Not only Mazowiecki damned an innocent bishop

Tadeusz Mazowiecki was not the only prominent Pole who brown-nosed the Stalinists and provided false evidence against Bishop Czesław Kaczmarek, accused of being an 'American spy'. Prominent writers who bore false witness included Szymborska and two of her husbands as well as many other well-known wordsmiths:

Karol Bunsch, Jan Błoński, Władysław Dobrowolski, Kornel Filipowicz (future husband of Szymborska), Andrzej Kijowski, Jalu Kurek, Władysław Machejek, W. Maciąg, Sławomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Nowak, Julian Przyboś, Tadeusz Śliwiak, Maciej Słomczyński (a.k.a. Joe Alex), Wisława Szymborska, Olgierd Terlecki, H. Vogler, Adam Włodek (first husband of Szymborska), K. Barnaś, Wł. Błachut, J. Bober, Wł. Bodnicki, A. Brosz, B. Brzeziński, B. M. ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_show_trial_of_the_Krak%C3%B3w_Curia#Resolution_of_the_Union_of_Polish_Writers

" Tadeusz Mazowiecki was not the only prominent Pole who brown-nosed the Stalinists and provided false evidence against Bishop Czesław Kaczmarek, accused of being an 'American spy'."

Has anybody heard about a certain American who brown-nosed commies and spied on good Poles?

A Pole would say: Co ma piernik do wiatraka? Prominent Polish political and cultural figures were being disucssed, not some odd Bolivian, or a Canadian I happen to know or an Italo-American my sister used to date. As usual, you've got yours wires crossed in an attmept to engage in your favourite pastime: ad hominem attacks. But even there you're slipping. You failed to bring in Grand Master Bernardone for the 27th (or is it 42nd) time.

You are claiming that a group of people brown-nosed and collaborated with the commies, so brown-nosing and collaborating is the topic of this thread.

I wonder why you don't want us to talk about a certain American who brown-nosed and collaborated and thus was allowed to travel where and when he wanted while other people were locked up by the commies you are accusing them of collaborating with.

That's like saying if Tusk staggered drunk across Warsaw's OId Town and you did likewise the following day. you'd both land on the front page of the next day's Fakt and Super Express. Your proportions are clearly skewed.

So the effects of collaboration are mitigated if the perpetrator is a nobody?

That's obvious. If a prominent figure lauded by some as a hero or outsanding leader is shown to have had a hand in a rigged Stalinist show trial against an important churchman which carried the death penalty, then that is obviously something to think about and reckon with.

The damage is still the same and the burden on the conscience of the collaborator, identical.

Wałęsa obviously signed something to get the SB off his back, but he did not snitch and nobody was harmed by it. Bishop Kaczmarek was facing the gallows.

He did not, though many did.


Even more did that.


Was he found guilty?

So all your kitty-footing, beating about the bush and variaitons on the theme are an attmept to whitewash only Mazowiecki or also the other Stalinist collabroators listed above?

You really did miss the point, didn't you.

So you're not trying to whitewash Mazowiecki?

How or why would anyone need to 'whitewash' a highly respected public figure, jailed dissident and former Prime Minister?


I wonder too...

So, you believe Mazowiecki acted nobly and decently when at the urging of the Stalinist regime he affixed his signature to what effectively could have been the good bishop's death warrant.

Maybe he was telling the truth.

Did they execute the guy?

No. They didn't.

Do you know anyone who collaborated with the regime?

So rigged show trials are OK if no-one gets executed. Subjecting an innocent man to Stalinist-style interrogation (I can tell you something about that if interested), incarceration, harrassment, trotting out false witnesses, and using the signatures of lackeys such as Mazowiecki, Szymborska, Mrożek, Kijowski, Słomczyński et al to build up a false case is a normal democratic procedure in your books?

Depends whether or not the person is guilty of the crime they're charged with.


Good people without stain on their character.

I think you'll find there are people in Warsaw far less reputable...

You're not Belgian are you? Any native-speaking UK-er would know a trial is rigged and false witnesses are trotted out so an innocent person can be convicted. Totalitarian regimes have always used this procedure to eliminate their political enemies.

Regardless of the regime, people can still be either innocent or guilty.

And people can still feel guilty about having collaborated.

" people can still feel guilty about having collaborated."
Some of them rant about the imagined failings of those who stood up to the commies and do so as a vain attempt to assuage the guilt they feel deep down inside.

Bishop Kaczmarek was innocent, and that makes Mazowiecki's heinous act all the more damning. You seem not to have the foggiest idea of what stalinism was all about. Ever read Arthur Bliss Lane's 'I saw Poland betrayed'? As US ambassador to Poland he was in media res and had hands-on experience with what was going on.

Please expand what this has to do with being Belgian.

A native speaker of English would surely know what a rigged show trial was, but he pretended not to. A non-native might not know what rigged meant in this context -- it isn't a word one uses every day.

This is one of your very sly (not to say slimy) tactics....you never write something without a reason...You cold say for example "Dutch", "French" or whatever.

I hear you coming from far away :)
Since your thread about the laid-back PF member exploded in your face, another tac? :)


Rigged is an everyday English word.

If you use that word on a daily basis, then your English is better than I gave you credit for. But you should see the broader context: my interlocutor said if a person is guilty he should be convicted. The point is that trials are rigged to convict the innocent. I know he knew the exact menaing of the word and it was just part of his haranguing, harrassing, nitpicking tactics. I guess some people get theri jollies off that way. I even suggested he should join a chess club.

Is this your usual BS dug up from wiki, or do you have a bit more credible information than wiki, like the Institute of National remembrance for instance? Or at the very least a newspaper article not written by Gazeta Polska or Fakt? And having had a look at your link, guess what Mazowiecki's name doesn't even appear on the list.

Innocent of what?


Spot on.

He was even casting aspersions on a nobel prizewinning poet and Joe Alex as well.

No, wikipedia was... Kazcmarek was innocent of the trumped-up espionage charges the stalimnist regime had cooked up. Anyway, this is common knowledge and public domain available to anyone who wishes to find out.

Kaczmarek was not the only prelate victimised by the Soviet-installed and Kremlin-cotrolled puppet government. Read up on the three years of Primate Wyszyński's incarcertion. There was even a TV play about it.

All in all, you have entrenched the view that the PC dictatorship is the direct heir of Stalinism. Same type of arguments and tactics -- guilt by suspicion and innuendo, casting groundless aspersions, generating false rumours... The only difference is the lack of physical reprisals but, if things continue the way they are now going, that too will come. Already Catholic adoption agencies have been forced to close down becuase they insisted on entrusting orphans only to married couples and not on demand or whim. That's still not as 'dynamic' as beating up or killing people in dark back alleys, but it's a step in the 'right' direction!

Since the IPN was mentioned, that institution has for years been compiling documenation on the lawless, incarceration, torture and cooked show trial of Bishop Kaczmarek. Those who read Polish will learn that the Good Bishop was tortured to exact false confessions, beaten, starved, threatened, intimiadated, pulled out of his cell at night for many-hour-long interrogations, in winter confined to unheated cells with wide-open windows. Commie torurers were indeed worthy successors to their Gestapo predecessors.

Please provide us with IPN documentation / judgment on the past of Mazowiecki. That should be not hard to do for somebody who is digging up obscure usenet links.