Dinosaurs in Parliament

Maciej Giertych, a Polish member of the European Parliament, believes that human beings and dinosaurs coexisted. As evidence, the Oxford-educated geneticist cites the legends of Loch Ness and the dragon of Cracow’s Royal Castle. This is not a joke. Last October, at a seminar on evolution, he voiced opposition to its teaching in schools. His son Roman Giertych, also a politician, generally shares his father’s views – and happens to be the Minister of Education.

However, dinosaurs are not the most serious problem in today’s Poland. It is the coexistence of authoritarian, nationalist, xenophobic, homophobic and fundamentalist religious tendencies in Poland’s government with a secular, democratic European Union that is the problem.

So much so that 4 out of 18 paragraphs in a June 15, 2006 European Parliament resolution on the increase in racist and homophobic violence in Europe referred to Poland. While intolerance rather than violence is the main issue in the country, the second longest paragraph was devoted exclusively to the Polish situation.

Poland’s current political landscape was shaped by the autumn 2005 elections. They resulted in a new government led by Law and Justice (PIS), a centre-right nationalist-populist party. The elections saw the rise of the Kaczynski twins, with Jaroslaw Kaczynski leading PIS to victory as head of the party and his brother Lech Kaczynski winning the presidential elections. To avoid endangering Lech’s chances in the presidential race (which followed the parliamentary elections), Jaroslaw appointed an obscure technocrat, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, to be prime minister, while he held the reins of power behind the scenes.

Many observers expected PIS to form an uneasy coalition with another centre-right party, the Civic Platform (PO), but this did not come to pass. PIS which won a rather unspectacular 27% of the vote found it difficult to stomach the idea of sharing power with the liberal, pro-business, pro-European PO, which achieved a similar result with 24%. And so began several turbulent months of attempts to build a coalition with two smaller parties. This was preferable for PIS: it could dominate such a coalition and have partners whose views on economics, religion and Europe were closer to its own.

The PIS vision is one of a strong state under its tight control. Its priorities are to battle various elites and old networks, purge and punish those with ties to the pre-1989 Communist regime, and defend Poland’s sovereignty. PIS sees itself as a guardian of Polish national interests, law and order, and traditional Catholic values with a mission to help ordinary, less well-off God-fearing Poles. To achieve its goals, PIS is seeking to take over state institutions, including public broadcasting, the courts, and intelligence services.

“Twinocracy” with a touch of fascism

In order to govern holding only one-third of parliamentary seats, PIS formed a tactical alliance with two radical parties: Roman Giertych’s ultra-Catholic hard-right League of Polish Families (LPR) and the somewhat disreputable, populist, hybrid left- right Samoobrona (meaning “Self-Defense”) headed by Andrzej Lepper, who used to lead farmers’ road blockades and has a fondness for the Belarusian regime. The tactical alliance was solidified in February 2006 with the signing of a “stability pact” between the three parties. However, the bickering and backstabbing pervasive in Polish politics continued; the accord collapsed within two months. Once again PIS tried to stitch together a working majority, and finally managed in early May – seven months after the elections – to create a formal coalition with LPR and Samoobrona. But turbulence continued: in September the coalition fell apart due to a budget row, but was again glued back together.
The LPR is a party that preaches “family values” and condemns homosexuality. That European Parliament resolution mentions that a leading LPR member incited violence against gays and lesbians ahead of a march for equal rights. When Lech Kaczynski had been mayor of Warsaw, he banned such marches and even criticized police for acting forcefully against rightwing hooligans who attacked marchers. These hooligans were members of the All-Polish Youth, a neo-fascist group closely connected with LPR. Roman Giertych himself used to be its leader. Photos have emerged of its members giving Nazi salutes at meetings and burning a large swastika-shaped cross.

In July 2006, the de facto Kaczynski “twinocracy” was formalized as Jaroslaw Kaczynski essentially forced Marcinkiewicz out of the Prime Minister’s office and took it over himself. In what may be unprecedented anywhere in the world, identical twin brothers are now head of state and head of government.

God’s media on side

The attempt to create a strong PIS- controlled state has been accompanied by another disturbing development: a further reduction of the separation of religion and state. Already in 1998, Poland ratified a Concordat with the Vatican granting the Catholic Church a number of privileges, e.g. paying Catholic priests from the state budget to teach religion (i.e. Catholicism) in public schools. As is well-known, Poland is a strongly Catholic nation with the highest church attendance in Europe. Yet, around 2 million Poles are non-believers.

Catholicism in Poland has two seats of institutional power: the traditional Catholic Church and a parallel media empire, led by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, that comprises Radio Maryja, TV Trwam and the newspaper Nasz Dziennik. The mainstream Church looks somewhat askance at Rydzyk’s venture. His empire disseminates hardline Catholic views filled with anti-liberalism, anti- secularism, anti-semitism, europhobia, xenophobia, and homophobia to millions of loyal listeners, viewers, and readers. It was this electorate that helped PIS come out on top in the 2005 elections. Previously, the LPR was the party most closely associated with Radio Maryja and got its support mainly from its listeners. PIS cleverly moved into LPR’s territory and won Rydzyk’s endorsement.

The payoff for the Rydzyk empire has been an enhanced role in Polish political life. When the “stability pact” was signed in February, TV Trwam, Radio Maryja and Nasz Dziennik were granted exclusive rights to cover the event. Journalists from public TV and the main private networks, as well as leading daily papers were excluded. To this day, the government uses TV Trwam and Radio Maryja for longer appearances to explain its policies and plans. Other media are used primarily for daily news sound bites and press conferences.

In March a private TV station broadcast a talk show on which one of the guests, a known TV personality, satirized a Radio Maryja presenter who recited prayers on air. As a result, the Polish National Broadcasting Council fined the station the equivalent of 125,000 euros for insulting the dignity of the presenter (who is disabled, a fact the talk show host did not know) and the religious feelings of her listeners. But when in April a Radio Maryja commentator made inflammatory statements about Jews trying to humiliate Poland by demanding restitution for expropriated property, and about Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading national daily, being a tool of a “Jewish fifth column”, the Broadcasting Council took no action, not even a verbal rebuke.

More religion, less evolution

The PIS-led coalition government has not only strengthened the role of ultra-Catholic media, it is also trying to increase the influence of Catholicism in public education. This is hardly surprising given that the Minister of Education is the head of the LPR. While his party now has only
3% support according to recent polls, he is in charge of all public education from elementary to university level
encompassing millions of students. He is on a mission to instill the good old-fashioned values of patriotism and religious faith among primary and secondary school children. This means classes in patriotism and increased attendance in (so far non-obligatory) religion classes, taught by priests who are paid by the State.

In October 2006, the deputy education minister Miros∏aw Orzechowski declared that the theory of evolution is a pack of lies and the “feeble idea of an aged non-believer”. He called for a debate on whether evolution should be taught in schools. Orzechowski’s boss, Roman Giertych, said that evolution is just one of many theories on the origin of life on Earth.

The reaction from Poland’s scientific community was strong. Biologists, geneticists, and other scientists from the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences issued statements in defense of the theory of evolution. Even a group of clerical scholars from Catholic academic institutions issued their own statement asserting the compatibility of evolutionary theory with Christianity. (Whether they are really compatible is another matter.)

In his latest move, Roman Giertych has proposed that religion be put on an equal footing with other school subjects. This means that grades from religion class will be counted in the grade point average of students. The fact that students in religion classes are mostly given the top grades will encourage more students to enroll in these classes. The fundamental problem is that “religion” in this case means Catholicism, not the objective comparative study of religions, much less any teaching that also examines alternative views on the question of religion and God, such as deism, agnosticism, and atheism.

Reductio ad absurdum

The year 2006 in Poland, a year of turbulent twinocracy, shaken by major scandals that belied the self-proclaimed moral mission of the new regime, ended with the drive to mix state and religion taking a truly absurd turn. Earlier in the year, during the hot dry days of summer, deputies from the three parties of the governing coalition prayed together for rain. In December, as if to outdo that absurdity, forty-six deputies from the same parties submitted a draft law that would declare Jesus Christ the King of Poland. But then, why not? After all, this is a country where dinosaurs can co-exist with humans.

Nyegosh Dube is a member of the Polish Humanist Association