JF Ptak Science Books Post 2884
There's nothing quite like a series of lies that is a vast series of lines, lies all the way up and mostly all the way down, lies that are built into Borgesian extravagancies with a sweetener here and there of a little bit of truth. That is pretty much what we have here in the pro-Stalinist/Soviet pamphlet, What is Happening in Poland, with an imprint of June, 1945.
There's a lot of difficulty in this work's 29 pages, all of which are ultimately directed against the still-extant Polish government in exile (in London) insisting that those are the anti-democratic and anti-Soviet forces at work in Poland. The write, a physicist named Ignace Zlotowski is the author, and he makes an abundant case for the London government setting out to destabilize (and de-Stalinize) the “New Poland”.
The rhetoric is really quite remarkable.
For example, Zlotowski makes the case for the catastrophic defeat of the Polish underground in the Warsaw Uprising (1 August—2 October 1944) directly on the Polish exile leadership. Even though far away in London the government did exert considerable influence in Poland, and did organize and begin the uprising. The rest of the story and the failure of the uprising against the Nazis can be placed in squarely in the lap of the Soviets, who—even though at the gates of the city, advancing West—did nothing in this fight against the German army. The Soviet forces sat just across the Vistula, ignoring pleas from Churchill and Roosevelt to help the Poles, and waited the tragedy out, until the Germans destroyed the uprising in bitter house-by-house fighting, ultimately destroying nearly the entire city, killing some 200,000 people (mostly civilian, and mostly murdered). The Wehrmacht pushed through the city from October to January, hunting people, destroying the city almost completely. It was a strategic move by Stalin, deciding to let two enemies fight it out, allowing the Nazis to destroy elements of the population that the Soviets found to be problematic for the administration of the country once they decided to push through Poland on their way west.
This was standard procedure for the Soviets—for example, there was the Katyn massacre, where 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and intelligentsia were executed in various parts of the Katyn forest. The Great Terror, the Great Famine, the Show Trials, the Holodomor, the Pogroms, and on and on. This was what the Polish government in exile was fighting against, and this is what they would lose to.
This pamphlet displays just a little of that Stalinist thinking, and it is enough to understand what those people were up to.
I've included (below) some of the text related to the Warsaw Uprising and the Trial of the Sixteen--we don't have the results of the trial though they are pre-ordained, as is the fate of the fabled and heroic General Okulicki, who would be found guilty and then murdered by the NKVD in 1946.
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