rich gas and oil deposits. Iran could be part of the Polish government’s long term plan to wean itself off its dependency on Russian gas.

The US would not take too kindly to any significant trade between Poland and Iran, however - as long as Tehran pursues its nuclear ambitions, be they peaceful or not.

Which brings us to the anti-missile shield, planned to be situated in Poland and the Czech Republic. The official reason for the plan, says Washington, is to protect the US’s Nato allies against attack from rogue states - meaning places like…Iran!

Whatever is going on here - diplomacy is a strange art at the best of times, but this story is so complicated it makes my brain hurt - there is one thing that Poland’s deputy foreign minister said in Tehran at the weekend that we can all agree on: Iran is so important to the region that solving problems without them is simply impossible.

Poland to ban Che Guevara T-shirts?

2009-04-24T21:26:00.006+02:00

The icon of many a young, idealistic bedroom revolutionary, Che Guevara - a regular on T-shirts the world over - could become outlawed in Poland, if the government gets its way.

Yes, the often-called “liberal” government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has proposed to make all images that promote dictatorship, communism or fascism illegal from public display. This would also include banning the sale and display of images of not just Hitler - who never has been a popular culture icon to display on your favourite T-shirt - but also Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara.

Thenews.pl reports that: “Elzbieta Radziszewska [minister of equality] wants to expand Article 256 of the Criminal Code which proposes a two-year prison sentence for producing fascist or totalitarian propaganda or which incites racist sentiments. The Minister now seeks to expand the law to include books, clothing and other items.”

But…um…why?

“Adopting such a law would aid the fight against racism,” adds the minister, helpfully.

Oh, really?

Of course, it is easy to sneer at such nonsense. But what a Western reader should realise is that this is the ruling political elite’s attempt to create a “Polish PC”. where certain images and sentiments are controlled, regulated. Where western liberal PC has speech codes of what is, and what is not, acceptable, here is Poland’s government trying to regulate which signs and symbols are publicly acceptable to display.

This right wing, conservative government - and much of the opposition parties in parliament - see the world very much in the same way as many of their liberal equivalents do in the West: that symbols, words and gestures are dangerous and should be banned.

Both mentalities have the very patronising view that people are so vulnerable that they could be affected by exposure to offensive and obnoxious signs, resulting in an immediate change of behaviour so severe that it could be a threat to society at large.

Broadcaster and writer Kenan Malik shows clearly in this extract from his new book that attitudes, certainly in the UK, have changed radically from 20 years ago about how willing governments and organisations are to ban offensive images, speech and even thought.

So the Polish government’s urge to ban, admittedly genuinely offensive symbols in Poland, plus a few cartoon revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, should be put in the context of a more broader fear of free speech outside of Poland as well.

When ruling elites are so afraid of anti-orthodox opinions and symbols they so show weakness, not strength.

Poland joins UN conference boycott

2009-04-20T19:03:00.008+02:00

The United Nations in Switzerland descended into farce today as Poland, the US, Germany and many more boycotted a UNESCO conference on fighting racism in fear that the Iranian president would turn up and accuse Israel of “racism.”

Well, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad duly obliged. In his speech to the depleted hall - he was the only head of state that bothered to turn up to the event - he said:

"In compensation for the dire consequences of racism [during WW II] in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine."

Oh, dear. Poor old Ban ki-Moon, head of the UN. This was meant to be the usual touchy-feely conference where everyone joins hands and makes cooing noises about how they are gonna fight racism and all the other nasty things in the world. And then the Bad Man turns up and spoils it all by saying something’ stupid like accusing another country of racism.

In fact, Ban ki-Moon had wagged his finger at Poland and the other nations which boycotted the whole shindig.

“Some nations who by rights should be helping us to forge a path to a better future are not here,” said the Secretary General of the UN, expecting everyone to put up with being lectured by the President of Iran on human rights and all that stuff, in a desperate attempt to look good to an electorate back home which looks like will give him a bit of a kicking in presidential elections scheduled for this summer.

While President Ahmadinejad was droning on about Zionist conspiracies many of the delegates who were there - from France, from the UK - walked out.

The conference was hilarious on many fronts:

- Quite apart from whether you think the Israeli state’s policy to the Palestinians is racist - and it probably is - what is the point of having a conference about tackling racism if you don’t want anyone to mention the “racism” word?

- The Iranian President has said many racist things about Jews in the past. So why did Mr Moon expect Israel to turn up? And if they did there would have been a BIG ROW and the United Nation’s fantasy about spreading peace and love throughout the world via dumb conferences like this one would have looked even more silly than it does, right now.

- Did Poland only cancel going to the conference “at the last minute” this weekend, as they claim, after the US’s last minute decision not to go, either? Hmm…

- Why bother with these ridiculous UN talking shops in the first place? The UN is really just about nations which won WW II consolidating their power. So this is an organisation that justifies global inequalities and accompanied militarism and always has done. And then it stages conferences on equality and expects people to take it seriously!

The result of the latest comedy sponsored by UNESCO is that many of us are scratching our heads and wondering just what is the purpose of the United Nations? It is neither united nor does it represent, much of the time, all the nations of Planet Earth.

Time for a rethink, Mr Moon.

More?

Poland's foreign ministry web site on why they didn't show

Mourning sickness in Poland

2009-04-14T18:59:00.013+02:00

The fire killing 22 - maybe more - people in a sheltered housing building in the north west of Poland over the Easter holiday was tragic and sad. But why have the minute of silences and the state pronounced day of mourning turned into minutes and days?

Nobody knows why fire swept through the building housing families down on their luck on Sunday night/Monday morning, killing 22, including young children. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was at the scene early Monday morning, said that there was probably a fundamental fault in construction - which was an interesting observation as the building was constructed in the 1970s.

Twenty two lives lost is tragic - that those lives were some of the most in need of help from society is all the more tragic. And a minute of silence at public events and a day of mourning is not nearly enough to pay respect to the victims and their grieving families. What would be more use, of course, would be more concrete and lasting help for Poland’s poor. That would be a more fitting tribute.

Instead, what we get is President Lech Kaczynski announcing, just hours after the event, that there will not be a day of mourning in Poland but Three Days of Mourning. This means that many public events - even a concert in Warsaw dedicated to the life and memory of John Paul II - will be cancelled until official mourning ends on Friday.

Is Poland joining the current trends in the West, where prolonged public shows of emotion and concern are almost obligatory?

I care, therefore I am?

Editor of the spiked web site, Mick Hume, termed this development ‘mourning sickness’, the key event in the UK being the death of Diana, when the British ‘stiff upper lip’ turned into a quivering bowl of jelly. Where Britain was once a place reticent to show its emotions is now a place where to burst out crying in public - like Chelsea captain John Terry did so memorably after missing a penalty in the European Champion’s League final last year - somehow makes that person more admirable.

Poland is a country that has seen many tragic events, most of which are slightly more significant than missing a penalty against Liverpool. It’s sadness is part of its history. But the inflation of a minute of silence into half hours of silence and a day of mourning into half a week, is puzzling. Being resilient and strong used to be values respected in Poland - instead, what we get, is an officially organised sob-fest.

It also does nothing to combat the real reason why those poor people died at the weekend - poverty and neglect of a public building full of people who nobody much thought about, until now.

Afghanistan - where western leaders go to ‘find themselves’

2009-04-08T21:07:00.007+02:00

When western political elites appear in Afghanistan - President Lech Kaczynski was the latest to turn up today - it reminds me of the old hippy trail, when disaffected, angst-ridden sons and daughters of ruling elites and the middle classes travelled from Istanbul to Kabul in ‘search of themselves’ and a meaning of life back home seemed unable to provide.

But what did they hope to find among the poverty, backwardness and poppy fields?

President ‘Kaftan’ Kaczynski was in Afghanistan to meet the 1600 Polish troops stationed there and later went on - after his plane was late - to Kabul for meetings with President Karzai. The Afghan leader was probably beside himself with gratitude for plucky Poland’s help in trying to stabalise a country that was never stable in the first place. Kaczynski promised more troops - 400 are leaving soon from Poland to be stationed in the Gahzni province - but he almost certainly parroted concern in Washington and London that Karzai was “not doing enough” to deal with the corruption, the war lords and the resurgent Taliban.

The West is tiring of their (democratically elected) cheerleader, and would prefer someone else to take charge.

Note the outrage - from Western leaders - at the move to make formally legal a practice that has been, up to now, put in place by local custom, that the ten percent Shia Muslim population should abide by the medieval dictates of Sharia law, where women’s status is second class, at best. This really was screwing things up for President Obama etc - Afghanistan is his Big Foreign Policy Mission. With Afghani legislators acting like they didn’t particularly want western NGO-sponsored women’s drop in centres littering up the place, and acting a bit…well, backward…is no help at all. How would Washington justify the American troops dying for such a great and noble cause?

Luckily, Karzai backed down and revoked the offending legislation. Few! But still, thinks Washington, London, Warsaw…“Wouldn’t it be better if we got someone else to run the place?”

Afghan is where some of the Western political elites are getting their kicks - this was meant to be the theatre of the ‘war on terror’; this was where the bad guys have to be whipped; this was where the poor people of Afghanistan could gratefully receive “humanitarian intervention”.

With the Soviet Union gone, where else would those guys get their reason to be; their sense of purpose? Like the hippies of old, places like Afghanistan have become a place to find oneself, when finding a sense of purpose at home is increasingly difficult for them.

In Poland, being the good boy of NATO is the number one foreign policy goal. Afghanistan is the perfect opportunity to show willing. When the US asked for more troops to go and fight the Taliban, many of the European governments started staring at their shoes, or noticing bits of fluff that had to removed from their suits. Not Warsaw! You want more troops? Even at a time when we are slashing our defence budget? Nie ma problemu!

Poland wants to be the NATO guard dog of its eastern borders, too. This is a consensus that crosses political divides in Warsaw. This is what Poland’s leaders need to feel useful, give them purpose.

Who is the bigger hippy?

It gets all the more complicated when President Kaczynski and Prime Minister Tusk are currently involved in a bloody battle over who is the more important as far as foreign policy is concerned, the underhand ruthlessness of which would make a Taliban leader look like a wuss.

The latest shenanigans at the NATO summit in Prague last weekend illustrates the point, nicely.

President and government had agreed to not back the eventual winner, Rasmussen, straight away, but try to wheedle a few concessions out of the other NATO leaders - like Turkey eventually did. Last week, the Foreign Ministry sent a note to President Kaczynski with the title: How to play the diplomatic game. Kaczynski obviously took a brief skim-read of the contents and, riled by the patronising title of the memo, chucked it into the bin.

So at the dinner last Friday night, before the summit proper, Kaczynski - suffering under his usual political-turrets-syndrome - blurted out that “Poland will support the Great Dane.”

Oops! Game over.

Foreign Minister Sikorski, who was basically rejected as a candidate for secretary-general because the Russians wouldn’t like him, must have been spitting blood. Kaczynski had done it again! Who was ruling Polish foreign policy, anyway?

And so the farce continues…

The political elite in Poland has had a hard time in Poland since 1989 convincing Poles that they are worth taking any notice of. And then something like Afghanistan, the EU, NATO come along, and suddenly they can feel important in high places. Afghanistan has become like opium for our leaders. They can’t get enough of it.

the beatroot in Rome - part II

2009-03-30T23:35:00.012+02:00

Back in Rome to see the ruins of the old Roman Empire, and a troubled press secretary of the gaff-prone, current one.

Italy has been trading on its past for quite a while now - centuries, even. And it’s all here in Rome: the emperors, the popes, the Renaissance, the food…the Fiat 500. I was so busy the first time I was in Rome - in October last year - I didn’t have much of a chance to see it in all it’s crumbling, fading, graffiti covered glory.

First stop was down to see the Coliseum, the Forum, the sites of glorious and/or dodgy Caesars and Senators.

The old ruins are magnificent, of course, though Italians have a talent for turning the profound into tacky tourist traps, complete with ‘gladiators’ arguing about whatever Italians are constantly arguing about; those annoying ‘living statues’ you see everywhere these days at these sorts of places, who stand still for a living for hours on end and expect people to drop money into little plates at their motionless feet; and, of course, the ubiquitous Peruvian pan-pipe players.

Moving swiftly on, down the Spanish Steps, which overlook Via dei Gucci Victims, where women with more euros than brain cells try to buy themselves an outrageously over-priced personality, with brand name attached. Tutti belli!

The centre of town is a little disappointing, but delights can be found, over the river where the old, medieval Rome can still be glimpsed - the perfect place to indulge in pasta and lamb, washed down with the Frescati from the hills of nearby Lazio. Balissimo!

We wanted to see the Vatican art museum - I had heard it was rather good - but didn’t want to queue for a couple of hours for the privilege. So time for a little favour. And a chance to see a couple of very nice people who work in the Holy See press office and let them know how Cardinal Dziwisz‘s film, Testimony - which they worked tirelessly on when we were there last October - did in Poland. Maybe they could get us in quickly? They did. Bless them!

It was a Saturday but the Vatican’s chief press officer was at his desk, with a copy of the Lancet opened in front of him. Pope Benedict was in Africa and had made an “unguarded remark”, said press officer, about how condoms were worse than useless as protection against HIV/AIDS - in fact they made things worse - and abstinence was the only real protection from getting sick. The esteemed medical journal is not pleased:

“When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.”

Oh, dear!

It’s the Vatican line, as we know, but apparently this was not on the list of things that Pope Benny was on the continent to preach about. This was meant to be a happy, controversy free trip to solidify the presence of Rome in one of the only parts of the globe where church congregations are growing - and not shrinking, like back home in Italy.

Signor Press Officer said the whole situation was rather “worrying.” And I got the impression - and it is only my impression - that the current pontiff is not seen as the safe pair of hands in front of the media that his predecessor, Pope John II, was. Pope Benny has a habit of putting his foot in it, unlike Karol Wojtyla, who played the media events like a church organ.

After the AIDS remark cue the outrage. Pope encourages ‘skin-skin’ in Africa! The Roman Catholic church is responsible for the spread of HIV!

I have argued here, as others have elsewhere, that the link between Catholic teaching and HIV rates is spurious - mainly because the nations with the highest HIV rates are not particularly Catholic. The spread of AIDS there is, at root, to do with poverty and underdevelopment. But you feel for the current Pope’s communicators. He doesn’t make their jobs any easier.

Bottoms

The Vatican art museum - no queue, in through the exit door - is better than I expected, by the way. Seemingly kilometers of corridors, lined with fantastic paintings, tell the story of Christian art, from the very old to the modern. It’s all there: Matejko’s rather gruesome depiction of Polish King Sobieski’s smashing of the Turks in Vienna - and they were worried about Danish cartoons! - right up to Munch, Chagall, Francis Bacon, even a Dali.

But it all just softens you up for the finale - the Sistine Chapel! It’s awesome. And while staring at one of Michelangelo’s many paintings that cover the ceiling I had a flash of inspiration - a revelation - about the origin of the term “mooning” - of showing one’s botty cheeks in public as a leisure activity. I had always assumed it was named after Wildman Drummer of the Who, Keith Moon, who liked to display his buttocks regularly. But, well, maybe not. See Michelangelo’s The Creation of Sun and Moon.

Back in April

2009-03-17T20:46:00.000+01:00

I wish I could say that there have been no posts because I have been involved in heroic acts, which have changed the coarse of history. Or that I had been doing worthy things for the good of Humankind. Or even that I forgot my passwords.

But no…just a bit knackered, still. Going to Rome, and will post in first week of April.

Buddy, can you spare a grosz?

2009-02-22T19:41:00.003+01:00

Solutions put forward to stave off the worst of the global financial meltdown - now knocking angrily at the door in Poland, like some aggressive and impatient Repo Man - have split into good old fashioned rightwing and leftwing remedies. But are they all missing the point?

The deliciously named Moody ratings agency alarmed everyone last week when they published a rather moody warning that they might downgrade credit ratings of Western banks active in central and eastern Europe (CEE). Austrian banks are particularly heavily exposed after lending the region 230 billion euros, the equivalent of 70 percent of Austria’s annual GDP. If the banks went tits up in this region they could take down many of their parent banks in the West. As manager of Manchester United, Alex Ferguson once said: “It‘s squeaky bum time,” for bankers everywhere.

The zloty has sunk against major currencies over recent weeks faster than a man with a skyscraper-load of concrete in his boots. The majority of mortgages in Poland, as elsewhere in the CEE are taken out in foreign currencies. Our flat is on a euro mortgage and repayments have risen by 15 percent since last November. The majority took their loan out in Swiss francs, a plan that now looks like it had more holes in it than Emmental cheese.

After initially seeming to be getting away with it, many central and eastern European countries are now forming an orderly queue outside the doors of the World’s bank manager, the IMF, for help. Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus… There is a plan on hold for Poland, if needed.

Each month macro economic analysts sit down and key new data into computer models, press ‘send’ and watch as the screen flickers up yet another GDP growth prediction that is even more gloomy than last month’s. The government thinks maybe 2.5 percent for 2009; the World Bank this week said two percent, most independent analysts are even more moody: one percent, maybe no percent.

CEE countries inside the EU who are in the Euro Zone - Slovenia, Slovakia… - are best placed to see out the recession. Those in the EU but outside of the Euro Zone - Poland, most of them - will have a harder time but should get some protection from Brussels. Those in the CEE but outside the EU, however, appear stuffed.

The government in Warsaw looks as shocked as everyone, these days, at the pace of it all. One minister said this week that they had tried to play things down initially, because they “didn’t want to worry people.” But now the government has scrambled a package together to try and steady the ship, a bit.

Prime Minister Tusk said that if the zloty falls to 5 to the euro then his government would intervene. The day after, when the zloty didn’t fall quite that low, the finance ministry started selling euros anyway.

The pro-EU Civic Platform government have emphasised that getting into the ERM-2 mechanism as quickly as possible would help protect the zloty from such instability (although it didn’t help the pound much in the early 1990s). May or June seems to the target date.

The government has a four point strategy, apparently - bills on bank bailouts, on equity for national trading bank Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego, on credit guarantees for businesses, and on tax relief for direct investors.

“I‘m no Obama”

But Donald Tusk warned that there would be “no massive injections” of cash into the economy. Tusk said that he was “No Obama” - as if people hadn’t actually noticed this before.

And here politicians in Poland are falling into two camps, much like the old left and right days. On the right, Donald Tusk - but in the left hand corner is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, calling for a programme of public works - a la Maynard Keynes - to protect jobs and stimulate the economy.

It’s no surprise Kaczynski is on the state borrowing and spending side of the equation. For all the emphasis on his social conservatism, he and Law and Justice have always been left on the economic front. Law and Justice, the conservative-socialists!

The World Bank report was actually much less gloomy than most. It said Poland would ride out the storm better than many in the region. But it’s still going to be rough, though not the Great Depression. There are no precedents to this. It’s something new.

And that makes me think that all the bailouts and other sticking plasters aren’t really coming to terms with what is behind this: an over producing but under consuming south Asia, and an over consuming, under producing West. This is about fundamental imbalances. But nobody seems to have a plan about that.

Friday quiz (on a Saturday)

2009-02-21T19:28:00.009+01:00

Q: What have former President of the Republic of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski (he's the one below) and World’s Most Wanted, Super Terrorist, Uber-Weird Beard and Cave Dweller, Osama bin Laden got it in common?

Answer: They are both fans of Arsenal FC!

Kwasniewski used to work in a pub opposite the old Arsenal football ground in north London and ended up going to see ‘the Gunners’ often.

Osama bin Laden was also a keen follower of Arsenal when he was in London in the 1990s. In fact, after 9/11 the club actually put him on the banned list of unwelcome spectators - like some Super Hooligan! Quite why he supported that particular club and not, say, Queen’s Park Rangers, Fulham, Chelsea or West Ham is probably down to him having the misconception that he could rearm the Muhadjeen via the Arsenal.

Normal service will be resumed soon

2009-02-17T20:23:00.002+01:00

Just a bit knackered…

Brutal Taliban beheading shocks Poland

2009-02-09T19:34:00.010+01:00

“And we were so close to getting him released…,” said Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, after confirming that Piotr Stanczak, the Polish engineer kidnapped four months ago in Pakistan, had been beheaded by the Taliban.

The now expected grisly video of the moment of death is being circulated on the internet adding to the utter horror that this type of story produces.

What’s worse, the voice of Stanczak appears calm on the video - it seems certain that he was presuming that he would soon be freed. He was just reading out a text that the Taliban had prepared for him: Poland to get out of Afghanistan; prisoners must be released…the usual stuff. They had let him shave and had given him back his normal clothes. It’s not the voice of someone who thinks they are about to die - in a most disgusting way - in only a few seconds time.

The recriminations have started: did the Polish government, the Pakistani government, do enough to get him freed? Prime Minister Tusk said over the weekend that they had never any intention to pay the ransom fee that the Taliban were demanding. But they certainly were in close contact with Pakistani special services who did have contact with the Taliban. How would Sikorski be so certain that they were so close to securing Piotr’s release?

I got a couple of nice emails at work today from Pakistanis saying how sorry they were about what happened to “Mr. Peter”, as he became known in the media over there. And I don’t think anyone in Poland blames Pakistanis for Stanczak’s death - only the deeply medieval and alienating Taliban - people who appear so brutal and not-of-this-world they may as well be aliens from Planet Weird Beard.

There will be questions of what, exactly, is Poland doing mixed up in this war, launched as part of Bush’s War on Terror. Obama has refused to use those words consecutively, but he seems even more keen than his predecessor to get sucked in, ever deeper. Is this sort of intervention ever constructive? Can you bomb and occupy a country out of the stone age? Were the Taliban so upset when the US invaded Afghanistan? Did the region become more stable as a result?

Is the Pope a Muslim?

The video is here - warning - I have not watched this all the way through - I just can’t look at this kind of thing - so I don’t know if this is the shorter version - which spares us the details - or the longer version, which doesn’t.

Make PiS, not War!

2009-02-02T17:36:00.005+01:00

Is the leader of Law and Justice (PiS) Jaroslaw Kaczynski turning into a peace-loving hippy?

At the party’s congress at the weekend he said that Polish politics must end the squabbling that has so characterised it since 1989 and that it was time for the government and his party to “Make peace… Poles want peace.” Observers are wondering if Kaczynski has not been rollin’ and smokin’ a little too much wacky-backy, lately.

The party congress was part of a new initiative by Kaczynski to change Law and Justice’s image. And it needs to - recent poll results put PiS twenty percent or more behind Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform. So, whereas focus groups have been telling him that he and Law and Justice are seen as conflictual and aggressive, Jaroslaw and his merry band are now presenting themselves as people of reason, of consensus, of peace. A bit like...Barack Obama, perhaps?

But can Jaroslaw keep it up? He has been picking fights with communists, liberals, old colleagues from the Solidarity movement - and who knows; maybe even his pet cat? - for most of his life. So will the new Man of Peace image sit easily with him? Well, already he is struggling. Jaroslaw only gets out of bed in the morning to pick a few fights.

Prime Minister Tusk - who wants a cross party consensus on ways to fight the little spot of economic bother that Poland is now in, along with the rest of Planet Earth - wanted to turn up to the party congress and say a few soothing, almost presidential words a la Obama… “Now is the time when all Poles should come together...etc,” to the PiS party faithful. But Kaczynski refused to invite him to the congress, only to a side meeting after it was all over. “Civic Platform never asked me to one of their congresses,” grumbled Kaczynski today, slipping back into the old bruiser routine he does so well. “If the government wants cooperation then they have to get rid of all their propagandists…”, he spat, referring to Civic Platform’s much talked about PR machine and maybe even alluding to Janusz Palikot, who anoounced, yet again via his blog, that he was at the congress “in cognito” - although how anyone with his hair style can be “undercover” anywhere except at a blind old people’s home, is anyone’s guess.

But perhaps Jaroslaw has changed? Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks and old leopards can change their spots? Maybe his conversion to the ways of peace - a kind of Polish Dalai Lama - happened when he disappeared from the political limelight and media for more than a couple of months last year. But where did he go? Maybe to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to hang out with what is left of the Grateful Dead and the rest of the flower power children generation, to toke on a few spliffs and wind daisy chains around the toes of Vladimir Putin…

The Real Football Factories International

2009-01-28T23:07:00.003+01:00

Just as an appendix to the previous post, if you want to watch a really compulsive documentary on Polish football hooliganism then I have to recommended The Real Football Factories International.

It’s a British made documentary inspired by the hit series Real Football Factories, which was about UK soccer hooligans and what the government did about it at the end of the 1980s.

The Real Football Factories International looks at football ultras, or “firms” as we call then in Britain, in many different countries, such as Brazil, Russia and many more. But the best episode is the one about Poland, made a couple of winters ago at the height of a resurgence of football related violence here. People were dieing.

It captures some of the most amazing footage of football violence - and the reasons why these guys do this stuff - I have ever seen. The central section of the film, about the rivalry between the teams from Krakow, Wisla and Cracovia, is breathtaking. The documentary has since become a cult success in the many countries that it has been broadcast.

At this point I should say that I had a hand in making the film. The producers got in touch with me via this blog, actually, and asked for help in getting contacts, etc. I also met the team in the Holiday Inn in Warsaw just after they spent an amazing couple of days with the hooligans of Krakow. They asked me lots of questions about how the UK got rid of its hooligan problem and I answered them as best I could.

They also interviewed many other people for the final “analysis” section of the film. The chairman of Legia was one. So was Simon Mol, who was then prominent in the “Kick racism out of football” campaign in Poland.

Unfortunately, just weeks before the broadcast premier of the documentary, Simon Mol was arrested for his now infamous behaviour. I then got an anxious email from the producers of the film: is Mol a kosher person as a “talking head”? I had to tell then that, in the present circumstances, he was not.

So, for that reason, or maybe for reasons of art - the footage of the Wisla/Cracovia game is so amazing and central to the film that they needed little extra - they cut Mol from the programme and many other ‘talking heads’. Except one.

See the rather entertaining documentary here (it‘s on youtube so split into five different parts). And I promise you that, although the British presenter is an actor, everything you see is how it happened. No set ups.

Is Poland’s racism even worse than its roads?

2009-01-27T20:30:00.008+01:00

Well you would think so judging by what some say awaits black players when they come to Poland and Ukraine for the Euro 2012 soccer championships.

The story, the journalistic narrative, of UEFA 2012 is already a long and well trodden one: Poland and/or Ukraine is not going to be ready. The roads, highways, stadia, hotels will not get built. The Polish football association, PZPN, is corrupt to its crossbar and can’t be trusted to do anything, anyway.

But now there is another “threat” to the games in “eastern” Europe - racism.

A conference in Warsaw this March is being organised by the Polish football association, in partnership with the European governing body UEFA and the footballers “trade union” FIFPro under the slogan Unite Against Racism.

Racist chanting has been in the headlines quite often over the years - some fans in Spain have perhaps now got the worst reputation for this, recently. So what to do about this is a relevant discussion topic at these kind of conferences.

In the letter of invitation sent out by the Governor of UEFA to the 250 delegates which are expected to turn up in Warsaw on March 3 and 4 it says this:

We now want to create an opportunity to review progress and renew our call for action. In particular, we want to record positive developments and in view of EURO 2012 look at the challenges facing us in the east and what more the European football family can do.",

So what are the challenges “facing us in the East”?

Mihir Bose is a reporter for the BBC who set out for Poland last year to investigate how big those challenges are. And, well, he found lots of “challenges”. On his blog post about his trip he says:

Racism may never be fully eradicated from football, but what I found during an investigation into the problem in Poland was truly shocking.

And this in the country that will co-host the 2012 European Football Championship…

…In a street in central Warsaw, not far from the hotel where I was staying, there was a lot of graffiti about 'white power' and the Ku Klux Klan, all associated with the city's main team Legia Warsaw…

…the president of Legia Warsaw, Leszek Miklas, an impressive and honest man, readily admitted that 15-20% of his club's fans were neo-Nazis….

…I went to a Legia Warsaw home match at the Polish Army Stadium, where the team fielded black players without any visible problems, although I was not able to go anywhere near the stand, which takes up a whole side of the ground, where the 'ultras' gather.

Before the match I had been to a bar near the ground where the hardcore supporters meet.

It was made clear by some fans, who feared for my safety and that of my crew, I should leave.

All nasty stuff, of course. And it’s shocking that the chairman of Legia seems to think that 15 to 20 percent of his supporters are neo-Nazis!

I have no idea how many of the banana throwing types - and it happens occasionally at Polish football grounds (as it did in the UK in the 1970s and 80s) - are actual, conscious neo-fascists and how many of them are simply stupid idiots using anything to have a go at the rival team’s players. And I don’t think anyone else does, either.

BBC journalist Bose wonders, however, later in his post about what all this means for Euro 2012? “ [T)ackling such deep-seated racism in time to welcome a Europe of all colours may be much more difficult than building roads and stadia,” he writes.

Is Poland’s racism really worse than its roads?

The view that Bose paints on his blog and in the film which he made about racism in Polish football (see here) does not ring true with people I have talked to about this, who do go to games most weekends.

On the Pitch Invasion er… ‘blog-zine’… responding to the Polish Hooligan = Nazi question, and the accusation that Nazi symbols, etc, are often seen at Polish footbal grounds, Michal Karas writes:

My first-hand experience is that this is very uncommon, although I can’t deny the problem exists.

During my five years on Wisla Krakow’s fanatic terraces, I’ve twice heard such disgraceful chants sung by a couple of isolated individuals. One is “Our role model is Rudolf Hess” and another “We have a hero — Adolf Hitler”, which sadly rhyme in Polish, making it even more grotesque. I did not hear these during games, but somewhere near the stadium.

Racism in general is, unfortunately, more common. Throwing bananas onto the pitch still happens occasionally — I recall a few cases during the last decade. Monkey chants also happen from time to time. These are, of course, deeply deplorable acts and need to be eradicated. The question, though, is whether racism is as wildly prevalent in Polish football as the BBC report ended up concluding, with the studio panel suggesting 20% of fans are racist.,

Karas then contextualises the remarks made by the Legia chairman - reminding us that the board of Legia was in dispute at the time with its fan clubs. After the Vilnius pitch invasion (video from a 'hooligan' with a camera before the riot, I think, here - it later got as silly as this) Legia, having been banned by UEFA from European competition, started banning anyone from their stadium thought to be leading the Nieznani Sprawcy (Unknown Perps) 'ultra' group in these and other activities. But this ban was not for racism. So painting all of Legia’s football hooligans as being racist was a convenient tactic by the Legia chairman in his battle to clean up the image of Legia generally, as this negative image is hindering getting the club readmitted to European tournaments.

If you read Karas’s post and then Bose’s it’s like seeing two different countries - or maybe, two very different halves of a game of football.

So I hope the summit in Warsaw in March will be looking at the real extent of racism on the terraces in Poland, while keeping some sense of proportion on this. There are some nasty little racists at Poland’s football stadia, but believe me, Poland’s roads are a lot bigger threat to the fabric of society - and international football tournaments - than those idiots.

Obama, Guantanamo Bay and the ‘CIA prison’ in Poland

2009-01-22T18:29:00.004+01:00

The phone rang at work this afternoon, as the gloom of the winter’s afternoon descended on Warsaw.

On the other end was a sunny, North American lady who said she worked for the BBC. She had a question, which went exactly like this:

“President Barack Obama has ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and all rendition camps, one of which was in Poland. Are Poles pleased with Obama for that?”

To tell you truth, I was slightly at a loss how to answer this. But this is what I came up with:

“Well…um…you do know that the evidence for a ‘CIA prison’ in Poland is deeply controversial? No government has admitted knowing anything about this and if you ask Joe Kowalski if he thought there were these places in Poland he might tell you that there probably weren’t any?”

“Poles don’t believe there were prisons in Poland,” she said, slightly taken aback that this story was not a done deal. “Yup,” I said, maybe slightly presumptuously, as I have never seen an opinion poll on this.

But I still think I am right. The very idea of a “CIA prison” in Poland is still quite an exotic one here. And it’s not really an issue that Poles feel connected too, anyway. I suppose ‘prison’ is preferable to early stories on this, which described this supposed place as the “new Auschwitz”, a deeply dumb and offensive idea. So, some progress of sorts, I suppose.

But it shows how it has now become common sense that there was these prisons in Poland to those like the journalists at the BBC. My own opinion, after following this story for over two years is that there was indeed something in Poland up until autumn 2005, but to describe what was probably a stopping off point while prisoners were rendition to somewhere else is not quite the same as saying there was a ‘CIA prison’. I think some elements of the Polish secret services did know about this - but how much politicians knew, and how out of control the secret services were at that time, is open to speculation.

Whatever - I hope I didn’t spoil one of the BBC’s “Obama good news” stories. Closing down the obscenity of Guantanamo is deeply welcome. Obama will also outlaw methods of interrogation which involve the “enhanced techniques” like water-boarding which Bush and his cronies always maintained “were not torture”, but, in fact, were just that. As to the slightly naive reporting of the BBC, well, that’s what they mean by a “dumbed down news media.”

Hey Bush!

2009-01-20T19:32:00.009+01:00

One of George’s lines has come back to haunt him. Thenews.pl reports.

Press reports claim that outgoing US president George W. Bush failed to contact any Polish politicians while bidding farewell to various heads of state at the end of his term of office.

President Bush made phone calls to leaders of the major global powers, writes the Dziennik newspaper, including Russian PM Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of France Nicolas Sarkozy.

The outgoing president also found time for a conversation with leaders of Denmark, Georgia and Greece.

But he apparently had no time for Poland’s politicians…

{…} In a presidential debate in 2004 with the then Democratic party contender John Kerry, - about the international nature of the coalition that invaded Iraq - the challenger said that the countries involved were only Great Britain, Australia and United States: “That’s not a grand coalition, we can do better," he said. Bush replied: “Actually, he forgot about Poland.”

It appears, this time, President Bush was the one who forgot about Poland.

Sss…boo…bah…sss…

Yup, much of the world has just breathed a sigh of relief. It’s over. Bush is finished.

The mistakes he made in his time went way, way beyond the linguistic, the grammatical. I just re-read Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, about Bush and the war in Iraq. It’s a much, much better book than Woodward’s first on the Bush presidency - Bush ar War - where his access to meetings of all the principles, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, was unparalleled. He was literally embedded into the regime. But with that closeness went Woodward’s critical distance. An awful book.

But State of Denial details the conflict and chaos within Bush’s administration as it ‘prepared’ for war brilliantly. Read it for all its shocking and awfulness.

The picture will stay always in my mind of how Woodward describes Bush sitting in the Oval Office listening to many people who knew that the US was about to make a terrible mistake and giving him detailed evidence of why this was so , and George looking as if he was concentrating as his little legs danced and jigged under the table.

Bush did things by instinct and he didn’t like it when someone was shattering his view that he must be, almost divinely in the right.

And now he has gone, off to his Texas ranch to set up a couple of Bush foundations and maybe even a library (with books full of words with no more than two symbols, natch...)!

But how will Obama approach Poland, America’s sometimes awkwardly over eager ally in Europe? Will Obama remember Poland?

He has a great chance to drop the anti-missile shield. Too expensive; maybe doesn’t even work; finance crisis, remember?

But nothing much is going to change as the US, Poland and all the others get bogged down ever deeper in Afghanistan. That will be. No change.

And I hope he doesn’t go, economically, down the protectionist route, like Democrats often do. That certainly won’t be in anyone’s interests.

But Poles generally don't share the huge expectations which now are going to weigh down on Barack’s shoulders, like they do in America, and maybe even in a European country like the UK, as well. Obama is a centre-right pragmatist, with a bright new shiney style. That’s it. He is movingly significant because of who he is - the first black president of the United States of America. But his politics? I think we should all calm down a bit.

And now Bush has gone, who are they gonna blame for all the other stuff he wasn’t responsible for? Maybe one day we are going to miss Old George. No more scapegoats.

Gaza and the blood libel

2009-01-18T19:07:00.008+01:00

Shaky unilateral ceasefires give the populations of Gaza and the border towns a break. But will this stop the opposition protests against Israeli militarism dipping in to a disturbing echo of the past.

The photo above was taken by a spiked journalist when reporting on the large demonstration in London last weekend. “Israelis eat babies…etc.”

I don’t know about you, but what came to mind as soon as I saw that were three things: a political cartoon, a painting by Goya and the old rancid chestnut about how Jews ritualistically slaughter babies. Coincidence?

Babies, as you can see from this video clip, did seem to be a theme of the demo in London. Why? Well, the Israelis had bombed a UN facility earlier that week where many children and women had taken refuge. But babies die in all wars - many have died under the bombs of Americans, the British, Russians and more in Baghdad, Kabul, Belgrade…. Many have died in suicide bombs all over the world. Children die in war, terrorist attacks. Especially in wars and terrorism these days.

But the protestor dressed up as an Israeli with the baby was obviously drawing on a reference to an award winning cartoon which appeared in the UK Independent in 2003, which was based, in turn, by Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son.

When the cartoon (click on photo to enlarge) appeared many were horrified. It seemed to draw upon the old myth of what is known as blood libel, a belief, quite common in Europe in less enlightened times, that Jews ritually sacrificed the children of Christians.

In fact, as you see by this (disgusting) video, a few cranks still believe this to be so today.

Whether the fool who dressed up as the Israeli with the child knew about blood libel, or even the cartoon, or the painting by Goya, I have no idea. But the protests against Israeli occupation have become synonymous, for many, with a protest against Jews in general. Starbucks, for instance, has come under attack for being a cappuccino Zionist, seemingly for no other reason that its owner is Jewish and a few weird rumours going around the internet. The boycott Israel types don't like Marks and Spencer, either (Michael Marks was a Jewish refugee from Poland before he moved to the UK to open up the shop with Mr. Spencer. And constantly we hear the comparison of Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto.

So perhaps both the protestor in London and the cartoon in the Independent do delve back into the European dark ages.

And those depictions of Jews with children have a long and ignoble history. For instance, one good example of the prototype for cartoonists and protestors to be inspired by can be found in St Paul’s church in Sandomierz, south Poland. Looks familiar, doesn’t it?

When protestors supporting Palestinians sink to this depth then you can count me out. Not all criticism of Israel is anti semitic, as some claim, but some confuse an Israeli for a Jew, generally, and it is becoming acceptable, in some right on circles, to make anti semitic references. That must stop.

EU Entropa exhibition pisses off...people!

2009-01-15T21:16:00.012+01:00

An exhibition, Entropa, at the European Union Council building in Brussels, by wacky Czech conceptual artist David Cerny has upset Bulgarians! And it depicts Poland as a bunch of crazy pro-gay monks! Ha, haagh…wheeze…!

The exhibit was meant to be by 27 different artists representing something about the 27 different cultures of the European Union. Brussels was pleased! And then the pieces were delivered. And they were a bit…hmmm.

You know…isn’t representing Germany with a “hint of a swastika”...

...Denmark as a series of Lego bricks (pfff!) Netherlands as a row of mosques sinking in a sea...

...and Bulgaria as one of those toilets with just enamel footplates to stand on and a hole in the floor...

...a little bit...you know...insulting?

"Entropa is an art piece, not a political statement. It is funny and ironic because sometimes you can use humour as a catharsis," Cerny said.

Ha, ha, haagh...giggle, snigger...

“It is a mirror in which you bend yourself and you smile and you think 'this is it'. No one should take it seriously."

Oooo, ha, ha...mirror...bend...ooooh...catharsis!...ha, ha...tickle...oh, stop it!

It has since emerged that there were no “27 artists”. The whole exhibit was produced by small team of wacky Czech artists. Oops! The EU art commissioner in Brussels must feel a little bit of a twit.

And those conceptual artist! Don’t you just love ’em! (I am sure Dada-ists are turning in their…toilet bowl installations, as I write.)

I don’t know which is sadder: the state of some contemporary art, which has to delve into crude stereotypes to get its kicks; or politicians like a Giertych, or a Kaczynski who provided, on an enamelled plate, the crude stereotype of Poland in the first place?

hat tip: radio journo Gabriel Stille

Jaroslaw or Jaroslawa?

2009-01-11T22:17:00.010+01:00

Self styled ‘controversial’ member of parliament for the ruling Civic Platform party, Janusz Palikot (photo), has just appealed on his blog for former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski to declare whether or not he is gay.

Palikot, the richest man in the Polish parliament - both in terms of wealth and thickness of hair - has used his blog in the past to shoot off accusations against the Kaczynski twins before - in fact his blog has got him into legal trouble. He has called the president of Poland - Jaroslaw’s twin brother Lech, “an idiot,” and wondered whether President Lech’s health problems were down to his love of the bottle, and demanded to see the head of state’s health records.

This time Palikot - who is a kind of Civic Platform version of Law and Justice’s Jacek Kurski, a political ’attack dog’ who says all the things the more establishment politicians would love to say but haven’t got the guts to do so - digs in to the old rumours about Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s sexuality.

By the way, my girlfriend tells me that the photo above of Palikot was taken during an appearence on the media about the very serious topic of rape, which he was speaking very seriously about. The effect, of course, was ruined by the dildo. But that's Palikot all over.

On his blog this weekend Palikot is reacting to comments made by Nelly Rokita, now an MP for Law and Justice and wife of Jan Rokita, one of the most prominent politicians in Civic Platform, who retired formally from politics shortly before the last election in October 2007.
Nelly - one of the more eccentric members of parliament and one of the decidedly weird politicians to come out of the Krakow scene (the other is her husband Jan) - pleaded recently in the media for Jaroslaw to settle down and get himself a nice wife - as he is one of the only top politicians in Poland not to have the prescribed ’happy family’, and contents himself to living with his mum and pet cat.

Palikot asks if Jaroslaw is actually Jaroslawa, the female form of his name. “Is Jaroslaw a woman,” asks Palikot. He also writes that it is common for one of identical twins to be homosexual.

The Civic Platform politician says he doesn’t mind one way or another whether Kaczynski is gay, but he “should tell the public” if he is. Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski have made many anti-gay comments in the past and have been criticised by human rights groups for their stance on the issue.

Whether or not outing politicians is a good and productive thing to do is debatable. But here’s the irony - by insinuating that a gay is “a woman” as Palikot does shows that the self styled controversial and “liberal” politicians of Poland are still pretty primitive themselves.

Using the Holocaust to beat the Israelis

2009-01-08T19:14:00.006+01:00

Protesters around the world are right to condemn the Israeli militarism in the Gaza Strip - but the comparison that many are making with the 1941 - 43 Warsaw Ghetto is historically illiterate and dumb.

Thousands marched in many countries last weekend against the repulsive action of the Israeli armed forces against Palestinians. A few hundred people stood outside the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw in protest at what is yet another example of Israel’s lashing out, counterproductively, at its Arab neighbours.

Thousands more marched in places like Amsterdam and London. And I would have marched with them were it not for the ridiculous slogans like “We are all Hamas now,” (oh, no you are not!) and “Gaza is the new Warsaw, ” (oh, no it isn’t). These are pantomime protestors protesting something they know little about.

Ambient music wiz Brian Eno, at the rally in Trafalgar Square, called for Israel to stop making, “a Warsaw ghetto in the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers Party (yes, they do still exist, apparently) was handing out its latest comment on the situation:

A quick look at a map shows that this has little to do with stopping Hamas from sending some missiles into sections of Israel, and everything to do with strangling an entire population of people, with the aim of either destroying the leadership that was democratically elected by the Palestinians themselves or dislodging that support from the Palestinian base. I think drawing analogies between what Israel is doing and what the Nazis did in the Warsaw Ghettos of Poland is entirely appropriate.

And of course the bloggers think they have found in Israel the new Nazis.

After all, the situation faced by the Gazans is ominously similar to that faced by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War Two. Penned in by the Nazi occupiers, the ghetto Jews suffered and starved and lived in endless fear of instantaneous death.

But it is not just the latest Israeli action that brought this analogy crawling out into the daylight. Back in 2003, two British leftwing MPs, Oona King and Jenny Tonge made the same charge. The Guardian reported:

Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was today compared to the Nazis' creation of the Warsaw ghetto by MPs who recently returned from the region.

The controversial comparison, drawn by Oona King and Jenny Tonge, will anger the pro-Israel lobby and the visiting Israeli finance minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, who met Tony Blair at Downing Street this morning.

Labour MP Ms King, who is Jewish, said Gaza was "the same in nature" as the infamous Polish ghetto.

"No government should be behaving like that - least of all a Jewish government," the Bethnal Green and Bow MP said.

Do you like the bit about the “infamous Polish ghetto”?

This comparison with the Warsaw ghetto is mindless and moronic. Israel is not embarking on the Final Solution of the Palestinians.

Quite what they think they are doing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a good question, however, and I am not even sure the Israeli government knows what exactly. Trying to stop the thousands of rockets that have been raining down on Israeli border towns? Well, even the Israeli side is saying it will never stop all of them. And if Israel thinks that Gazans are suddenly going to start blaming Hamas for being at the wrong end of Israeli rockets, guns and an invasion then they are very stupid indeed. Hamas will just get more popular with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

And on the other side, it is not even clear why Hamas has been lobbing rockets in Israel for two years. These rockets, which have a very low degree of accuracy, can fulfil no military objectives at all. None. So why does Hamas do it? Are they trying to illicit responses from the Israelis, like the one they are reaping now, in the hope of outside intervention from …well, who? The European Union?

Though the suffering of Gazans is great it is not on the same scale as what happened to those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Virtually nobody was left alive in the ghetto after the Nazis decided to trash it. And no Palestinians have been packed off the extermination camps.

Another difference is the amazing resistance the Jews put up against the Nazis, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in many of the ghettos across Poland.

I don’t see any of the above happening in Gaza right now. When protestors - who know little of either Gaza or Warsaw - shout slogans involving “holocaust”, or “genocide” or “Warsaw ghetto” they degrade all those terms and memories, and put off one person - me - who would like to join them in condemning Israel and its stupid, bloody attacks.

No Irish?

2009-01-05T19:47:00.007+01:00

Now here is an historical twist! Signs are apparently appearing on ‘employment wanted’ signs outside Polish building sites - “No Irish Need Apply”!

The Belfast Telegraph tells us:

Trade union official Michael Kilcoyne - also president of the Consumers Association of Ireland - said it had recently been brought to his attention that the 'No Irish' signs had appeared on a couple of Polish building sites where workers were being sought.

Mr Kilcoyne said: "The reality is that our international reputation as employers has been sullied. Many foreign people who have worked here, especially during our boom years, have had bad experiences.

Labour tribunals in Ireland have been hearing cases of discrimination and exploitation of Poles and other central and eastern Europeans, against ruthless employers, squeezing the last euro out of vulnerable immigrants.

Quite where this story comes from originally is anyone’s guess and I can’t find out who actually saw these signs in the first place. Maybe someone can help? Onet.pl says the story came from the portal for Poles in the British Isles, mojawyspa.co.uk, although the story there brings us back to the Belfast Telegraph.

But if this is true, then…oh, what irony! My mum is from the Belfast area and she claims she saw, when she moved to Manchester in the 1950s, signs similar to the archetypal “No dogs, no blacks, no Irish…” in windows of houses with rooms to let - as in the photo above. That was before legislation making that kind of nonsense illegal.

It’s illegal, of course, to put signs like that up in Poland. Although, a good post here suggests that this story maybe a bad Irish joke. The beatroot will investigate.

UPDATE – So the nice lady at the Irish Consumer Ass. gave me Michael Kilcoyne’s number and I talked to him about where he got this story from. He said that he heard about it after a “caller to a phone-in programme on the local radio station in County Mayo said he had seen the advert…”. And that’s the source of this story.

Michael is a nice man and conscientious trade unionist, but one caller to a phone-in show is not usually enough evidence to make a story out of. To my knowledge, there is no such advert and never was. Unless, you know better…

Beatroot’s Pole of the Year

2008-12-23T21:45:00.009+01:00

Yes, it’s that time of the year, when magazines, TV programmes, and blogs, name the person most unforgettable in 2008.

Normally, when editors, etc, name their person of the year people agree or disagree and then that’s the end of it. When Time magazine named “You”, as their person of the year - titter, titter - there was some derision, but nobody was sacked, nobody died, and wars they broke out, not.

Well, not, that is, unless you are the award show shown on TVP this November, the annual Roze Gali (Gala Roses) that is. The event was sponsored by Gala magazine - Polish Hello-type drivel - one of those excruciatingly awful rags, full of beautiful celebrities showing us their beautiful wives/husbands/children/homes/pet parrots/white teeth, all in glorious photographic yukky-colour.

The award show was proceeding as award shows usually do - full of beautiful celebs thanking other beautiful celebs for being such beautiful celebs. So far, so beautiful.

And then…oh, dear! The award for Most Beautiful Couple - it’s true, they have such a category (pass the bucket when you are finished with it) - was given to film critic and journalist Tomasz Raczek and his partner, graphic designer, journalist and writer…Marcin Szczygielski!

Aaaarrgh! Gurgle.

A gay couple gets award for most beautiful couple on public television award show shock!

Cue scandal and outrage by the lay governing board which oversees TVP and full of nominees fromLaw and Justice, League of Polish Families and the Self defence party. Yes, you thought the Fourth Republic government was given the boot by voters over a year ago. But no. This coalition - a fractious coalition, as always - still controls large parts of public media. And the terms of these governing bodies, like the umbrella watchdog and controller the Radio and Television Council, overlap and outlast terms of government.

So conflict is actually built in to the Polish Constitution.

And folk scratch their heads wondering why there is so much chaos in Polish governance!

Anyway, back at TVP, the program makers claimed that Gala magazine had kept from them that a gay relationship was going to be endorsed by Polish public TV. The Board of Directors (who are in day-today control of the all the public television stations) was sacked, for this and other alleged incompetence. A new board was hastily put in place.

But the old board said that their dismissal was unconstitutional and refused to stand down and are still trying to administer cash-strapped TVP.

You have to feel sorry for TVP. Chaos as usual. And its financial situation is dire - people have all but given up paying the licence fee after Donald Tusk announced he wants to ditch it and fund the place via direct taxation, at the same time arguing that public TV has got to be de-politicised! Um…

So, the choice of Most/Best person/couple thing is not without its dangers, its consequences. But who to choose for Beatroot’s Most Unforgettable Pole of the Year?

It’s got to be one of the world's top goalkeepers, Our Artur Boruc.

Not for what he does in goal - he’s good but inconsistent. He has trouble concentrating, you see, probably since he started getting death threats after he was photographed in Warsaw with a new chick - ex-gangland moll, allegedly - getting pissed when he was on the injury list at Glasgow Celtic and only days after his wife and kid left him and headed back to Poland. That’s one beautiful couple who will no longer be gracing the glossy pages of Gala magazine.

But Boruc’s main talent is for winding people up and, being a favourite trait of this blog’s, then for that the Beatroot nominates him for Pole of the Year.

But then again, you might disagree…

Why is the West so fascinated by a Buddhist monk?

2008-12-15T17:42:00.005+01:00

He came (for a week), he saw, he talked quite a lot of harmless nonsense. But he conquered a few hearts in the process. So just what is it about the Dalai Lama that makes westerners turn so gooey-eyed?

Poland was part of the Dalai Lama’s extensive European tour. He was guest of honour at Lech Walesa’s Nobel Peace Prize anniversary bash last weekend; he was in Wroclaw receiving honorary citizenship; he was in Warsaw for an impromptu meeting with President Lech Kaczynski and then wowed an audience of a thousand or so, where he gave a rambling lecture about compassion. And he giggled a lot. He giggled for the whole seven days.

He’s an outwardly nice, old man, just like your slightly daft great uncle.

But the power he has over young westerners and older media hacks is awesome to behold. You would think he was…well, divine - a strange choice of hero in a godless Europe.

So there must be more to the Dalai Lama phenomenon than his Buddha-like qualities. Why is a man who was elected by nobody, who is in control of a semi-state which is run like some medieval religious fiefdom, able to draw such awe from the otherwise cynical, liberal westerner?

I mean, he is not even that keen on gays...surly the barometer of who is cool and who is not, these days? He is the arch-pacifist who thinks that the Iraq war could have been justified!

Maybe he is just a silly old man?

He’s probably much more popular in the West than he is in his own “country”, where many see him as an antiquated old man from a different age.

And what is it about the Tibet struggle for some autonomy from China that excites liberals like many other political struggles do not? Why Free Tibet and not Free China? Why not free themselves?

Maybe the fascination with Tibet and the Lama tells us more about us in the West than it does about the politics of China. Maybe westerners have got this romantic view of Tibet…unspoilt by industrialisation (otherwise known as “progress”); Tibet seems so pure whereas those nasty Chinese have turned into US - consumed by consumerism, building an economy, maximising progress? Tibet is juxtaposed with our own self-hatred.

“They seem so happy,” thinks the westerner as he sees the Dalai Lama go into another fit of the giggles.

The reality of life in Tibet is probably very different from that. It’s a traditional backwater, where most of the labour is backbreakingly antiquated and where the young are yearning for what we have in the West but have learnt, from somewhere, to have contempt for.

I think that having the Dalai Lama as your top political hero is rather sad. It means that we cannot draw inspiration any longer from what we have achieved here, in Europe and America and in many parts of Asia, but only from an elderly man in an orange robe, with a twinkle is his eye.

Confessions of a Dyskopatia sufferer

2008-12-09T17:48:00.001+01:00

The doctor told me I had dykopatia - discopathy, today. No, it’s not an irrational aversion to disco dancing - or even the Bee Gees - but it does explain why it feels like a hippopotamus has been kicking me in the back recently.

So sitting and writing long posts is just too tiring at the moment. Back when the pills start working.

Poznan climate conference denial

2008-12-02T21:13:00.005+01:00

Hundreds of delegates have descended on Poznan in the west of Poland for the United Nations climate conference, ostensibly to “discuss” a global response to global warming. But the last thing that the environmental movement, and many governments, want is a “discussion” about anything at all.

The 12 day climate catastrophe shindig started yesterday with Poland’s environmental minister taking the chair, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk making the opening speech. He said the correct, soothing things; he kept to the script. “No human activity should disturb the symbiosis between man and nature…”

The Poznan summit is but a prelude to a deal, which every country on Earth must sign up to, seemingly, which will be made in Copenhagen next December. Before then a lot of talking will be talked, a lot of carbon miles will be burnt up in diplomatic travel, a lot of hot air will be aired.

The climax of this year’s event - which picks up the Bali baton of last year - will be the arrival of the Climate Catastrophist Superstars, in the bulky shape of Al Gore and even more bulky Arnold Schwarzenegger . Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa will also be attendees, but where they fit in is anybody’s guess.

You get the feeling that the Polish government just loves having the UN on its patch to talk climate change. Status! Ping! You also get the impression that Poland is an unlikely host to such a thing.

You see, Poland, aided by Italy and supported by at least six other EU countries, are challenging the targets of the EU - which are even more strict than the UN proposals, to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. Poland is - according to Greenpeace - among the top 20 twenty carbon emitters in the world, due to its jolly old fashioned reliance on coal for 90 percent of its energy needs.

PM Tusk has led the charge in Brussels saying that if he does not get concessions on the targets he is going to veto the whole thing. This will not please Brussels. With its constitution/reform treaty thing put in cold storage by those pesky Irish, the climate deal is the next main chance to show us how relevant they are and how the world needs them so, very much.

So Poland is the host of the climate change summit while at the same time being an arch enemy of climate renewal, or whatever Greenpeace et al term such a position.

Taking the peace out of green

So Poland has become a target for Greenpeace and other groups. It has launched its usual media savvy protests (who needs a mass movement of greens behind you when you can simply turn up regularly on the Six O’clock news?) aimed at the coal industry in Poland. Two weeks ago it blocked an open face coal mine in Konin, on the way to Warsaw from the west, causing, say owners, a 100,000 euro loss of production. Miners, understandably, got a little annoyed with this mixture of Polish greens and climate change tourists, and fisty-cuffs was the result.

The new liberal/left seemingly has little support for the working class and trade unionists - how dare they want to protect their jobs, and even want more in general, when we have to 'save the planet'? Or not.

I heard a Polish Greenpeace activist saying on the radio yesterday that, “we have no choice” but to cut carbon emissions… “The Science” supports us…etc, etc.

Whether the science supports the global warming thesis is still open to some question - and the debate within science goes on, although you would never believe it. But it does - one of my favourite web sites is this one, and you can read for yourself both, and many, sides of the argument and judge for yourself.

But why do environmentalists stoop to use words like “denier” for anyone that dares disagree with them? And why do some of them say climate change denial is morally and socially unacceptable? And don’t they think that is a little, tiny-winy bit …authoritarian?

Compare the reaction to two documentaries. The first, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth - the other, by climate-change denier, Martin Durkin and his The Great Global Warming Swindle (see documentary here).

Both films have some inaccuracies in them, in fact. But one won an Oscar and led to a Nobel Prize, the other director was frequently deemed in “climate change denial.”

“In denial”, a phrase associated with a psychological disorder or, even, Holocaust denial? George Monbiot, in the Guardian: “Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.”

So, according to the new thought crime, to descent from the path of holy climate change - i.e. to question the amount of warming and/or that the only way to combat such a warming is to cut back on economic growth (even for counties like Poland that never had that much growth in the first place) is the moral equivalent of being…well,… David Irving!

I find that disgusting. Climate change is a political issue. And what is a political issue without political debate? Authoritarianism. Nasty.

Georgian shootings were a Saakashvili, Kaczynski set up?

2008-11-26T20:16:00.000+01:00

Evidence mounts that the visit of presidents of Poland and Georgia to a disputed area on the South Ossetia border on Sunday, was designed to increase the tension in the region.

Georgians, not Russians were behind the now infamous shooting incident.

In fact, the Saakashvili presidency has been accused, even by one of its own members, of planning attacks on sepratist regions in August this year. This crisis was not the immediate cause of a “Russian” invasion anywhere, let alone South Ossetia: it was the result of a petulant Sakkashvili, easily provoked by Moscow.

The shooting incident on Sunday, when president of Georgia and Poland, went to the de facto border between Georgia and South Ossetia - and an area that was once in Tbilisi’s hands before the August war - appears, according to the Polish security service, BOR, to have been a set up by Presidents Saakashvili and his Polish friend. A report for the government says that Polish security forces became separated from the presidents’ car. When the first of three bursts of automatic fire began, Georgian commanders at the scene did not flinch, did not react. It was almost as if they were expecting the gunfire. Saakashvili was reported by BOR to have been smiling!

The accusation by even Polish officials that this was a set up by the Georgian side - and not the Russians as Kaczynski and Saakashvili have both alleged - does two things. It hands over to the Kremlin a propaganda victory - people will begin to believe Putin much more than they will a Kaczynski or a Saakashvili, or a Bush; it also gives the excuse to Moscow to ratchet up the bullyboy tactics in the Caucuses, and weakens any principled stand against them.

Many are coming to the conclusion that Poland’s president’s obsession with the region is helping make the place more unstable. If rule one of foreign policy is: ’Do no harm’, then Kaczynski is failing the test.

We should not join President Kaczynski or anyone else - like George W. Bush - in trying to make out that Saakashvili is some kind of super-patriot, fighting a lone battle against the evil empire of Russia. The reality is that both politicians - from Georgia and Poland - are more interested in a “crusade” against the Kremlin, for reasons best known to themselves. The rest of us should not be joining in on this vanity project.

Kaczynski, Saakashvili at the end of Russian guns?

2008-11-23T20:11:00.001+01:00

Oh, dear. This story is going to be huge.

It is emerging that two different issues are at stake: firstly, who fired the shots and were the shots actually fired at President Saakashvili and President Kaczynski? And secondly, it has emerged that the security arrangments travelling with Pres. Kaczynski were woefully inadequate for a trip to what is, basically, still a war zone.

The convoy travelling with the two presidents was between 15 and 30 cars. Journalists, unusually, were placed near the front of the motorcade. Suspicious? The trip - to an area in South Ossetia, which was, unusually, was in control of Georgia before the short war in August but is now in Russian controlled hands - appears to have not been on President Kaczynski’s original itinerary: he was in Georgia to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the so-called Rose Revolution. But, sometime on the way to Georgia, or when he was actually there, he and Saakashvili decided to go and see if Russian troops had in fact withdrawn, as was in the plan the EU cooked up at the end of the shooting.

Well, Kaczynski found - you could say, Kaczynski has demonstrated - that Russia is still in control there.

Russia says the whole thing was cooked up by Saakashvili and Kaczynski to make Moscow look bad. Kaczynski and Saakashvili say that the whole thing was a provocation by Russia.

At a guess, the shots probably were by South Ossetian militia - but to what aim? They say that the convoy asked for permission to enter the area but this was refused. Some of the cars, regardless, started to enter. Maybe that was when the shots - warning shots - were fired?

That said, reports by journalists travelling with the two presidents say that at times security officials were nowhere near the car taking Kaczynski to a zone with a lot of guns in it. Whatever Kaczynski was up to he was being extremely reckless, as he was when he showed up with presidents of the Baltic states and Ukraine on the final day of the August conflict.

The Polish government has been trying to clam things down saying that the whole incident was not as serious as is being painted by the Presidential Palace and they have inferred that this is a very convenient way for president Kaczynski to scupper any re-start of talks between the EU and Russia to forge a wide ranging agreement on many issues - something that the Civic Platform led government supports.

Whatever - Kaczynski’s one man war with the Ruskis continues.

the beatroot in Jerusalem

2008-11-23T17:37:00.018+01:00

“In the last 17 years, this country has been invaded by murderers, thieves, prostitutes…and spies,” says David, dramatically, a Georgian migrant to Israel, who works as a security guard at the Yad Vashem institute in Jerusalem.

We had only met the guy two minutes before, after stopping to ask the way out of the vast and beautiful complex of Yad Vashem, set up as a permanent reminder of the Shoah, or Holocaust, situated on the edge of a forest on the outskirts of the Israeli capital. But already - true to his Georgian roots - David has offered us something to eat - a tray of meatballs, mashed potato and pasta - and is now pouring us a huge glass of vodka. Lovely guy!

David, the security guard - so he must have been bored out of his skull (cap) - says he came to Israel in the mid-1970s, after working for the KGB in some aircraft surveillance capacity. He was on duty for the Soviets in Prague in 1968 and was ordered to shoot people - something he says was “terrifying”. “If you don’t shoot then they [the Soviets] shoot you,” he said, as the vodka liberated his tongue.

Eventually he had had enough of working for the Russians and left for Israel. Now, as he pours the second, huge glass of vodka for me, he says how Israel has changed for the worst, mainly due to some of the recent immigrants, he claims.

We were at Yad Vashem to see the latest name to be added to the list of over 22,000 people from 41 countries, honoured as the Righteous Among Nations, those who helped Jews, often risking their own lives to do so, during Nazi occupation. The last name, which was added to the list on November 11 this year, was of Catholic Pole, Stanislawa Slawinska, who sheltered ten Jews in her home, while a Nazi officer lived next door.

The list - laid out by country - resides, elegantly, in a garden about five minutes walk from the main museum building. So after passing through the museum - a harrowing experience, but one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen, telling the whole gruesome story of Nazi horror - we set off to look for the garden, the lists and the name of Stanislawa.

You can imagine the disappointment, then, when I discovered that though her name had been put at the end of the long list of names of the Righteous from Poland - far bigger than any other nation - it had been mysteriously rubbed off - as you can see by the photo below.

I am presently trying to establish why this is so.*

Changes

But David is right about how Israel has changed, certainly since my days working on the Megiddo Kibbutz, quite near Nazareth in the north, in the late 1980s.

For one thing, things have got a lot more expensive. Having to pay up to 20 euro a bottle of wine, in many places, is not a sustainable price for a wine-enthusiast anywhere, let alone one coming from Poland! (Israeli wine is now very drinkable, thankfully - another change from 20 years ago!)

Another, more important, change, is the growth of religiosity in Israel. It was very noticeable to me how many more of the ultra-orthodox there are, but also how the Muslim community has become more religious, too. I was given two explanations for this.

We were sharing a taxi with a Jewish guy from Cockfosters in London, a place only known, as he said, for its position at the opposite end of the Piccadilly line from Heathrow airport. He was on a business trip for the chief rabbi in London - something to do with education programmes. I was asking him when and where his family came to London from? He said he didn’t know for sure, but it was probably somewhere in Poland, certainly before the 1860s.

He then pointed out that the ulra-religious in Israel has many more children than the more secular Israeli - up to eight children a family, on average! - so the growth of religiosity is a simple numbers game.

Though from London, he referred to coming to Israel as like “coming home.” But after we dropped him off at his hotel, our driver - who had been quiet throughout our ten minute conversation - immediately became very animated.

“You asked good questions,” he said. “He says he is coming home. But whose home is that?”

Our driver was a Palestinian who lived in the Old Town in Jerusalem. And whose home Israel is, of course, is at the root of all the problems there.

“They talk about something that happened 60 years ago. But what are they doing now? Here. Today!”

I asked him why I could see more signs of religion among the Palestinian population.

“It‘s simple - we don’t like seeing the western way of life.” I asked him, however, if he didn’t think that the problem was more about politics than religion - the old pan-Arab, secular nationalism has failed, leaving the door open for more religious groups like Hamas to take over.

“No, I hate politics,” he said, and then proceeded to give me a lecture about Palestinian politics.

“If they have another election then Hamas will win it, not Fatah. Fatah came from Tunisia, not from here. They have no roots. And they were only in it for themselves. But Hamas have roots in Palestine, and they do good for the Palestinian.”

“But you know,” he said, waving his hand out the window at the Israelis of Jerusalem, who were hurriedly going about their business on Jaffa Street: “We have fought wars with the British, and they went. We have fought wars against the [Crusaders], and they left. These will have to leave too, one day.”

Whether the growth of religion in Israel is a numbers game, or childbearing patterns, or because of western decadence is open for debate. But I still maintain that it is actually the failure of the old leftwing-rightwing politics in Israel and elsewhere that is leaving the way open for ultra-conservatives, both Israeli and Palestinian - and that means the end of this long conflict is getting further away, not nearer.

photos by traczka/beat productions

* Yad Vashem mystery solved.

It appears that the name of Stanislawa Slawinska was rubbed off the wall in the photo because somebody put her name on the wrong wall by mistake! So it was rubbed and the name was engraved, later, at the proper place. The photo below shows the unveling ceremony, November 11.

Marines Suspected in Sergeant's Slaying

2008-11-21T12:50:00.001+01:00

Have been asked by journalist David Dastych to publish this letter from mother of murdered Sgt. Jan Pietrzak to president-elect Barack Obama.

November 11, 2008
Barack Obama
President Elect of the United States
Washington DC

Dear President Obama:

They killed my son. He was 24 years old. He was a US Marine Sergeant. His name was Jan Pawel Pietrzak. Jan Pawel is John Paul in English. He was named after the Polish Pope John Paul II, who made this world different and changed the course of history bringing about the fall of communism.

In 1994, we immigrated to United States with my husband, son and daughter and settled in Brooklyn, NY. My husband and I worked hard to bring our children up to be good Americans, patriotic and faithful to their new
country.

After 9/11 my son at 17 decided to join the Marines. He wanted to defend America. He wanted to join the legendary corps known for Honor, Courage and Commitment, to protect the American President and most important people. He chose a tough but noble path of the Corps of the Few and the Proud.

He Joined the Marine Corps in 2003, fought in Iraq. After his tour of duty, he was assigned to Camp Pendleton, CA. He was promoted to the rank of Sergeant in a helicopter unit, commanding a technical support team. In May, he bought a house in Winchester and on August 8 married Quiana Jenkins, his Afro-American bride from California. They were just beginning to build their life together.

That life was taken from them on October 15 in a savage murder. They were attacked in their own home. They were bound, gagged, and tortured. My son's wife was brutally raped, probably before his eyes. Subsequently, they were executed in cold blood.

The murderers were four soldiers, US Marines, like my son, his brothers in arms. From the same unit as my son, two under his command. They were four Afro-Americans, like my daughter-in-law, her brothers of the same ethnic extraction, brothers who murdered their sister.

I ask: Why did it happen? Wherefrom such hate, such savagery, such indifference? Why were my son and my daughter-in-law so unacceptable to them? What was the underlying motive? Was it just a desire to burglarize the house? If this was really the case then why did they not come when my son was away? Why did they come in the middle of the night armed to their teeth?

I ask: How could such an unthinkable act happen? How could such individuals, predisposed to murder, one of them was a former gang member press accounts induction have been lowered recently for need of manpower in a time of war?

If individuals with a record couldn¹t be inducted, my son and his bride would be alive today.

Death in a war is a patriotic honor for a soldier. This fact enables the family to overcome the tragic loss of a loved one. A murder of a soldier by a soldier in his own country makes military service senseless. Such a death becomes eternal sorrow for the family. My loss will not cease until my death. I wish no mother of a soldier go through such torment as I have.

This is why I ask that my son¹s death be fully and honestly explained. This must be done for all the mothers of soldiers who serve their country.

The parents of my daughter-in-law deserve the truth too. They need to know why she died, a wife of a soldier. They need to know why she was selected to be so savagely attacked as if she were an enemy in her own country in time of peace. This must be fully explained for the sake of all the families of military wives.

The murder of Quiana and Jan Pawel is an unpardonable evil. Their brothers murdered them. It is time for no one in America to die this way again.

Time for a Change.

I am asking you, Mr. President, to help me believe in the possibility of that Change.

May God bless you and protect you.

Respectfully,

Henryka Pietrzak-Varga

WITH PERMISSION. POLISH VERSION APPEARED IN DZIENNIK ZWIAZKOWY [Chicago]

Going here

2008-11-13T00:07:00.000+01:00

Will drop you a line...

Obama - ‘the end of White Man’s civilisation…as we know it’

2008-11-10T19:44:00.001+01:00

Yes, it’s true. Obama didn’t just win an election last Tuesday, he has become the “Black Messiah” of the new left, is a joy to Islamist weird beards with life-style ambitions to become a suicide bomber, is a “pacifist”, and is the black man whose presidency will bring White Man’s civilisation crumbing down around Barack’s rather large ears.

I made the bit up about his ears (though they are HUGE! Put a couple of solar panels on them and you could produce the energy needs of the White House). But the rest of the bull above actually did come dribbling out of the mouth of one of Poland’s most loony of politicians, Law and Justice MP Artur Gorski (that's him in the photo).

The remarks - which many believe to be a little…you know…racist…were made to parliament last Wednesday. Slowly the horror of what he said burned…foreign ministry condemned him…his own party promises he is going to get a good spanking.

Gorski said that he “never meant to offend anyone [?] and that he was “um…taken out of context.”

Journalists have printed the whole transcript of what he said and, no, he wasn’t taken out of context.

Gorski has been in the news before, during a campaign to get an image of the Virgin Mary put on the national flag. He was also one of a bunch of MPs who wanted to make Jesus the King of Poland.

What makes a frazzled mind such as Gorski’s put together devout Catholicism, a nutty type of nationalism, the most blatant racism, and his own delusional fantasies that he - he! - is superior, in anyway, to anyone, ever?

This is the last post about Obama for a while. Promise. In fact, the next beatroot post will come to you, direct, from Israel.

Poland’s president gets confused over Obama phone call?

2008-11-09T12:03:00.004+01:00

Has President Lech Kaczynski been telling little fibs about his conversation with president-in-waiting Barack Obama on the anti-missile shield, to be deployed in Poland? And why?

President Kaczynski claims on his presidential web site that he spoke to Obama on Friday and the two agreed to further and deepening cooperation between Warsaw and Washington. "He also said the anti-missile shield project would go ahead," claims the statement on Kaczynski’s web site.

But Obama’s people are saying that he said no such thing. Denis McDonough said in a statement.

"The president-elect had a good conversation with the Polish President and the Polish Prime Minister about the important US-Poland alliance…President Kaczynski raised missile defense but President-elect Obama made no commitment on it. (my emphasis)

"His position is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable."

Oh, dear. Not four days since the historic election of Barack Obama and President Kaczynski appears to have put his little foot in it.

But what could be behind - and let’s be kind about this - this “misunderstanding” between the two men as to what was said in the telephone call? A mistranslation? Maybe.

Maybe not. Kaczynski has been convinced for sometime that Obama’s team and the present government under Donald Tusk have been doing deals behind his back on the anti-missile shield and much more beside. He infamously secretly recorded a conversation earlier this year between himself and Foreign Secretary Radek Sikorski, where insults flew and tantrums were...tantrumed.

The Dziennik daily claimed that the president quizzed Sikorski on whether he knows the American Democrat Ron Asmus, as he suspected that Sikorski had made a secret pact with the Democrats, on a recent visit to Washington, that the deal on the anti-missile shield will be signed with them after the elections in November, thereby enabling Tusk and Obama to claim all the credit. President Kaczynski wants to emphasise that he and his twin brother Jaroslaw, were the authors of the agreement and not Sikorski or Tusk.

So could this suspicion by the president extend to - let’s be kind, again - thinking that he heard Obama (or the translator) say that the missile shield deal would go ahead as planned, when, in fact, the president-elect had, in fact, declined to comment?

It has been reported that EU officials and government heads of the 27 nation bloc are confused over the mixed signals coming out of Warsaw as regards Poland’s foreign policy. Just who is in control of the agenda, they wonder, Kaczynski or Tusk? Well, that confusion has now crept across the Atlantic?

Whatever - you can bet your bottom dollar that the Obama team are now deciding that, in the future, they will deal with Tusk and Sikorski on this matter, and not the President of Poland, who seems to have a hearing dysfunction on matters of national defence.

Poland wants Obama

2008-11-04T20:19:00.004+01:00

Even though not as enthusiastic as most Europeans, Poles would vote for Barrack Obama by a margin of three-to-one.

According to a poll conducted by the BBC World Service, from a sample of over 22,000 in 16 countries in all continents, the world is anxious for a win by the senator from Illinois. For instance, in the UK, says the report:

By more than a six-to-one margin, a majority in the United Kingdom would prefer to see Barack Obama elected president instead of John McCain. Britons are among the largest majorities saying that America’s relations with the rest of the world would remain the same under John McCain, while a majority says they would improve under Obama.

Support for Obama is pretty unambiguous in Britain. In Poland, though not so clear cut, support for John McCain is weak.

Thirty-eight per cent of Poles would like to see Barack Obama elected US president while just 13 per cent say they prefer John McCain and 49 per cent do not express an opinion.

Poles are divided on whether America’s relations with the world would improve if Obama were elected US president (33%) or whether they would largely stay the same (31%), though just 4 per cent feel they would become worse. Poles most commonly would see relations staying the same under a McCain presidency (41%), while 12 per cent say relations would improve and 6 per cent feel they would become worse.

Just 13 percent would vote for the Republican!

This is quite a change from four years ago. Back then, the Philippines, Nigeria and Poland were among the few countries to favour Bush's re-election. All three now favour Barrack Obama.

In the US itself, the Polonia vote is mixed. Rob Strybel, who is an American Pole based now in Warsaw, sums up the changing voting patterns of Poles through the decades. Like most immigrations they voted Democrat through the New Deal years.

But that changed from the radical sixties inwards, particularly after the disastrous McGovern loss to Nixon in 1972. Writes Strybel:

Polonia’s pro-Republican stance became more firmly grounded during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr, both of whom were seen as aiding the cause of Poland’s independence.

But now it is 2008, and Blacks, Jews, Latinos, trade-unionists and most Hollywood types have by and large remained Democratic sympathizers. With Polish Americans and voters with other East, Central and Southern European roots, political loyalties are more diversified. Some say that most Polish Americans have made the transition into the middle class and do not perceive themselves as a separate electorate with specific needs.

So Poles do not vote a block anymore and have differsyfied in terms of class, areas where they live and so on. They have, in short, become more American.

The central issue, I think, for everyone watching the election, both in the US and outside, is: which candidate can get back the respect, at home and abroad, for the “Land of the Free”? I think that a vote for Obama just might get back some of that respect. But you never know - after four years the world might be ready for Mrs Palin.

God save us. God bless America: the only country in the world which has the bright idea of representing its two main parties by the sign of an elephant...and a donkey?

Beatroot on Normblog

2008-10-31T21:11:00.000+01:00

A profile has been posted on the ‘prestigious’ UK blog by Norman Geras about the beatroot.

But I am far too modest to draw readers' attention to something as egocentric as that!

Obama lets Russia invade Poland!

2008-10-30T19:09:00.006+01:00

The US religious rightwing is trying to scare the type of people who get scared about these things that a vote for Barrack Obama will result in pornography being shown 24/7 on TV, abortion will become just another form of contraception...and Poland will be invaded by Russia!

Yes, it’s true. Vote Obama, invade Poland! The prophecy comes from religious nut jobs Focus on the Family, founded in 1977 by James Dobson, who also runs a radio show which claims a syndicated audience, worldwide, of 220 million listeners.

Nuts, but popular. Popular nuts.

In a sixteen page open letter Dobson imagines what the US, and the world, would look like in 2012, four years after the election of Barrack Obama. Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll would take over the US. Porn would be as readily available on the television as ...well...religious nutjob broadcasting.

Internationally, an Obama presidency would be so weak and ineffectual at protecting democratic rights that, in 2009, says Dobson, Russia would move tanks into the Baltic States and retake areas lost to it on the break up of the Soviet Union. Three years later, more tanks would roll into Warsaw, Prague…

“In 2009, [Russia follows] the pattern they had began in Georgia in 2008 and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Then in the next three years Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria with no military response from the US, or the UN […] Liberal commentators in both the US and Europe have uniformly expressed deep regret at the loss of freedom of these countries but have observed that the US cannot be the world’s policeman..”

Sounds like hell, don’t it? Maybe that’s no coincidence since many that go in for this kind of rightwing evangelicalism appear to think Obama is the Devil, as prophesised by Revelations.

Stop sniggering - people actually believe this stuff! So it’s no leap of imagination to envisage Russia trying to regain its old Soviet empire, as an effete Barrack frets in front of the mirror...

Google-bomber on trial in Poland

2008-10-27T18:17:00.001+01:00

Marek M., who was arrested late last year for google bombing President Lech Kaczynski, has gone on trial for defaming the name of the head of state.

You may remember that Marek had set up computer programme software which replicates the usual collective method of google bombing. The ‘victim’ was President Kaczynski, infamous for his oversensitivity and insecurity when being made fun of. The software tied a search of Lech Kaczynski on google to the Polish word “kutas”, a rather rude term for a male member.

To link the President of the Republic of Poland to a penis was too much for the head of state and police went round to Marek’s flat and arrested him. He faces three years in jail.

“This is not a matter of freedom of speech,” said Andrzej Holdys, a regional prosecutor in the southern town of Cieszyn, where the programmer lives. “If somebody uses a derogatory word to libel the head of state than it’s a clear insult which violates the law.”

It is actually against Polish law. But to spend the state’s time, and money, on an inconsequential issue as small as a male todger is a very good way of making a prick of yourself.

Central Europe joins the finance crisis

2008-10-22T20:01:00.004+02:00

Early advise by ‘experts’ that the banking crisis would not affect Poland and other countries in the region too badly is looking a little shaky.

The central bank in Hungary has put interest rates up by a whopping 3 percent to try and prop up the collapsing forint; Hungary, Belarus and Ukraine are currently in talks with the IMF in the hope of a massive injection of funds to stave off serious economic trouble; Poland’s currency, the zloty, is depreciating against major currencies - so economy minister, Wladamar Pawlak better forget about his call, earlier this month, for rate cuts.

The central bank in Warsaw has got together a “confidence package” to get banks here to start lending to each other again. Despite the fact that these banks do not have the structure of debt that lenders do in the US and much of western Europe, a crisis of confidence has made bankers over- cautious even here in Poland.

And the foreign parents of Poland’s banks - as much as 71 percent of the banking system here is owned by foreign banks - are in trouble. ING has had a bail out from the Dutch government, Fortis and Unicredito look vulnerable, too. Talk is of a sell off of Polish assets to offset massive losses elsewhere.

Getting a home-loan has become very difficult. The housing market is taking a whack.

Suddenly the finance crisis - which was a bit of a spectator sport for the average Pole, as they watched the rich bankers of America and Europe take a spanking - has got a little too close for comfort.

Poland has a deposits guarantee system that promises to cover any losses should a bank fall. Getting confidence in banks is a priority in a country where folk simply didn't have bank accounts until not so long ago. Recently banks have risen the upper limit to calm any lasting fears of losing money overnight. But as the stock market in Warsaw tumbles - the Top 20 index lost over 7 percent of its value today - investors are taking money out of the bourses and putting them in government bonds - a move that one economist recently described to me as the equivalent of sticking all your money under the bed, as the interest you will make on that investment in minimal.

Is this the end of…well, what, actually?

Of course, in the wake of the finance crisis, the commentariat have rushed out to announce the end of Thatcherism, or neo-liberalism, or the free market, is nigh. Some have blamed the “greed” of bankers who lived off the never-never for too long.

But I don’t get the impression that any ideology has ended. Neither do I think the greed of bankers is to blame. Greed thrives in certain circumstances, and those circumstances were the rancid, sluggish nature of modern day capitalism in the highly developed countries in western Europe and the US.

Even though everyone for years has talked about a “boom” in western capitalism, when you look at the growth rates - 2, 3 percent, mostly - they are not that impressive at all. The recent long period of growth in the UK, for instance - 16 years of continuous growth - was a lot less spectacular than many think. In fact, its been a long, slow growth - not a “boom”. What has boomed in those countries is the housing sector. That fooled people into thinking they were getting richer and richer, when they weren’t.

As Asia, much of South America and this part of Europe have been experiencing a high growth rate boom, with real growth in productive forces and manufacturing base, the western capitalist countries have destroyed their manufacturing bases, failed to make real investments in developing infrastructure, and relied on the finance sector - and a weird web of loans and debts between customer and bank, and bank and bank - to keep their economies chugging along.

And that chug has now ground to a shuddering halt.

So it’s not greed that's responsible for this mess, but advanced capitalism itself. That doesn’t mean a socialist revolution is around the corner, because there isn’t really a socialist movement to take advantage of the situation anymore. Capitalism is not in its death-throws. But it does mean that our rulers are going to have to ask themselves some tough questions and come up with some tough and radical remedies.

But I wouldn’t be waiting for those remedies to emerge anytime soon. Our leaders are a fearful, disorientated bunch at the best of times. So expect some kind of tinkering to try to get through and out the other side. But they will still have to ask themselves this: how can western capitalism maintain decent growth rates without a manufacturing base and no other way to keep things going than a system of borrowing that even they don’t understand?

I know! Maybe environmentalism will come to their rescue. Green capitalism!

Carbon credit bond, anyone?

President Kaczynski threatens to crush...a daisy?

2008-10-21T22:35:00.008+02:00

Poland’s head of state screams and shouts at TV reporter Monika Olejnik in Brussels last week, says she is on his “short list”, accuses her of being a commie spy, and threatens to “crush her”. (photo: Pres. Kaczynski feels the full force of a hurricane of derision)

President Kaczynski isn’t suffering from paranoia - but they really are out to get him! The forces of evil lurk in every television studio - especially at TVN - or what Law and Justice party members refer to as “”Tusk Vision National”.

After an interview (see a bit here) by Monika Olejnik - the Jeremy Paxman of Polish TV political journalism - where the, now, veteran journo quizzed and pressed President Kaczynski, the guy just lost it. After the cameras were turned off he threatened her with…well, we know not what. He said that the “secret services” (meaning commie spies!) and the “Walters” - meaning her boss at TVN (another spy!) “will not be able to save her…”. He then accused her of being …yes, you guessed it - a commie spy!, operating under the code name Stokrotka (Daisy).

Oh, dear

President Kaczynski said he had a “short list” of people he was going to “get”. But Kaczynski’s list of people he thinks are working for dark forces is hardly “short”. In fact, it’s a rather “long list”, a very long list, full of most of the people who work for private and public media in Poland.

Kaczynski isn’t a paranoiac, but they really are out to get him!!!

TVN were outraged by, what is, possibly slanderous accusations. The president - like the sodden drunk who beats his wife up, only to wake up the next day with remorse added to his stinking hangover - apologised later, sending roses, I believe.

So what led to this outburst of ungracious and ungentlemanly behaviour from Poland’s president, witnessed by both Poles and Belgians at the summit last Wednesday?

Apart from the fact that the Kaczynski twins have had a rather difficult relationship with TVN in the past, President Kaczynski had had a rather strained few days leading up to the EU summit. Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the rest of the government didn’t want Kaczynski to come to Brussels in the first place. They said it wasn’t usual for both head of state and PM to turn up at EU summits. They were there to talk about things like the “Climate Package” - which demands expensive cuts in carbon emissions, among other things - and how it was disadvantageous to Poland. This wasn’t a defence matter so the president should not be involved, said Tusk.

Kaczynski dug in, however, and said that even though he wasn’t wanted there, he was going to turn up anyway.

The government said that there would only be two chairs for Poles at the summit and they were going to be sat on by PM Tusk and Foreign Minister Sikorski. So would the president kindly butt out!

Miffed - very miffed - Kaczynski decided to hire his own plane and set off for Brussels regardless. The especially chartered LOT airlines Boeing 737 cost the country a cool 42,000 euros return trip - not exactly Ryanair prices.

When the weird coalition government led by Lech’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, was kicked out of office last autumn by a traumatised electorate - suffering over a year of Messrs Kaczynski, Giertych and Lepper running the country - I thought that Polish politics would become boring and …sensible. So let’s hear it for the continuing saga of Kaczynski and his fight with the forces of darkness, evil and...daisies.

There will be a slight delay between posting a comment and it appearing in the comment box due to temporary moderation issues. Trog attack!

Normal service has been resumed

2008-10-20T21:37:00.001+02:00

Comment box is open to everyone again.

But, sadly, I am going to have to moderate the comments coming in to this blog for short while. That means that your comments will not appear in the comment box instantly.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Beatroot at the Vatican with Walesa and the Pope

2008-10-19T10:04:00.004+02:00

If New York is the city that never sleeps then Rome is the city that never shuts up talking. Ever. (photo - Pope Benedict XVI...at the cinema?)

Rome is a city wired up to the eyeballs on amphetamine-strength coffee. It’s probably why Italians talk so much.

I was in a taxi yesterday with a driver who was in the middle of a long monologue that covered such diverse topics as: why the Church murdered Bruno; the egotistical nature of the modern day Italian; and the disrespect and delinquency of his 14 year old son. While he talked his eyes were not often on the road and where he was going but on me in the back seat. His arms followed the intricate patterns of his stories, waving around all over the place. At one point he was driving the car with his left elbow only - I am not joking - as he debated, with himself, the pros and cons of the, latest, Burlusconi government.

Thursday morning I went to a special mass at the Basilica overlooking St Peter’s Square in honour of the 30 year anniversary of Karol Wojtyla becoming JP II. There were thousands of people in the huge church, about one in five of the pilgrim-tourists were from Poland, many wearing Solidarnosc scarves or t-shirts.

After the mass I went for a stroll, agog at Rome’s teeming traffic. Small cars - the Smart is a particular favourite at the moment - whizzed in and out of the lines of scooters and motorbikes. Horns honked and Italians shouted and waved their arms at each other.

Small cars are essential in Rome as the parking of these vehicles is …creative and inventive. Any tiny space not colonised already by one of these vehicles is backed into, with varying degrees of success. Many cars show signs of bangs and prangs, dents riddling bodywork as a testimony to past parking attempts gone wrong.

Just as parking is a mysterious Italian art so is crossing the road. There are traffic lights and stuff but they are treated as optional extras by both drivers and pedestrians. People wait at the side of the road for a moment and then suddenly dive into the middle of a stream of traffic. Some cars and bikes then skid to a stop, some swerve to avoid the person who is now in the middle of the road. It took me a while to pluck up the courage to try this, but once you take the plunge it seems to work. As you stroll - and Italians stroll everywhere, they never simply walk - through the traffic you hear the babble from within vehicles, the sound of horns and the scrapping of metal-on-metal as yet another parking stunt doesn’t quite make it.

Testimony

I was in Rome for the premiere of the film version of the memoirs of Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, Testimony, recounting his 39 years serving John Paul II. The film itself is not all that great although there is a lot of good archival material I never saw before. We also get the revelation - if that is the right work in the circumstances - that JP II survived not one but two assassination attempts. Not just a mad Turk tried to have a go at him - with the help of the Kremlin, or not: who know? - but also a mad Portuguese priest stuck a knife in him, in 1982, on the anniversary of the first assassination attempt. They covered the incident up in the hope that trying to kill the Pope would not become a fashionable thing to do for the world’s loons.

But the premiere itself - in a theatre slap bang in the middle of the Vatican - was something I will never forget. Six thousand people from all over the world sat down to watch the movie in the company of Lech Walesa, Jolanta Kwasniewska, and…Pope Benedict!! I never watched a film with a pope before, just a few seats down the isle.

The photo above I took as he made a little speech after the film. He was very moved by what he saw, obviously. The movie does have a very sad, although predictable ending, and someone told me they saw Pope Benny crying at the end.

Afterwards, people were milling around outside the theatre with the Swiss Guard looking on in their fancy dress garb. One photographer saw former first lady Jolanta Kwasniewska chatting away to the woman she took over from, former first lady Danuta Walesa. When the photographer asked if he could take a picture of them together, Jolanta started to pose, while Danuta - probably under strict orders from her husband - refused and quickly moved away. Relations between the ex-Solidarity leader and ex-communist Aleksander Kwasniewski may have warmed a little since the 1990s, but Walesa still does not want it to be seen that both families are best of buddies. That’s one miracle that JP II never got around to making and won’t be used in the evidence for his inevitable canonization.

Later I went for another stroll in Rome and after 20 minutes got completely lost. I quite like being lost in cities new to me. Soon, however, I wandered into an area where a succession of African guys seemed delighted to see me. They gave me high-fives and complicated handshakes and were very keen to sell me…something, I know not what.

So it was obviously a good time to get out of there. But how to get back to the Vatican? I stopped a nice looking old lady to ask the way. Understanding no Italian I just planned to follow the direction she was pointing in. Unfortunately, being an Italian, as she described the shortcut back to the Basilica her arms waved around all over the place. If I followed the directions of both hands I would be still be wandering around Rome in ever decreasing circles. So I set off in the direction she was facing, as she talked and talked…she’s probably still giving me directions even now.

Simon Mol, dead

2008-10-13T21:39:00.002+02:00

Simon Mol, on trial for intentionally infecting up to 40 woman with the HIV virus in Poland, died in hospital on Saturday.

He never gave evidence in the court. No case was proven, no justice was ever brought.

Whatever, his legacy on race relations in Poland has not been very positive. We will never now know what his real motives were. I suspect he was, in what they call these days, “in denial” about lots of things in his life.

It’s an awful case with many victims. But one of the nasty strands of a generally ugly reaction to the Mol case was when some showed contempt for the women who contracted HIV. “If they are so dumb to be fooled by someone like Mol, they they deserved it…”, etc.

If anyone met Simon Mol then they were “fooled”. I met him. He seemed a genuine person to me. Lots of the people thought that. Lots.

So to be accused of being “fooled” by him is ridiculous. Even Simon Mol was fooled, by himself.

If you want to see how ugly it got then have a look at, the record for this blog, 166 comments, from an early post I wrote about all this.

October 16, 1978

2008-10-13T20:15:00.000+02:00

After the shock of the death of John Paul I - a man thought blessed with real charisma - Rome concentrated its mind on finding someone equally compulsive and with bags of people-magnetism.

The second edition of US Time magazine that October reported that the search was on for a candidate who had both physical strength and the will to carry on the work of John Paul I.

‘The search for charisma, plus the near-universal insistence on a "pastoral" Pope, concentrates continued attention upon Corrado Ursi, 70, a popular shepherd in Naples whose easygoing air and ample girth inspire repeated comparison to Pope John XXIII. Close behind him in the early discussions is Salvatore Pappalardo, 60, also an effective pastor in Sicily,’ wrote the Time journalist.

Sergio Pignedoli, 68, was also a front-runner, Giovanni Benelli, 57, an outsider. Some mentioned the possibility of a foreign pope, a non Italian! Johannes Willebrands, 68, of The Netherlands. Some Cardinals are touting Curialists Eduardo Pironio, 57, of Argentina and Villot, 72, of France, perhaps? But that was unlikely. It hadn’t happened since 1522.

And then, two paragraphs from the end of the Time article, they get to a name not widely known outside of Poland.

‘Last week speculation also ran to names rarely heard before: Paulo Evaristo Arns, 57, Brazil's brave champion of human rights; Joseph Cordeiro, 60, of Pakistan, who exudes saintly simplicity and concern for the poor; and Poland's Karol Wojtyla, 58, who is a strong leader in a hostile environment—and speaks fluent Italian.’

But it was just speculation. A non-Italian who was under 60 years old? Nah. This was still the world, before JP II.

On Wednesday I am going to the Vatican. Catch you then.

More?
A Light That Left Us Amazed, Time magazine, Oct 16, 1978.

Kidnapped Pole in Pakistan

2008-10-06T19:26:00.007+02:00

It’s been over a week now since Piotr Stanczak was abducted by Taliban in the northwest of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. What are his odds of getting him back to Poland, as Pakistan seems to be coming apart at the seams?

Stanczak was working for a company looking for oil when three, maybe four Taliban ambushed his vehicle, killed his Pakistani driver, bodyguard and one other person, then took the Pole and disappeared into the mountains that surround the region of Attock.

Piotr follows two Chinese telecom engineers who were also abducted in the same region back in August. The two Chinese may be alive, as last week a spokesman for the Taliban said that they would exchange them for prisoners arrested by the Pakistani army - maybe over 100 of them.

Since Piotr’s abduction, a conflict has broken out between Pakistani officials and the company he works for, Geofizyka Krakow Ltd, as to who was to blame for the kidnapping. The prime minister of Pakistan and local police officers claim that Geofizyka did not avail themselves to security provided for them, and were negligent in the precautions they took before sending workers out on field trips. The Polish company and people who know Stanczak say that the security measures he left the base with on September 28 were standard and in keeping with guidelines.

There was also a nasty altercation between the Polish head of the Geofizyka base in Pakistan and the journalists who descended on the compound after the kidnapping took place.

Pakistan on the edge

The region the abduction occurred in is the most dangerous in Pakistan and is a spill over of the war in Afghanistan and the ‘War on Terror’ in general. On Sunday, the home of the North West Frontier Province's chief minister, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, was attacked by rockets, though nobody was killed.

Suicide bombers stalk the region, a haven for Islamic militants of the al-Qaida type and their whacky Taliban friends, who have regained support since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan has produced little economic fruit, and the recent incursions by American forces into the north-west of Pakistan. This is where many think Weird-Beard-in-Chief, Osama bin Laden is hanging out.

The instability in the region has been caused, in part, by Bush’s war on terror. Invasions by foreign forces usually have that effect. It’s a lesson neocons and liberal interventionists appear slow to learn. This is why the War on Terror was a mistake from its beginning.

Barrack Obama has made much in his presidential campaign of his opposition to the Iraq war before it began. Well, good - I have always opposed it, too. But where we differ is that he opposed the war in Iraq because, as he sees it, it distracted from the real objective: to go get Osama!

But does he really think that throwing more troops into Afghanistan would mean peace and security for both Afghans and Americans; that the world would be a more peaceful and happy place all round?

This is a delusion. Afghans have no trouble fighting large armies occupying their country - ask a Soviet Afghanistan veteran. The war on terror was always doomed to fail because it was trying to find the location of an abstract noun - terror.

Problem was, as Rumsfeld said in many Whitehouse meetings at the time - according to Bob Woodward - “There just ain’t enough targets in Afghanistan…” - meaning for Washington to look like it was “doing something” about 9/11, it would need a more spectacular “shock and awe” than bombing a few, low grade targets in one of the most undeveloped and poorest nation in the world.

No, to be really shocking and awful then Iraq would have to be next.

Barrack Obama supports a policy of American troops going into Pakistan in pursuit of Taliban and other Islamists. If that happens on a regular basis then the region will destabilise still further, Pakistan will disintegrate some more, and many more foreign workers will disappear into the lawless mountains that run along a front line in America’s war on terror.

more?
‘Geofizyka’s security arrangements normal, not negligent’, thenews.pl, Oct 6

Is al-Qaeda winning?, BBC, audio, 23 minutes

Bogdan Zaryn

2008-10-03T22:38:00.010+02:00

A very nice person died this week. I have known radio journalist Bogdan Zaryn for a long time and he was one of the most extra-ordinary people I ever met.

Grieving him are two children, a wife and many, many others. He was in hospital for radical surgery to help him walk again, freely. The first surgery was successful but an emergency surgery after was not. He died Friday, aged 51 years old.

Tragedy always seemed to follow Bogdan. His mother was a survivor of the Nazi’s Auschwitz. She moved to Canada after the war and that’s where she gave birth to Bogdan. Bogdan was born with bad legs, bad back, you name it. The family is not a lucky one.

But even though he was sick for much of the time I knew him, he was also one of the most positive people I ever met. And Bogdan had a special kind of charisma that everyone found irresistible

Even when people got annoyed with Bogdan - and that seemed to be quite often - they never could dislike him. In fact, the opposite. Even when you were annoyed with Bogdan, you always remembered the reasons why you were so, so fond of him.

Bogdan’s guide to journalism

Bogdan never did conventional research. While the rest of us mere mortals looked up stuff in boring old books and computers, Bogus - with typical Bogus logic - thought: why look something up in a book when you can telephone an expert and ask them? So that’s what he did. All day. Everyday. All the time.

After a couple of years of this he had a contact book that resembled a telephone directory for the entire New York State. Bogdan knew LOTS of experts.

Unfortunately, he didn’t just ring experts up. If he didn’t know something - even the most banal of things - he used to ring his work colleagues up, too. Even when they were in the room next door.

Bogdan used to single out individuals at the workplace as the target - victim - of his constant questioning. He phoned them at work, he phoned them at home. At morning, noon and night, Bogdan kept right on phoning.

He knew that he only had a limited time for their direct attention, as after a few days the poor hapless colleague would be such a nervous wreck that they would have to retire to a sanatorium to recuperate - by which time Bogdan had moved on and found himself a new victim to harass. Corridors were littered, at times, with the twitching, gibbering results of Bogdan’s ’special attention’. Some folk would be scared to answer the phone in case it was one of his questions on the other end of the line.

Bogdan was never the most technologically savvy person I ever met. The internet always confused him, a little. Once he was listening to us talking about what a god-send Google was - information in under 0.14 of a second, blah, blah. The next day he came into work and turned on the computer. And then, by reflex, he got on the telephone. This time it was to me. I was in the room next door, so I could hear his voice both on the phone and coming through the dividing wall between us. It was one of his classics.

“How do you spell ‘google’”, he shouted.

“I don’t know,” I said in prophylactic exasperation: “Why don’t you GOOGLE IT!”

It was like that all the time. He was a very hard person to refuse. That’s one reason why he was so good at getting people for an interview. People always stopped for Bogdan, no matter in what rush they were in. I have seen government spokesman being pursued by Bogdan down spiral staircases - Bogdan asking questions as the spokesman helped him get down the steps.

He could illicit the dumb quote from celebrities by asking a perfectly timed, cliché question. He once asked Edyta Gorniak: “So…who is the real Edyta Gorniak?”

Gorniak said: “Ooo, I really don’t know - there are so many sides of me!”

Cringe.

Bogdan had met them all. He interviewed Donald Tusk once about his Kashubian roots, before he became the current prime minister. Tusk didn’t want to speak to him in English and did the interview in Polish. But, somehow - and only Bogdan could get people to do this - he got Tusk to sing him a song in Kashubian! To my knowledge that is a world first.

Even when he was in hospital he was on the telephone the whole time, ringing colleagues up.

After the first, successful operation to help him walk again, he decided that he absolutely must get an interview with his, rather good, surgeon. For two whole days he harassed a couple of colleagues, night, day and very early morning, to get them to send him some recording equipment. Finally, they relented. So a special company car was sent to take to the hospital, not a person, but a small recording device and a microphone. I wonder if the driver made it wear a seat belt?

But you just could not refuse Bogdan, when his mind was set on you doing something for him. And that’s quite a talent he had. A people talent. Bogdan had lots of people-talent.

What a sad day Friday was. It was made all the sadder, for everyone who knew him, for the fact that Bogdan had never been happier. His operation was successful, he was moving house, he had two gorgeous young children. And then one day he went into an operating theatre and never woke up again.

The memories of him will be made up of all the mad stuff he got up to in his life, his wheezy laugh …and maybe his constant questions. But in my mind I will always remember Bogdan’s last masterpiece.

After Bogdan’s operation, the 24 hour news station - TVN 24 - got to hear about this new and risky surgery he had undergone. How they got to know about this is still a mystery to me. Maybe Bogdan rang them up? Anyway, a film crew went down to the hospital in Constancin, on the outskirts of Warsaw, and did an interview with Bogdan. It’s a moving, short piece of film, which you can see here.

I am going to miss him so much.

Who does Sepp Blatter think he is?

2008-10-01T17:38:00.009+02:00

FIFA president Sepp Blatter (pictured right) has warned the Polish government that if they do not reinstate the suspended board of the Polish football association, the PZPN, then nasty sanctions could follow - meaning he will not just take his ball home with him in a sulk, he might also take away Poland’s chance to co-host the Euro 2012 soccer championships.

The question on many a lip in Poland is this - does Sepp Blatter - and his sidekick at the European governing body UEFA, Michel Platini (pictured sitting, coquetishly, on the left) - think that they are above the wishes of a democratically elected government?

Another question footie lovers here are asking is this: what exactly is the relationship between Sepp Blatter and the now deposed head of the PZPN, Michal Listkiewicz?

I was asked to comment today on this issue by RTE radio in Ireland - the programme was 'Sports Drivetime' - so there is a lot of international interest in this strange affair.

When the Sports Ministry wound up the present board of PZPN this week they also did what many wished they had done years ago - got rid of Michal Listkiewicz, who has been in the job since 1989 - a rare feat in a country which gets tired of its officials after a few weeks, at best. Listkiewicz has long, then, presided over a football association that has sat on its hands - when those hands are not busy taking a few bribes and greasing a few palms…allegedly - at a time when over 100 football officials, referees, managers and players have been arrested in Poland on charges of being involved in the wide spread sleaze which appears endemic within Polish football.

Sepp Blatter - more powerful than God, more sexy than...Brad Pitt?

The Polish media today is full of reports on the close relationship between Sepp Blatter and Michal Listkiewicz. Sepp said yesterday that Listkiewicz was the only man in Warsaw that he could do business with. What's more, national sports institutions, says Sepp, should be completely independent of government, and elected politicians should keep their nose out of PZPN’s business. If not, then “there will be consequences”.

Blatter and Listkiewicz do seem unusually close. The Dziennik newspaper carries allegations today that they share girlfriends! Allegedly, Listkiewicz’s long time lover, the 40 year-old Ms. Ilona Boguska, is now the 71 year old Sepp Blatter’s new flame. I suppose she loves him for his…understanding of football, who knows. Sepp and Michal are very good friends indeed, evidently, and if you mess with Listkiewicz then you are gonna have to get past Blatter first.

Which is… nice.

Normally I would agree that national sports associations should be completely independent of government. But these are not normal times in Polish football. Sponsors are loathed to get involved with a game that, quite frankly, stinks. So cleaning up Poland’s football industry is a legitimate area for government to be involved in if - and this is a big if - the current football association has been negligent.

And the kindest thing one could say about the current losers in the PZPN is that they have been ‘negligent’.

By the way, four names are in the hat to take over from Sepp’s Listkiewicz as head of PZPN - one or two of them you might of heard of: Grzegorz Lato and Zbigniew Boniek. Boniek was a fine, fine footballer, of course. But do fine footballers necessarily make good sports administrators?

The best way to answer that question is to just name one high profile football politician who is now the second most powerful administrator in the game: Michel Platini - a glorious footballer, but a complete oaf as head of UEFA. Maybe its time, not just to blow the whistle on corruption in Polish football, but show a red card to Sepp Blatter and the rest of the cronies at FIFA.

Simon Mol is dying

2008-09-25T17:14:00.001+02:00

The Cameroonian on trial since July for deliberately infecting women in Warsaw with HIV is to be released from prison to get treatment for AIDS.

His condition seems very serious as he will not be put under police custody when in hospital but he has had his passport taken away and is forbidden to leave Poland.

The case caused outrage when it broke in late in 2007. I can’t face writing the details all over again and hesitated before even writing this much here, as it seems to bring out the worst in everyone.

What is perhaps the biggest danger now is that his trial will never be completed and that the truth as put before a court of law - the only truth that counts - will never fully emerge. The women he infected, and Mol himself, deserve to see the end of this. It appears this might not happen.

For details of the case see previous posts here and here.

Poland’s ‘liberal’ government - part 365

2008-09-21T12:39:00.002+02:00

Donald Tusk’s ‘liberals’ are conservatives in drag.

“Poland's liberal opposition Civic Platform party has won a massive poll victory…” (BBC); “Poland's main liberal opposition Civic Platform was leading elections for the European parliament early Monday with 25.21 percent…” (Eurobusiness); “’Liberal landslide ends Poland's era of the twins”…” (M&C); “Foreign leaders and Poland's business community on Monday welcomed the victory of the liberal Civic Platform party in Sunday's parliamentary elections…” (Financial Times).

So wrote the western press after the victory of Civic Platform in last autumn’s general election. With the defeat of the Kaczynski/Giertych/Lepper arch-conservative coalition, the future of Poland was Donald Tusk’s ‘liberalism’, right?

Wrong. As I have pointed out many times there is little ‘liberal’ about the current government, apart from a certain liberalising instinct when it comes to the economy. This past month we have seen how conservative the Civic Platform party really is. Donald Tusk is the equivalent, not of a Polish J.S. Mill, but a weird kind of Polish pro-European Margaret Thatcher - in drag.

Take his call for ‘chemical castration’ of paedophiles following the brutally strange case of the Polish Fritzl. When challenged that castration, be it of the chemical or knife variety, was against human rights - once a punishment is served and a debt paid to society the convict should be free to rehabilitate themselves back into society; or when doctors complain that they are there to treat people, not castrate them; or that this is against the Polish Constitution, the ‘liberal’ Donald Tusk said: “I don’t consider paedophiles truly human, so why should they have ’human rights’?”

Of course, castration would not have prevented the repeated rape of the Polish Fritzl’s daughter…nor would it have prevented the abuse of the majority of the victims of child molesters in general. Most have no previous convictions. But that’s not why Tusk is supporting chemical castration. His policy proposal is the typical knee-jerk reaction of a reactionary, conservative political jerk - the need to be seen to be doing something about a modern folk devil, whenever a media panic ensues.

The liberal Civic Platform government also has a problem with that bastion of liberalism throughout the ages - free speech and expression. Director Paweł Chochlew is looking for funding for his new fictional feature about the Nazi invasion of Westerplatte that effectively began WW II. A thousand national myths surround this event. But Chochlew decided that a fresh approach was needed and decided to look again at some of those myths. But when he sent the script in to the government’s film board to try and get some money to produce Tajemnica Westerplatte (The Secret of Westerplatte) the government promptly threw it in the bin. The script is “anti-Polish” and “demeaning”, apparently. Chochlew’s defence that his film was meant to be fictional and so has no responsibility to be ’historically and/or politically correct’ fell on deaf ears.

It seems that some of Poland’s myths are so fragile that they cannot be challenged.

Donald Tusk’s government is censorial and reactionary. And each time journalists - both at home and abroad - reach for the ‘liberal’ adjective to describe them, John Stuart Mill turns, uneasily, in his grave.

The end of capitalism as we know it?

2008-09-17T18:37:00.000+02:00

Morbid headlines are starting to appear in the Polish media just as they have elsewhere - we are facing the “worst financial crisis since 1970s…no, 1940s…no, the Great Depression!” What a load of nonsense.

A few months ago I was talking to a British bloke here in Warsaw. He was a member of the old Trotskyist Militant faction, an entryist organisation within the UK Labour Party that I knew well when I was involved in the Poll Tax unions of the early 1990s. That was quite a while ago but the rhetoric is undimmed by nearly two decades. “We are heading for a showdown,” said my Trotsky friend. “Environmental crisis, and capitalism is facing its greatest meltdown since the 1930s. We live in interesting times. It gives us great opportunities politically,” he said knowingly.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Did lefties still talk like this, these days? Are they still waiting for the inevitable collapse of capitalism?

That kind of thinking, then, might be still alive, but not so well, on what is left of the cranky leftwing. No surprise, really, I suppose. But my friend’s catastrophist thinking has become almost mainstream today. Everyone is talking about the crisis in the financial sector in the US and elsewhere as if it really was the greatest economic crisis since… well, the Great Depression.

See the skies raining bankers and brokers as they take their last step, from a tenth story window!

Last month, the British press reported that UK finance minister, Alistair Darling had “let the cat out of the bad” when he announced that Britain faced the worst economic conditions since…1948![?] Quite why the chancellor chose 1948 as his Year Zero is still a mystery to me. Why not 1947, or 1949?

Darling was quite obviously talking out of an orifice not designed for the talking out of.

My dad was alive in 1948 and I remember him talking of rationing, which was still in existence then in Britain. There were chronic shortages of many things, including labour. Those post-war years were dark and difficult for most.

Darling’s 1948 bull, however, looks almost sensible compared with some other doom mongers, who, like Mr Militant, think a new Great Depression is coming. But let’s look at that real Great Depression and see what it had in common with the banking crisis of today.

What they do have in common is that both then and now, problems started in the US. In the first ten months of 1930, 744 American banks failed. Prices and incomes fell on average around by 20 to 50 percent during those years. At its worst point in 1933, 25 percent of Americans couldn’t find work. Between 1929 and 1932 the Times index in New York declined by 89 percent. Poverty was endemic. More than half of Americans were living below subsistence level. In 1930, GDP shrank by 9.4 percent!

Sounds familiar today? No, it doesn’t, does it. And nobody is expecting growth to fall by nearly 10 percent. In fact, what is expected is that growth will remain sluggish in western Europe and the US…maybe even dipping below zero for a time. Unemployment today is not expected to rocket over 10 percent. Mass poverty is not about to return.

In Poland, they are starting to get media alarmist too. But it never will reach the hysteria that is now sweeping our great commentators and politicians in western Europe and the States. Poles remember hard times just gone past. Nothing is going to be worse than the 1980s. The economy is growing by 6 percent, will slow to something like 4 percent. And though the price of bread is rising like a particularly lively yeast culture, it won’t be going up by 100 percent overnight, as the communist had an annoying, and very dumb, habit of doing every ten years or so.

There is an unforeseen element in all this that is hard to predict. But if my friend Mr Trotsky, from Tunbridge Wells, wants a revolution then he had better sharpen up his ideology, and maybe even power of hypnosis - he‘s gonna need them - cause he will not be stepping from the ruins of capitalism and sweeping into the Presidential Palace, just yet.

Polish kings, American presidents?

2008-09-14T17:14:00.003+02:00

A slightly bizarre article by Polish born American Henryk A. Kowalczyk (not the PiS MP) ponders: which foreigner would be best suited to become US president?

He thinks either Tony Blair or ex-finance minister and early-1990s “Mr. Shock” therapist Leszek Balcerowicz would be good choices...bizarrely.

He starts off claiming some similarity of Polish kings to US presidents. The similarities being - firstly the kings, like presidents, were elected (though the electorate was rather small in the case of Poland) and that the end results of the ballot could be a little messy.

Slightly tenuous link, Henryk, but never mind.

But his main point is that foreigners could be elected as kings of Poland - several were. But in US elections every one in six living in the US are not eligible for the top job. Maybe that is why the usual calibre of entrants is so poor?

So he comes up with a few names who would be good as foreign presidents. UK ex-prime minister Blair he chooses because - bizarrely - he:

…is already deeply involved in the Middle Eastern mess, and he was clever enough to have already started pulling British forces from Iraq. This indicates that, as president, he would get us out of Iraq as soon as achievable, and with as little humiliation as possible.

Oh, and…

Blair reformed UK immigration policy by managing increased legal immigration and keeping illegal immigration at about 0.7 percent of the population (compared with at least 4 percent in the U.S.). We need someone who can do the same here. Additionally, Blair worked on reforming the government-run National Health Service by promoting the increased role of the private sector. In the United States, we might need some government involvement in reforming our privately run health care system. Blair sounds like the most qualified man for this job.

So Blair should be US president for his record on Iraq, immigration and the health service!? I don’t think you would get a single British person anywhere to agree on all three…or even one or two, of those.

And Balcerowicz? US president? Yup!

His "shock therapy" converted the completely disintegrated Polish economy of the socialist era into a halfway decent market-driven system. Balcerowicz grew up and received his education in a socialist country, but gradually matured to understand and value the benefits of the free market.

Um…

On a side note: I wonder which Polish king George W. Bush would fancy himself as? Probably Jan Sobieski (1674-1696), who won - helped win - the Battle of Vienna (an event the city of Krakow is celebrating this weekend) which “saved Europe” from the evil Turkish/Islamic empire. But maybe readers can come up with other monarchical role models for Poland’s King George W. the First. Poniatiowski? Nah…

Two tribes go to war

The electability of a foreigner in the US would be dependant on how he or she could come to be seen as part of the correct lifestyle tribe. These days, elections are not really about policy at all. This election is as much about lifestyle as politics.

Recent research shows that Americans are increasingly choosing the location of where they live on the basis of their political allegiance - Red or Blue. There are now almost consciously created Democrat zones and Republican parts of town.

Each sees the other group as if they came from Mars or Venus. Do you eat organic or spend Sunday morning at the Evangelical church? Do you prefer cats as pets (then you are a Democrat) or are you more likely to own a dog (then welcome to the GOP). The Economist writes:

Over time, this means Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views. In a book called “Hearing the Other Side”, Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania crunched survey data from 12 countries and found that Americans were the least likely of all to talk about politics with those who disagreed with them.

Lifestyle as a definition of ‘politics’ could be seen by the nomination of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice-presidential candidate, and the so-called ‘liberal’ reaction that came after.

Palin, though a pro-life, gun owning, God fearing Good Conservative, was conspicuously quiet on these issues in her acceptance speech. She seemed to be going out of the way not to say anything too political. She didn’t need to preach to the converted on those issues in the Republican electoral base. And she didn’t want to scare away too many of Hilary Clinton’s disaffected female supporters. This was the Republican version of ’identity politics’: “Vote for me…I am woman!”

And the liberal reaction to her shock candidature was anything but political. This was a middle class elite showing its disgust for her and her lifestyle. She is a gun-toting, hockey-mom redneck; she dared have a child in early middle age!! She returned to work after only a few days after giving birth…!

And remember - these are not conservative critics , they are the Huffington-ites of this world.

So could a foreigner immediately identify, and be identified, with one of these tribes? Blair? He maybe is a ‘liberal’ and is at ease with the Clinton tribe. But he is also a war-monger and supporter of the neo-con project of bombing democracy into the Middle East and elsewhere.

Maybe Balcerowicz would understand a little easier. There are some similarities between Poland and the US in this regard. Poles have always thought tribally - most urbanites have little in common with small town or rural folk. They vote differently on that basis. The Kaczynskis, despite being from Warsaw and qualified lawyers, like to make a show of their ordinariness, their non-cosmopolitan-ness - Jaroslaw’s favourite food is not oyster but scrambled eggs. Both twins like to make it known that they are not too keen on foreign travel - much as Sarah Palin has done.

However, in Poland, things are different. There is not the physical separation of the different tribes. Communist housing policy mixed everyone up. New areas are emerging and transforming, but the majority still live all jumbled up together.

And anyway, Poland is a thousand tribes, and the US just two, with a few sub-tribes thrown in for good measure. It maybe is easier to rule a country with a social complexion of just two lifestyle groups, but the presidential elections are precious little to do with politics and a whole lot more about snobbery - inverted or otherwise. This is one development that Poland should not import. We may as well go back to Poland's feudal kings.

Sikorski with Laughrov

2008-09-11T20:16:00.002+02:00

The New Cold war looks like this. Bit of a laugh, innit? (photo)

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was in town today. The meeting with Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was keenly anticipated by the media commentariat. Would Sergei the Russian Bear be taken to task by Rad the Eagle? Or was Lavrov going to roast the eagle on a spit? After all, it’s Sikorski’s signature on the anti-missile shield agreement.

Would their high-octane meeting do what that particle physics experiment could not? Create a black hole with an energy force field so strong that the Foreign Ministry building on Szucha Avenue collapses in on itself, disappearing into thin air, and taking all of Poland and Russia’s diplomats with it?

There was a time when everyone thought - because Dziennik said so - that Lavrov had cancelled his trip to Warsaw after Poland’s support for Tbilisi during the South Ossetian war.

And then it was - if he does come, should he meet President Lech ‘Caucasus Rambo’ Kaczynski as well?

In the event, Kaczynski was out of the country today, busy with urgent meetings of the Visegrad group - and you can be forgiven for never hearing of it before. The G8, it is not.

So tension was high in Warsaw’s Foreign Ministry this morning.

And then…nothing really happened.

After the two emerged from their meeting it was all rather jolly and polite. If I was on the verge of a New Cold War I wouldn’t be smiling like that. But the thing is, we are not in a New Cold War - unless we want to talk our way into one, that is.

Lavrov did complain about the anti-missile system - but he was blaming the US, for trying to build a Nato ring around Russia. He said Poland was no threat to Moscow.

Sikorski said that he “understood Russia” better now. Which is good. I hope he shares his insights with us, and often.

And they both talked about the relations that are still going on between the two countries, in terms of trade, cultural ties, and so on.

So far, so predictable, so diplomatic. It was a par for the course foreign ministry meeting.

All the time the elephant in the room - Georgia - remained virtually untouched.

The only tricky bit came when Sikorski brought up the embarrassing antics of some of Russia’s generals. They love to get in the newspapers threatening to nuke Poland from the face of the universe. Which is quite rude, isn’t it?

But all in all, this was not the hyper aggressive Russia we have seen, on occasion, recently.

The historic fear of Russia in Poland is entirely understandable. But having an ahistorical fear of them is not. Russia is in a very new place right now. It has economic power, not military. It will try to hang on to as much territory as it can. It does so because it feels threatened. It’s from weakness not strength that Moscow is authoritarian and can bully.

And we should always ask ourselves: can the US, UK etc really accuse Moscow of being the bullyboy when they have taken it upon themselves to act like the world’s policeman/humanitarian social worker - whether the ‘client’ wants it or not - since the end of the Real Cold War.?

Beware the bear with a thorn in its foot. But in the end Russia needs the West as much as the West needs Russia. All talks and disputes should take that as their starting point.