KATYŃ MASSACRE EVENT AT THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL (published in the POST EAGLE weekly newspaper in September 2012)
by John Czop
Photo caption: Mr. Antoni Chróscielewski, Mrs. Maria Szonert-Binienda, Esq., and Mr. Richard Poremski participated in the Katyń event at the United States Capitol.
This is the first of several articles about the official opening of recently declassified materials related to the Katyń Massacre. This event started at 3:30 p.m. and closed at 6:50 p.m. on Monday 10 September 2012 and was held in a small meeting room, Congressional Meeting Room North, in the United States Capitol, Washington,DC. Approximately 150 attended.
The event’s program had three principal components: Presentation of the Findings of the National Archives and Records Administration; Non-Governmental Panel(which included a first-rate speech by the Director of the National Office of the Polish American Congress, Mrs. Barbara Borzuchowska Andersen, Ph.D. whose grandfather was among the 25,700 Polish officers murdered on Stalin’s orders in April 1940 at Katyń Forest and several other places near Smolensk, Russia); and Open Time for Expressions from the Community.
The September 10 Katyń event took place in the context of the effort by Polish Americans and others who value truth and fair play in international relations to redress a more recent crime without punishment, the April 10, 2010 Smolensk Disaster. Only one speaker at the Katyń event linked the Soviet crime of 1940 masked by the Soviet lie that Nazi Germany was responsible for Katyń, with the Russian crime of 2010 and the Russian MAK Report that implausibly blames the Polish pilot for the Smolensk Disaster. This is why the first article in this series focuses on the remarks of a Polish American leader who asks us to learn from the mistakes of the past. The mistakes of the United States and the United Kingdom in suppressing the truth about Katyń are cautionary examples for the Polish Government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk in the case of the Smolensk Disaster.
THE HIGH POINT OF THE KATYŃ EVENT WAS MR. ANTONI CHRÓSCIELEWSKI’S COMMENT: “TODAY’S POLAND IS NOT THE POLAND THAT I FOUGHT FOR AT MONTE CASSINO.” THE LONG SERVING PRESIDENT OF THE POLISH NATIONAL HOME IN GREENPOINT,BROOKLYN AND COMMANDER OF DISTRICT #2 OF THE ASSOCIATION OF POLISH ARMY VETERANS OF AMERICA (SWAP) CONTINUED BY OBSERVING THAT THE TUSK GOVERNMENT IS DISCREDITING LEGITIMATE POLISH PATRIOTIC SENTIMENTS BY TEACHING POLISH SCOOL CHILDREN THAT POLISH PATRIOTISM IS A FORM OF EXTREME NATIONALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM. THE VETERAN, WHO SERVED IN GENERAL ANDERS’ II CORPS, THEN REPORTED THAT AN OFFICIAL IN THE POLISH FOREIGN MINISTRY TOLD HIM THAT POLAND CANNOT CONDUCT AN INDEPENDENT FOREIGN POLICY BECAUSE POLAND DEPENDS ON RUSSIA FOR OIL. THIS EXPLAINS WHY POLAND WILL NOT ASK FOR AN IMPARTIAL INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE THE SMOLENSK DISASTER OF 10 APRIL 2010.
At this point, Poland’s Charge d’Affairs interrupted Mr. Chróscielewski and said, “A Polish Foreign Ministry official could NOT have told you this!” Mr. Chróscielewski replied, “Don’t tell me what didn’t happen; I’m telling you what happened!”. The veteran received well merited applause, and some in the audience called for the prompt enactment of United States Senate Concurrent Resolution 14, which calls for convening an independent international commission to investigate the Smolensk Disaster, because the Tusk Government is too spineless to do so. This resolution was sponsored by United States Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) in May 2011 after he met with former Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga and Minister Antoni Macierewicz. Readers recall that at their May 2012 meeting, the Council of National Directors of the Polish American Congress enacted a resolution calling on the Polish Government to convene an international investigation of the Smolensk Disaster. Recent scientific evidence publicized by the Libra Institute, Inc., whose president is Mrs. Maria Szonert-Binienda, Esq., discredits the Russian MAK Report’s conclusion that errors by the Polish pilot caused the deaths of President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others at Smolensk North Military Airfield on 10 April 2010.
Mr. Chróscielewski delivered similar observations on the decline of patriotic education in Poland today when he spoke this year, two weeks ago, at the American Częstochowa in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The PO Government is undermining Polish patriotism, according to Mr. Chróscielewski, because its educational policy is informed by post-modernist and relativistic values rather than the traditional moral values of our Christian civilization.
Mr.Chróscielewski’s remarks at the Katyn event at the Capitol were NOT included in the mainstream media’s coverage of Monday’s Katyn event at the Capitol. The public needs a full record of what happened at the 10 September Katyn event. This is why THE POST EAGLE needs money from lucid and patriotic Polish Americans if readers are to receive the full truth about important events.
The English language and Polish language mainstream media have no interest in publicizing truthful remarks like Chróscielewski’s which deviate from the “propaganda of succes”. This useful locution was coined by Professor Marek Jan Chodakiewicz in order to describe the neo-Communist/transformed-Communist line that all is well after the so-called collapse of Communism in Poland and Poland’s accession to NATO and the EU. Far too many accept this “propaganda of success” as the truth, just as far too many continue to believe Stalinist propaganda that Poland needed to be occupied by the Soviet Army after the war to stop the Poles from continuing the mass murder of European Jewry which Hitler started.
The mainstream mass media has NO INTEREST in publicizing anything that contradicts the “propaganda of success” or Stalinist propaganda. Moreover, the mainstream media ignore how yesterday’s suppression of the truth about Katyń is linked with today’s reluctance by the Polish Government to convene an independent international investigation of the Smolensk Disaster.
That is why we need independent media, and especially a newspaper like THE POST EAGLE. Polish Americans need to have information that powerful interests want to suppress, and they need to know that their leaders, like Mr. Chróscielewski, fear not to talk truth to power.