Nous n’entendons pas les protestations qu’on pourrait attendre. Le monde poursuit sa vie comme si de rien n’était alors que l’Iran intensifie ses efforts pour se doter d’armes nucléaires et menace de rayer Israël de la carte. Benjamin Netanyahou
Katyn est le premier film qui porte sur le massacre et l’agression soviétique contre la Pologne, commise en accord avec Hitler. Ce fut un sujet tabou pour la gauche française. Pendant de longues années, elle garda le silence autour de l’invasion de la Pologne par l’Armée rouge, des crimes des Soviétiques, de même que sur Katyn. Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, ce tragique événement historique est un cadavre dans le placard de la gauche française, si longtemps indulgente à l’égard du « Grand Linguiste » (Staline). Adam Michnik
Quelle satisfaction aurait-on de voir que la carrière semi-clandestine d’un film sur le massacre soviétique perpétré à Katyn ne serait que le fruit d’une manœuvre réussie de diversion, de sorte que le grand public ne prenne pas connaissance d’un des plus atroces crimes du communisme. Pour peu que l’on ne veuille pas le corriger à l’aide d’excursions pédagogiques de spectateurs révoltés, il faut se rendre à l’évidence que les distributeurs timorés prévoyaient consciemment pire que la censure : les pires aspects du communisme, même confiés à un grand metteur en scène, n’émeuvent guère le grand public, ne suscitent aucune indignation sincère, n’enflamment pas la passion ou l’imagination d’un large public (…) C’est une conclusion amère et triste, mais réelle. (…) 20 ans après la chute du Mur de Berlin, le communisme et ses massacres n’intéressent pratiquement personne, à l’exception de ceux pour qui l’anticommunisme est devenu une obsession. (…) Concernant le communisme – aucune indignation. Dans le monde de la culture, dans le débat public, aux caisses des cinémas, l’anticommunisme a subi une défaite mélancolique. Pierluigi Battista (Pourquoi « Katyn » n’intéresse personne?, Corriere della Sera)
Il fallait qu’un journaliste ose le mot. C’était trop tentant. On a guetté tout le week-end. Ils tournaient autour, parlaient de « malheur », de « tragédie », mais se retenaient. Et c’est finalement Nicolas Demorand, lundi matin, sur France Inter, qui a décroché la timbale en haut du crucifix en évoquant la « malédiction » de Katyn. Malédiction ! Aussi impressionnant que soit l’accident aérien qui a coûté la vie au président polonais, et à une centaine de membres du personnel politique et de hauts fonctionnaires, sur les lieux même du massacre des officiers polonais en 1940, aussi « inimaginable » que soit cette « tragédie », pour reprendre les mots mesurés de Lech Walesa, faut-il pour autant tomber à genoux, Jesus Marie, en parlant de « malédiction » ? (…) dans les premiers récits du crash polonais, discrétion de violette sur la chaîne des responsabilités de « l’erreur humaine ». Et pourtant ! Imagine-t-on une seconde qu’un pilote transportant le tout-Etat, ayant tenté trois fois un atterrissage dans le brouillard, tente seul un quatrième atterrissage, sans en référer à ses prestigieux passagers ? Cherchez bien, dans vos médias, qui pose cette simple question, et venez nous le raconter. Soyons juste : avec une loupe, on peut en trouver trace. Il faut par exemple arriver aux toutes dernières lignes de l’article de Libération, pour lire ceci : « le pilote aurait été sous pression de l’équipe présidentielle. Elle aurait mis en avant le fait que quelque 400 personnes venues de Varsovie en train étaient sur place, qu’une messe était prévue, et que la retransmission télévisée ne pouvait pas attendre ». Pour la suite de l’enquête, on attendra la fin du délai de décence. Daniel Schneidermann
C’était, naturellement, un genre très ordinaire de brouillard qui (avec le pilotage apparemment imprudent) a abattu l’avion transportant le Président polonais Lech Kaczynski, son épouse et son entourage de notables politiques alors qu’ils tentaient d’atterrir pour la commémoration du 70e anniversaire du massacre de Katyn. Pourtant, on peut être pardonné pour se demander si les mondes physique et métaphysique ne s’étaient pas ligués contre eux dans ce dernier épisode de la tragédie polonaise. Le brouillard jette un voile sur le monde connu; le déchirer a toujours été l’objet de la longue quête de la Pologne pour la liberté. (…) L’histoire est peut-être irréversible, mais elle existe sous un constant état de siège de ceux qu’elle gêne. La défendre est le fardeau permanent de tous les peuples libres, la tâche essentielle pour laquelle les Polonais ont encore payé le prix le plus terrible. Bret Stephens
Au lieu de reconnaître les faits sur les origines de la deuxième guerre mondiale, le Kremlin est engagé dans une fraude massive, cherchant à convaincre le monde que la Russie était la clef de la victoire en Europe. Il ne précise pas que sous Josef Staline, l’Union Soviétique était également la clef de la défaite pour beaucoup d’Européens. L’Union Soviétique permit à Hitler de lancer la guerre éclair contre la Pologne ; assura à Berlin des approvisionnements vitaux en crédits, énergie et armes, permettant à Hitler de lancer sa conquête de l’Europe occidentale ; et contribua aux conditions de l’holocauste nazi tout en conduisant ses propres déportations et crimes de masse contre les nations soumises. (…) Sans de telles mesures courageuses, le dégel entre Varsovie et Moscou ne sera jamais plus qu’une poignée de terre meuble jetée sur le permafrost. Janusz Bugajski
Attention: un brouillard peut en cacher un autre.
Au lendemain de la catastrophe aérienne qui a coûté la vie au président et à une centaine de hauts responsables politiques et militaires polonais sur les lieux même du massacre de 1940 …
Et de la 65e commémoration de la journée de la Shoah en Israël alors que, devant le refus du Pénitant en chef d’appeler les choses par leurs noms, l’Iran multiplie tant les déclarations que les préparatifs pour une nouvelle Solution finale …
Comme à la veille, le mois prochain, des cérémonies grandioses qu’un Moscou plus révisionniste et revanchard que jamais va nul doute encore nous concocter pour le 65e anniversaire de sa victoire sur le nazisme …
Comment éviter le mot qui indigne tant le chroniqueur des médias Daniel Schneidermann, à savoir celui de malédiction, employé lundi matin sur France inter par Nicolas Demorand ?
Comment en effet ne pas comprendre, au-delà de la trop facile explication par le syndrome du passager VIP présentée par des journalistes particulièrement hargneux au moment où le contenu des boites noires va être rendu public, l’intense pression qui a apparemment poussé si désastreusement les victimes elles-mêmes à faire coûte que coûte après la troisième tentative ce fatidique atterrissage dans le brouillard de Katyn?
Comment ne pas imaginer, au-delà des centaines de personnes venues de Varsovie, de la messe et de la retransmission télévisée, l’attente de tout un peuple depuis 70 longues années pour cette reconnaissance, devant le reste du monde et contre la tentative de récupération de Moscou trois jours plus tôt, d’un des pires crimes de guerre de l’Union soviétique sur quelque 22 000 membres de leurs élites?
Et, un an après l’incroyable indifférence qui a accueilli la sortie en Occident du film de Wajda, comment ne pas voir, avec le chroniqueur du WSJ Bret Stephens, cet autre brouillard, bien humain celui-là, que tant les actuelles autorités russes avec leur censure sur les archives et leur volonté révisionniste que certains de nos propres historiens semblent vouloir maintenir sur l’ignoble massacre et ses tout aussi dévastatrices répercussions?
The Fog Over Katyn Forest
Poland’s struggle of memory against forgetting.
BRET STEPHENS
The Wall Street Journal
April 13, 2010
‘The struggle of people against power, » Milan Kundera famously observed, « is the struggle of memory against forgetting. » Is there any place that better captures that truth than the Katyn Forest, or any metaphor more apt for Katyn’s place in our historical memory than fog?
It was, of course, a very mundane kind of fog that (along with some apparently reckless piloting) brought down the plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and an entourage of political notables as they attempted to land for Saturday’s commemoration of the Katyn Forest massacre’s 70th anniversary. Still, one can be forgiven for wondering whether the physical and metaphysical worlds didn’t conspire in this latest cycle of Polish tragedy. Fog makes the known world unseen; cutting through it is what Poland’s long quest for freedom—itself so often dashed to pieces—has always been about.
Today, the facts about Katyn are not in doubt. In the spring of 1940, 22,000 Polish prisoners of war—most of them army officers, but also thousands of leading members of the Polish intelligentsia—were systematically murdered by the Soviet secret police on direct orders from Joseph Stalin. Comrade Stalin, who was then carving up central Europe as an ally of Adolf Hitler, worried that some future Polish state might someday oppose him. « Under those circumstances, » observes historian Gerhard Weinberg, « depriving [Poland] of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would make it weaker. »
In one of history’s richer ironies, the massacre was first discovered and publicized by the Nazis in 1943. That made it that much easier for the Soviets to dismiss the revelation as German propaganda to cover up a German crime, a line the U.S. and Britain were only too happy to adopt to propitiate their wartime ally. The behavior of the Roosevelt administration was particularly disgraceful: As Rutgers Professor Adam Scrupski has noted, the U.S. Office of War Information « implicitly threatened to remove licensure from the Polish language radio stations in Detroit and Buffalo if they did not cease broadcasting the details of executions. »
Thus was the cause of a free Poland—the very reason the West had gone to war against Germany in the first place—sold out on the altar of realpolitik. It would not be the only sellout.
In 1968, Gabriel Kolko, now a professor emeritus at Toronto’s York University, published « The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. » The book—a landmark work of Cold War revisionism—affects to be agnostic on the question of culpability for the massacre. But Prof. Kolko did something else: He trivialized the massacre. Even assuming the Soviets bore responsibility, Katyn was « the exception » to Soviet conduct. « Its relative importance, » he said, « must be downgraded very considerably. » There is in that remark something very much like the view of France’s neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen that the Holocaust was « just a detail in the history of World War II. »
Then again, Mr. Kolko’s book at least acknowledges Katyn, which is more than can be said for Eric Hobsbawm’s 1994 bestselling history of the 20th century, « The Age of Extremes, » which the New York Times called « a bracing and magisterial work. » In his 627-page catalogue of « extremes, » the celebrated British historian and lifelong communist—who at 92 also remains the president of the University of London’s Birkbeck College—devotes exactly one paragraph to Stalin’s several million victims. Katyn itself rates no mention, even though the book was published four years after the Soviets finally acknowledged their responsibility.
Katyn denialism doesn’t end there. In Russia in recent years, there has been a renewed effort to raise a fresh round of doubts about Soviet guilt. To his credit, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has disavowed that line, and last week gave a conciliatory speech linking Russians and Poles as two peoples that « paid an exorbitantly high price . . . for the inhumanity of totalitarianism. »
Still, Russia continues to seal its archives related to Katyn. And it is under Mr. Putin that the Russian government has been systematically scrubbing its history textbooks so as to present Soviet history in a better light. It brings to mind the old joke that, under socialism, « the past can never be predicted. »
It goes without saying that Katyn is hardly the only piece of history lying under a fog. The Iranian government has made it its business to deny the Holocaust, partly out of true belief, and partly because Holocaust denial plays well throughout the Muslim world. And the governor of Virginia had a recent mental lapse in the matter of the peculiar institution the Confederacy was created to uphold. History may be irreversible, and yet it exists under a permanent state of siege from those whom it inconveniences. Defending it is the permanent burden of all free people, the essential task for which the Poles have again paid the terrible price.
Voir aussi:
The curse of Katyn
Janusz Bugajski
The Washington Times
April 14, 2010
The tragic death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, together with dozens of military commanders, politicians and top advisers, has fixed the spotlight on the Katyn massacre of 70 years ago and the context in which it occurred. This will have a sobering effect on Polish-Russian reconciliation unless all the facts about World War II are finally acknowledged by leaders of the Russian Federation – the legal inheritor of the Soviet Union.
While Russian leaders celebrate the 65th anniversary of World War II Victory Day in Moscow on May 9, awkward questions will be asked about the infamous Soviet-Nazi alliance that made World War II possible. In recent years, the Kremlin, in claiming Russia’s « great power » continuity, has sought to downplay or disguise the origins of the war. Indeed, official statements and history books continue to depict the Soviet Union as a victim and victor rather than as a co-conspirator with Hitler when it invaded Poland in September 1939, murdered tens of thousands of Polish citizens and deported more than a million into Siberian exile.
The air crash near Katyn will refocus Polish-Russian relations and give new urgency to recent moves by both capitals toward reconciliation. Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had been lauded for inviting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to a commemoration ceremony in Katyn before the fatal air crash, thereby acknowledging its importance for the Polish nation.
However, Mr. Putin’s objective may not have been so clear-cut. Plainly, the Kremlin can no longer brazenly deny that the Katyn murders were perpetrated by the Soviet security services. Instead, it is seeking to contextualize them and thereby minimize their significance. Russia has avoided issuing a formal state apology to Poland; it depicts Katyn as one of several atrocities by the faceless « totalitarian regime » and refuses to call the Katyn massacres a war crime.
The reasoning is logical. If Katyn were defined as a war crime, one would need to ascertain who was at war with whom. Why did more than 20,000 Polish officers and more than a million Polish citizens find themselves in the Soviet Union in September 1939, prevented from defending Poland from the Nazi invasion? Russia’s current leaders want to avoid discussion about the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the close collaboration between the two dictators before and during World War II aimed at carving up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. The Soviets only became anti-Nazi when Hitler decided he no longer needed Moscow as an ally.
Instead of acknowledging facts about the origins of World War II, the Kremlin is engaged in a massive deception, seeking to convince the world that Russia was the key to victory in Europe. It fails to point out that under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union also was the key to defeat for many Europeans. The Soviet Union enabled Hitler to launch the blitzkrieg against Poland; provided vital economic, energy and military supplies to Berlin, enabling Hitler to launch the conquest of Western Europe; and assisted in creating the conditions for the Nazi Holocaust while conducting its own mass murders and deportations from subject nations.
It is not surprising that Mr. Putin wanted to push Katyn to the sidelines before the May 9 anniversary and calculated that Polish leaders would reciprocate for his minimal acknowledgement of Katyn by attending the celebrations and thus giving credence to Moscow’s skewered version of history. The Katyn air crash may undermine this strategy, as the mass murders of 70 years ago have become a live subject for public debate amidst calls for closer scholarly scrutiny.
Ironically, the second Katyn tragedy provides an opportunity to initiate a genuine Russian-Polish reconciliation if Russia’s leaders undertake several crucial steps. First, they will need to acknowledge publicly that the Katyn murders were a war crime perpetrated against Poland and an attempt to decapitate the leadership of a country that the Stalin regime wanted to occupy and annex, which it did after the war.
Second, all the archives sealed in Russia pertaining to the atrocity will need to be opened to historians in order to gain all pertinent facts on the precise identity of the perpetrators and how the crime was covered up for more than 50 years.
Third, the Russian authorities must begin to tell the full truth about Stalin and the Soviet role during World War II as a co-conspirator with Hitler as well as one of Hitler’s eventual victims. Without such courageous measures, the Warsaw-Moscow thaw will simply remain a layer of loose earth over the permafrost.
Janusz Bugajski is the holder of the Lavrentis Lavrentiadis Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Voir enfin:
‘VIP passenger syndrome’ may have contributed to Polish plane crash
The role of the Polish president in the air crash in which he and 95 others died has been called into question amid suggestions he many have put pressure on the pilot to land despite bad weather warnings.
Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Matthew Day in Warsaw
The Telegraph
12 Apr 2010
Russian aviation experts claimed that « VIP passenger syndrome » could have played a part in causing of the tragedy, as it was disclosed that Lech Kaczynski had previously tried to sack a pilot who refused to land a plane for him in dangerous circumstances.
Black box recordings have confirmed that the pilot, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, an experience airman serving with the Polish air force, had ignored warnings to divert to another airport because of heavy fog.
However, it has been suggested that Mr Kaczynski did not want to miss a ceremony for the 22,000 Poles massacred by Soviet forces in the Second World War and may have urged the air crew to continue trying to land the plane.
Viktor Timoshkin, an aviation expert, said: « It was quite obviously ‘VIP passenger syndrome’. Controllers suggested that the aircraft’s crew divert the plane to an alternate route. I am sure that the commander of the crew reported this to the president. But in response, for whatever reasons, he had a clear order to land. »
In August 2008, Mr Kaczynski « shouted furiously » at a pilot who had disobeyed his order to land his plane in then war-torn Georgia for safety reasons. He later tried to have Captain Grzegorz Pietuczak removed from his post with the Polish air force for insubordination, however, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister intervened. Captain Pietuczak was later awarded a medal for carrying out his duties conscientiously for his refusal to land having judged the risks.
A Russian aviation expert said yesterday: « If he tried to land three times and fell on the fourth then he probably had the 2008 incident in mind and that was why he felt he had to land at any price. In effect, he did not take the decision but the main passenger on board did – even if the main passenger did not utter a word to the pilot. »
Andrzej Seremet, Poland’s chief prosecutor, said that there was no information from the investigation so far to suggest that Mr Kaczynski had put undue pressure on the pilot.
A senior air traffic controller at the Russian airport where the Polish plane was trying to land stirred controversy by suggesting that the Polish pilots’ poor knowledge of the Russian language was to blame.
« They were supposed to give us a report about their altitude on the approach to landing, » he said. « They did not give it. » When asked why, he said: « Because they have a bad command of the Russian language. There were Russian speakers among them but for them numbers were quite complex. »
It came as tensions between Russia and Poland over the air crash were escalated when a Polish MP claimed the Kremlin was partly to blame for the tragedy.
The two countries have set aside centuries of mutual distrust to present a united and recrimination-free front but yesterday Artur Gorski, a member of the Law and Justice party founded by Mr Kaczynski, said that Russia may have tried to deliberately prevent Mr Kaczynski’s plane from landing and thereby indirectly caused his death.
Mr Gorski said: « One version of events says that the plane approached the airport four times, because every time the Russians refused it permission to land; they wanted to send the plane with the president to an airport in Moscow or Minsk,
« They came up with some dubious reasons: that there was fog over the airport, that the navigation system didn’t work as it was under repair, and that the airport had a short landing strip. »
Mr Gorski suggested that the real reason Moscow did not want President Kaczynski to land was because he was due to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of an infamous Soviet massacre of Polish officers.
The Russians, he claimed, did not want Mr Kaczynski to upstage a similar event hosted by Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, a few days earlier.
The Kremlin may also have feared that the Polish president, a noted hawk when it came to Russia, may have planned to criticise Moscow for not issuing a proper apology for the 1940 massacre, he added.
Mr Putin, who has taken charge of the investigation into the air crash, which is being carried out by both Russian and Polish teams, yesterday promised an « objective and thorough » investigation.
Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland’s acting head of state, has announced an immediate review of regulations, or the lack of them, governing just which political and military leaders can fly together. The air crash was carrying nine senior military leaders, as well as the governor of Poland’s central bank.