I seem to remember Poland throwing off the yoke of communism in 1989 when the trade union Solidarity won overwhelming support from the people of Poland and then Lech Walęsa became prime minister in 1990. While President Jaruzelski was a better leader than many realise and kept the excesses of Soviet Communism at bay in Poland, often by meting out his own version of state oppression, I imagine that freedom of speech was not high on the agenda of the Polish Communist Party. Certainly, many Roman Catholic priests—notable among them Father Jerzy Popielusko—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the evils of communism.
Article 54 of the Polish Constitution protects freedom of speech while proscribing certain hate crimes such as promoting totalitarian (fascist or communist) forms of government. But it does not take much, it seems, for these laws to be ignored as in the most recent case of the cancellation of a series of concerts in Poland by former Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters. His crime was to criticise President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in a letter to his wife (why he wrote to her is not clear) and to describe forces within her country as ‘extreme nationalists’. The existence of far right elements and paramilitary groups within Ukraine is well known and they have everything to gain from perpetuating the war with Russia, especially copious amounts of arms and ammunition from NATO countries. But this, it seems, is a truth too far and anyone who is willing to call out the situation in Ukraine must be silenced, including musicians. The official line from the organisers of the Roger Waters concerts is ‘no comment’ but I am fully expecting that soon we will hear something about ‘amidst concerns for his safety’. If the Polish people are so against the views expressed by Roger Waters, then let the concerts proceed and run the risk of being financial flops. However, I suspect above all that the Polish authorities could not run the risk of packed gigs and any show of support from the Polish people for Waters or any public criticism, however implied, of the Ukrainian president.
Meantime, that massive international waste of time and resources, the United Nations has been in Ukraine investigating atrocities. They sent three investigators to interview Ukrainian citizens in war torn areas and, lo and behold, found copious evidence of war crimes by Russian soldiers which the three investigators have just reported. I cannot help feeling that sending three investigators does not really indicate a huge concern to gather facts quickly about the situation. The report is covered in Global Health Now the newsletter of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (both, incidentally, Gates Foundation funded bodies as shown in LifeSite by Dr Niall McCrae and me) accompanied by a war porn picture of mass graves stretching as far as the eye can see (and frankly stretching credibility) from which bodies had allegedly been removed. The three investigators found copious evidence of Russian ‘war crimes’ but only two incidences of similar actions against Russians soldiers by Ukrainians. So, clearly, nothing to see there then.
I have absolutely no doubt that war crimes are being committed by both sides. War is hell whoever is prosecuting it and whoever is the target. But surely, the point is to stop it and to stop it as soon as possible. The sons, fathers and brothers on both sides of this internecine conflict are a huge loss to both countries and all we seem to be capable of doing in the west is to provide more of the wherewithal to lose more of them. The only sensible voice in the mainstream media on the war in Ukraine is Peter Hitchens who has called for an end to ‘McCarthyite intolerance’ over reporting of the war. He is also the only person asking where the United Nations is in all this; it is certainly not trying to stop it. The United Nations is clearly doing the bidding of the global elite for whom this war is a profitable endeavour. Rather than trying to stop the war, they are investigating war crimes while the war is in progress, reporting and adding more fuel to the flames. I would join a ‘stop the war’ protest near me but, strangely, I cannot find any. Ironically, the only reporting of stop the war in Ukraine protests that I can find on Google are ones in Russia.
Lead Correspondent | David Clews is the Lead Correspondent for UNN, with over 20 years of political/campaigning experience and a wealth of social media and communication skills David gets to the heart of what is really important to the real people of the UK.
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