A powerful TV programme in Poland has aroused a lot of interest there. 

Trzech Kumpli ("Three Mates") describes the fates of three men who were students in communist-era Krakow in the 1970s.

One became a poet murdered seemingly by the communist police.

One under the Kaczynski twins’ leadership became the head of TVP (Polish BBC-equivalent), a fervent anti-communist.

And one became a prominent journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza (sort of Guardian equivalent in Poland).

The point is that the film describes how the third of the three also was a serious collaborator with the communist regime, spying and informing on his friends.

And how the crimes and abuses by the regime which he may have helped provoke have gone largely unpunished, while this collaborator like so many others who helped run the apparatus of repression has lived well on generous pensions and privileges, far beyond what the average Pole receives.

This collaborator not only has lived well. After communist rule ended he established himself in a senior role on the leading Polish newspaper which came out strongly against ‘lustration’ (the full revealing of who did what to whom in the communist period).

Nice work if you can get it.

Like a murderer from a gang of killers who manage to destroy the evidence which might convict them, who subsequently becomes famous for arguing strenuously in the media that murderers in general should not be punished harshly because ‘society is to blame’?

Beyond sickening.

This issue – should we ‘move on’ from communist-era crimes – is a profound one for modern Europe.

I tackled it in my very final telegram for the FCO, sent from Warsaw:

… during the Communist period the authorities pressed a person to sign a simple document indicating a readiness to cooperate even when the security police did not care whether the person actually would cooperate or not.

What they wanted was the recognition by the person signing of his/her own psychological submission, expressed via just that mean little secret signature, whose very meanness and smallness and furtiveness made the act of submission even more total…

… the striking thing is how the psychological force of Submission lives on today. Clamour from the Poles and indeed foreigners against opening the secret police archives here comes from different angles.

From the former communist elite intending to keep ill-gotten gains by keeping the scale of their plunder and deceit well away from the wider public eye. 

From the rantings of Lenin’s useful idiots in Western media and academic circles (and indeed! How useful they have been to the Communist cause down the generations – the Bolshevik poisoned gift that keeps on giving).

Some from well-intentioned decent people who unhappily conclude that even if the cause is just, the pain and disruption (including to the Catholic Church) provoked by tackling these problems will not be worth it.

The arguments and motives differ. The end result is the same.

The days trickle into months and years. It all gets … difficult. Complicated. Memories fade.

Thus people who slyly presided over or benefited from the communist system are feted as modern European social democrats. Jewish, Polish and other victims of communism who had their property stolen or heroically refused to cooperate appeal to European institutions for justice, and often leave empty-handed. We prosecute elderly Nazis for their crimes. Elderly Communists go free…

… Do Al Qaeda and Hamas look at how Stalin got away with mass murder at Katyn, and think that by being viciously determined enough they can do the same? Do they expect the sheer intensity of their hatred of our pluralism to overwhelm our readiness to defend it? That they too can bring us to Submit?

How might we measure if they are succeeding? 

Well done Poland, for keeping the subject alive.