Collaborators

Courtesy of Boing Boing, we have this story.

WARSAW (Reuters) - Polish spies may be in danger after a list of names from communist-era files was leaked onto the Internet earlier in the week, Prime Minister Marek Belka says.

The directory of 240,000 names includes informers, spies and people questioned by the secret police under communist rule. The archives are held by the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) but the names were copied by a journalist and published.{...}

While this seemed sensational, it has the potential for greater repercussions:

{...}Investigations into links between politicians and the former communist leadership is becoming a major election issue in this year's parliamentary and presidential polls

All Polish politicians have to reveal any links to communist special services and if they are found to have lied by a special tribunal, they face a ban from public office.{...}

Now, this list was never meant to be made public in its entirety. Special access to it was granted only to historians, journalists and the like, but no one was supposed to copy the list and publish it. Oops. It's caused quite the sensation in Poland. According to Boing Boing:

{...}"The list instantly cropped up on many web sites, p2p networks, became available via BitTorrent, while the the term 'lista Wildsteina' (Wildstein's list) became a super-popular query at all Polish search engines. At one (onet.pl, the second most popular after google), people searched for it around 300,000 times a day comparing to just only 9,000 searches for 'sex', the former top query."

While the Poles have made a tremendously succesful conversion to democracy and a market economy, whilst forging many new alliances in the meantime, they still have serious issues with their communist past and the injustice of the era. This could be very, very big. Given the prevailing attitude toward those who collaborated, well, let's just say that I don't think the words "Innocent Until Proven Guilty" will hold much sway with voters. A whiff of this scandal would be enough to kill many a candidates hopes---forever. Even if they were proven innocent of collaboration later on in the game.

If the gravity of this isn't getting to you, let's propose a hypothetical: how do you think the French would react to someone, say Blacques Jacques Chirac for example, having been revealed as a Nazi collaborator? Do you think that might hurt his chances of staying in power, given today's media coverage and the worldwide condemnation that would ring forth?

Posted by Kathy at February 6, 2005 10:09 PM