Mediaboss Marketing

Since its start a century ago, Communism, a political and economic ideology that calls for a classless, government-controlled society in which everything is shared equally, has seen a series of surgesand declines. What started in 1917 Russia, became a global revolution, taking root in countries as far flung as China and Korea to Kenya and Sudan to Cuba and Nicaragua.

Communism launched from Lenins October Revolution and spread to China withMao Zedongs rise to power and toCuba, withFidel Castros takeover. It was the ideology behind one side of the Cold War and saw a symbolic decline with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today just a handful of countries remain under communist rule. Below is a timeline of notable events that shaped Communisms arc in history.

February 21, 1848: German economist and philosopher Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto, calling for a working-class revolt against capitalism. Its motto, Workers of the world, unite! quickly became a rallying cry.

November 7, 1917: With Vladimir Lenin at the helm, the Bolsheviks, ascribing to Marxism, seize power during Russias October Revolution and become the first communist government. Later that month, the leftist Socialist Revolutionaries defeat the Bolsheviks in an election, but, despite his promises of bread, land and peace, Lenin uses military force to take power. Its during this period the Red Terror (executions of the Czars officials), prisoner-of-war labor camps and other police state tactics are established.

July 1, 1921: Inspired by the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party of China is formed.

January 21, 1924: Lenin dies at age 54 of a stroke, and Joseph Stalin, who had served as Lenins general secretary, eventually takes over official rule of the Soviet Union until his death in 1953 from a brain hemorrhage. He industrialized the country through a state-controlled economy, but it led to famine. Under his regime, detractors were deported or imprisoned in labor camps, and, as part of the Great Purge, 1 million people were executed under Stalins orders.

1940 to 1979: Communism is established by force or otherwise in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Poland, North Korea, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, China, Tibet, North Vietnam, Guinea, Cuba, Yemen, Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Burma, Angola, Benin, Cape Verde, Laos, Kampuchea, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Vietnam, Somalia, Seychelles, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua and others.

May 9, 1945: The U.S.S.R. declares victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. With Japans defeat, Korea becomes divided into the communist North (which the Soviets occupied) and the South (which had been occupied by the United States).

March 12, 1947: President Harry S. Truman addresses Congress in what would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine, calling for the containment of communism, and later, leading to U.S. entry into wars in Vietnam and Korea to provide defense from communist takeovers. The doctrine becomes the basis for Americas Cold War policy.

March 5, 1946: Great Britain Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes his famous Iron Curtain speech in Missouri, alerting Americans to the division between the Soviet Union and the Western allies.

October 1, 1949: Following a civil war, Chinas Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong declares his creation of the Peoples Republic of China, leading the United States to end diplomatic ties with the PRC for decades.

July 5, 1950: Leading United Nations forces, the first U.S. troops engage in the Korean War, after communist North Korea invaded South Korea with the intent of creating a unified communist state. The war would last until July 27, 1953, with North Korea, China and the United Nations signing an armistice agreement.

January 1, 1959: Fidel Castro overthrows the corrupt Fulgencio Batista regime, and Cuba becomes a Communist state.

April 25, 1976: Following the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, South Vietnams capital is seized by communist forces. A few months later, in July, the nation is reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under communist rule.

October 25, 1983: The United States invades Grenada under orders of President Ronald Reagan to secure the safety of American nationals under the countrys communist regime, led by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. The pro-Marxist government was overthrown in about a week.

June 4, 1989: After weeks of protests, the Communist Chinese government sends in its military to fire on demonstrators calling for democracy in Beijings Tiananmen Square. The bloody violence ends in hundreds to thousands of deaths (no official death toll was ever released).

November 9, 1989: The Berlin Wallthat separated communist East Berlin from democratic West Berlin for nearly 30 yearsfalls. The years 1989-90 see the collapse of communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Benin, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Yemen.

December 25, 1991: With the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union is dissolved. New Russian President Boris Yeltsin bans the Communist Party. Communism soon ends in Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Congo, Kenya, Yugoslavia and other nations. China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam remain under communist rule.North Korea remains nominally communist, although the North Korean government doesn't call itself communist.

History of Communism,Stanford UniversityCommunism: Karl Marx to Joseph Stalin,Center for European Studies, University of North CarolinaFrom Tsar to U.S.S.R.: Russias Chaotic Year of Revolution,National GeographicThe Truman Doctrine, 1947,U.S. Department of StateThe Chinese Revolution of 1949,U.S. Department of StateThe Korean War: Timeline,"CBS NewsTiananmen Square Fast Facts,"CNNUnited States Invades Grenada,Politco

Follow this link:
Communism Timeline - HISTORY

PRAGUE/WARSAW Eastern Europeans with strong memories of authoritarian Communist rule have taken a "been there, done that" attitude to the restrictions on free movement and shortages of some basic goods caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The shuttered stores, sealed borders and other measures have revived memories of life behind the old 'Iron Curtain' before the fall of Communism and advent of democracy in 1989.

As Czech scientist Jan Konvalinka, 57, joked on Twitter, "Shut borders, nothing on shelves, store closures? Welcome to my childhood."

"We've been there, done that," he added.

Scenes of shoppers in Britain, the United States and elsewhere plundering supermarkets for toilet paper, pasta and canned goods have bemused many in a region where people once had to wait years to be able to buy a car or where they would queue hours for a rare delivery of bananas at a state-run store.

"In the UK, where youve had democracy for years, people panic when theres an unusual situation. We are behaving in a more rational way, we are detached," said Piotr Adamowicz, 59, an opposition member of the Polish parliament and former anti-communist activist.

Echoing that comment, Andrea in Budapest said: "People here are not panicking".

"My grandmother lived through two wars, my mom was born during World War II and then we had Communism. We are prepared for this," said Andrea, an ethnic Hungarian who grew up in Romania and spent time in a detention center before 1989 after trying to cross into Hungary.

TEMPORARY MEASURES

People do not expect the current restrictions to last very long, unlike the privations they endured in the past.

"For me these border closures dont hurt me as much as during Communism because I know they will open one day," said Filip Antos, 51, owner of Czech online travel service A-Hotel.com.

"This is not like Communism because we know this will end. During Communism we didnt think it would ever end."

Access to trustworthy news sources today has also eased the strain for those who remember Moscow-dominated rule that ended in a series of mostly peaceful revolutions in 1989. Under Communism, governments that nobody trusted were the main source of people's information in a pre-Internet world.

i For younger east Europeans, however, the experience of shortages and closed borders is novel.

"I never thought such things could happen again," said Tomas Klima, 31, who was born a year before the 1989 Velvet Revolution in then-Czechoslovakia.

But, noting the hugely expanded role of the state in many countries to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and cushion the economic impact of the disruption caused, he added:

"We tend to forget too quickly what it used to be like back then. The state controlled everything, you had to ask for permission to travel abroad etc.

"I hope people will realize soon that by allowing the state to take control of various aspects of people's lives, even if with good intentions, they lose a lot of their liberty."

(Additional Reporting by Joanna Plucinska in Warsaw, Jan Lopatka in Prague and Krisztina Than in Budapest, Editing by Gareth Jones)

Read the original post:
Closed Borders, No Shops? Been There, Done That, Say East Europeans - The New York Times

BBJ

Saturday, March 28, 2020, 00:31

Imre Nagy, the martyred Prime Minister of Hungarys 1956 Uprising and four other revolutionary leaders Mikls Gimes, Pl Malter, Jzsef Szilgyi and Gza Losonczy were re-buried on June 16, 1989, 31 years after they had been executed. The ceremony became a solemn demonstration of the Hungarian nation against the ruling Communist Party and it marked a crucial milestone on the way to the final collapse of the regime.

The 1956 revolution in Hungary was crushed by Soviet troops, and the events were quickly labelled counter-revolutionary by the new communist regime led by Jnos Kdr. Prominent leaders of the uprising Nagy, Gimes (the editor of Magyar Szabadsg, or Hungarian Freedom), Malter (Minister of Defense), Szilgyi (the head of Nagys secretariat) and Losonczy (Minister of State) were sentenced to death in a show trial and executed on June 16, 1958.

Initially, they were buried in a prison courtyard, then in 1961 the bodies were wrapped in tarpaper and barbed wire, and placed in secret face-down in unmarked graves in parcel 301 of the Municipal Cemetery in Budapest. Secrecy around the burial had been so tight that it took a seven-year investigation to relocate the bodies in 1988.

It was taboo to talk about the four, or the 1956 revolution in anything other than the officially sanctioned terms of a counter-revolution, and it wasnt until the regime began to destabilize in the early 1980s that the issue resurfaced. After the debt-financed prosperity of the 1970s, economic problems turned into social ones, and Hungarian society began demanding an ever more public moral and political judgment of the system.

Therefore, forming an opinion about 1956 and the legitimacy of the Kdr regime that ruled after the Soviets smashed the uprising merged. The underground opposition, which took root at the end of the 70s, also played a key role in restoring the legacy of 1956 by equating the figure of the dead Nagy with the true origin of Kdrs reign. Facing the past became of critical importance in the democratic transition process. Thus the re-burial of Nagy gained symbolic significance in tearing down the Communist regime.

Things were moving unexpectedly fast leading up to the re-burial. It had been seen as close to a miracle by many that, just one year earlier, a mass gathering was permitted to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the execution. That ceremony wouldnt have been possible without the prior removal Jnos Kdr from power in May 1988, which prepared the ground for more moderate figures to take over the party. Yet, the fact that that the commemoration was brutally dispersed by the police clearly showed how half-hearted the authorities attitude still was toward freedom of speech.

But the wheels of change had been set in motion. The Committee for Doing Historical Justice was set up and reached agreement with the party leadership about the re-burial. As part of the compromise, full rehabilitation was still deemed to be out of the question, though.

Meanwhile, opposition forces were gaining ever more publicity, and within the party ranks it dawned on many that things could no longer be handled in the old-fashioned way. At the same time, guidelines from Moscow hinted that, instead of trying to stop the unstoppable, party officials should strive to taking the lead in the democratization process with the purpose of solidifying their influence in a post-communist era.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense that Imre Pozsgay, a member of the party bureau, dared to label the events of 1956 as a revolt on January 28, 1989. Although the statement officially caused huge uproar, some historians now point out that it might simply have been part of that above-mentioned Moscow-driven plan.

Along the same lines, once the date of the re-burial was fixed, the party leadership started to communicate it as a day of national reconciliation with the intention of dulling the political edge of the occasion. This fueled fears among the opposition that the Communist Party could somehow hijack the event for its own purposes.

The ruling elite logically wanted to mix as little politics into the upcoming ceremony as possible, but that was simply Mission Impossible. The issue was pure politics and, feeling the momentum, the opposition wanted to ride the wave of change by organizing a huge demonstration. The fact that it was not banned outright already shows the fading influence of party hard-liners, not to mention the fact that originally the event was going to be an ordinary funeral in a cemetery.

However, by April 1989 public pressure to hold a mass commemoration had grown so intense that the authorities had no choice but to let it happen. Similarly, it was becoming clear that rehabilitation including retrial had to be put back on the agenda as well. The Opposition Roundtable, the consultation forum of the democratic forces, was also pushing for it as it was no longer the issue of the widowers as it was the nation rehabilitating itself. Although hard-liners still expressed their concerns, the reformist wing won the argument.

But one should not make the mistake of assuming the opposition was one homogenous whole; it had its own ideological fault lines. The dispute sparked by radicals like Gyrgy Krass concerned whether the funeral would be primarily about Nagy and his companions, who were all originally Communists, or about all the victims of the revolution.

The matter was resolved by the Committee for Doing Historical Justice that came up with the idea of using an empty sixth coffin as a symbol for all those other revolutionaries who died in the fighting or were executed in its aftermath.

More importantly than such niceties, however, the opposition hoped that massive attendance could demonstrate its political strength. After all, the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party still had some 800,000 members at the time.

Undermining the legitimacy of the Kdr regime was one thing, gathering legitimate support for the organizations fighting for change was another. Showing force seemed crucial when the Opposition Roundtable was about to begin negotiations with the ruling elite.

In the end the ceremony itself drew a crowd of some 250,000. The communist leadership had feared that a massive turnout could trigger turmoil on the streets, so secret agents were mobilized and sent to mingle with demonstrators en masse. The military and the Workers Militia were also put on alert. Those precautions proved baseless, though; the event passed in a tense, if solemn manner.

Speakers praised Nagy, his legacy and the revolution, but rather than talking about the necessity to continue or revive it, they all emphasized the importance of a peaceful transition with the purpose of achieving the objectives of 1956. Even the party rank-and-file was relatively pleased with the content of the speeches, except for two things. For one, they found it problematic that there was no word about their own losses in the fights.

The second and more serious complaint concerned the speech of one Viktor Orbn, a founding member of Fidesz (originally an acronym for Fiatal Demokratk Szvetsge, or Alliance of Young Democrats) and something of a 27-year-old bearded firebrand liberal, who was the only one to openly demand that all Soviet troops should leave the country for good.

He also said that, in 1956, the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party (as the local Communist Party was known) had taken away the future from the young; therefore, not only a murdered young person is lying in the sixth coffin, but rather our next 20 or who knows how many years. The speech was powerful enough tp put Orbn on the countrys political map, and is still remembered as the first openly anti-communist speech, symbolizing the countrys final break with the communist era.

Left-wingers werent that enthusiastic about it at the time, though. Many pro-government organizations and media outlets condemned its message, claiming that, although Orbn said he was speaking on behalf of the young, he represented just a minority opinion.

This criticism was shared by Ferenc Gyurcsny, who was then vice president of the Communist youth organization Demisz, but who would go on to become a Socialist Party (MSZP) premier, and today leads DK, the Democratic Coalition. He left the MSZP in disgrace, following a leaked recorded in which he told party members the leadership had lied morning, noon and night to win reelection.

Another future MSZP prime minister, Gyula Horn, who, as member of the Communist militia in 1956 had helped crush the revolution, but as foreign minister would earn a reputation as the politician who helped tear down the Iron Curtain in August 1989, labeled Orbns speech as anything but solemn or moderate.

But the clash of civil society and political aspects could not overshadow the event. Even as it evolved into a political demonstration of unprecedented strength, where the executed martyrs became a symbol of the Hungarian nation that had suffered under Communism, it remained a simple memorial service at its heart.

The rehabilitation process of Nagy was completed a few week later in that fast paced summer, on July 6, 1989, when he was acquitted by the Supreme Court. In an odd twist of history, on the same day, the man responsible for ordering his execution, Jnos Kdr died. Politically, he had been dead since April 12, 1988, the last time he spoke in a party event.

Although some 100,000 people still attended Kdrs funeral on July 14 1989, the re-burial and the legal rehabilitation of the man he had replaced as leader of Hungary, Imre Nagy, had led to a dramatic speeding up of Hungarian politics and paved the way to the final key milestones of Hungarys freedom after 40 years of Communist control.

More on that in later issues. Next week we go back in time slightly, to look at the formation of the Opposition Roundtable and the increasingly vocal resistance to single party rule.

Read more here:
30 Years of Freedom: The Re-burial of Imre Nagy, The Point of no Return for Communism in Hungary - Budapest Business Journal

Dulce bellum inexpertis War is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It

W. R. Baker

While March 29th is National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the official federal remembrance day (August 18th in Australia and New Zealand), each of us who went to war will probably remember not only the date we left the United States and the date we returned, but also certain events in-between that occurred in the land which President Reagan called 100 rice paddies and jungles in a place called Vietnam.

The individual Vietnam remembrance day might be the day you were first fired upon (perhaps shelled, mortared, or shot at) or the day wounded occurring with those who became your closest family, who you relied upon each day, just as they did you. War has a way of throwing the best and the worst things at you all at once and Vietnam certainly proved that.

One of the most important remnants of the Vietnam War seems to be how it is still popularly reported by historians who mostly never had a stake in the game. The repetitive nature of their books and articles continue to remain distorted, inaccurate, and often just plain wrong, no matter how often they repeat each other.

The Draft was a fact of life for young men, however as much it may upset many today. Boys were taught such things as to hold doors open for women and, yes, to protect them from harm that was how boys were raised by parents who were raised that way too no apologies. Having a Draft Card was also a rite of passage, as well. Despite the cowards who fled, the protesting students, and college professors who egged them on, most young men answered The Call. This was because we were also raised by our WWII parents to take up the obligation to our country first which many people unfortunately snicker at today.

The much-maligned Domino Theory also proved accurate from the onset. New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and the countries in the region had already faced (or were about to become challenged by) communists attempting to gain control of their countries - all united to prevent North Vietnams dominance of Southeast Asia and the obvious threat that communism posed to their countries. Many also showed their support of the American effort by deploying troops into South Vietnam, as well.

Rarely mentioned is that a treaty of neutrality on Laos was signed by North and South Vietnam (et al) in July 1962. Not surprisingly, North Vietnam ignored their written promise from the onset. During the War, the North positioned divisions in both Cambodia and Laos. Their forces would often strike into South Vietnam and run back across the border afterward, which we were forbidden to cross, even if we were in contact or hot pursuit.

History of the Vietnam War has also been hijacked by such people as socialist/communist Howard Zinn with his far-left version of American History. It is absurd and includes, of course, a section on Vietnam which many historians and school curriculums have embraced and feel determined to accept and teach. Of course, there is no mention of Zinn going to Hanoi at least twice during the war.

South Vietnam ultimately fell to the communists because academia, the press, and the politicians failed to continue sponsoring this budding democracy. When you are commanded to fight with one hand behind your back, the outcome is predictable. The aftereffects of our abandonment of South Vietnam were almost immediate: re-education camps where 185,000 died, 65,000 were executed outside of the camps, and 2 million refugees fled (and the 250,000 who died on the ocean) trying to escape the communist regime.

Its interesting to note that, as Vietnam veterans get older, historians (particularly those who never served) have accepted these slanted changes in American history put forward by collapsing education systems without many moral or ethical values. They are quick to question the memories of those who were raised differently and are still alive to impart how things really were during the Vietnam War not the omissions and biased interpretations that the repetition of academia, the self-important press, and the politicians are so keen to present as fact. It is bizarre that our military schools preach this impotent type of history because they should know better.

We can be proud of what we tried to do in Vietnam - though the fictional three-headed Hydra still guards a greatly distorted brand of truth, which some veterans groups and individuals seem to have also succumbed to.

This is our dilemma, but not the same one that the countries (and Montagnards) of Southeast Asia had to endure due to Hanois unbridled militaristic expansion and subjugation of their own people after we left. You can ignore these facts and say its not our fault that millions more were killed no matter how many times you might repeat it, it will also never be true.

Read the original post:
Dulce bellum inexpertis War is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It - smallwarsjournal

People want to kill Waldemar Zurek. They shout epithets at him on the street. News sites call him a traitor, thief and disgrace to his country. His crime, as he put it recently stepping out of a courtroom where he faced anti-government charges, is at once simple and dangerous:

Doing my job.

Zurek is among hundreds of judges who have marched against the harassment, discipline and dismissals theyve encountered for criticizing Polands increasingly zealous nationalist government. They range from local judges to the Supreme Court president. Judges from 22 European countries joined them on the streets of Warsaw last month to oppose changes they said would erode the independence of Polands courts.

In the four years since the right-wing Law and Justice party was elected to power, this nation that was once hailed as a post-Soviet success story has become the object of scorn among human rights groups. Legislators have imposed restrictions on news outlets, clamped down on museums, called for the closing of its borders to Muslim refugees and railed against gay rights as a foreign threat to Polish identity.

The judges find themselves at the center of a battle over the nations and, to a wider extent, Europes democratic ideals in a time of resurgent populism and xenophobia.

I dont recognize my country, said Zurek.

He was born in 1970 in Chrzanow, about 20 miles southeast of Katowice, to anti-communist activists. As a teenager, he spray-painted walls in his hometown with slogans against the government and state media Down with communism, Solidarity and TV news is lying and protested with revolutionary groups under threat of arrest. But Zurek is facing a different, more troubling, enemy today.

Hes changed phone numbers to avoid anonymous text messages that call him a communist pig who should be sent to camps in North Korea. At one point, he stopped going to the market with his family after receiving emails promising two shots to his face when he was out with his wife and two young girls.

Demonstrators carry a large national flag during a protest against the governments court overhaul in front of the Polish Parliament in Warsaw.

(Wojtek Radwanski / AFP/Getty Images)

Over the years, the Law and Justice party has appointed its allies to a constitutional tribunal, taken over the body that selects new judges and attempted to purge the Supreme Court. This month, the government clashed with European Union officials after the Polish president signed a law prohibiting judges from questioning changes to the judicial system.

The party has dispatched state TV and commercials to depict judges as elite and out of touch. A prime-time TV show that debuted this year, The Caste, features stories of corrupt judges, while billboards describe them as thieves and violent drunkards. At least $2 million has been spent on the campaign, according to Polish media reports.

For those Americans who are concerned about a constitutional crisis in the United States, weve got nothing on Poland, said R. Daniel Kelemen, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who focuses on Europe.

As right-wing, nationalist, populist governments have gained influence across the continent, notably in Hungary, Poland is the new battleground. There have even been suggestions of a Polexit, he said, referring to Brexit, Britains departure from the EU.

It all comes as right-wing movements have made gains across Europe, including in neighboring Germany, where a racist gunman last week killed nine people.

Demonstrators rally in support of judges outside the Court of Appeal in Katowice, where Judge Waldemar Zurek was called to appear in January.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images)

Under EU law, members are bound by legal standards that apply across the union. The EU, which Poland joined in 2004, has sued Warsaw repeatedly for tampering with the courts. Pressure has grown for the bloc to cut the billions of euros it sends each year to Poland. And the Polish Supreme Court recently declared that the countrys flouting of European law might force it to leave the EU.

When communism fell 31 years ago, Zurek enrolled in the countrys oldest university to become a lawyer. Over his 22 years as a judge in Krakow, he was hailed as a rising star for his caseloads and legal opinions, often on lawsuits between major corporations. He spent eight years on the National Council of the Judiciary, which appoints judges and reviews complaints about them, before he said the ruling party forced him out and installed its allies. The countrys major legal newspaper, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, once named him the best judge of Poland, and his name was floated to join the Supreme Court.

Most of that was before the Law and Justice party won parliamentary elections, first in 2015 and again last year on a platform of reforming the court system, which it said was overburdened, inefficient and rife with communist-era holdovers. Former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and twin brother Lech founded the party in 2001. Lech was president when he died in a plane crash in 2010. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is now in Parliament, wields tremendous influence on the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, who ran for office as a party member.

There is an ongoing war regarding the state of democracy in Poland, said Adam Bodnar, a government ombudsman and independent human rights monitor. We are in the last stages.

Judge Waldemar Zurek

(Jacek Taran / For The Times)

Representatives of the nations Ministry of Justice did not reply to requests for comment from the Los Angeles Times. In a December interview with the Polish Press Agency, Kaczynski said that judges actually do not bear the consequences of even their most unlawful and harmful actions, were part of a sick system and could be evil.

Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski, who has clashed with EU officials over Polands judicial transformation, said in an interview that critics were playing politics while the government was democratizing the courts and making them more transparent.

We have been accused of all kinds of crimes against democracy. Its not true, Jablonski said. We want our judges to stop being political. They should be impartial.

The words unnerve Zurek, who fears he will eventually be out of a job, or worse.

Poland is going backward, he said recently during a meeting in a cafe across the street from his court to avoid what he said was regular street harassment during interviews. The government now has a totalitarian mentality.

Zurek during his appearance at the Court of Appeal in Katowice.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images )

In Katowice, about an hour from his Krakow court, Zurek showed up last month on charges that he disobeyed the orders of a superior appointed by the ruling party to switch to a new court division. He has appealed the transfer.

Some of the accusations against us judges seem from the outside like we are picking small fights, he said in an interview. But these are tactics the government is using to set us up to fail. They give us new responsibilities, give us big caseloads, and dont give us adequate clerks, to set us up to fail all because we question the pseudo-reform of the judiciary.

He has also been investigated by the governments anti-corruption office on suspicion of not paying taxes, including on a tractor he sold five years ago. In another case, the government charged him for a tweet last year in which he criticized the appointment to the Supreme Court of an attorney aligned with the ruling party. Hes also faced criticism for participating in a public debate on the judiciary. Once a popular lecturer at the National School of Judiciary and Public Prosecution in Krakow, he has now been banned by his court from teaching.

Dozens of demonstrators showed up in support of Zurek at his hearing, as they do at many of the court proceedings against judges that have become commonplace around the country. They held Polish flags and posters that said wolne sady! The phrase means independent or free courts.

We will return to the dictatorship, because now all power will be in the hands of one party, just as it was during [communism], said Henryk Mizerski, a 70-year-old who was part of the Solidarity anti-communist movement of the 1980s.

This government isnt creating anything. Its only decomposing our law and society, said another demonstrator, Tadeusz Kus, 60.

Demonstrators attend a hearing at the Court of Appeal in Katowice, Poland, to support Zurek.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images )

Although tens of thousands have marched in Warsaw and elsewhere over the months in support of judges, they represent a small fraction of the countrys population of nearly 38 million. Among the nations 10,000 judges, about 1,000 at most have spoken up publicly or attended protests over the judiciary. Judges associations, which have been unified in their opposition, say many of their members stay quiet because they fear retribution.

Early this month, after the new law banning judges from criticizing the government was signed, thousands of Poles rallied in support in Warsaw by the Constitutional Tribunal building. They held signs that read popieram reforme sadow! I support court reform!

Justice is the strength and the foundation of the power of the Republic of Poland, protest leader Adam Borowski told the crowd. If this justice is not found in the courts, our homeland will be weak.

The Law and Justice partys successes in elections and pushing its agenda are in part a result of a healthy Polish economy and generous social welfare programs. Hovering around 5%, the unemployment rate is at a historic low. The government, meanwhile, has spent the equivalent of billions of dollars on programs popular with poor and middle-class Poles, including a 500 zloty monthly allowance about $126 for each child in a family, banning income taxes for 2 million workers under 26, and promising to nearly double the minimum wage by 2023.

Protesters hold banners in support of Zurek outside the Court of Appeal in Katowice.

(Omar Marques / SOPA Images )

For a family that sees itself doing better under the party, the issue of courts seems like an obscure issue that doesnt affect it, said Bodnar, the government ombudsman. He added that the court overhaul also had its source in real problems.

The Polish judiciary does need substantial reform. There is a big backlog. In big cities, you may have to wait more than a year for the first hearing in a divorce case, Bodnar said. So when the government says there needs to be reform, people agree. But the actions the government takes are entirely different.

Zurek, who has become accustomed to the onslaught of critics, said he feared for the future of his country and his family.

After a demonstration last month in Krakow where he spoke, a drunken man cornered Zurek to yell at him about his speech, saying it was wrongly anti-government. Zurek said the moment reminded him of another incident that shocked the nation. In January 2019, Pawel Adamowicz, a liberal mayor of the northern city of Gdansk and well-known government critic, was stabbed to death on stage during a charity concert by a man who opposed his political views.

The government blamed the crime on a deranged man with a checkered past. Activists questioned whether bitter political divisions and the demonizing of government critics in the media played a role in the hatred.

I feel we judges are heading toward the same situation now, Zurek said, clutching a cross with a Polish eagle that he wears on his neck. I pray nothing happens to me.

Go here to see the original:
Poland judges face peril, even death threats, for criticizing right-wing government - Los Angeles Times