Requiem for the Polish Leadership in Commemorating the Katyn Massacre

The moral of this commentary, and most of my others, is “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”




Poland lost its leadership the other day when the plane crashed which was carrying them to Russia to commemorate the Katyn Massacre by the Soviets. Interestingly, the site of the crash was the same forest of Katyn where, in 1940, the Soviets had massacred 22,000 intellectuals, leaders, ethnic minorities, and military Reserve [militia] officers and non-commissioned officers. The Russians blame the crash on “pilot error” and fog, while conspiracy theorists believe this was a carefully laid plot; they’ll be watching for a Russian putsch.


In reality, the Katyn Massacre may have been the catalyst for the unraveling of the Soviet Empire in later years. In 1978 (back when I was a Pentagon Intelligence Analyst) I reported on a mass civil riot in Warsaw in which Soviet soldiers were attacked and mauled by thousands of irate Poles. The incident was sparked by a group of drunken Soviet soldiers who made a show of desecrating the Katyn monument in Warsaw. The consequent death toll of Soviet soldiers was not insignificant; what was more significant was the size and intensity of the riot itself, coupled with the conspicuous absence of any retaliatory action by the Soviets against the citizenry.


A good part of the Soviet reticence was the fact that Poland was one of the key producers of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction for the Warsaw Pact, and there was the possibility that inflamed Polish citizenry might just turn some of these weapons against the Soviet troops. In addition, Poland produced key components of major weapons systems and vehicles, any of which could be [and frequently were] sabotaged on the production line by unhappy workers.


Following the riots over the Katyn Massacre monument, there were a series of visible rebellious events, such as the stoning of the puppet president while he attempted to give a speech in a coal mining town, again without Soviet retaliation. The absence of a response by the Soviets emboldened revolutionary figures like Lech Walesa to lead the Solidarity Movement from the Gdansk Shipyard, and eventually topple the Soviet-backed government in Poland; the collapse of the Soviet satellites soon brought down the entire Soviet state, and of course, the rest is history.


All this is background to how the Katyn Massacre came to be; it was based on Stalin’s theory of domination of a conquered country which consisted of killing off the leadership and intellectuals; most recently, we witnessed the Killing Fields of Cambodia, in which all intellectuals were rounded up and killed. [I periodically operated in northern Cambodia (Khet Preah Vihear) and personally witnessed the depravity of the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese soldiers who advised the Khmers; they slaughtered teachers, priests, nuns, village leaders, and even those who wore glasses on the premise that if they were smart enough to recognize the need for glasses, they should be killed. On occasion, we’d capture these sub-human creatures; rather than kill them ourselves, we’d strip them down and march them to the nearest village and let the people deal with them – slowly.]


To completely dominate a country and its people, Stalin and Hitler operated from the same SOP. The first step was gun control through universal registration, and later, confiscation of all privately held guns using the registration documents. Concurrent with this process was the mandatory registration of all educated persons in the military Reserves, which then made it an easy task to track down and arrest anyone who might conceivably pose a threat to the State. All this legislation was enacted in the interest of public safety and national security, and the educated populace em
braced it wholeheartedly as a means to domestic tranquility, initially.


Interestingly, Hitler didn’t have to initiate gun control since the Weimar Republic had legislated in 1928 to "protect the citizenry"; Hitler simply used existing laws as the basis for disarming the populace. In the period leading up to Kristallnacht, all firearms were confiscated from the Jews; any one found with a gun was arrested and either shipped off to a concentration camp, or executed.


I’ll close my comments with quotes from two notable men in history:


"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country."

                                                --Adolf Hitler, 11 April 1942, quoted in
                                                              Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44: 
                                                              His Private Conversations, 
                                                              2nd Edition (1973), Pp. 425-426.

“The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the palladium of the liberties of a republic, since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers and will generally, even if these (rulers) are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
                                                             US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story
                                                             Commentaries on the US Constitution [1833]