The mind almost blows a fuse when contemplating the nightmare of Poland’s latest national tragedy: the deaths of Lech Kaczynski, President since 2005, and no fewer than 96 others in a plane crash on April 10.
President Kaczynski and his fellow victims (who included National Bank of Poland director Slawomir Skrzypek, as well as parliamentarians from all parties in the national legislature) had visited southwest Russia in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of an even worse disaster. That disaster was the mass execution, in 1940, of more than 20,000 Polish military officers, public servants, Catholic priests, physicians, and intellectuals at various venues, under orders from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Politburo.
The most infamous site of this grisly slaughter was the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, where the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish officers were found in mass graves in 1943. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they had been executed by a shot to the back of the head or neck. Thousands more of Polish prisoners were similarly executed by the Communist NKVD in prison camps in Belarus and Ukraine. In all, they slaughtered nearly half the Polish officer corps. The Soviets blamed the Nazis (guilty, heaven knows, of their own monstrous crimes against humanity) for the atrocity. Yet, even though the mass graves were found and the truth came out, no communist ever served five minutes in jail for the Katyn massacre.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has announced his willingness to establish a special commission into the crash’s cause. Putin remains unrepentant about his own KGB background. The KGB, of course, was the most well known acronym given to the dreaded Soviet secret police during its many reformulations over the decades. Currently, in its post-Soviet reincarnation, the KGB has been renamed and reconfigured as the FSB (for domestic intelligence) and SVR (for foreign intelligence). Like Putin, the FSB and SVR leadership are KGB veterans, and, except for very limited disclosures, the KGB records from the Soviet era are sealed.
Amid so much current grief, we can but hope that some proper research, encompassing the relevant Soviet archives, will be carried out into yet another Polish tragedy. This was the death in a July 1943 air crash of Poland’s exiled Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski, whose plane landed in the sea near Gibraltar within minutes of takeoff.
Sikorski, in the months before his demise, had publicly called upon the International Red Cross to investigate the Katyn butcheries. Even then he knew, though the average Western politician did not, who bore the blame for that particular achievement of Murder Incorporated.
The demand Sikorski made for Red Cross action caused the Soviet regime to break off all diplomatic relations with his London-based expatriate cabinet. Predictable agitprop emerged from Moscow — and was faithfully parroted by the Western media’s useful idiots — about Sikorski’s "Nazi" sympathies.
Even after Stalin’s own unlamented death, every attempt to get the matter publicly discussed in Britain was stonewalled. British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in 1969, assured the House of Commons — on the basis of documentation never published — that the original British investigation into Sikorski’s death had been satisfactory: "there is no evidence at all [he further said] that there is any need or reason to re-open the inquiry." Wilson, even during his own lifetime — he died, a senile wreck, in 1995 — never successfully rebutted allegations of being a Soviet agent. Was his involvement in the 1969 findings pure coincidence?
And was it yet another pure coincidence that Churchill, still in the throes of what can only be described as his adolescent crush concerning "Uncle Joe" (his own phrase), proclaimed: "There is no use prowling round the three-year-old graves of Smolensk"?
Was it pure coincidence that at the time of the Gibraltar crash, the Iberian Peninsula chief of British political intelligence MI6 (SIS, to give its 1943 name) was that celebrated "patriot," Kim Philby? (Harold "Kim" Philby, for those unfamiliar with the name, was one of the most notorious traitors in modern espionage. A member of the "Cambridge Five" Communist spy ring, Philby became a deep mole in British intelligence and caused tremendous damage to Western security before fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1963).
Was it pure coincidence that the brutal murders of 42 unarmed Jews in the Polish city of Kielce on July 4, 1946 were blamed in the Soviet-controlled press on "fascists," by which word was meant simply anti-Communists? In fact — as even left-wing historian J. T. Gross admitted in his book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz — such archival sources as survived Stalinist purging indicate that the murders were committed by local Communist agents provocateurs. (Anti-Communist leader B. A. Santamaria, though dependent wholly on what information he could obtain from the other side of the world — Melbourne, Australia — stated this simple fact in his magazine News Weekly within a month of the slayings.)
Was it pure coincidence that President Kaczynski, along with his twin brother (and former Prime Minister) Jaroslaw Kaczynski, had worked more dutifully than any other post-Cold-War Polish political leader to permit research into Polish collaboration with the Soviets during the 1946-1989 period?
Was it pure coincidence that both President and Prime Minister did everything in their power to oppose the flooding of their country with the porn-abortion-sodomy culture which now invariably accompanies Western European liberalism? This flooding has occurred even in countries such as Spain, Greece and Portugal, which until the mid-1970s had recognizably Christian governments holding the line against what James Joyce pungently called "syphilization."
All pure coincidence, you understand. If you believe that any conspiracy has ever existed anywhere in the world since the dawn of time — least of all that any conspirators should have sought to reinvent their nihilistic, sexually degenerate canting as modern "conservatism" — you are a Bad Person and should probably have been left kicking and gagging on the end of a Nuremberg rope.
In 1952, the Henry Regnery Company published May God Forgive Us by Robert Welch, the founder of The John Birch Society. The book was republished in 1960 by American Opinion, predecessor to The New American. It is a testimony to evil’s persistence (as well as to Robert Welch’s clear vision) that most of these words could be written in 2010:
The real trouble [Welch observed] is a callousness throughout the whole mood and the collective conscience of the American people. How can we expect either a Roosevelt or Truman to have been disturbed by the barbarous Katyn Massacre, or to have reduced for that reason their pampering appeasement and generosity to its perpetrators? The news of a similar mass murder, of eight thousand of our own sons and brothers, as prisoners of war behind the Korean lines, caused only a temporary ripple of indignation across the national consciousness; and we go serenely on negotiating with, and making new concessions to, the cold-blooded murderers.
What’s the matter with us, anyway? Neither facts nor pictures seem to sink into our centers of feeling any more …. The physical suffering, the mental anguish, the never-ceasing terror of our fellow human beings, represented by these words and pictures, no longer reach through the glaze to activate our imaginations or to excite our sympathies….
For the pusillanimous part that we played in all this spreading horror; for our indifference to the grief of others; for our apathy to the crimes we saw and our blindness to those we should have seen; for our gullibility in the acceptance of veneered treason and our easy forgetfulness even when the veneer rubbed off; for all our witting and unwitting help to the vicious savages of the Kremlin and to their fellow ordinate savages everywhere, may God — and our fellow men — some day forgive us!
Photo: Polish President Lech Kaczynski speaks to the press prior to boarding his plane in Warsaw, Poland, on Aug. 12, 2008: AP Images
