Ref: “Was Poland’s Notorious Communist Dictator Actually a Conservative” by Michal Krupa, Chronicles, October 2020.
Note from Polonia Institute:
This Letter to the Editor in response to Michal Krupa article on Gen. Jaruzelski was never published by the Chronicles. Accordingly, it is time to finally make it public.
According to Michal Krupa, the communist dictator of Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski, was a closet conservative. I suppose if we follow Krupa’s logic, his coming out was the very introduction of martial law in 1981? As we now know, his martial law was an in-house job, not a Soviet diktat under threat. He sodomized Poland, not under duress, but rather acted in line with his political commitment from the very beginning, having willingly joined the Soviet security apparatus in 1947 where he remained its loyal agent for the rest of his life.
At last, the general was coming out and displaying all paraphernalia of his political sodomy, standing bare and naked in front of the Nation, unashamedly proud and stiff, as the coming out etiquette requires.
Mr. Krupa authoritatively tells the American audience that the general was one of the “most important figures in Poland’s modem history “. If by “important” he means “having a significant effect on Poland’s success or national well-being” – he was not important, not even by a labored stretch of one’s imagination. Jaruzelski was as detrimental to Poland’s well-being as any of the bloody communist satraps of the XX century.
There are civilized limits to how vulgarity can be expressed in public. Mr. Krupa crossed the civilized frontier between journalism and propaganda by using Martin Luther King’s image to elevate Jaruzelski’s image in the eyes of an unsuspecting American audience.
Mr. Krupa, with the self-authority of a budding historian, relates that Jaruzelski re-converted to Catholicism on his deathbed and received the Last Rights Sacraments. There is no public record that such deathbed conversion ever took place. It appears to be fake history, a spurious conversion as similar ones in the past, not unlike that of Charles Darwin. Sadly, Jaruzelski was no match to Darwin’s evolutionary mind, only its pathetic pedestrian disciple.
If there was a confession and the Eucharist Communion, as Mr. Krupa insists, the Church would have issued an official document or a public statement attesting to the alleged “re-conversion”.
The “re-conversion” of General Jaruzelski is a rumor spread by his communist-era security services comrades. It is reminiscent of the 1943 rumors spread in Washington by the Soviet Ambassador that Joseph Stalin “re-converted” his spiritual life and embarked to support the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. The Washington elite on upon hearing this “good news” entered seventh heaven of its blissful political ignorance.
One should remember the doctrine of the Catholic Church, namely the Seal of Confession, which is the absolute duty of priests not to disclose anything that they learn during the course of a confession. Did the Father confessor publicly announce the conversion?
Mr. Krupa, a doctoral reader at the Catholic institution of higher learning, introduced the confusing term “re-conversion” of Jaruzelski to the Catholic Church. Is anyone aware of any possibility of “re-converting” to the Church? The doctrine of the Church plainly states that once a Catholic by the sacramental authority of baptism and confirmation, then always a Catholic. Catholics who willfully and repeatedly commit mortal sins and do not repent during the Sacrament of Confession head for damnation in Dante’s Inferno.
Mr. Krupa goes on further, stating that the funeral was “… a solemn ceremony” disrupted by a group of pathological protesters loyal to the current ruling party.
However, he left out that the “solemn ceremony” was not a Sacramental Funeral Mass, but a civil ceremony like a memorial service open to atheists. Yes, the patriots were shouting, appropriately so, as that theatrical assembly was attended by detested communist rulers of the past. For Mr.Krupa, who represents a Catholic academic institution in Warsaw, the Polish patriots who demonstrated against such demonic rites are the “pathological example”.
In summary, contrary to the author’s thesis, Jaruzelski prolonged the well-being of communism in Poland, and Poland remains its captive.
Mr. Krupa missed a golden opportunity to tell the American audience something with more substantial historical interest, instead propagandizing for a communist” ..favor of broadly nationalistic ideology rooted in tradition “‘ that never was. Communist apologetics exemplified by a long citation from an unscrupulous work “From the Communist Project to the Neoliberal Utopia” intends to convince the American reader that Jaruzelski had a neoliberal economic mindset and rejected a centralized non-market economy.
The fact is, Jaruzelski was an uneducated, simple-minded, political apparatchik and could not remotely understand the free market economy’s nuts and bolts and its prerequisites.
To suggest otherwise amounts to intellectual abuse and violence done to the truth.
At the time around 1989, there was almost ecumenical fervor of the ruling communist class to privatization of the national economies and public property. Privatization – not the free market – was the political goal.
By “privatization” ruling communists meant “theft”. And they were quite successful at that, as theft has been the essence of communism since 1917.
It was in 1981 at the very beginning of the Martial Law that Jaruzelski arrested and imprisoned top comrades of the Polish Communist Party (PZPR), including its first secretary, Edward Gierek, and its premier, Jaroszewicz. This was a seminal historical moment, marking the new era of political power transfer from the communist party to the communist security and military intelligence services under Jaruzelski’s control. Juruzelski’s power grab was undoubtedly ordered by his handlers in Moscow. Soon, the same power grab happened in Moscow itself when the Soviet Communist Party and its Politburo were ousted from power by the state security apparatus of the KGB GRU of the Vladimir Putin incarnation. And so it remains.
Mr. Krupa writes, “Then came the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the partition of Poland in 1939.” No, definitely not some “partition” and not some innocuous “pact”, but rather joint aggression and brutal occupation of Poland by Germany and Soviet Russia. It was a jointly executed Russo-German annihilation of the Polish nation, exterminating jointly 3,000,000 Christian Poles, devastating the country, and helping themselves to enormous theft of national treasures and property.
The historical fantasy continues in Mr. Krupa’s learned narrative meant to canonize Jaruzelski: “.. .his tragic deportation to Siberia” … “We know that during this time Jaruzelski lost his religious faith and renounced his anti-Soviet views.”
Soviet deportations to Siberia were not tragic as Mr. Krupa wishes us to believe, but rather deadly. Very deadly, in fact. Imagine a forced weeks-long cattle train journey from Poland in the dead of winter. The elderly and many young children did not make it. There were no funerals along the way, no “solemn ceremonies”. Dead bodies were thrown from moving train cars.
Krupa continues his journalistic fiction by poetically reflecting that Jaruzelski, during his time at the Siberian GULAG, came to his senses and naturally lost his religious faith and bravely renounced his anti-Soviet views. I am curious how he “lost” his Christian faith and why he fell in love with the hangmen? Well, some of us may have an inkling of how it happened.
I suppose Mr. Krupa may know it too, but he will not divulge it.
History tells a different story, namely that Jaruzelski denounced his own father to the Soviet security forces NKVD. His father perished and young JaruzelSki returned to Poland to a bright and secure life in the communist-occupied country. His mother, an exceptional woman, passed in 1974. Five bishops celebrated the Catholic Mass and burial followed with similar pomp and reverence. Her son, Wojciech, did not attend the Mass or burial.
Mr. Krupa allows his imagination to run amok with a comically servile claim that Jaruzelski would himself fully identify with statesmen like French Marshal Petain. Did he?
Marshal Philippe Petain, a French patriot, and hero of World War I, pragmatically collaborated with the Germans after France fell before the German army in May-June 1940.
For ever-so-politically-correct Mr. Krupa, it was the Nazi invasion. The difference is that Marshal Petain was a French officer and a patriot and did not arrive in France with the occupying German army to occupy France. Quite the opposite.
In stark contrast, Jaruzelski arrived in Poland in 1944 as a trusted political and intelligence officer of the occupying Soviet Red Army. At no point in his lifelong loyal service to Moscow did Jaruzelski ever defend Poland, in spirit or in deed.
The world continually needs idols to adore and Poland, in her long history, lacks no heroes. A penetrating question to ask: why do forces remain in Poland trumpeting the merits of communists to the heavens? Even more astounding is the fact that this trumpeting hails from a supposedly Catholic University in Warsaw bearing the name of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.
Cardinal Wyszynski (1901-1981), the Primate of Poland, was unabashedly confronting communist rule in Poland. He was a statesman of the highest caliber. He was the lnterrex of Poland.
Lastly, I must point out an omission intended to whitewash an ugly image into a politically respectable one. The author willfully omitted Jaruzelski’s rabid Anti-Semitism, which prompted him to purge his communist peoples’ army corps of all Jews.
And one more thing which flies in the face considering the timing of publishing such a triumphant panegyric of Jaruzelski:
In August 1920, 5.5 million Red Army troops under the command of the arch-Bolshevik Leo
Trotsky was marching West to conquer Europe. At the gates of Warsaw, the immense communist army was confronted by less than a million Polish troops. The asymmetry of the armed forces was spelling defeat for Poland, and the Red Army had already announced its impending victory. “Not so fast, comrades” the Poles announced, and the monstrous Soviet Red Army was decisively defeated by Poland. Christian Europe was saved.
Wouldn’t it be a great subject to write about today, 100 years after that Polish victory? And by the way, on November 3 vote T-Rex.
Sincerely,
Mark Maciolowski
[a long-time Chronicles subscriber]
