It has come to this.

I am transformed from a hoplessly progressive Guardian reader into hopelessly progressive Guardian writer.

My Response to Timothy Garton Ash’s recent article about Michal Kaminski has appeared. The article as I drafted it for the paper has been tweaked by Guardian HQ in certain respects for unclear (to me) reasons.

It does nonetheless make my two main two points:

  • that ‘Polish antisemitism’ since WW2 has been more a phenomenon of Left than of Right in Poland
  • and that the Law and Justice Party led by the Kaczynski twins with Kaminski to the fore has done a fine job for Poland and Europe in utterly demolishing lumpen Red/Brown populists, who only a few years ago were commanding some 30% of the Polish vote, so well done them

The Guardian has added its own curious headlines:

Cameron and Kaminski are modernisers in a complex modern milieu

David Cameron’s links with Michal Kaminski have been portrayed as reactionary. In fact, they’re progressive

Not quite sure that I would have put it that way myself, but anyway.

This being the Guardian, a gush of comment is gushing, much of it deliciously extreme or largely unrelated to the article/issue:

I love the way that in a desperate effort to cover up their own racism, the right project as ‘left wing’ any despotic government they see fit to.

Poland has never had a socialist government. Even Marx himself would have acknowledged socialism in a previously feudal East European economy, as an oxymoron.

How many times do we have to spell it out to right wing commentators? The USSR was a state capitalist economy, that had to industrialise to build a means of production that previously didn’t exist. Capitalism is a global system, that can only be challenged by a global movement. There is no such thing as socialism in one country.

And this one:

Polish priests in the 1930s proclaimed that at Passover, Jews killed Catholic children to use their blood in the rites.

Cameron has supported Gordon Brown in his policy of massacre by poverty which John Coles is blaming on the NEETS themselves, the victims of deliberately created unemployment.

This is holocaust policy modernised, extended and updated, that makes Hitler look like an amateur.

But bright beams of good sense stand out:

The idea that the Polish Workers’ Party was anything other than Left Wing or that the People’s Republic of Poland was anything other than a socialist state is so delusional it should be captured in amber and preserved for future generations.

Enjoy.