By Ed West
I'm an unashamed Polonophile. If you grew up in a certain kind of
Irish-British Catholic household in the 1980s, Poland was a heroic and
tragic fairytale kingdom that, having endured the neo-pagan Nazis, was
now held captive by the godless Soviets – and yet maintained its faith,
chivarly and honour.
The story of medieval Christian chivalry battling against the
monstrous modernists had a Tolkienesque grandeur to it (or Lucasian, you
could stay - Star Wars has similar themes) and the election of
John Paul II, and the overthrow of the Communists in early 1989, was
the end of the hero's journey. The Evil Empire was destroyed.
Katyn tells the truth about Communism
The Soviet Union was certainly evil and one its worst moments was
Katyn, the massacre of 12,000 Polish officers, policemen and
intellectuals in April 1940. The Nazis discovered the bodies in 1943 but
for some reason no one believed them when they said they hadn't done it
this time. Our Russians maintained this lie and the West went along
with it, as we went along with Stalin's vicious colonisation of our
ally.
The massacre, and the subsequent battle for the truth, is the subject of an overwhelming new Polish film, Katyn.
I went to a screening last week and, rarely for review screenings,
there was total silence afterwards. The audience was stunned
The last 20 minutes is incredibly powerful, certainly the most
devastating account of Communism's inhumanity I have ever seen. Without
much melodrama we see unarmed men being taken from trains to trucks and
down into a bunker and shot. Others are brought to the edge of the mass
grave where their now lifeless friends lie in piles, and shot in the
back of the head. The men – who have mothers and sisters and wives and
daughters back home – say their prayers and clutch their rosaries. Their
executioners impassively murder them and then share cigarettes, before
burying the bodies and bayonetting the survivors.
The horrors of Nazism are so well known they are part of the cultural
landscape. But even the wrongs committed by the West during the Cold
War have been endlessly chronicled in cinema, television and theatre.
Compare the number of films and plays about Senator McCarthy's victims
(who lost their careers) compared to productions about Beria and
Stalin's victims (who lost their lives).
It's because Western artists prefer not to tackle Left-wing tyrannies that Communism has always been given an easy ride.
People walk around with CCCP football tops, wear Che T-shirts, or go
drinking in vodka bars called Revolution (an especially tasteless idea –
would the council allow me to open a Nazi-themed bar called Lebensraum?
Admittedly it would become a gay bar pretty soon). When David Beckham
turned up one day wearing an Adolf Eichmann T-shirt I thought maybe for
one second it was a protest about the casual way mass murderers are
turned into icons (what Mark in Peep Show calls the “ironic veneration of tyrants”).
We shouldn't forget how bad the Soviet Union was, especially to heroic Poland. Katyn is out on 19 June – watch it, and next time you see someone wearing a Che T-shirt, punch them.
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