Something Strange About the Death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski

The news reports out today about the airplane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski along with 96 other high-ranking officials, contain some exceedingly strange details and coincidences. It would appear that lurking beneath the public information there is a lot more being left unsaid.

At least one commentator put into words the unspoken subtext. The German Press Agency reported that

"[i]t fell to former Czech president, Vaclav Havel, to warn of the danger ahead if Poles seize on the idea that Kaczyński was murdered. Havel forecast that speculation rather than facts about the cause of the accident might influence developments in Poland.'That speculation will influence the elections,' he said, predicting some Poles would see an analogy to the 1943 plane-crash death of Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland's premier-in-exile. Some believe that Sikorski's plane was deliberately brought down."1

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski missed "irony" as an adjective when he told the BBC,

"We could not have conceived a more horrible, poignant, tragic occurrence than our president going to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the murder of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn, himself dying with his wife, with the army commander, with parliamentarians, with the head of the national bank. It's just beyond belief." 2

As part of the news coverage coming out of the Israeli on the Sabbath day, a Ha'aretz article, last updated at 3:39 pm---or only seven-and-a-half hours after the 10:56 am crash---quoted Polish officials who were already reporting "that the crash appeared accidental and that so far there was no suspicion of a terror attack." A sincere accident investigation would logically have barely begun during this time frame, rendering the remark both meaningless and suspect.

Har'retz then offers us an overabundance of causes for a convincing accident. Saying that the "pilot was reportedly making his fourth attempt to land when the plane crashed," amid "thick fog," they warn that "despite a recent upgrade, the Smolensk airport was not fitted with special anti-fog radar common in the West." Quoting a Smolensk government spokesman, Andrei Yevseyenkov, they added, "[p]ilot error was a possible reason for the crash...The pilot was advised to land in Minsk, but decided to land in Smolensk,"

It appears as overkill for Har'retz to then describe the airplane, a recently refurbished Tupolev Tu-154, as "aged," with the equipment having "a questionable safety record." Either human error in responding to the dangerous weather conditions was at fault---or a mechanical failure triggered the crash, but it's unlikely it resulted from a combination of both.

By overstating their case with a needless laundry list, the Israeli media botch the legitimacy of the report---news of the tragedy being already a conspiracy theorist's wet dream.

"The presidential plane was carrying a delegation to Katyn, to commemorate the mass murder of a previous Polish elite: the 20,000 reservist officers murdered by Stalin’s NKVD in 1940." 3

The Economist also reported that

"Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister, who broke the news to the prime minister, Donald Tusk, this morning said that the head of government wept on hearing it. Both men had been at Katyn earlier in the week, at a ceremony attended by the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The hawkish Mr Kaczynski did not attend that ceremony, instead insisting on his own visit three days later."

A unilaterally bifurcated Katyn memorialization is suspicious on its surface. Wasn't Russian-Polish reconciliation part of the purpose of holding a ceremony at the site? Megan K. Stack writing in the Los Angeles Times offers us a too plausible explanation

"This week, Tusk, the Polish prime minister, had traveled to Katyn to mark the massacre. In what was regarded as a turning point in the often frosty relations between Moscow and Warsaw, Putin also attended the ceremony.

"Kaczynski, a frequent and outspoken critic of the Kremlin, was not invited to that ceremony.

"Unlike Tusk's visit, which was given prominent coverage in Russian media, Kaczynski's plans to attend Saturday's commemoration were all but unmentioned. A few weeks ago, the Russian Foreign Ministry publicly griped that Kaczynski had not sent official word of his planned visit. The ministry had heard of his intentions from press reports, officials said." 4

Who else attended the event earlier in the week, along with Tusk, Sikorski and Putin? Why was the event that Kaczynski was attending so top-heavy with Polish officialdom? Who was doing the insisting, and who did the inviting?

The victims aboard Kaczynski's plane ranged across the political spectrum, and included the leading left-wing candidate, Jerzy Szmajdzinski. The London Financial Times, in an oddly titled article, 'Do Not Use,' reported that

"The dead also included many of the senior members of the right-wing opposition Law and Justice party that Mr Kaczynski helped found in 2001, except for the president's twin brother, Jaroslaw, who was in Warsaw." 5, cached

Other juicy quotes from the Financial Times article

“'We stand humbly in the face of fate, which decided in an unfathomable way to link this place with another national tragedy,' said Bronislaw Komorowski, the speaker of parliament, who took over Mr Kaczynski''s duties, as the Polish constitution dictates."

"Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, spoke with Mr Komorowski, the Polish speaker of parliament who took over Mr Kaczynski’s duties, by telephone to express the deep sympathy of the entire Russian people for what he called a “terrible unprecedented tragedy”. “Russia shares the deep sorrow and mourning of Poland,” the Russian president told Mr Komarowski.

"He said he and the rest of Russia had been deeply shocked by the news and said he was calling for a special government commission to investigate the catastrophe in cooperation with the Polish authorities to be headed by Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister." But it was an accident, wasn't it?

By far, Global Breaking News has posted the best list of victim's names on the web---37 military officials and politicians. Some of the tricky roles in Polish government were filled by figures such as Janusz Kurtyka, who headed the Institute of National Remembrance, which investigates Nazi and Soviet crimes against Poles; and Aleksander Szczyglo, the head of the National Security Bureau, which is likely a secret police agency; and Franciszek Gagor, the chief of the general staff of the Polish Army. 6

The conservative Jewish and Israeli press swooned over the loss of Kaczynski, with the American Jewish Committee claiming solidarity with him across three continents.

"We knew President Kaczynski very well, as we did several members of his entourage who also lost their lives in the accident. We last met the President in Warsaw in February, where we thanked him for his powerful speech at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz a few weeks earlier, agreed on the profound danger posed by the Iranian nuclear program, and discussed the current state of Polish-American bilateral ties.

"That meeting followed many earlier AJC meetings with him in the Polish capital, as well as in Israel, when he attended the country's 60th anniversary celebration, and the United States, when he made official visits here." 7

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, chairman of Yad Vashem's board of directors, certainly didn't find Pope Benedict's 2009 speech at the Israeli memorial "powerful." At the time, Lau said of Benedict's speech that

"There is a clear difference between 'killed' and 'murdered.' There is a difference between saying millions in the Holocaust and saying six million. The word six was not said. There was certainly no apology here."

(However, the Pope did say "six million" during his speech at his arrival at the Jerusalem airport.)

Getting back to the "good Pole" Kaczynski, the Jerusalem Post's article, Netanyahu: Kaczynski was a Polish patriot and a great friend of Israel, and Ynetnews.com's online posting, Lieberman: Polish president was true friend of Israel, speak for themselves. Apparently, to affect a Jewish-Polish reconciliation, all Kaczynski had to do was to bend over and take his marching orders from two of the most hawkish and reactionary Zionist leaders the Middle East has ever known.

Kowtowing to American interests also helps---as if those could ever again be separated out from the Jewish lot. The Polish defense minister, Bogdan Klich, announced in January this year that American surface-to-air missiles would be deployed near Russian soil, probably by early April. He also said American soldiers would also be based in Poland once the missiles were sent there.8

And let's not forget that Kaczynski would have had to agree to the CIA's establishing black sites in Poland---secret prisons outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction where reportedly detainees often were tortured.

At this point I would like to stop my media analysis in order to offer up a personal reminiscence that could offer a clue as to what this pair of symmetrical tragedies might represent, both of which made targets out of the same select demographics---and perhaps for the similar reasons.

For the past ten months, I've provided housing for a young man in his mid-twenties who is a Polish Jew---the only child from a rather upmarket, albeit dysfunctional family, who maintain homes in both Connecticut and Warsaw. When we met however, he was temporarily down on his luck, homeless, and living in his car. To give him a leg up I offered him a no-strings-attached, grace-and-favor tenancy in a cottage behind my house. In return, we would see what he might make of himself with some time and a little help. Alas, after a good start, which lasted several months, he reverted back to some old habits and I recently asked him to leave.

But while he was newly in residence, he told me a story that I found credible, given his background and an apparent lack of an agenda to feed or deceive me. He said it was a little known fact that a large percentage of Poland's post-war political and social ruling elite were comprised of people hiding secret Jewish backgrounds. On the one hand, this surprised me because I was taught that Polish Jewry was nearly wiped out in the holocaust; but on the other hand it made perfect sense as an assimilationist ruse and survival strategy.

Mark Twain, writing in the late 19th century about small-town life in America, said he thought the number of Jews reported living in the vicinity of his Midwestern locale was a dramatic under count---with the figures being deliberately low-balled. It is within the ability of Jews to choose whether or not to manifest their Jewish identity publicly---or instead, to blend in amongst the dominant, and oftentimes hostile, culture. It is a skill at acting and 'seeming' honed over many millennia. I imagine it is synonymous with the experience gays choose when operating within a dominant straight culture.

I was curious about the Polish names, but my informant said he'd have to go to the library to refresh the details in his memory, but we never did get around to the topic again. However, he mentioned Lech Walesa as being a preeminent example of the species.

So I began a search using terms such as "Lech Walesa + Jew." It didn't start out to be a promising hunt, but in several spots, such as Wikipedia, which quoted Time Magazine, Walesa was said to be a devout Roman Catholic, and "a strong supporter of the traditional family," which isn't antisemitic code. But with a family of eight children, it seemed he could demonstrably be a Catholic.

Then a well-named web site, www.jewishtribalreview.org, returned a "master document," with its name all in caps: LIST OF NAME CHANGES FOR POLAND'S MOST POWERFUL/ INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN OUR MODERN ERA. It consisted of a tally of approximately 263 paired Jewish and Gentile names---with Mr. Lech Walesa showing up at number 173, with a Jewish name of Lejba Kohne. A disclaimer seemed to add a degree of authenticity, as did the one name familiar to my eyes, that of Jerzy Kosinski's. Where is Roman Polanski when you need him?

"The following is a post by a Polish commentator at a discussion group. We at JTR cannot verify the accuracy of this list, nor the Polish source book for this. But, from our own research, the names we recognize on this list from our own research (Bronislaw Geremek, Jerzy Kosinski, Stanislaw Krajewski, Adam Michnik, Jerzy Urban, Dawid Warshawski) are indeed Jewish. But Lech Walesa?!)"

Reading over the list of names, I had the same sensation I had when I first read a good copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the supposed and infamous slander, which, if it is an antisemitic forgery of a text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by the Jewish people, then I have to say---it's certainly a damn good one! It encapsulated a world vision that I was totally unfamiliar with. Glimmering it was similar to the deflowering effect I felt reading Machiavelli as an adult, when I could take it to heart. It changed me.

I found an occasional reference to this list elsewhere on the web. Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1997 mentioned it while labeling them as "fictitious Jewish names," (this would assume that the Goyem names are recognizable to Polish readers.) Buruma (and does that sound Jewish?) also mentions the same kind of covert under-counting of Jews that I just spoke of

"Nobody knows the exact number of surviving Polish Jews. Five thousand is an often quoted number--the generally old people who meet in a handful of badly maintained prayer halls to worship, quarrel and speak Yiddish. Unofficially, the number is thought to be around 30,000. Some anti-Semites suspect there are many more, of course, hiding their identities, secretly tugging the strings of Polish society. I was shown a leaflet in Warsaw put out by an extreme right-wing party in which every more or less moderate politician, including Lech Walesa, was accused of being a Jew. Fictitious Jewish names were helpfully provided to identify the imposters, as in 'Lech Walesa -- Lejba Kohne.'" 10

But I think Buruma slips up with his sentence, "Some anti-Semites suspect there are many more [Jews], of course, hiding their identities, secretly tugging the strings of Polish society." Why does he say, "of course?" It is as though he aims to play both sides in a chess game of logic, anticipating the reaction and objection an adversary might raise. Personally, it feels like an attempt to get into someone's head where he doesn't belong. It may be a good way to co-opt and disarm a point of view, but it also identifies someone as manipulative.

In my opinion, that is what Jews have long been accustomed to---playing both sides of the street, acting out the antagonist and protagonist roles in almost every drama---or, let me rephrase that as, the overt and the covert sides. Goyem like myself never really catch up to get our breaths. I'm constantly being forced into some reaction by Jewish maneuvers. For the most part, this becomes our collective "reality," all that we know.

Palestinian Hamas and Fatah factions fight each other because it's in Israel's interest to divide them into opposing Orwellian camps, using the dirty tactics of deceit and subterfuge. At one time, Hamas was fostered by the Israelis, while Fatah was brutally repressed; and when that gets old, the tables will be nonsensically turned by those operating the levers for the next act.

For instance, the view from inside Israeli posits that it was Arab militarism and aggression that started the six-day war in 1967, and that Israel responded, and through skill and effort defended itself---it just happens that they wound up the victorious possessors of the occupied territories, including the capture of the holy Temple Mount. This was no accident of fate.

Since Israel insists it will never give back the conquered East Jerusalem, the only logical analysis possible is whatever led to the actual warfare between the parties, by design intent the Jews were the instigators, since it delivered their strategic goal, and giving them what they really wanted. Simple, yes? Cui bono?

So what was my point about Jews in high places in Poland again? Well, one theory I might suggest is that those Polish elites who died in a modern shadow echo of the earlier 1941 genocidal atrocity, were not themselves Jewish, (how many of them were the first time?) or necessarily aligned with Jewish power structures.

In fact, since on the surface this would appear to be a tragedy for the Jews and Israel---given the sudden death of their best and strongest supporter from within the European Union---that would make for perfect cover to effect even more dastardly schemes. Maybe the surviving Polish leadership have the Jewish alignments, and helped craft an airplane disaster as part of a some coup d'état against a competing Roman Catholic power structure running at cross purposes to Jewish influence. I don't know what it is but I know what it is not.

My sense is that Kasczinski was just a compliant toady who acquiesced to Israeli demands in exchange for something in return, and he had that look of 'strange bedfellow' as a result. An in-depth article by Brian Porter from the September 2006 issue of Jewish Currents, The Return of the Radical Right in Poland: The Betrayal of Solidarity and the Politics of Discontent, captures the ethical inconsistency within the relationship.

"The Kaczynskis themselves condemn any allusions to violence and repudiate the crude slogans cited above— while fanning the flames of homophobia and blaming Poland’s problems on mysterious unnamed “webs of influence,” or “power-wielding networks” that supposedly run things behind the scenes."

"The Kaczynskis themselves have established close ties to the “Radio Maryja” media network, which propagates a combination of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and ultra-conservative Catholic religiosity. Although neither of the brothers have any personal history of anti-Jewish remarks (even in private, by all accounts), they have found plenty of ways to appeal to a racist electorate while keeping their own hands clean. "

"By appointing Roman Giertych, the leader of The League of Polish Families, to the position of vice-premier and minister of education, the Kaczynskis have bestowed legitimacy on a volatile extremist who traces his ideological roots to 'National Democracy,' a radical right movement.”9

Evidence there are no Jewish illusions in return, is a statement by then-Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir in 1989, which created a stir, when he was quoted as saying “Poles suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.” 11

The Kaczynski/Jewish partnership reminds me of the support given Israel by Christian Zionists such as Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, and a man guilty of Christian heresy for his efforts to let Jews off the hook for their refusal to go on and get saved. There is something unholy, in my opinion, about these raw power exchanges between Israel and her apocalyptic co-conspirators. Then again, Hagee says some pretty awful things about Roman Catholics too, so maybe he's just an all-around hater

"Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews" - from Jerusalem Countdown (revised edition, 2007), p. 114. [2]

"A Godless theology of hate that no one dared try to stop for a thousand years produced a harvest of hate." Mr. Kettle

The beautiful clear voices of truth ring out like clarion bells. It is all so clear now---if they had been allowed to get away with 9/11, and Iraq and Afghanistan, then where would it have stopped?

"....Teheran was the true nadir of international diplomacy, morally far more ignoble and strategically far more catastrophic than either Munich five years before or Yalta a year later. And the key to Teheran was Katyn; once Stalin had got away with that, he realized he could get away with anything." 'Historians Have Yet to Face Up to the Implications of the Katyn Massacre' By Adam Scrupski 5-17-04 (professor emeritus, Rutgers Graduate School of Education.)

1http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/318006,leadall-europe-shocked-at-kaczynski-plane-crash-death.html

2 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8613778.stm, 11 April 2010

3 Tragedy in Smolensk Poland's President Lech Kaczynski dies in a plane crash, The Economist, Apr 10th 2010

4 latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-polish-president-crash11-2010apr11,0,4409138.story

5 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2ca5c438-44a7-11df-9615-00144feab49a.html, Financial Times, by Jan Cienski and Catherine Belton, April 10 2010 A Cached Copy

6 http://www.breakingglobalnews.com/polish-plane-crash-passenger-list/1226861

7 AJC Mourns Polish President Kaczynski, Other Victims of Plane Crash (PR Newswire)

8 'Poland to Deploy U.S. Missiles Near Russia,' by Judy Dempsey, January 21, 2010

9 http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2006-sept-porter.htm

10 Poland's New Jewish Question, by Ian Buruma, NYTimes.com August 3, 1997,

11 Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, by Sabrina P. Ramet