Although the vision of an Oscar for Ida excites the elites of the postcolonial Third Republic of Poland, we must strongly protest and say it out loud: “We do not want that Oscar!” The price we would have to pay for it is insanely high.
Wesprzyj nas już teraz!
As corroborated by experts in the art of film, Ida is a meticulously prepared and detailed picture. The photographs are a masterpiece and the film delivers scenes that are etched in a viewer’s memory. Pawlikowski’s picture is the example of cinema for connoisseurs, because it is a difficult film in perception, overwhelming with understatement, and full of acting with gestures, facial expressions, words, and symbols. However, what is most disturbing is the outrageous message carried by the film that puts forth a false version of history, presented in Jan Tomasz Gross’s writing and recently depicted in Aftermath (Polish: Pokłosie) by Władysław Pasikowski. What is this version? Poles were the perpetrators of crimes during the Second World War, not their victims.
Crime and Fault
Aggressive promotion of the film at the salons of Europe – and most recently also in Hollywood – coincides with the Germans’ attempts to shift the responsibility for the victims of the 1939-1945 war onto Nazis of unspecified nationality. The approach has been significantly supported by the progressives who have kept saying, over the last few decades, that Hitler or Stalin’s crimes were not a result of the collapse of civilization, but of a sudden and incomprehensible explosion of “anti-democratic” ideologies and political talents of “extremists” of those days. The reason for their development was to be only the economic crisis or the tiring existence of an “archaic” regime in Russia. However, nobody seems to take notice of the extremely anti-religious and anti-civilization nature of communism and Nazism. Communism created organizations such as the League of Militant Atheists, while Nazism that derived from a neo-pagan philosophy professed demonic practices aimed at destroying the Church.
Selective historical memory of influential intellectual elites in Europe facilitates the Germans’ devising a new story of their role during the Second World War. Not only is Poland unable to respond to it, but it also accepts the progressives’ narrative, which suggests that Nazism did not originate from the decadent and corrupt Old Continent, but unspecified anti-semitism and radicalism having its sources in, what else, intolerance of many nations, including Poles. If you want to make a slight exaggeration of the rhetoric of people like Gross, it should be stated bluntly: the Second Republic of Poland was a state dominated by a bitter atmosphere of waiting for the chaos induced by the war conflagration, when our fathers and mothers could finally be able to put the hatred of the Jews into practice.
And what about the “fathers and mothers” of our German neighbors? They became victims of the economic crisis, which was, of course, a side effect of a legitimate struggle connected with the departure from monarchy in the 19th century. Therefore, when the people of France and Germany appear to be eulogists of demoliberalism and progress that are to successfully close a period of war and extremism, we, Poles, become dark people bashed for their primitivism, racism and murderous tribal instincts. How could one blame Germans and Russians for such acts? They are great nations creating Europe’s both political and cultural history, aren’t they?
Ida fits perfectly in this series of progressive propaganda. Pawlikowski’s picture lacks German criminals, lacks even a word about their cruelty, while Poles are depicted as a tribe driven by bloody instincts, savages motivated solely by profit. They murder with axes and then drop their victims into hastily dug pits. Catholicism, being the foundation of European civilization and still a strong support for many Poles, is shown as a series of schematic and senseless rituals, a kind of sectarian practice, distant from “genuine” Poland, which is racist and eager for profit.
Oscar’s Price
If Ida receives an Oscar, it will be a grim culmination of pushing Poland’s history of heroic struggle with the “products” of civilization collapse of Europe, Nazism and communism, to a dark corner in the attic of infamy and shame. The gauntlet thrown down to Germans and Soviets by Poles fits in quite a different narrative than the one presented by the progressives. This is a part of the history of Catholic Europe fighting against those who defied God near Lepanto, Vienna, Warsaw, and on Westerplatte.
The Second World War was a war of the Catholic civilization, undigested by modern Europe’s elites craving for progress. The attitude of Poles from 1939 to 1945, as well as after the war, towards communism, shown in its true light would be a great, painful splinter in the eye of modern ideologists of “the end of history.” Preceded by Gross’s books and Aftermath, Ida creates history anew by depriving Poles of a heroic element of defenders of Christian civilization and reducing them to the role of perpetrators of the hecatomb committed a few decades ago. Therefore, in spite of the vision of an Oscar for Ida that excites the elites of the postcolonial Third Republic of Poland, who are obedient to “words of wisdom” proclaimed in the West, we must strongly protest and say it out loud: “We do not want that Oscar!” This award will only increase the legitimacy of anti-Polish and anti-civilization propaganda. If the Oscar gala brings Pawlikowski a success, officially we, willy-nilly, make a milestone on the road to the abdication of the position of Vienna, Warsaw and Westerplatte defenders. What we will be left with after Piłsudski and the Cursed Soldiers’ monuments are forgotten is this one embarrassing picture: a filthy Pole digging out the remains of his victims from a forest pit. That image will become a symbol of poverty and replace our nation’s proud history, the history of the generations being Antemurale Christianitatis. This is the true price of an Oscar.
Krzysztof Gędłek
