Ooh, a Purge!
I thought I’d missed them!
Times Online - Poland prepares purge of communist collaborators
Teachers in Poland are sweating their way through a nerve-wracking summer holiday. The new Government of Jaroslaw Kaczynski is preparing a purge of hundreds of thousands of Poles suspected of collaborating with the communist secret police, including headmasters and university chancellors as well as journalists, diplomats, army officers and politicians of all colourings.
“The twins mean business,” said a 51-year-old teacher who once taught my son at a Warsaw kindergarten. “It’s time to retire.”
“The twins”. God that’s funny.
“We are dismantling the past but we don’t believe in a future,” said the novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, one of many intellectuals critical of the ultranationalist, anticommunist line taken by the twins. “Those who still believe in a future are leaving the country in droves.”
This time, the victims of the purge are people who co-operated with the communist police two or more decades ago. A list of all former secret police officers is to be placed on the internet. The names of their informants will be made public. Anyone in public life who is on either list — and was born before August 1, 1972 — can be sacked.
Until now the Transparency Law, first passed in 1997, has applied only to members of parliament and senators. They faced a ten-year ban from political life if the authorities discovered that they had lied about their former contacts with the secret police. That law was regarded by many in Central Europe as a model of how to deal with the past. It allowed former communist agents to live normal lives, providing that they did not seek a political career. About 27,000 people were vetted under the law.
But the Kaczynski twins are determined to push harder and to accelerate what they call the decommunisation of Poland, 17 years after the communists surrendered power.
July 26th, 2006 at 12:58 am
To the Gulags with the collaborators! Work! Work is the way to salvation! Make up for your crimes against the people! The salt mines await! Education! No, Re-education! Re-education is the key to the glorious future!
I’m thinking camps with some nice inspirational posters, 18 hour-a-day patriotic songs blaring over the loud-speakers, self-criticism sessions, isolation alternating with over-crowding, insufficient food, over-work, the occassional beating… and so on, and so forth.
Just to be fair.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:00 am
I’d like to see Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and other Marxist academics stand trial for treason against intellectual freedom. Then I’d make them read Hayek and nothing but Hayek for 10 years. That’d fettle ‘em.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:18 am
I don’t know Hayek but I liked the old Funniest Item of the Day from a couple of months ago about the copy of Atlas Shrugged in every night stand.
July 26th, 2006 at 10:31 am
We are dismantling the past but we don’t believe in a future, Those who still believe in a future are leaving the country in droves. - Oh boo-hoo-hoo communist crybaby! Nobody is forced to believe in a future for Communism. So to what Worker’s Paradise where are they going in droves then, to Cuba or North Korea?? Good riddance.