The Smolensk Air Crash and the Idea of Martyrdom

The term "A Second Katyn" has been used to describe the Smolensk Air Crash. The use of the word "catastrophe" tends to sound extreme in English ears but in Polish it is used in the same sense as "disaster" or "terrible accident ", so there are no grounds for the belief that in Polish eyes the Smolensk Air Crash was not a catastrophe

However, words do matter. The loss of many in the Polish Establishment was based on their attempt to get to a commemoration the NKVD's mass execution of Polish reserve officers was a massacre not a "genocide" as the IPN keeps maintaining and the word "tragedy" and "catastrophe" could well describe the doomed yet heroic uprising against Nazi occupied Warsaw in 1944.

It was a great loss for Poland to lose such decent and brave men as Ryszard Kaczorowski as the last President-in-exile in London, one maintained by the survivors of the Armii Krajowe who maintained correctly that the Stalinist regime proclaimed in Lublin in 1945 was not a legitimate government. It was a totalitarian regime imposed by force, fraud and terror.

As for Lech Kaczynski, the fact his father in law fought in the Warsaw Uprising and that he did much to get a museum dedicated to it really means he should not have been buried in the Wawel but in Warsaw, as Norman Davies correctly suggested, without endorsing the hullabaloo in Krakow greeting that decision.

If anything can be described as a "catastrophe" it has to be the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 which, according to Lancet, a conservative British medical journal, that has reached mortality rates reaching 1.3 million and that was supported by Kwasniewski. former "dissidents" such as the lousy Adam Michnik and, of course, the supine Lech Kaczynski.

Being buried in the Wawel next to men such as Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Wladislaw Sikorski and Josef Pilsudski seemed like an insult to many Poles but not to others who might have made a better case for Kaczorowski to be buried in the Wawel as he actually did fight for Polish freedom and independence in the AK.

In contrast to Lech Kaczynski, Kaczorowski did not espouse atavistic hatred and nationalism nor had a spin doctor called Michal Kaminski who made statements such as the Poles would apologise for the Jedwabne Massacre of 1941 if the Jews apologised for supporting Communism, an anti-semitic myth with its roots in the Endecja politics of Roman Dwowski.

The fact is that Lech Kaczynski was not a "national hero": he just died in an air crash on his way to Katyn as did many others. Fetishising the image of Lech simply to make the political statement that he was some 'moral guardian' of Polish national integrity is absurd. His style of fanatical witch hunting for collaborators, including Lech Walesa was foolish and idiotic.

Lech Kaczynski and his twin bother Jaroslaw were a disgrace to the Polish nation: they degraded it by their lack of diplomacy, emotional and undiplomatic outbursts and did not reflect the liberal, truly conservative or liberal inheritance of the AK. They were opportunists and fanatics who played on the "victim nation" status to retard Poland's progress as a state.

This victim mentality was yet again demonstrated by the fact some Poles started complaining that "1940-2010:Poland is alone again Where in Sarkozy? Berroso? Obama ?" on placards.

Perhaps their appetite for martyrdom would have been appeased by another potential air crash caused by the sheer bad luck that all flights were cancelled that week by the volcanic eruption in Iceland.

Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, himself not immune to making victimhood comments about the Russian-German Nordstream pipeline deal that bypasses Poland being like the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, at least made one sensible comment when he claimed

"We don't want to be a nation that only finds its pride in martyrdom. We want to take pride in being modern and prosperous state"

Unfortunately, the cost of that seems to come at the expense of Iraqi lives in an war for oil supported by Sikorski and his Washington Times columnist wife Anne Applebaum who made bogus claims that Iraq under Saddam most certainly had concealed weapons of mass destruction.

Now there will grow up in Iraq sectarian Islamist militias with a taste for martyrdom, killing and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East.