ON A COLLISION COURSE
MIROSŁAW PIOTROWSKI
There is still holiday season. The president of our country Andrzej Duda was resting at the seaside. Before he went on holiday, he had signed an act ‘about prohibition of promoting communism or another totalitarian system’, with which he undoubtedly led Poland onto a collision course with the European Union. For in an initial bill it is forbidden to give names of communist activists to buildings and other objects of public utility. This writing is in the Chapter 1 ….and in the second one it is said about prohibition of promoting communism by monuments which ‘cannot commemorate people (…) symbolizing communism’. What an anti-european carelessness, as one would like to say. After all the president of the serene Republic of Poland had been an MP for the European Parliament for a year before he took over such an honourable function. Entering the headquarter of the EP in Brussels, at the entrance, he must have noticed a big statue of an Italian communist Altiero Spinelli, whose name (about which I have already written in ‘Niedziela’) was given to this building. ‘A private ownership must be liquidated, limited, corrected or developed depending on a situation, not dogmatically, for a rule’ – the communist Spinelli wrote in the known ‘Manifest from Ventotete’, to which the so-called European elites refer. But, in the quoted ‘Manifest’ it is said about awareness of the labour class and liberation of the working class. Pure communism, simply. Maybe one more examples of thoughts of the patron of our Brussels building: ‘In the past the character of private ownership and the right to inheritance made it possible to gather riches by few privileged members of the society. At the times of revolutionary crisis there is an occasion to divide this property in an egalitarian way and liquidate the parasitic class’. And one can only think that this communist is a leading person of the European integration for over a hundred influential euro-deputies from various political fractions in the European Parliament, and also Christian democrats as well as other European politicians and officials. He was loved, among the others, by a chief of the liberals Guy Verhofstadt, and also the chief of the European Commission Jean-Clude Juncker and chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, who, nearly a year ago, co-organized a summit meeting of leaders from Germany, France and Italy in the place of Spinelli’s imprisonment and where the ‘Manifest’ was created, that is, on the Ventotene island. There is also a grave of this communist founder of united Europe here, on which the chancellor laid flowers. Symbolism interweaved and still interweaves with practical realization of Spinelli’s vision, a member of the Italian Communist Party, but, first of all, a fervent intercessor of communism. Maybe not exactly the intercessor of Stalinism but more Trotskyist one. As a follower of European federalism he was a member of the European Commission, and since the year 1979 he had been a MEP for the European Parliament. I will remind that he demanded liquidation of national countries, creating a vision of the Socialist European revolution. And here, suddenly in Poland, in the EU country, an official prohibition of promoting communism and other totalitarianisms was validated. ‘What a shocking thing!’ – as Jan Pawlak said in the film ‘Love or leave’. So, how can the European Union like us? Indeed we do not give it a chance to. But must it twist the facts round saying that it is just our country which chose the totalitarian course?
AA
„Niedziela” 32/2017