Oh, to have one’s choice of a ride – of wheels, man, of an automobile to take you around! The vast majority of us are limited in this respect by budgetary considerations, but some are not. Among those are heads of state, and Rzeczpospolita takes a look at their choices of roadster.

This inquiry just doesn’t come out of the blue, though. Last Friday there was apparently some sort of incident involving Polish President Andrzej Duda as he was riding in his official limousine along the national A4 highway. This article only mentions this in passing; you have to go elsewhere to find out any more about it (like here, to the tvn24 site, in Polish), and even then many details are still missing. The important thing, of course, is that President Duda was completely unharmed. Additionally, there seems to have been some damage to the tires, at least, but otherwise the incident is being investigated further, by all sorts of Polish governmental agencies. President Duda was himself asked directly about it yesterday (Monday), but he was willing only to confirm that he was in fine shape.

Well, what sort of car is it that he rides around in? A common thread for presidential cars – as one would expect – is that they are made within the same country in question, so that, for example, David Cameron uses a Bentley Mulsanne, President Mattarella of Italy cruises in a Lancia Thesis, Czech President Zeman disposes of a Škoda Superb and (of course) Angela Merkel* has a Mercedes S Class. Poland is not really known for any make of cars, though, so President Duda is taken around in a BMW 7, the “High Security” version which is (like all the others mentioned) modified to reflect the needs of security (and of communications) for a head of state.

President Obama’s ride is most famous of all. It’s a Cadillac, again highly, highly modified (e.g. to enable communication at any time with the Vice President and the Pentagon; also to withstand chemical attack), known as Cadillac One, or the Beast. This vehicle is transported to any of the various places in the world to which the President may travel, and is so heavily weighed-down by its armor and other equipment (it weighs 10 tons, although with a super-charged engine that can handle all that) that it gets only 100 km per 30 liters of gasoline (that is 7.8 miles/gallon).

The piece finishes up with a listing of other Heads of State and their official cars, which I’ll reproduce (and translate, where appropriate) for you here:

• France: Citroen DS5
• Hungary: Audi A8 Ls
• India (sorry, no Tata): Mercedes-Benz S600
• Japan: Toyota Century
• Malaysia: Maybach 62 (Maybach is owned by Daimler-Benz; it’s their luxury line. Strange, Wikipedia reports that the 62 model was discontinued, so the Malaysian government may have trouble finding spare parts.)
• Russia: Mercedes-Benz S Class (just like Merkel)
• South Korea: Hyundai Equus VL500
• Sweden: Volvo S80; and finally
  
• Vatican: Kia Santa Fe (!); maybe they particularly like the model-name?

* Yes, it’s true that, properly speaking, Angela Merkel does not belong in this list because she is a Head of Government, not Head of State. Nonetheless, this is the data-point which the (unnamed) Rzeczpospolita author uses. I think we can assume German President Joachim Gauck rides around in his own presidential Mercedes S Class as well.

The second week of Champions League last-16 action kicks off tonight, with a pair of very juicy matches indeed: Bayern Munich at Juventus and Barcelona at Arsenal. So maybe it’s the appropriate time for a little reminder about one of that competition’s chief sponsors.

Gazprom has paid big to associate its name with Europe’s leading international football club competition for a number of years now, and at every commercial break you’ll see an elaborate paean to it on your TV screen, generally in cartoon form and accompanied by a medley of leading tunes from Tchaikovsky. The thing everyone must remember is that Gazprom is not really a company in the conventional sense of that term. Rather, it is a component of the Russian state, tasked with making money, for sure, but also with carrying out Putin’s strategic objectives. Those have included, multiple times, forgetting about money entirely and cutting off gas supplies to entire countries – generally in mid-winter, of course – to make them knuckle under. Among these victims have been the Ukraine, of course, but also those EU countries, generally to the East (e.g. Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Finland), which have not had the resources or time to make the considerable infrastructure switch from the heavy dependence on that gas that they had during Soviet times.

So you can watch those playful cartoons of serious-looking employees manning gas pipeline control rooms, etc., flick by on your screen, but you need to remember: this is a “company” that would be glad to simply let you and your family freeze; all that it takes is for Putin to give the word. The sad fact that it has been able to do that reflects the absence of any common EU energy policy. Yes, the Commission has certainly been aware of the problem, and of course there exists a Directorate-General for Energy within the Commission, now headed by the Slovak Maroš Šefčovič. And in one sense it’s reassuring to read (in Dutch, from Het Financiële Dagblad; behind paywall) that the Commission recently concluded from a study that “well coordinated actions by member-states, above all in case of emergency, can considerably increase the security of [natural gas] delivery.” (On the other hand: Why did they find this out only recently? And what are they going to do to make that conclusion a reality?)

Fortunately, other developments have occurred which – often independently from anything the Commission might have done – serve to lessen this dependency on Gazprom and Russia. For one thing, demand for natural gas is declining simply due to increased energy-efficiency and alternate renewable sources of energy that are coming on-line. And there are other developments, too, discussed in a separate article not stuck behind a paywall (although it is in Polish):

“American natural gas arriving on European shores forces Gazprom into a battle for the market and for investors.” Yes, the Americans are coming to the rescue again, specifically the shale-oil companies which, via fracking, have unlocked considerable new supplies of both petroleum and gas there on the North American continent. Mighty kind of them, you have to admit, namely to pollute their own ground-water and a as result have so much gas coming out of local household water-taps that you can light a match and explode it, all just to produce some more fossil fuels to sell. But the business of America is business. (more…)

Perhaps some of you in the UK will have already heard of the remarkable #polishblood initiative, but most have not. And it is all supposed to go down tomorrow (that is, Thurs., 20 August).

This is a tale of the birth and growth of a special meme, largely via social media, in this case among the very many people of Polish citizenship living and working in the UK. It started out of the substantial accumulation of grievances held by this particular cohort against the country they chose to move to – basically, of the many instances of unfair discrimination against Polish people as being foreigners, as an unwelcome people coming to the UK to steal native jobs, to compete for resources, take up space on a crowded island generally, etc.

One of their natural champions in articulating and publicizing these grievances has been Polish Express, a Polish-language UK newspaper. This publication certainly does not hold back on its Twitter-feed:

“20 thousand pounds reward for information on the affair of the degenerate who brutally attacked an immigrant” – Polish, of course.

“Immigrant [actually, not Polish this time] does not pay a fine of 20 pounds, is deported.”

“These UK firms cheat their workers! We publish the government’s ‘list of shame.'”

A few weeks ago, in the febrile atmosphere of the UK’s summer heat, resentment at this sort of treatment cropping up in the Polish Express’ on-line forum finally boiled over. “We’ll show them!” was the new attitude. “Let’s have all Polish people in the UK go on strike for a day, to show the Brits how their economy would collapse without us!”

That must have been a satisfying feeling, getting that off one’s chest and being able to look forward to a coordinated, nation-wide action designed finally to demonstrate the error of their ways to what UK-based Poles perceive as an often resentful native population, insufficiently appreciative of their contributions to modern-day Britain. Just how things went on from there, however, is not so clear.

For the evident down-side of such public action – assuming it really can successfully be coordinated on a wide scale in the first place – is that it could make British people angry even as it reminded them of how much they depend on the Poles. Indeed, it might make them angry precisely by making them aware how much they depend on the Poles.

Blood for Money

That is why we now have #polishblood, at least as Rzeczpospolita (which is of course one of the leading national newspapers in Poland) reports it. Don’t go on strike; instead, take some time from your work to go to the local hospital, or Red Cross center, and donate blood!

That’ll show those Brits! Ha! No regular Anglo-Saxon person will be able to donate blood his/herself that day, as all the slots will be taken up by Poles! In fact, according to the Rzeczpospolita piece, this new campaign took off among Poles so much that even they were having trouble arranging to go give blood on the appointed day (which is 20 August: tomorrow), so that many of them had to resort to booking times to do so even several days before. (more…)

This ain’t 1941. This is actually good news!

“German soldiers go into Ukraine.” But not to stay: they’ll be in the western part for around 11 days starting July 20, near the major city of Lviv, participating in NATO maneuvers called Rapid Trident, associated with the separate Sea Breeze exercise coming in off the Black Sea.

This is good news as the token it is of German support for Ukraine in its struggle over the eastern provinces which, although now seemingly at a low burn, has hardly yet been resolved. US troops (and ships) will be involved as well in these exercises as well, of course; the Obama administration has so far shown itself willing to go even further in its support for Ukraine than the Europeans, to include training and even selling equipment (although, so far, the latter has remained “non-lethal”).

This German participation has also attracted public Russian attention, as Vice-Premier Dimitri Rogozin inquired on social media whether the Germans were there to tour the sites of their past “military successes.” There we are taken back to 1941, and clearly the Russians aren’t happy about this development. But just let Rogozin vent, or any of his colleagues: they surely still have credit on account from the 20 million+ dead of 70 years ago.

UPDATE: And speaking of 20 million . . . Here’s a new report that the German government is increasing its budget for Bundeswehr maneuvers outside the country by that amount.

Note that this is a budgetary supplement applying only for the remainder of this year. In fact, in terms of numbers of troops, slightly fewer German soldiers are going on maneuvers outside their country this year compared to last; further, the really big exercise – named “Trident Juncture” – actually is to take place on the Iberian peninsula from 28 September to 16 October.

Nonetheless, this monetary move is seen to be an explicit sign of resolve towards Russia.

Here’s a good on-the-ground example of what the current Western skittishness about providing Ukraine with the means to defend itself actually means.

“Szrot for the Ukrainian army.” Szrot (pronounced simply as [shrot]) would be a fun Polish word in any other context: it means “scrap metal,” basically trash. But that’s basically what the Ukrainian army has to look forward to now, specifically to twenty “Saxon”-type armored personnel carriers coming fairly soon from United Kingdom stocks, to be eventually followed by fifty-five more.

This piece by Rzeczpospolita staff-writer Piotr Wożniak goes on to estimate that Ukraine will be paying the UK government about $51,000 for each such APC, which seems hardly a high amount for a military vehicle. The trouble is that this is hardly top-of-the-line equipment. A perusal of the Wikipedia page for the Saxon is valuable here, although Wożniak provides several related data-points of his own. Saxons went into service in the British Army in the early 1980s; they’re no longer actively used there because they’ve been replaced by more modern equipment. You’ll only find them still in use in backwater militaries like that of Hong Kong or Mozambique.

Even then, and even for that $51,000 apiece, none of the Saxons will come equipped with the armament that was standard for them in British service (namely a 7.62 mm MG medium machine gun, which itself is really no very big deal) – for no one wants to actually provide the Ukraine with “offensive weapons” as that would be too “offensive” to the sensibilities of Vladimir Putin. (Meanwhile, just go on-line for satellite photos to take a gander at the top-of-the-line Russian military equipment – and personnel, let us not forget – crossing the border to support the Separatists.)

Relevant to this point, Wożniak has a great paragraph:

What is interesting is that the lack of support for Kiev when it comes to weapons and military equipment cannot be rationally explained. Ukraine is not the object of any embargo, nor is it some terrorist-supporting state. There exist no legal obstacles.

Ah, but of course that is just a Pole talking, someone whose country knows all about invasions from the East from past experience, whose country is objectively next in line – just look at the map! – after Ukraine falls. That is, someone who doesn’t realize how Vladimir Putin can be a perfectly reasonable fellow, provided one simply doesn’t resist him.

Take a look: is this really a face only a mother could love? (I mean the guy on the left.)

He’s not getting much love in France right now. In fact, he’s under arrest. His name is Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala; his occupation depends on whom you ask. Avant-garde comic – or dangerous rabble-rouser. One thing for sure is that he is rather anti-Semitic in his views, and that has led in the past to cancellation of some of his shows. To name but another of his misdeeds, shortly after the beheading of James Foley by ISIL he posted a video making light of that event. (His controversial opinions also meant that he was denied entry into the UK outright – yes, which once provided exile to the likes of Karl Marx, back when it was known as the British Empire.)

But right now we’re still lingering in the Charlie Hebdo afterglow, and Dieudonné had to put his two cents’ worth in. I want to rely on this report from Rzeczpospolita in the first instance to get a little distance, a little impartiality: from this, it seems that all he did was use his Facebook account to make fun of the “Je Suis Charlie!” slogan, writing instead “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” using there the surname of the slain hostage-taker at the Jewish supermarket in Paris. (more…)

You might remember that was the publicity campaign undertaken back in 2009 by the Australian state of Queensland, when it opened applications for that “best job” of working as a blogging “caretaker” of an island on the Great Barrier Reef for six months, at a hefty salary.

How hefty? Hey: 53 thousand zlotys per month!

OK, he wasn’t actually paid in zlotys, probably in Australian dollars. But that’s simply the figure given in this treatment today by the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita:

Najlepsza praca świata: Poszukiwany kandydat do opieki nad rajską wyspą w Australii. Do obowiązków należeć będ… http://t.co/Ec5dPVxkNz

March 5, 2013 9:32 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@rzeczpospolitaa

Rzeczpospolita.pl

My calculations show that that is just less than the equivalent of €13,000 per month – pretty good! But there was trouble in paradise. Agata Każmierska’s article also tells of how the winner (who beat out 34,000 other applicants), the Briton Ben Southall, was stung by a “un-large, but uncommonly dangerous jellyfish” just days before his “best job” gig was to end. As he recounted on his blog, at first he tried to tough it out with the increasingly severe symptoms he experienced – feeling light-headed, but then fever, rising blood pressure – but finally called a doctor onto the island, who saved him from a heart-attack just in time.

That Rzeczpospolita tweet actually reads like a job announcement (“Wanted: Candidate for a paradise island in Australia”), as if “The Best Job in the World” is set to go again. It’s a bit strange: Ms. Każmierska merely hints that that might be the case, and does so inaccurately, when she writes as the first sentence after her lede, “Unfortunately, the work is only for candidates from Great Britain and Ireland.”

In fact, “The Best Job in the World” is in fact on again, but for details you need to switch to a piece provided by AFP in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique. (more…)

You may recall how George W. Bush had big plans for a Europe-based anti-missile shield, mainly aimed against anything that might come flying from Iran. The radar and control installations were to be based in the Czech Republic, while the interceptor missiles themselves would be in Poland. But then Barack Obama became President, considered that such a set-up would be too expensive – and would also probably rile the Russians a bit too much – and so canceled the whole plan, on the symbolically-important date of 17 September 2009.

(Symbolically-important only to the Poles, as that is the anniversary of their invasion by forces of the Soviet Union, back in 1939 when they were already trying to fight off German forces attacking from the West, that effectively sealed their fate and sentenced them to five years of brutal occupation. Apparently not so symbolically-important to, say, the US State Department, which must be suffering from a shortage of anyone with an awareness of modern Polish history.)

So too bad, that’s it then, right? Not so fast, as this recent tweet from the leading Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita reminds us:

Ustawa o ratyfikacji umowy ws. tarczy antyrakietowej podpisana: Prezydent Bronisław Komorowski podpisał ustawę u… http://bit.ly/eJo9DW

April 26, 2011 10:22 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@rzeczpospolitaa

Rzeczpospolita.pl

This tells us of the recent signing by Polish President Bronisław Komorowski, following ratification by the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, of the US-Polish agreement initialed back on July 3, 2010, to let Poland station some US-made, US-controlled interceptor missiles after all. For when it comes to US allies and American missiles, everyone is a winner and all must have prizes! (more…)

The past weekend was a bit of a traumatic one for Poland, and on the surface it’s easy to understand why: Sunday was the one-year anniversary of the catastrophic plane-crash at Smolensk airport of the Polish government airplane that was carrying President Lech Kaczynski and almost 100 other members of government or other prominent VIPs to ceremonies meant to commemorate the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB) executed in the deep woods near that city around 20,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia captured in the German/Russian invasions of the previous fall. But it’s even worse than that: whereas the tragedy understandably united the Polish nation in grief, a year later that effect has worn off and instead the deceased president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw – who happens to head the opposition political party Law and Justice – is now trying to make political capital ahead of elections later this year by hinting at a Russian conspiracy to kill his brother, and by denouncing what he sees as the current government’s subservient attitude to the Russians.

You would think that, for its part, the Russian government would welcome the improvement in relations with Poland that was the initial result of the tragedy and the common investigation both nations’ authorities then undertook, and so would try to prolong that any way possible. Or maybe not. For an article in one of the leading national newspapers Rzeczpospolita now informs us of a piece of trickery – petty trickery, at that – which would have elicited an approving nod from the likes of Lavrenty Beria, long-time head of the NKVD under Stalin.

What’s worse, it took an on-site inspection by no less than Poland’s First Lady, Anna Komorowska, to reveal the transgression. Last Saturday she led a ceremonial delegation to the Smolensk memorial site, now meant to commemorate not only last year’s crash but the Katyn atrocity that indirectly led to it. There, the delegation discovered to their horror that a change had been made to the memorial plaque that had been placed there shortly after last year’s tragedy. Those of you out there who would like to try out your Polish can click here to see the before-and-after for yourselves, otherwise let me just inform you that the original Polish-language tablet was gone and replaced by a bilingual Russian-Polish one. OK, there’s nothing wrong with that per se, except that space had been created to fit the Russian in by deleting the text in the first plaque which had mentioned the Katyn atrocity, cited as “genocide” (ludobójstwo)*, together with the Russian government’s admitted responsibility for that.

Naturally, the Polish government had never been consulted – because it would never have approved. The Russian authorities apparently just went ahead and made the change. Actually, it would have been more appropriate to consult the “Association of Katyn Families” since that was the name on the original plaque, responsible for putting it there. Instead, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski will have a chance to “consult” with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev today on a number of things, including – one would expect – this plaque affair.

UPDATE: Poland’s other mainstream national daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, is now reporting that the two presidents have found a solution to try to tamp down the public outrage in Poland over the Smolensk memorial plaque shenanigans. A competition! There will be a competition, run by the Polish Ministry of Culture, to come up with yet another memorial plaque, to be placed at there in time for the two-year anniversary of the tragedy next year – which, we can only hope, will proceed a bit more tranquilly, in both countries.

*Of course the Katyn massacre per se was by no means “genocide.” That word unfortunately has been so overused by those out to make cheap political points that its original meaning and impact are truly under threat – and it is only roughly 67 years old!

Wikileaks has now come to Poland: revelations from the massive dump of US State Department confidential cables have now come to the surface which – as has also mostly been the case in other contexts – do much to undermine the rosy picture of US-Poland solidarity usually presented for public consumption. Poles are now in a position to read all about them in summary articles coming out in both of that country’s prestige nationwide dailies, namely Rzeczpospolita (coverage by Wojciech Lorenz) and Gazeta Wyborcza (by Marcin Górka).

Poland had already shown up as a bit player in another Wikileaks dispatch from earlier this week, revealing new NATO contingency plans to make extensive use of that country’s transportation infrastructure to shift troops to the Baltic States should they be invaded by Russian forces. (Polish soldiers would also be heavily involved, in the form of at least one of the nine divisions slated to be included in any such maneuver.) But the only really new element disclosed in that connection by the Wikileaks dump was a certain dissatisfaction among Polish political and military authorities over the plan, since in such a situation Russia would by definition be at war not only with the Baltic States but also with Poland and with NATO in general, and such a commitment of resources would necessarily thin out Poland’s own defences somewhat.

No, the new and notable revelations that have emerged over the past few days have to do with the physical commitment to Poland’s defence made by US authorities in the form of US Army Patriot anti-rocket and -aircraft missiles sent to be stationed there. (Those who want to read an English account can turn to the UK’s official Wikileaks publisher, namely the Guardian, which spreads the story out over two articles here and here.) Recall first of all that those Patriots were stationed in Poland in the first place as an accompaniment to the anti-missile rockets that were also to have been there as part of a “missile shield” system to protect the US from Iran-launched ICBMs that the Bush Administration had worked so hard to establish, but which was then canceled by Barack Obama in September of last year. The Poles were glad to have at least that one sort of partial American military presence in their country even as the other was canceled – for the old, crude reason that having American soldiers in your country heightens the chance that they will also be killed if anyone attacks you, thus making American intervention to do something about that attack much more likely – but they had always been more concerned about threats from Russia rather than from Iran. “Don’t worry,” was the American reaction, “the Patriot can defend your territory against airborne threats from any direction, not just from the Middle East.”

There was one catch, however, as we are only know finding out thanks to the Wikileaks dispatches: those Patriots can defend Poland against airborne threats coming from Iran, Russia, or anyone else only if they are equipped with bona fide live missiles, which for the majority of their presence on Polish soil they have not been. Indeed, these communications make clear that the concept for the Americans the whole time was for the Patriot contingent in Poland (stationed in some patch of wilderness up in the Northeast, near the border with the Russian Kaliningrad enclave) to be only a training post – fly Patriot crewmen in there on occasion just to get some practice in wartime deployment to a more-exotic location to the East, work a little with what amounted to only mock-up equipment, and then get out of there again back to their home unit. Naturally, the level of permanent personnel stationed there reflected this role, usually numbering only around 20 or 30 whereas Polish authorities had expected something more like 110, reflecting staffing for a ready-to-go combat unit.

It’s something, then, but it’s not much – and it certainly is nothing that would stop Russian aircraft or missiles should the need arise. But it was all that Polish authorities found themselves able to get out of the American government, and they did their complaining quietly (e.g. about getting nothing better than “potted plants”) while never letting up on efforts to try to get even more of an American deployment of forces to Poland, and maybe with some actual combat-teeth for a change. Ideas that have arisen along this line are stationing some F-16s on a Polish airbase and/or maybe some C-130 transport aircraft and/or maybe even moving a detachment of Naval Special Warfare troops from Stuttgart to Gdansk. As it happens, Polish President Komorowski will have the opportunity today to discuss such things as he visits President Obama at the White House. But the shine is already considerably off the encounter after these latest revelations of the fast-and-loose behavior American military and diplomatic authorities display towards even the country’s closest allies (e.g. still with its own troops fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with American forces in Afghanistan).

UPDATE: As a great philosopher once observed, “two out of three ain’t bad”! The Gazeta (Wyborcza) Twitter-feed carries the news coming out of the Polish-American presidential summit:

Amerykańskie F-16 i Herkulesy w Polsce. Od połowy 2013 roku http://bit.ly/hZyovB

December 9, 2010 6:30 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@gazetapl_news

Gazeta.pl

So that will be 16 F-16’s (how symmetric!) and 4 C-130’s (all American-manned and -operated; this isn’t an equipment sale) stationed on a Polish airbase starting in mid-2013. And if you click through Gazeta’s link to the article you even can see, amid all that Polish, a nice photo of Komorowski chatting with Obama in the Oval Office.

PressEurop yesterday came forward with an obscure piece of news from Poland that may nonetheless soon resonate internationally. Citing an article in that day’s edition of the mainstream Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita, they noted that no less than Polish ex-President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, his ex-premier Leszek Miller, and an “ex-head of intelligence,” one Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, were facing the prospect of going before a State Tribunal on war crimes charges stemming from the secret prison they allegedly allowed the American CIA to set up in their country back when the “War on Terror” was at its height, and which might well have been the scene for prisoner torture.

Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights. (more…)

That’s the title of the speech that Polish President Lech Kaczyński was to have delivered at the Katyn Massacre commemoration ceremony to which he and his party of almost 100 important officials were heading when their plane crashed on Saturday. That title is now heavy with irony.

The newspaper Rzeczpospolita has posted a copy of that speech here – in Polish, oczywiście. Naturally, it mentions “21,000,” the NKVD, “Stalin’s will,” the “Third Reich” and the “Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact” within the first three sentences; Kaczyński wasn’t going there to use flowery diplomatic language.

If there happens to be a demand for a translation – and no one can find it elsewhere (I’ll be sure to post the link if I do) – then I’m open through the usual media (e-mail or Twitter) to requests to do it myself and post it here.

On the other hand, with all due respect to Poland’s tragedy of last Saturday, I can assure readers that neither this weblog nor the Twitter-feed intends to become “all Kaczyński plane-crash, all the time.”

I take this from the on-line article published by the respected Polish daily (if with an unpronouncable name) Rzeczpospolita. (UPDATE: RP modified that article! It no longer contains the list of victims, for that you click here to open/download a .doc file with the list – for as long as they keep that there and unchanged, anyway.)

Please note that I will use “RP” (i.e. the Polish abbreviation) to denote the Polish Republic. The “Sejm” is the lower house of the Polish parliament (upper house = Senate).

Victims that seem to be of particular importance (in my estimation) I have put in bold. Of further note is the sheer number of dead from among Sejm deputies – imagine how many special elections need to be called now to fill those places! (more…)

In the run-up to Valentine Weekend, the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita offers a brief cross-cultural vignette: Arabia doesn’t want any Valentines. It turns out that, while it’s normally no problem to import or deal in red roses, red hearts, or any sort of “Be my Valentine” articles in Saudi Arabia, the big exception happens to be during the days immediately preceding February 14, when the religious police crack down on that stuff, inspecting shops and confiscating anything of that sort that they come upon.

Frankly, I’d venture to say that Valentine’s Day is little more of a traditional, long-standing part of Polish culture than it is for the Saudis. Rather, it’s more likely the kind of Hallmark-card-driven “holiday” that intruded into both nations the more they became exposed to the West – and although that exposure came rather more suddenly to Poland, in the wake of the anti-Communist revolution that culminated in 1989, Saudi Arabia clearly is more determinedly vigilant about counteracting it.

UPDATE: Yes, I was right about the place of Valentine’s Day in Polish culture (it’s namely a rather recent thing), as we can see from a quite interesting article on the subject by Jan Cienski on the GlobalPost website. There is also a brief Valentine’s Day piece from Rzeczpospolita, written by Ewa Łosińska (Valentines with the Saint), that mentions the importance of the actual Saint Valentine to Polish Catholic worship (i.e. what Valentine’s meant in Poland before the opening to the West with the fall of the Iron Curtain). But this is all rather meager stuff: there are relics of the Saint within the Saint Florian cathedral in Krakow as well as a statue of him in the Ethnographic Museum in that same city, and then another figure of the Saint in a village in the area, but that’s about it.

I don’t cover the Polish press here that often; nevertheless, the overriding imperative of this weblog remains finding and discussing the most interesting goings-on within the wide ambit of my language-coverage, and these days that certainly has to lead us to the Polish front.

I use “Polish front” here deliberately, because yesterday’s headline event in Europe was without a doubt the convocation of several national heads-of-state at Gdansk, Poland for ceremonies marking the seventieth anniversary of the opening of that Polish front by Nazi Germany with the ground-attack that started the Second World War. This is understandably a sensitive historical matter for the host nation, and controversy was assured from the very beginning just by the list of attendees. That featured a few names who you would think simply did not belong at such a ceremony, for various reasons. Like James Jones, US National Security Advisor: why were the Americans sending such a relatively low-ranking official and not someone at least at the level of, say, Vice President Biden? There was also Russian premier Vladimir Putin, whose presence was sure to be controversial for more profound reasons, both contemporary (Putin has for years been engaged in an effort to glorify Russia’s past, particularly its involvement in the Second World War under Josef Stalin) and historical (that involvement notably involved the Red Army’s “stab-in-the-back” invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, arranged according to the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact negotiated only the month before).

“We can’t forget for a moment that what we have here is a great battle over memory,” preached Archbishop Henryk Muszyński of Gniezno at a Mass he held yesterday. “Preserving that memory and the entire truth about the Second World War is our obligation.” That is probably the wisest, most-reasoned remark made in connection with those ceremonies at Westerplatte, the specific spot on the coast at Gdansk where hostilities begain early in the morning of 1 September 1939, from among those cited in Rzeczpospolita’s main article covering the event, by Piotr Kubiak (After the war – the battle over memory). (more…)

Returning to my €S post from a well-deserved summer break, and thus resuming my scrutiny of European affairs, my attention was piqued in particular by the entry on Matthew Yglesias’ weblog entitled US to Scrap Eastern European Missile Defense.

“Could this be true?” I wondered. I have certainly covered this whole Czech-and-Polish missile defense system topic here before, most notably in a post from last March entitled Poles Down the River?, and my common theme has been the Obama Administration’s steadily-waning support for going through with this deployment. Yglesias – evidently a non-Polish-speaker – can only provide as reference a link to a report from the DefenseNews site that itself cites “[l]eading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza” as the source for its information. Here we can do somewhat better, of course, and even with five days’ delay it was relatively easy for me to use the Internet-tubes to find the on-line article in question (Poland without shield, by the newspaper’s Washington correspondent Marcin Bosacki – athough feel free to insert “the” or “a” there in the title before “shield,” as the Polish language ordinarily uses neither word explicitly). (more…)

A little while ago I covered here the alarming prospect for EU officials that, because of the fall of the current Czech government under prime minster Mirek Topolánek, that notorious Eurosceptic Václav Klaus, the Czech president, would in effect be in charge of much of the European Union’s important business for the remainder of the Czech Republic’s EU presidency (lasting until the end of June). Yesterday we got word from the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita (Klaus will not extend hand to Lukashenko) that Klaus is already putting his stamp upon the EU “Eastern Partnership” summit scheduled to take place in Prague the first week of May, where he is to host the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, the Ukraine, and Belarus. The president of that last country, Alexander Lukashenko, may very well come to Prague for the occasion (or, indeed, he may decide not to), but if he does, President Klaus will not shake his hand nor include him in the official reception to be held at Prague Castle.

Keep in mind that this “Eastern Partnership” summit actual takes place just before Mirek Topolánek’s government heads out the door and is replaced by a government of technocrats headed by current chief of the Czech Statistical Agency, Jan Fischer. Yet even if Topolánek had any objection to this treatment of the guest from Belarus – there’s no indication either way whether he does – his extreme “lame duck” status would provide him little standing to do anything about it. Besides, no matter who is in charge of the agenda of a summit occurring in Prague, it’s at least always up to the Czech president who he invites to come dine at the Castle.

Plus, it just so happens that this is the right thing to do. Lukashenko has long been known as “Europe’s last remaining dictator” for the ruthless way he manipulates the sham elections he is called upon to stage every so often and persecutes the native political opposition. One complaint against the EU from many who are not privileged to walk the governing halls in Brussels is the way, when some international actor does something nasty which should make him persona non grata, it seems that all that it takes is a certain period of lying low and avoiding any more nasty headlines to get back into the EU’s good graces again. Here Václav Klaus is demonstrating that, despite his somewhat advanced age, there is nothing wrong with his memory or political sense on this issue.

The big news the past week on the international relations front was President Obama’s “secret letter” he had hand-delivered to Russian president Medvedev last month. In it, he supposedly suggested – or at least hinted at – a possible deal whereby the US would stop the planned deployment of an anti-missile system with the radar installations in the Czech Republic and the actual anti-missile missiles in Poland, in return for Russia’s assistance in stopping the alleged drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, this move certainly denotes some new thinking being applied to both Russo-American and Iranian-American relations. Then again, what about the Czechs and the Poles? As is so rightly pointed out in that NYT article (the one I link to above), in those countries “leaders invested political capital in signing missile defense cooperation treaties with the United States despite domestic opposition.” (more…)

Darn, I was enjoying this article from the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita on the recent messy collision, 805 km up in space, of an American communications satellite with a Soviet communications satellite (the latter presumably inactive; then again, we also are all forced to presume that they were innocuous, civilian-type satellites when the truth could be different). And I was seized with this powerful EuroSavant-type urge to just blast off and tell y’all alllll about it!

But then I realized that the main source of information for the article was NASA. (Of course it would be NASA, who else? The Polish space agency? Jacek from Bialystok with the telescope set up in his backyard?) So why wouldn’t this news also be out already into the usual American channels?

I had to go check this out with Google News, and of course it was. You’d be much better off reading the NYT piece by William J. Broad, so go there – it’s alright, just go. Still, at the time I checked that NYT article was listed by Google News as appearing only “1 hour ago”!

The Polish daily Rzeczpospolita gave word yesterday: Israel prepares for Pope’s visit, due to occur in May.

You might ask, why wouldn’t Israel start preparing for a visit by Pope Benedict XVI if that is to come in May? Well, just to refresh your memory, just over the weekend the Pope withdrew the previous excommunications of four bishops, one of whom – a certain British-born Richard Williamson – is on record as recently as just last week as denying that millions of Jews were killed in the Nazi gas chambers.

And this is by no means the first incident tending to estrange world Jewry with the Vatican under Benedict XVI’s stewardship. For a couple of years now there has been a dispute over Pius XII, who was Pope during the Second World War. There have been indications from within the Roman Catholic Church that it would like to declare him a saint. On the other hand, his behavior during the war was at the least rather controversial, particularly when it came to his reluctance to take any steps (including mere public denunciations) in response to the reports he received, early and often, about Germany’s murderous actions towards Jews. And then, only earlier this month, the cardinal who is president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a certain Cardinal Renato Martino, publicly termed the Gaza Strip a “big concentration camp” in the wake of the Israeli military offensive there. Now, this weblog is certainly willing to admit that Cardinal Martino’s characterization is probably accurate, but you can also see how it strikes the completely wrong tone with many partisans of Israel. And now it looks like the rabbis in Italy – the highest-profile rabbis when it comes to the Vatican – are withdrawing in protest from certain planned inter-faith celebrations.

If you are aware of this background, then it’s really somewhat surprising that the current Pope’s planned visit to Israel in the Spring is still on. Frankly, this pattern of recent events strongly suggests that there is yet more to come in this baleful syndrome of mutual alienation, so that betting on that visit to go through after all may still not be a wise thing to do. The shine might be off of it already for Benedict XVI; the highlight of John Paul II’s visit to Israel in 2000 was his visit to the famous Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, but Rzeczpospolita reports that the Yad Vashem Institute itself issued an outraged condemnation of Williamson’s return to the Vatican fold, so that same invitation may not be forthcoming in May.

The impact of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s recent interview with CBS’ Katie Couric – widely considered to have been a disaster, even within GOP ranks – seems not yet to have been felt over on this side of the Atlantic. (Or – who knows? – perhaps some of those answers she gave that were judged incoherent at the time actually do make some sense when translated into other languages.) Rather, judging from the weight of press coverage, the media over here is fascinated instead with the YouTube video recently unearthed showing her in 2005 at the church she attended, Wasilla Assembly of God, standing by the pulpit to be blessed against “witchcraft” by a visiting Kenyan pastor named Thomas Muthee – a few months before she went on to win the Alaska governorship.

Black magic will not threaten Mrs. Palin is the headline of the leading Polish daily Rzeczpospolita (no byline given) (more…)

Traipsing through the Polish press lately, I found an interesting piece of commentary in Rzeczpospolita on The Spoiling of the Nobel Prize for Literature, by Waldemar Zyszkiewicz, a member of the Polish Writers’ Association. (You can read a history of that Association – in Polish – by following the link. It looks like yes, it was your standard Communist state writer’s union during most of the post-war period, but that its members offered quite a bit of resistance – and suffered quite a few arrests – during the Solidarity/martial law period of the 1980s.) You might recall my posting of not so long ago in which I commented on the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a contrast to the Nobel Peace Prize which was my principle object of discussion. It seems I was too optimistic even in my evaluation of the Literature Prize; according to Zyszkiewicz, the rot also set in there some time ago. (more…)

“He forgot Poland” George W. Bush famously complained during that first presidential debate last week. And so John Kerry apparently did. And what about Poland, and specifically its roughly 2,500 soldiers now serving in Iraq? We’re out of there by December, 2005, no matter what happens, is the essence of what Polish defense minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski announced in an interview published yesterday in the leading Polish national newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

A pretty definitive statement, you would think. And, by the way, a resounding scoop for Gazeta, since no other on-line Polish newspaper treated Szmajdzinkski’s remarks until today, and that mostly in reaction to the splash he had made in yesterday’s interview. But unfortunately it’s not so simple as all that: Gazeta had several pieces accompanying that interview – as do other newspapers today – basically passing on a message of “don’t listen to Szmajdzinski!” from other leading Polish politicians, to include such figures as the President and Prime Minister! The situation is muddled, then, to say the least. (more…)

Back to serious tragedies now, inevitably having to do with Iraq. In fact, today’s reports in the Polish press about the death of two Polish soldiers echo quite a lot of a similar incident I discussed here a few days ago which killed a Dutch soldier. (more…)

As the May 1, 2004, date for the accession of the ten new EU member-states approached, most current EU members started to get cold feet about the Union’s “free labor mobility” aspect, which is supposed to mean that any EU citizen can go work freely in any other EU state than his own. For the Spanish or Portuguese moving to, say, Austria or Germany, that’s OK – studies show that in fact European workers are generally to little inclined to leave the home and culture they are used to to make use of this facility anyway. But then all those Czechs, Hungarians, and especially Poles? – who could even triple the value of their current wages at home by moving into their new brother EU countries, and/or who would be eligible for the much more generous social welfare programs over there if their job-search did not pan out? That was something else again; in the face of this, that “free labor mobility” would simply have to be suspended for a while, and most current EU member-states accordingly took advantage of provisions gained in accession negotiations with the ten entering states to set up various (temporary) restrictions on those nationals being able to come to their countries to gain work or social welfare benefits.

Ireland was the exception, imposing no such restrictions. And well it would not, since Ireland has continued to be the “Celtic Tiger” high-growth economy – at least relative to other pre-May, 2004, EU members – that attracted so much attention from international observers in the late 1990s. Today unemployment is still under 4% there, meaning that labor is in short supply, and foreigners are flocking to supply it – particularly foreigners from Ireland’s new fraternal EU member-states, and particularly Poles. This phenomenon is described in the article Promised Green Island by Jedrzej Bielecki in the mainstream Polish daily Rzeczpospolita. (more…)

You might not have heard about this; after all, it has nothing to do with Boston or John Kerry’s nomination, or his speech, or the Republican reaction. But other parts of the world do continue to have their own concerns. Believe it or not, in some cases these still involve the Second World War, for which 2004 contains the sixtieth anniversary of various of its events. In particular, Sunday was the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against the Nazi occupation, and German Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder paid a visit to Warsaw to participate in the ceremonies. (more…)

On Monday there was a meeting in Warsaw of the finance ministers of the so-called “Weimar Troika,” i.e. Germany (Hans Eichel), France (Nicholas Sarkozy), and Poland (Andrzej Raczko). The result was basically bad news for Poland; as the title of an article on the meeting in Rzeczpospolita by Jedrzej Bielecki puts it, Poland Will Pay for the Difficulties of France and Germany. (more…)

As everyone knows very well, Polish membership in the EU is now a full month old. So it would seem to be an idle exercise in frustration to go back and review the various crazies who were agitating against that up till the very end: the small-time farmers afraid of being displaced in the market by Western European producers who are both more efficient and more generously supported by funds from the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy; those die-hard anti-German paranoiacs who were convinced that, right after the fireworks had died down, the descendants and representatives of those who had been driven out of what were once German but are now Polish lands would be back demanding their property back.

Except that these “crazies” won’t go away, and may even be proven right! It is support from the countryside that is the main pillar behind the surging Samoobrona, or “Self-Defense,” party headed by Andrzej Lepper, which €S covered here back during our “When Good Post-Communist Regimes Go Bad” series back in April. What’s more, it seems that the old Germans from what was once Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, etc. are getting ready to demand their land back, a tale told in this excellent, long article on-line on the Die Zeit website. (more…)

The current crisis concerning the situation in Iraq (e.g. continuing open rebellion, uncertain transitional government to which to “transfer sovereignty” on 30 June, just to name a few of the headline things) is hardly going unnoticed in Poland. This is another country which has significant numbers of troops on the ground there, in fact right at the main hot spots, i.e. in the Shiite-dominated south. Back in the early days of the occupation – back when sectors were being chosen for Coalition allies – that area was considered a safe bet to stay “cold.” After all, the country’s Shiite majority had long been oppressed particularly egregiously by Saddam, no?, and so should be particularly grateful and cooperative in the aftermath of his toppling. But that’s just another aspect that has gone wrong with the “plan” – and while we’re on that topic, check out this.

I thought about making this entry the latest in €S’ “Poles in Iraq” series (it would be entry number X – yes, we number them here like the NFL numbers the Super Bowls), but that’s not quite going to fit. (more…)

Whether it constitutes a shameful retreat in the face of terrorist attack, or an angry reaction to an incumbent government trying to twist the facts surrounding a national tragedy to its own ends – we’ve already covered all of that here, at least from the German point-of-view, and it doesn’t matter anymore, since José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is now the Spanish premier as of last weekend and the Spanish troops will withdraw from Iraq. What is new and interesting is what Zapatero and his Defense Minister, José Bono, promptly announced with almost unseemly haste just after assuming office: that they will withdraw those as soon as possible. You might remember that, in the wake of the 11 March Madrid train bombings and the victory of Zapatero’s Socialist Party in the ensuing Spanish general election, the new prospect of the Spanish troop withdrawal was at least couched in the fig leaf that such a withdrawal would be canceled if operations in Iraq were put under a proper United Nations basis by the passing of a suitable UN Security Council resolution. Now that fig leaf is tossed aside: the Spanish troops are basically outa there, and as fast as possible consistent with security concerns, meaning in effect in six weeks or even less. George W. Bush is not pleased.

Spanish troops now make up the third-largest national contingent in the Polish-assigned sector in southern Iraq – once thought to be a quiet backwater since the area is dominated by Shiites, but now containing some hot spots indeed, like Najaf and Karbala. (So reports Gazeta Wyborcza, without naming contingents numbers 1 and 2 – I’m guessing that those are the American and Polish troops, respectively.) So how do the Polish authorities feel about the Spanish action? Let’s take a look at their national press. (more…)