Jaruzelski vs Pinochet

I would love to buy the bloke who bricked Jaruzelski a drink. The only sad thing is he only stunned the bastard. But Poles are hoping for another best-selling book before he snuffs it.

Amazed that all this merits an academic argument.

Yes, the case of Mr Helski, farmer, wronged by communist authorities, was scandalous indeed.

Comment : TVP1 showed on Monday, 1 February 2010 documentary Fri " Comrade General " by Gregory Braun and Robert Kaczmarek . The film depicts the life of Wojciech Jaruzelski . After the film there was a discussion led by Ed. Rafal Ziemkiewicz , with the participation of journalists Jacek Zakowski , Wojciech Mazowiecki, Peter Zaremba and Lukasz Warzecha . As my voice in the discussion I present an article written October 12, 1994 at the request of the Secretary- editor of "Gazeta of Poland". The text was not allowed to print.

But hitting a man with a stone in the face was a barbaric, un-Christian revenge. After so many years the hatred didn`t subside.....???


Come on, it is just an innocent forum discussion. :):):)

To be fair, they could have crushed the Church if they wanted - but it would have meant keeping Poles in a genuine police state and tied up considerable Soviet resources in doing so. It made far more sense to leave the Church be.


It is absolute nonsense. Holding such hatred in your heart can only bring you down too.

Sorry, Delph, crushing the Church was impossible at the time. :):):) Stalinist communists tried it in 1940s/50s but failed and gave up.


No, it would mean execution of millions who were ready to die for their beliefs.

Protests in Poland


Exactly. :):):)


Yes. I have never been able to understand people who hate others and never forgive.

Did they really try that hard, though? I know there was the usual Stalinist tactics towards the Church, but never a massive repression with a total ban on attending Church?


Do you think that millions really would have died for the Church? It doesn't seem likely to me - people were already destroyed by the years of war - if the Church being outlawed meant a return to relative normality, would many people really have tried to fight?


Likewise. It must be such a burden to carry around day after day.

Personally, I'm only sorry that Jaruzelski (and others) were never brought up in front of a South African style Truth and Reconciliation process.

Yes, right, no massive repression because, as I said,



No, not for the Church. But for God, yes.


And that`s why they needed God so much.


How can the destruction of the Church lead to relative normality???


That`s interesting. I never heard about it.

It's an interesting question - would those that were left (especially the intellectuals that had survived) really put themselves in a situation where Poland was going to be finished as a result just for the sake of attending church?

It's only a guess, but after those long years of war and the harshness of Stalinism, I don't think people would fight for it. But let's not argue about it :)


Well - if the deal on offer was the Church being outlawed in exchange for some stability and an improvement in living conditions, I think people would have accepted it. I think Poland was so brutalised to the point where they simply had enough. A great mystery to me though is why the Stalinists didn't just take over the Church in the first place.

For me, the whole Party-Church relationship in Poland was exceptionally interesting. I know by the 70's, many small places had settled on a consensus that the Party and the Church dominated local affairs.


It's an interesting idea - you give everyone immunity from prosecution, but they are expected to tell the full truth in the process.

Jaruzelski vs Pinochet
Jaruzelski is far worse Jaruzelski is responsible for hundred of thousands people killed during ww2 with his reports about patriots and then after the war for enslaving a nation.

hmm...... subtract a few zeros.....

Comparison of the so-called special lustration court in Poland and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

The New York Times
nytimes.com/2007/01/22/opinion/22osiatynski.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0 - Poland Makes Witch Hunting Easier
By WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI

Warsaw, January 22, 2007

Politics breeds conflict. And that is why politicians should leave some sensitive realms of morality alone. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was separated from contemporary politics. In Poland, the past has became prey for today's hunters, proving again that whenever history falls into the hands of politicians, distorted truth becomes an instrument for their own goals.


Czesław Miłosz w "Traktacie poetyckim":

[i]Niech tutaj będzie wreszcie powiedziane:
Jest ONR-u spadkobiercą Partia.
A poza nimi nic nigdy nie było
Prócz buntu godnych pogardy jednostek.
Któż miecz Chrobrego wydobywał z pleśni?
Któż wbijał myślą słupy aż w dno Odry?
I któż namiętność uznał narodową

Let it be stated here clearly: the Party
Descends directly from the fascist Right.
Outside of them there was never anything
But rebels whose posturing merited scorn.
Who resurrected the sword of Boleslaw the Brave?
Who drove pillars into the bottom of the Oder?
And who recognized that the way to power
Was to blow on the coals of national passions?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolesław_Piasecki - And the fascist Right was quite close to the Church, wasn't it?

Church-bashers will never comprehend that it was mainly Holy Mother the Church that enabled the Polish nation to survive as well as it did despite attempts at de-Polonisation over 123 years of partitions, the WW2 Nazi-Soviet occupation and 45 years of Soviet enslavement. De-Catholicised countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Protestantised East Germany became the harshest of Stalinist dictatorships. The Church helped stop the collectivsiaton of Polish argciutlure, and only in Poland were hardly any churches converted into warehouses, offices, communtiy centres, etc. The Church and its millions of faithful were a force to be reckoned with even by the despotic Soviet-imposed regime. A weak or decorative church not involved in public affairs crucial to the nation's well-being could not have achieved that. It was largely the Church's uncompromising stance that softened the regime's oppressive MO and helped turn Poland into what has been called 'the jolliest barracks in the Soviet camp' (najweselszy barak sowieckiego obozu).

I do not think that those most secular countries were overcome by the religious fervour of Stalinism. As you know, the man's only education, who gave the name to the movement, was a religious one: first at the Gori church school and then at a seminary in Tbilisi.

The diary of Andrei Arzhilovsky:

The portraits of our leaders are now displayed the same way icons used to be: a round portrait, framed and attached to a pole.
Very convenient. Hoist it on to your shoulder and you're on your way. It 's just the same as people used to do for church holidays.

They had their activists then, we have ours now. Different paths, the same old bloody nonsense.

That Stalinism was turned into a religous cult, creaqted a pseudo-litrugy and annexed many of its trappings is obvsious, but that pseudo-religion had far fewer adherents in Poland than in any other captive nation. Catholicism increased the nation's resistance to Stalinism, whilst secularism made it more receptive to the intrusive false ideology brought to Poland on Soviet bayonets.

They, secularized countries, just yielded to power, they had to, just as Poland did. And there were some in Poland who collaborated willingly with the Stalinist regime although they declared themselves to be Catholics, for example Bolesław Piasecki and his PAX movement.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolesław_Piasecki

What do you think of him and his movement?

PAX was never supported by the Church which knew its prupsoe was to weaken and undermine Poland's mainstream Catholicism. It was the only way a pre-war Falangista Piasecki could have hoped to play any role in Soviet-occupied Poland. he story goes that he personally was received by Stalin who spared his life in exchange for hsi pledge to undermine the Church. There was also a group of renegade Priest-Patriots under the thumb of the regime who collaborated for different perks and privileges. Professor Edmund Ordon of Detroit's Wayne State Unviersity once told me that PAX's only redeeming factor was that it made it possible to publish books by Catholic thinkers that would otherwise not been published in a Soviet-bloc country.

Not to mention the ones that collaborated.

I forget his name, but there was that priest that estimated something like 8-10% of the Church was compromised.

His name is Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski and he has estimated that some 10% of the clergy collaborated. Not a bad result when compared to the writers, journalists, teachers, actors and academics who supported the regime. The figure would undoutbedly be smaller if one considered only those priests who voliuntarily and servlistically collaborated for private gain as opposed to thsoe hwo were blackmailed, harassed and/or intimidated in various ways. The UB had their tried and proven methods.

Yes, that guy was really a scandalous lowlife.


True but not only. PAX also gave work to anticommunist patriots from AK who left prisons in 1956 and were turned down by official state institutions.


I read a good book about it:




E.g., the one who suffered from a serious disease and had to take special medicine not produced in Poland. Communist secret service provided him with the medicine and required information.

If it's true, then the number is similar to elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. I find him an interesting character - but perhaps not a reliable one.


Are there numbers available for those professions?


Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. I dare say that a significant number of priests were simply blackmailed.

Yes, but not exactly. In other countries, especially USSR, 10% priests DIDN`T collaborate with communists. :):):)

15% more like.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6233531.stm

Let's start with a warning from Jesus: Judge not, that you be not judged.

It does not matter much if they did not compromise the Christian values; in Poland it was possible because, as Polonius3 said, Poland was the freest barrack in the Socialist camp to some extent due to the Catholic Church. One of those values is forgiveness, truth and reconciliation.

Some examples priests themselves have shared with me:
**A leaky church roof was destroying valuable religious art but building materials and all the necessary permits and paperwork wase availkable only to those clerics willing to play ball.

**A priest's elderly parents were often harassed if their son did not want to collaborate.
**Priests not willing to do the UB's bidding were denied passports to travel to Rome and uncooperative bishops had their semiarains conscripted. (Popiełuszko did time in one such special army unit for seminarians who were brainwashed by commie indoctrinators.)

**A village priest who declined to collaborate may have received a little girl's First Holy Communion photo sent like an open non-enveloped postcard addressed to FAther So & So with the message: 'Daddy, I wanted you to have this souvenir of my First Holy Communion. Your loving daiughter Marysia.'.

**The paedophile business wasn't in vogue back then or the UB would have surely used that to destroy the credibiltiy of uncooperative priests.
Just a small snippet of the system personified by the Jaruzelskis and Urbans of this world!

You're wasting your time Marek - my compatriot from Poznan , who really should know better, is leading the (baseless) argument for a re-appraisal of Jarulzelski's crimes by basically saying , "yes, oK , he was a wrong 'un - but you had to be there and lead the illegitamate regime to try to change and mould it from within."

Absolute garbage - Jarulzelski and his cohorts were simply murdering and thieving commies - and if that scum ever came within a mile of my Polish family, who were true patriots and stood up to be counted, robbed, humiliated, threatened, imprisioned in police cells, and dismissed on a daily basis as they were, from being a respected and God fearing Dabrowa Gornicza family - to being reduced to toil and scrub the toilets in their own town cinema, that they built with their toil, and for the daily takings to be taken away in a bag for the Party to **** out of...well screw that "hatred will eat you up" crap. I would get out the heavy weapons.

This excuse for a man, and his killers should have been treated as the East Germans and czechs treated their scum. Olszewski was right
End of academic discussion - I admire what you're trying to do Pawian, and it is historically interesting...but there is a another usurper from history we can draw a parallel with......

Bonnie Prince Charlie was another aspirant to power - in another land in another time. Like Jarulzelski, he was both misguided and a clown, and a usurper.

What we do know is that after Culloden, his men were hunted like dogs and hacked to death or shot where thay were cornered, in street, or home, or place of victual, even in church.

The last would be a wonderful place for Jarulzelski to die - so he can meet his maker sooner rather than later - and be fast tracked - the bastard.


Exactly. Never thought I would agree with you Polonius - of course if it were so that the authorities "allowed" the church to exist, we also have to consider the altruism of the sad commies who were sneaking off in secret to communion - even if they hadn't attended confession - still afraid for their souls. Because they knew the extent of their betrayal.

That or a deep-seated superstition.

Excuse me, but if so, then you have been in the business too long for that shiit!

You're trying to arouse emotions in your story. Can you be more detached in telling it.

Hmm, it doesn`t sound like a discussion, it looks like a very emotional outburst.


Of course they didn`t fear for their souls, they attended religious ceremonies because of their families` pressure.

Doug, I'm sorry to call you out on this one, but what convinces you that they were as genuine as they say they were? We saw in East Germany that families were destroyed by revelations in the files - people who were supposedly ultra-opposition turned out to be collaborating, and that many families were betrayed from within. If the family suffered that much - then it makes you wonder if they didn't have a traitor in their midst. Of course, the files are mostly closed, so you won't be finding that out anytime soon.

I'm of the opinion that it is very, very difficult to know for certain that someone was clean in those times.


It's remarkably easy for you to say as someone who didn't have the Soviet Union breathing down your neck to judge Jaruzelski.


That sort of unhealthy hatred will get you nowhere. Communism has been dead for 23 years and counting - not to mention that it didn't affect you personally.


I'm sorry, but you never suffered personally at the hands of Jaruzelski.

Agreed. Some party members did (and do) strongly believe they were making the world a better place.

Indeed. It's remarkably naive to believe that all Communists were corrupt - even looking at Jaruzelski, his history shows that he was never interested in the perks that accompanied power. I can't judge for his whole character, but it seems that he genuinely believes that he was doing what was best for Poland.


And one that I don't understand. Being furious at Communists if you're Antoni Macierewicz makes sense, but being furious at them when you grew up and lived in a country where Communism never really took hold? Odd.