OUT OF STEP
Some Polish Americans are having a hard
time coming to terms with the election of Bronislaw Komorowski as
President of the Republic of Poland. Having been Acting President
since the tragic plane crash of April 10, he was elected by the
citizenry on July 4 and will be inaugurated in his own right as
President in August, 2010.
We thought the days of the
witch-hunters was almost over in Polonia, but it lingers on. The
extreme right-wingers refer to the incoming President as a communist
or, at least, a sympathizer. The epithets are still applied to
anyone with whom they don’t agree. These are the same sorts who
cannot accept Barack Obama as President of the United States. Being
Black does not seem to be Obama’s problem, but being liberal and
supporting real democracy makes him anathema. The same reasoning
applies to Komorowski. If you do not bow to the outdated notions of
conservatism, well, you must be a commie. Somehow, it makes sense to
those opponents who have convinced themselves that beating the other
side to absolute submission by any means elevates them to the
pinnacle of democracy. Weird, but it seems they actually believe it.
It has taken me a long time to say it
openly, although I’ve been thinking it for a long time, but
ultra-conservatives are a bit goofy and a lot deluded. Examine them
sufficiently and you will find their extreme beliefs to be founded
on false notions of history, a misunderstanding of the basic tenets
of democracy, a confusion of the relative positions of church and
state, and, of course, a mistrust of the people. The latter notion
follows from the conceit that only they can know the truth.
Paradoxically, the truth would make them free, but they do not want
to displace their own deeply entrenched ideology with anything else,
regardless of how sensible or reasonable.
Getting back to President-Elect
Komorowski himself and his supposedly communist background. The
truth is that he acted with the democratic opposition during the
communist regime as an underground publisher. He was sent to prison
in 1979 along with other members of the Movement in Defense of Human
and Civil Rights. Them in 1980-81, he worked in Solidarity’s Center
of Social Investigation. During the same period, he signed the
founding declaration of the Clubs in Service of Independence. Much
of the foregoing led to him be interned under martial law. It should
not come as a surprise, then, that he taught at a seminary from
1981-89.
Yes, that’s the guy the Jaroslaw
Kaczynski supporters call a "commie."
The Polonian right-wingers are clearly
at odds with Poland’s increasingly liberal population, much of which
considered Komorowski’s election opponent, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, to be
a political Neanderthal, out of step with a modern Poland, which is
swiftly and increasingly assimilating with the rest of Europe and
Western thought. Even more succinctly put, Kaczynski is a fossil,
wanting to rule a politically and socially backward Poland that no
longer exists and surely never will again.
American Poles who retain Polish
passports could vote in the July 4 election. Unlike those who
remained in Poland, they voted in favor of Kaczynski, leading my
friends in Poland to ask how they could be so far removed from the
Polish consensus. It is not an easy question to answer, except for
what has already been said at length above and, perhaps, separation
from the homeland for so long having frozen them in a time now past.
After all, the extreme right was once a reasonable reply to the
extreme left and it must be hard to shake that posture … or to get
in step with a maturing democratic Poland.
POLONIA
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