Roman Giertych, former education minister and ex-vice PM, is retiring from politics. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (photo: Roman with what's left of his electorate).

His party, the League of Polish Families, only got a miserable 1.3 percent in Sunday’s election. Will this mean the end of Poland’s curator of 1930s style nationalist politics? Does this mean the end of his type of nationalist politics?

He is going back to his old job and setting up a law firm in Warsaw. Journalists, he said, will ‘get a 20 percent discount.’ Which is nice.

Looking back at all the posts I have devoted to this guy, I don’t know where to start summing up the year and half he has been in Poland’s government.

So I’ll just content myself with reliving a few of his choices quotes and moments.

How about when he drew up a new school reading list – the latest wheeze to come out of the Roman Giertych Education Think Tank (subtle as a ‘tank’, very little ‘think’).

Off the reading list went Gombrowicz, Witkacy, Conrad, Kafka, Goethe, Dostoyevsky...and on the list, lots of books about JP II.

And then there was the assault on evolution (see Descent of (Ro)man).

Or how about his contribution to the Polish language, with the popularizing of the term Homoagitacja – homo-agitation?

He was a little obsessed about gays, was our Roman.

‘The propaganda of homosexuality is reaching ever younger children. In some countries it is even forbidden for children in hospital to talk or read about mommy and daddy, because this allegedly violates minority rights.”

Or how about Roman’s chief henchman, Wojciech Wierzejski, who after recommending that gays should be bludgeoned if they took to the streets of Warsaw, had some deep insights about homosexuality, with which he would like to share:

“Every police officer will confirm that homosexuals are a circle that is nearly 100% identical to the circle of pedophiles. It is a fact that does not require any research.”

What a charmer!

Or remember when Giertych, as education minister, took over the organization of exchange visits of Polish and ...Israeli school kids? Tel Aviv was not pleased.

The Israeli press repeated the well rehearsed view that Giertych was...well...you know...not really the right person get involved in Polish-Israeli relations.

But President Lech Kaczynski felt he had to defend Roman when on a trip to Israel.

"Giertych is not anti-Semitic, He only grew up in an anti-Semitic tradition. He is the son and grandson of Polish politicians. But recently he has undergone a change [spooky!]. Today he is certainly not anti-Semitic. There is no problem with him. The problem lies in the extremist elements in his party."

Um...

But Giertych is amazingly sensitive on this subject. He took the massive step – for him, anyway – of visiting the memorial to the Jedwabne pogrom. In his political tradition this was akin to treason.

On communists? Well, he had quite strong views on the subject.

We must go forward and chop, it's a knife fight! Otherwise we'll lose. If we stop, they will take everything from us. The tradition of bloodshed stands beside us. This is something different from the styrofoam tradition, of those who supposedly fought communism, those from the Workers' Defense Committee and other Trotskyites!

Is his demise the demise of his ‘movement’?

Is there Life After Giertych?

Now that he has stood down as leader of his party, does this make them the League of One Parent Families?

And who am I gonna write about for the next two years?

Still, I can console myself that his even more nutty dad, Maciej, still lurks in the endless corridors of Brussels.

More?

I have just seen that henchman Wierzejski will be the self styled 'face' of the 'New Endecja' - so League look set to remain bunkered down in the nationalist 1930s.

Every time Giertych senior opens his mouth something nasty comes out of it.

“Germans have been trying to dominate Europe for a thousand years”, Maciej Giertych, MEP told a Polish TV channel. He believes the present German chancellor is “trying to do the same, but using different methods".

Bad hair cut Merkel an equivalent to Hitler? Surly some mistake?

“Hitler’s methods were completely different, but I’m talking about a chain of actions taken by Germany over decades”, he explains.

Whereas Hitler used the Luftwaffe, Merkel is using the EU to bulldoze its way through Europe to dominate the continent in a demonstration of the Nietzschian will to power, perhaps?

“Mr. Giertych badly needs medical help. Germany has been implementing the democratic state principle for 40 years and we have a great chance for an advantageous alliance with them, yet such comments may destroy everything,” says MEP Dariusz Rosati.

Besides Giertych is not really being a threat to anything – the guy is increasingly an isolated eccentric on his last legs as a politician - may be medical help wouldn’t actually help him much at all. Giertych’s is an ideological sickness, a virus caused by his determination, as I have pointed out before, to live in the time of the great Polish nationalists such as his hero Roman Dmowski – way back in the 1930s. He loved the guy so much he named his son after him.

It’s going to be called LiS – ‘lis’ is Polish for fox.

Stop sniggering…it’s true – Andrzej Lepper’s Samoobrona (Self defense) party and Roman Giertych’s Christian nationalist Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families) will unite. Take the first letter of Samoobrona and the first letter from Liga, add an ‘i’ (and) and you get LiS.

When asked which of them would be the leader of LiS, Lepper said that it would probably be a joint leadership: “Me - balanced, calm and serious. Vice premier Giertych - eloquent, intelligent, witty.”

One possible election slogan for the new LiS party, says Lepper, could be: ‘Strong as a lion, cunning as a fox’.

Is this man on drugs?

But why and how, I hear you cry, would an ex-Stalinist like Lepper (previously a member of the old Polish communist party) and an uber-Catholic nationalist like Giertych get together and form a party? What have they in common, ideologically?

Well, not much, really. Policy-wise though, they both want to de-privatize much of what was sold off after 1989. They both want to limit foreign influence and renegotiate Poland’s membership of the EU. But that’s just about it.

What they have most in common, of course, is that both their parties have little support left in the country after a year and a half in the coalition government with PiS, and if an election was held now they would be left with no members of parliament at all.

Hence the emergence of LiS – the cunning fox. Lepper thinks that if they stand together they could get, ‘around 17 percent of the vote…’.

I think that is more than wishful thinking. I think voters will see it for what it is: the naked opportunism of two desperate men. LPR voters, what’s left of them, won’t stomach voting for Lepper, who has just been thrown out of government on suspicion of being involved in a corrupt land deal. And there are lots of other Christian nationalists to vote for that are outside Giertych’s party – like Marek Jurek’s PiS splinter group, for instance.

This unbelievable new alliance – LiS – looks less like a cunning fox, and more like a dumb, mangy old mongrel.

More Pope, less literature...

This is the latest great idea from the Roman Giertych Education Think Tank (which is about as subtle as a ‘tank’, but with very little ‘think’).

Giertych said yesterday on the radio that ‘teachers all around the country have sent in suggestions for what should be on compulsory reading lists for school students.' He said that more about John Paul II should be put on the list but…

Gombrowicz, Witkacy, Conrad, Kafka, Goethe, Dostoyevsky...

...should be taken off.

These are, of course, some of the most significant names in literature in the last century, or so.

The secretary of the late Witold Gombrowicz, Rita, for instance, told a newspaper this week that her former boss would have got the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1969, I think) if he had lived a little longer. Unfortunately he died that year and the prize went to …Samuel Beckett.

So if Gombrowicz is good enough for a Nobel Prize then why shouldn’t he be good enough for Polish school kids’ reading lists?

I am not sure that teachers all over Poland really have been writing in pleading for Gombrowicz et al to be – like gays – banned from Polish schools.

So what has Giertych himself got against these writers, one wonders?

I am off to Amsterdam on a bit of journo bizzzzness. Next post Wednesday evening.

Ciou for now….

4,000 turned up for what is becoming an event in the calendar in Warsaw.

Maybe only 100 turned up for the counter demonstration by the new youth wing of the League of Polish Families (LPR) – an organization hastily cobbled together after All-Polish Youth got kicked out of the party after one too many embarrassing neo-Nazi type antics.

LPR had tried to get the Equality Parade banned, of course – this time on the feeble excuse that homosexuality was against Christianity, and the Polish Constitution [?] which apparently privileges relationships between men and women.

Unfortunately for LPR the Polish Constitution also guarantees the right to free speech and assembly, a concept that they and many in the present government are still struggling with. And as Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the Mayor of Warsaw pointed out, to ban the march would be to go against a recent ruling in the Court of Human Rights.

I was sitting in the Jazz Bistro in the centre of town watching the parade pass. It looked fun. One old lady sitting at a table next ours said to her elderly companion: “Such a lot of young people….it’s that Roman Giertych I blame….”

Photo by Joseph Vogt

p.s. - Some moron has been impersonating the beatroot on the All-Polish Youth web site. The second comment is me, the first is not. How sad.

pps – There was a March for Family and Life in Warsaw today, organized by ultra-conservatives. It’s hard to know how many turned up. It says here between ‘600 and 3,5000’, which is rather vague. Was that the gap between what the organizers said and what the police think? .

Equality Parade, Warsaw, May 19 14.00…… Krzysztof Bosak, leader of the Youth Movement of the League of Polish Families not pleased: “ Public propaganda of homosexual lifestyle is a threat to public morality and is against natural law as well as family values, which are in our Constitution….”.

Or homo-agitation in English. It’s the linguistic contribution to the Polish language of education secretary, Roman Giertych.

To agitate means to arouse interest in (a cause, for example) by use of the written or spoken word.

Homo-agitation will not be allowed in schools – meaning gay groups will not be allowed into schools to ‘promote’ homosexuality - if Giertych gets his way. He is going to create a new law to ban these heathens entering the gates.

In the mind of Roman, heterosexual kids could turn gay at any second, if exposed to 'homosexual propaganda'.

His idea of a law banning gays from high schools has support from Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and from Andrzej Lepper, also part of the coalition, Giertych cliamed today.

His is an interesting, and fluid, view of sexuality. It’s even one many gay and lesbians might agree with, in a way.

I remember great rage among my fellow sociology students when models of homosexuality were introduced in lectures claiming that a part of the brain of homosexuals was somewhat unusual.

Or how about the (in)famous Xq28 chromosome. This, I remember caused outrage among gay campaigners when geneticist Dean Hamer published his research in 1993. That would mean that gays are, in some way, 'abnormal'.

The dominant view in sociology back then (late 1980s, early 1990s) was based on a Foucaultian model of sexuality – of the power of ‘discourse’ and ‘counter-discourse’. The work of British sociologist Jeffrey Weeks is typical of this view. Any biological explanations were not PC, even ‘fascist’.

Well, they needn’t have worried – as they have an unlikely ally in Education Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Roman Giertych – the man who gets highly agitated by the thought of homo-agitation. He’s a man, basically, who is afraid of speech and the power he thinks it has - another curious similarity between the conservative nationalists and some trendy liberal, deconstructionist post-modernist.

We live in strange times.

Pro-life and pro-choice supporters march through Warsaw today. (photo: Gazeta Wyborcza)

Two separate marches merged into a demonstration of 4,000 people in front of parliament, where lawmakers were debating amending the constitution to tighten Poland's anti-abortion law, already among the most restrictive in the EU.

See here and here for details.

The pro-lifers want to stop even women who were raped having an abortion, and want to enshrine into the constitution the ‘right to life from conception to natural death’ into the Polish constitution.

Usually, a change in the constitution requires a referendum to decide. That’s why there was one before joining the European Union.

So why do you think that the League of Polish Families, Radio Maryja – and the ruling Law and Justice – are trying to avoid having one?

Because they think they would lose.

I called for a referendum on this issue a long time ago. We need to debate this issue in this country.

The only folk who should be afraid of democracy are those who don’t feel very comfortable living in one.

See video of pro-life march at tvn24.pl

Polish Catholic-nationalists, and 'liberal' environmentalists, in their different ways, fear there is a demographic time bomb waiting to go off. Bang!

Poland’s population is shrinking faster than any other country in the EU. Strange that, in a country that claims to be 95 percent Catholic, don’t you think?

The average family in Poland has 1.22 children, and a couple of weeks ago the government announced tax breaks for working women with children which will cost the tax payer 17 billion zlotys (US$5.6 billion, €4.5 billion). At a time when the EU is pressing the government to cut its budget deficit, that's not going to help, fiscally.

Catholic nationalists (of which the governing coalition is full of) blame all sorts of things for this. Feminism is the main culprit, apparently. They would like women to get back in the home and return to what the ‘natural’ function of a woman should be: being a baby machine.

A report by the UN adds to these people’s fears. In half a century’s time Poland will be one of the oldest nations on earth. In a dozen nations - including Japan, Bulgaria, Macao, Hong Kong, Italy, Poland, Korea, Slovenia, Romania and Spain - four in 10 citizens will be 60 or older by 2050, the UN says.

Eeek!

Does this mean that Poland will simply fade away as a nation?

But scratch the surface and you will find that what these people are really worried about is that there will be no Polish Catholics - the 'true' Poles - left in Poland to light up the candles in church before Mass.

A shortfall of population can easily be addressed by immigration, of course. But that, as catholic nationalists like Maciej Giertych would say, would weaken Polish (read ‘Polish Catholic’) ‘civilization’.

But if immigration is the obvious solution, then where would it come from?

There is always the less developed countries. They have lots of babies, don’t they?

And the tree huggers don’t like it

Whereas catholic nationalists in Poland fear that the low birth rate is a threat to (Latin) civilization as we know it, western ‘liberals’ think that there is just too many people in the world.

It’s getting impossible, for instance, to pick up the UK Guardian without being confronted by some misanthropic gibberish like this from ‘columnist’ Juliette Jowit:

In the time it takes you to get to the end of this sentence, seven people have been added to the population of the world…..

Then welcome seven new people to the world, I say! It’s a great place to be, if you avoid reading the Guardian too often, that is.

Jowit works herself up into a froth of indignation about how we cannot deal with ‘climate change’ without cutting down the number of humans on the planet.

Some population activists argue the world can only support a population of two to three billion, even as few as 500 million in future [?!?]. But even if reducing the world's population is unlikely or distasteful, it is incredible that there is not even a debate about limiting and maybe one day reversing growth.

….some braver voices - Sir David Attenborough, Jonathan Porritt and Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, to name a few - have begun to raise the issue.

Well, Juliette (where does the Guardian get these morons from?) Sir David Attenborough, Porritt et al have not suddenly 'began to raise this issue', they have been raising it for sometime. In 2003, these people - who have formed the scary sounding Optimum Population Trust (sounds like a bunch of Nazis) - were calling for the UK’s population to be cut in half!

Attenborough, the BBC’s natural history guru, seems to prefer the company of tigers and algae to his fellow human beings.

But whereas these kind of people would be scoffed at in the past, today this kind of thinking is becoming almost mainstream.

It’s basically a form of neo-Malthusian ‘analysis’ – which progressives used to laugh at when I was at college in the late 1980s – which fits in well with the culturally miserable-ist times.

What both Catholic Polish nationalists, and the tree hugging human haters need to be told is that too many humans, or not enough Poles, is not the problem. The problem is the lack of faith in human ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

It just goes to show that neither conservatives nor liberals have the ideology to cope with the modern world.

A little more faith in humanity, and a little less fear of the future, will sort this out. Humans - even immigrants! - are not the problem, they are the solution.

Roman wants any new EU Constitution (yawn) to include a ban on abortion and rights for homosexuals.

Education and deputy prime minister Giertych has been justifying what he said in Germany yesterday: legal abortion is a ‘form of barbarianism’, and homosexuals threatened the future of European civilization as we know it.

‘The propaganda of homosexuality is reaching ever younger children." [Giertych said in the speech released to the Polish media Friday].

"In some countries it is even forbidden for children in hospital to talk or read about mommy and daddy, because this allegedly violates minority rights. Let's free ourselves of this unwise political correctness."

"If we will not use all our power to strengthen the family, then as a continent there is not future for us. We will be a continent settled by representatives of the Islamic world who care for the family."

Of course, the image of gays ushering in the European Islamic Caliph is a delicious one and should be cherished by us all.

And it follows nicely on from the recent bizarre ramblings of his father, Maciej, whose nasty little pamphlet, Civilizations at war in Europe, proved that these are minds locked into a 1930s time-warp (see my review here).

Responding to charges that he is an anti-Semite loon, Maciej told the European Jewish Press:

‘Those who said [the pamphlet] is anti-Semitic haven’t read it. My impression is that critical comments come from people who have not read the book. They read only a few sentences".

No Maciej, I read the lot. Every word. It’s anti-Semitic tripe (and much more besides). The EJP continues:

He said his text, published in English, is an attempt to promote the teaching of Polish professor Feliks Koneczny, who has developed a "very interesting" method of classifying civilisations. "I am presenting his methods of classification," Giertych said. "It is in fact a contribution to the big discussion occurring in the world at the moment about the clash of civilisations."

I like the tense of ‘...Feliks Koneczny, who has developed a "very interesting" method of classifying civilizations.’ Note ‘who has’...but the guy died 58 years ago. Koneczny, and his ideas, are well and truly in the past (very simple) tense.

And that’s where the Gietychs should be. There has been a big fuss over the latest antics of the Giertych dynasty. But these people are no big deal, and their ideas – so antiquated – will gradually fall to bits like an old, pre-war, wardrobe.

Giertych-isms are well passed their sell by date.

Take a deep breath and come with me as we delve into a mind stuck in the 1930s.

‘Jews form ghettoes’….’they settle in our civilizations, preferably among the rich…’

That’s one of the classic lines in a just released ‘scholarly pamphlet’ you can be sure will be on all Polish school students’ reading lists, any time soon. His son is the present education minister, Roman Giertych, and the magnificent piece of scholarship is LPR Member of the European Parliament Maciej’s rambling ruminations on Civilizations at war in Europe.

I just read the whole thing. It’s…..er...

Maciej Giertych goes neo-con?

No, no, no. This tract is not the product of the pre-Iraq war neo-conservative ‘battle of civilizations’, but back, way back to the 1930s, to nationalist politics frozen in time from 1945 - 1989, now seen staggering around Poland like a man recovering from long Soviet years of frozen animation, into the blinding light of post-Communist Poland.

That was a long sentence, wasn’t it?

Civilizations at war in Europe is based on what Giertych believes was a truly marvelous writer, odd-ball Polish historian Feliks Koneczny, the founder of the so-called ‘comparative science of civilizations’, who died in 1949. It takes in garbled sociology, tongue-tied linguistics, and a bit of 1930s race biology is thrown in for good measure.

Giertych on race

Civilization is a strong marriage barrier. People normally look for a spouse from the same [culture] as their own. They expect to share civilizational norms with the spouse. As a result the covilizational barrier becomes a biological one. In biology animals and humans develop as a consequence of isolation.

In the introductionary passage he seems to use the concept ‘human race’ and the differences between races of animals, synonymously. Whites, Arabs and Africans are, for Giertych, like the biological variations between wild cats and domestic cats.

That’s something mainstream biology gave up decades ago when categorizing humans. Human races – in the plural – is not a biological concept, but a social one.

But no matter, Giertych is not using race to explain the growth of societies – at least not in this essay. Civilizations are not formed from races, he says but from culture.
.
Giertych on Civilization

He says in the ‘method’ section that the categorization of cultures:

’…will be used hierarchically. Thus within the Latin civilization there are such cultures as British, Spanish, Polish and others. Within the Jewish [civilization] one can find Sephardic, the Hassidim, the Karaim and other cultures.”

Note ‘hierarchically’… But which civilization is on top, we wonder, breathlessly?

He spends rather a long time on trying to demonstrate certain defects in writing expressed in other than the Latin script. He claims that Chinese pictorial writing inhibits abstract thought [?] and that written Hebrew, because it expresses no consonants, leaves ambiguity in meaning[!].

Arabic script, though, is good, because you can scribble it quickly[!!].

Latin civilization (and he uses civilization and culture interchangeably) is the most enduring and successful [shock!] only spoiled if it comes under pressure and does not defend itself from either the outside (historically Byzantine and Turanian cultures, - meaning basically Russia and Germany) or from Jews from within.

It’s a Rip van Winkle world view in a 1930s rain coat. And there is a hole in his sock.

Giertych has a coded go at Law and Justice.

He fights his long dead 1930s nationalist dad’s battles for him, saying that Pilsudski-ites, followers of Marshall Jozef Pilsudski – and arch enemy of Giertych’s nationalist idol Roman Dmowski - were characteristic of the Russian and German cultures, in their preferred political system of a strong leader, leaving decision making to the higher-ups. That’s why they went along, as the Dmowski nationalists did not, with the Pilsudski led coup of 1926.

It’s a historical reference with a contemporary inference: the present Law and Justice led coalition government – of which Giertych’s League of Polish Families is part – consider themselves ‘Pilsudski-ites’.

Giertych’s whole view of today is informed by the nationalist struggles of the past. By bringing up Pilsudski as some kind of example of how Byzantine strong leader culture had infiltrated Poland’s ‘Latin’ culture, he is back fighting the inter-war struggle between the nationalist Endecja movement and the Sanacja government, filled with Pilsudski-ites.

Come on Maciej, isn’t it time to move on, old boy?

Giertych on Jews

Jews are not a race. So, logically, he says, almost proudly, “It’s a mistake to think that anti-Semitism is racism”.

Er….

“We [Poles] consider the Jewish people today as a tragic community, a people that has not recognized the time of its visitation,’ he says.

The real problem with these people, writes Giertych, is that they are still waiting for the messiah, when everyone knows he turned up 2000 years ago in Jerusalem. Jews have suffered for this religious blindness ever since.

The cultures that recognized Christ flourished, but the Jews did not, and:

‘…became wanderers, jealously nurturing their Chosenness, this messianic consciousness, which gives a defining mark to their [culture].'

The essay really starts to pick up speed now, and it all just comes tumbling out.

On intercultural relations

Cultures – civilizations – must remain separate, otherwise they weaken.

This is why a Jew cannot be a Pole. Neither can Gypsies.

“Can a Gipsy become a Pole? Though [sharing the same language and religion] I think most Poles would tell you, and most Gypsies, that no, they cannot.’

After a brief detour into the Arabs (they are coming to get us, you know) he concludes:

‘…differentiate civilizations are mutually exclusive. Integration, middle ground, the ‘melting pot’ are not possible.'....The war between civilizations will be fought in the schools. Who will have the greatest influence on the minds of the young? Who will education our children?

He then makes a little detour back, way back, into his family’s past, to a golden age when men were men and women did what they were told. He bizarrely accuses the work of Polish Nobel prize winning author Wladyslaw Reymont of exhibiting un-Polish, un-Latin, elements.

‘In 1925 my grandfather forbade my mother of a standard text in her school, Chlopi, by Wladyslaw Reymont, because he considered it had immodest content. The whole class read it, but my mother did not…she never did read the book.

Which European school today would respect such a wish….?'

Giertych’s essay is a hymn to the ‘Latin culture’ and how it should defend itself against the invasion of other cultures; divorce, homosexuality, abortion and the EU are all symptoms of this creeping occupation. Poles, with a higher sense of national identity, have a lot to teach other Europeans, if we are to won the war of civilizations.

and so it goes on...and on...It's a pamphlet that should not be put on the shelves of the national library, but the natural history museum, where it belongs.

Maciej Giertych’s diatribe to the dinosaurs, which, in its richness and modernity, and it’s breaking of intellectual barriers, will be poured over by scholars for years, is here. Do not read just before bedtime.

Well, several members of the Polish parliament did via email from the ultra-nutty anti-Semites, National Rebirth of Poland (NOP).

According to chief NOP crazy Adam Gmurczyk the e-cards are in reaction to ‘absurd political correctness’.

The two incidents of ‘political correctness’ he is referring to are: the binning by a department store in Germany of thousands of Santa Clause toys showing Old St Nick making a Nazi salute (though the Rossman store protested that Santa was innocently pointing to the sky); and the outcry in Poland by media and most politicians after a film was found showing members of the All-Polish Youth having a kind of outdoor ‘fascist BBQ’ three years ago, shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’…accompanied by a swastika burning in the background.

“It was enough for the All Polish Youth to make some gestures for journalists to think that Fascism had arrived," said Gmurczyk, dumbfounded by all the fuss.

But even Roman Giertych, Head of LPR and founder of the reformed All-Polish Youth in 1989, has since disowned them.

As regards the Nazi Santa toys...well, yes, they could be pointing at the sky as Santa spots where he parked his reindeer. Banning them was silly, but shows how sensitive anything resembling the Nazis still are in Germany today.

But Polish ultra-nationalists dismissing the furor over All-Polish Youth – and producing the very stupid Christmas card above - shows that these people have a rather warped idea of what the word ‘irony’ means.

In that context, the Santa Clause toys, and the Xmas card, become a sick form of ‘fascist ketch’.

Just to give you a flavour of National Rebirth of Poland’s er...’politics’ (the group has been going since 1981) a recent campaign during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict included a poster stating, "Bomby na Izrael - Już czas!!!" ("Bombs against Israel - it's about time!!!")

But I suppose me protesting against that kind of crap is just ‘political correctness’.

Maciej Giertych’s assistant joins in the fun at neo-nazi party.

dziennik.pl reports film evidence of a neo-nazi party (that’s having a good time ‘party’, but maybe not only) two years ago in Silesia, with lots of drinking, cries of ‘Sieg Heil’ and burning swastikas etc, attended by members of the All-Polish Youth (Młodzieży Wszechpolska), the Giertych-jungen of the League of Polish Families (LPR).

It gets worse. Spotted at the neo-nazi knees-up was a female assistant of Maciej Giertych, Euro MP and senior member of LPR.

Holding nazi type gatherings is illegal in Poland under article 256 of the penal code.

Leader of LPR, Roman Giertych (and former president of Młodzieży Wszechpolska), denies any knowledge of the matter and says that any perpetrator of improper behaviour must be punished – ‘and that includes All Polish Youth.”

In July this year, the editor of Zielony Sztandar printed an apology for accusations that All Polish Youth were fascist sloganizers, promoting violence and criminal activity. I bet he wishes he had to stuck to his guns.

Don’t forget to support All-Polish Youth’s jolly web site in English. It has comment boxes like a blog, so I am sure they will be glad to hear what you think.

More?
Right-wing Polish European Parliament lawmaker dismisses aide after neo-Nazi rally video, IHT, Nov 30

Far right Polish politicians are not descended from apes.

Members of the League of Polish Families (LPR) have started a campaign against the theory of evolution. Miroslaw Orzechowski (deputy education minsiter) said:

"The theory of evolution is a lie, an error that we have legalised as a common truth….We should not teach lies, just as we should not teach bad instead of good, or ugliness instead of beauty….We are not going to withdraw Darwin's theory from the school books, but we should start to discuss it."

According to Orzechowski, Darwin only thought all that stuff about humans descending from apes because he was ‘a vegetarian’ and consequently lacked ‘fire in his belly’ [?].

His boss at the Education ministry and leader of LPR, Roman Giertych umed and ahed about evolution on Radio Zet, though he is on record as not believing a word of Darwin’s Descent of Man.

The story started earlier in the week when Roman’s father, and member of the European Parliament, Dr. Maciej Giertych (who is an expert on the genetics of trees) did call for evolution to be taken out of European textbooks.

Maciej Giertych is a well known Creationist biologist. In a forward to Creation Rediscovered, by Gerard J. Keane, Giertych wrote:

‘Genetics has no proofs for Evolution. It has trouble explaining it. The closer one looks at the evidence for Evolution, the less one finds of substance…..

A whole age of scientific endeavor was wasted searching for a phantom. It is time we stopped and looked at the facts! Natural sciences failed to supply any evidence for Evolution. Christian philosophy tried to accommodate this unproved postulate of materialist philosophies. Much time and intellectual effort went in vain, leading only to negative moral consequences. It is time those working in the humanities were told the truth.’

So what are Polish kids going to be taught in biology class, if the Giertychs get their way?

Well, take Noah’s Ark. Creationists like Maciej Gietych, following John Woodmorappe’s book Noah’s Ark: a Feasibility Study,.have spent much energy trying to prove that Noah did in fact take animals on a large boat during the floods. Woodmorappe and others calculate that the ark, as it says in Genesis, was about 140x23x13.5 metres (or 459x75x44 feet), so its volume was 43,500 m3 (cubic metres) or 1.54 million cubic feet. To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent volume of 522 train carriages – which Woodthmorappe calculates could accommodate around 16,000 animals.

‘But, Miss’, I hear the kids thinking at school as they are being taught this, ‘How would Noah get rid of, you know…all the animal shit?’ He was in the boat with 16,000 animals for just under a year.

Answers in Genesis.com clears the matter up (if you forgive the deliberate pun):

‘It is doubtful whether the humans had to clean the cages every morning. Possibly they had sloped floors or slatted cages, where the manure could fall away from the animals and be flushed away (plenty of water around!) or destroyed by vermicomposting (composting by worms) which would also provide earthworms as a food source. Very deep bedding can sometimes last for a year without needing a change. Absorbent material (e.g. sawdust, softwood wood shavings and especially peat moss) would reduce the moisture content and hence the odour….’

It might have smelt fresh on Noah’s Ark but do I detect the smell of bullshit trying to enter the science classrooms of Poland?

More?
League of Polish Families info pages

Capital punishment is back on the Polish political agenda.

Generally the public is very much in support of the death penalty, it is the politicians and other bodies who oppose it. I am quite sure that it will be difficult to reintroduce death penalty but someone has to start work in this direction.

Those are the words of the far-right League of Polish Families, MEP Maciej Giertych, who is launching a campaign to reinstate the death penalty. He’s going to get half a million people to sign a petition demanding a referendum on the subject.

President Lech Kaczynski said last week that the EU should debate reinstating execution EU-wide.

EU establishment’s jaw hits its boots.

Giertych wants to start with the most outrageous killers – predatory pedophiles who murder children.

“The public is afraid of such criminals after they are released from prison.'

Poland formally gave up capital punishment in the late nineties. But nobody had been executed since 1988.

Donald Tusk, Leader of Opposition Civic Platform, a party that tries to appeal to the more ‘liberal’ voter, said that:

“Everyone would be willing to do away with a freak who kills children but on one condition - everyone has to be aware of the repercussions of the reinstatement of capital punishment in Poland. One of the most important for the millions of Poles would be the weakening of this country's position in the EU or even the exclusion from the most vital membership rights.'

One of the conditions of entering the EU is giving up the death penalty.

As usual with Civic Platform this is rather feeble opposition. The only argument they can come up with against capital punishment is that ‘Brussels won’t like it’.

If Tusk wants to oppose capital punishment then he is going to have to make some rational and coherent moral and judicial arguments why capital punishment will not make children any safer from pedophiles, nor will it make Poland a lovelier, happier, place to live.

But why now?
This might be about the EU, sovereignty, but all politics is local. By jumping on the momentum of Kaczynski’s remark, the League’s petition campaign is an attempt to give it some distance from its senior government coalition partner, Law and Justice (PiS). This could well be about pressing the right populist buttons to reinforce the electoral base.

PiS, who in opposition in 2004 tried to get a reinstatement of the death penalty (and lost by four votes!) and will make noises about reinstating it when in government, are still wary of the huge international consequences if they tried

The League couldn’t care less.

Commentator Oskar Chomicki told Radio Polonia:

'The League of Polish Families wants to be recognized as a separate political entity versus the ruling Law and Justice. It is a local issue but it also has some international repercussions.'

League of Polish Families is hovering around 5% in the opinion polls, barely enough to get them members of parliament in an election or many councilors in the local elections later this year.

It’s time to play the hang ‘em, flog ‘em’ card.

Roman Giertych, chief of far-right League of Polish Families calls off counter demonstration to the gay rights march in Warsaw this weekend.

The two marches, led by the Campaign Against Homophobia in Poland and the counter demo, organized by the youth wing of League of Polish Families, were to walk the same route Saturday lunchtime, only in different directions.

But now the counter demo has been called off. Why? “We are going to celebrate Poland’s participation in the World Cup, instead”, said Giertych.

And a much better use of the young men’s time it will be, too.

Poland’s first game is against Ecuador on Friday.

So the far right, All-Polish Youth, think that football is more important than intimidating gays, lesbians, trans-gendered individuals and human rights campaigners? What is the world coming to?

A cynic would say that Giertych, now that he is deputy prime minister, wants to put forward the best image he can. He likes his place in the coalition. So members of his party brawling in the streets would not go down too well with the new image - Giertych the Statesman.

He's also got the other problem of having at least 137,000 students signitures on a petition demanding that he be sacked as education minister.

But I am just an old cynic. I am sure he loves football as much as me.

But what if Ecuador beat Poland tomorrow? Will he still want to celebrate the World Cup then?

The Tolerance Parade will still be taking place Saturday.

There is a feeling that the All-Polish Youth know that the Tolerance march, which will be joined by thousands of people from outside Poland – particularly from Germany – was just going to be too popular to compete with. This, coupled with the fact that Giertych does not want bad publicity at the moment, contributed to the cancellation of the counter demonstration.

Whatever, this is a defeat for the far-right here and a victory for tolerance and modernity.

For more see Tolerance Parade web site

...’If deviants begin to demonstrate, they should be hit with batons.’

That’s the views of the spokesman for one of the three parties, League of Polish Families (LPR), that make up Poland’s government coalition. He’s referring to the planned Tolerance Parade in support of gay and lesbian rights scheduled to take place in Warsaw on June 10.

And as Marcin Sobczyk reports in the Warsaw Independent the far-right politician thinks the recent protests and petitions against the new coalition government could not have been the work of true, honest Polish students (it was) because:

“There aren't enough anarchists in Poland to organize such large rallies on the streets,” Wierzejski told the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. “Homos organize those rallies using online chats and forums. They sign all kinds of appeals against [LPR leader] Roman Giertych.”

Wierzejski also reiterated his earlier statements that there was little difference between homosexuals and paedophiles.

“Every police office will confirm that homosexuals are a circle that is nearly 100% identical to the circle of paedophiles. It is a fact that does not require any research,” Wierzejski said.

What a charmer!

Troglodytes like him are now in the Polish government.

Polish reactionaries and EU liberals have more in common than they think.

It’s becoming a bit of a habit. Local authorities in Poland, this time in the mid-west city of Poznan, have banned a Gay Pride march, scheduled to take place this Saturday. The reason the local council give for denying people the right to free assembly and expression is that the march would be a, ‘serious danger to social order and property.’

A similar excuse was given by the then mayor of Warsaw, and now president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, when he banned (for the second year running) a similar parade through the centre of the capital this summer.

Of course, if you asked these politicians what the real reason is for such authoritarian behaviour they would tell you that they just find homosexuality offensive and ungodly, and don’t want to see such a parade in their city.

Polish human rights campaigners have argued that banning gay pride marches goes against the Polish Constitution. The European Union has warned President Kaczynski that he is going against human rights agreements signed by Poland.

Meanwhile, down at the EU parliament…

An anti-abortion exhibition entitled Life and Children in Europe ended in fisty-cuffs yesterday. Sponsored by MEPs from the League of Polish Families (LPR), the exhibition showed photos of unborn foetuses, and children in WWII concentration camps.

Enraged by the connection between terminations and Nazis, liberals and social democrats in the parliament, where the exhibition was being displayed, tried to take down the photographs. Security guards intervened when LPR members tried to keep the photos just where they were, and a fight broke out.

But the liberals succeeded in getting the offending material taken down.

Leader of LPR in the EU parliament, Maciej Giertych, said that he “never thought that the exhibit would be censored. I thought parliament was the place where controversial opinions were expressed.”

And, of course, he’s right. Just because someone doesn’t like opinions being expressed, or finds them offensive – like I do - is no reason to ban those opinions.

And that includes the actions of bigots in the local council in Poznan. Just because they find homosexuality offensive is no reason to ban a Gay Pride march.

Both the League of Polish Families and the liberals in Strasburg seem to agree that freedom of speech and expression is only permissible if that speech is not offensive to anybody.

But freedom of speech is not divisible. Both gays and anti-abortion activists have the right to press their case. And if people don’t like that case then they should be free to oppose it. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is becoming increasingly unfashionable, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum.

If I was the security guard at the EU parliament I would have left the MEPs to it. These days, bigots and 'liberals' deserve each other.

It’s not been a good week for European liberty.