The president and prime minister of Poland are waging aggressive "political warfare" against the Communists, discrediting them by exposing their collaborationist past and crimes on behalf of the Soviet Union.
The unusual team - President Lech Kaczynski and twin brother Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - is bringing about change like no previous government has been able or willing to do. They want to break the back of the old Communist order once and for all.
The president signed a law to ban former collaborators with the communist secret services from serving as judges or holding senior positions in government-owned enterprises. The prime minister, Bloomberg reports, "is preparing a bill that would make public the names of people who spied for the secret services."
They say - properly - that the house-cleaning is crucial for Poland's full transition to democracy. But critics, who include former Communists and collaborators, predictably complain that the government is leading a "witch hunt" to distract from the country's high unemployment rate.
Destroying the old Communist power base and the Russian-backed intelligence appareatus behind it is vital for Poland to be trusted as a full NATO ally. But it's nothing that other countries like the Czech Republic haven't done already.
A Polish analysts tells Bloomberg, "This is more like waging a political war." '
"These people enjoy material privileges and remain entirely unpunished," Poland's culture minister, who co-authored the draft bill to name names, said in a January radio interview. "This isn't a settling of accounts but a project to implement justice in a free country.''
The president is also writing a bill to demote former military dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski (pictured) from general to private. Archival documents show that Jaruzelski was an agent of Soviet GRU military intelligence. (Click here to view original document.)
This blogger has long argued for such measures in the former Soviet bloc. He co-edited a book, Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), with Ilan Berman, to explore the secret police legacies in former communist countries.
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