Culture War Seen in Polish Broadcasting Case

International Herald Tribune – May 4, 2006

Richard Bernstein – N.Y. Times

 

 

When Kazimiera Szczuka, a well-known literary critic and television personality here, satirized a young woman who often recites prayers for broadcast on Radio Maryja, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic radio station in Poland, she did not know, she says, that the young woman suffered from a crippling disease and used a wheelchair.

 

"I called her and apologized to her, because I didn't know she was disabled," Szczuka said in an interview, "even though many disabled people phoned me to say that I shouldn't apologize."

 

Still, the Polish National Broadcasting Council, which enforces broadcasting regulations, fined the commercial television station on which Szczuka had appeared the equivalent of $125,000 for insulting a disabled person and mocking her religion. It was, the Polish press has reported, the highest fine the council has levied.

 

That was in March. In April a regular commentator on Radio Maryja, Stanislaw Michalkiewicz, made what are almost universally deemed here to have been anti-Semitic statements, accusing Jews of using what he called "the Holocaust industry" of trying to exact financial "tribute" from Poland through property restitution claims.

 

But the broadcasting council has taken no action so far in the case of Michalkiewicz and Radio Maryja, even though the radio station has often been a forum for comments that Jews and others here have called derogatory and insulting.

 

Why the different treatment, and what does it show about Poland? Commentators have been asking those questions, even as the conservative government has negotiated a power-sharing arrangement with a group of populist parties whose beliefs are very close to those of Radio Maryja.

 

The government says no action was taken against Radio Maryja for a simple technical reason: When Michalkiewicz made his remark, the head of the National Broadcasting Council, Elzbieta Kruk, a longtime friend and associate of Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, had been forced to step down because of a challenge to the way she had been appointed, by Kaczynski himself rather than by the council's other members. During this time, Kruk has told the Polish press, she has had no authority to act.

 

But critics of the government see things differently, saying it fears alienating the station or its constituency, which both helped it win the last election. Beyond that, some Poles see the unfolding of a bitter culture war involving two incompatible views of this country's identity and values.

 

The conservative governing party, Law and Justice, clearly sides more with the religious and traditional values generally represented by Radio Maryja than with people like Szczuka, who see Radio Maryja as an intolerant throwback to an unwelcome past.

 

"They don't like her because she is independent," said Andrzej Jonas, editor of the English-language Polish Voice, referring to Szczuka, who is well known in Poland as a feminist, an active supporter of gay rights and an opponent of Law and Justice, whose leading figures are Kaczynski and his twin brother, the party chairman, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

 

Nobody here is saying the affair indicates a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which is against the law here and which many people, including opponents of the Kaczynski twins, believe has never been at lower levels in this country than now.

 

But Szczuka's views reflect a secular, Western-oriented Poland that is in the European Union and subscribes to what have become the standard European democratic and liberal values.

 

"There was a scandal because they hate me," Szczuka said, referring to the Radio Maryja listeners who reportedly demanded that the government take action against her. "They hate me because I'm a feminist, I'm Jewish - mostly because I'm a feminist."

 

She is also an activist for gay rights, while Lech Kaczynski is a political figure who as mayor of Warsaw last year gained notoriety throughout liberal circles in Europe when he banned the city's annual gay pride parade.

 

On the other side is Radio Maryja, which to many Polish analysts represents the still deeply religious Poland that feels threatened by the creeping secularism. The station was founded about 16 years ago by the Reverend Tadeusz Rydzyk, a conservative, populist priest who actively supported the Kaczynski brothers during last year's election campaign.

 

From time to time the station has taken on a nasty edge, in the form of callers on talk programs or commentators who have expressed the not-quite- disappeared caricatures of Jews that were once deeply embedded in Polish culture. As reported in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, Michalkiewicz, the commentator, spoke on the air of "the men from Judea" who "are trying to surprise us from behind." He said the World Jewish Congress was demanding $60 billion in compensation for Jewish property lost in World War II, calling the organization "a main firm in the Holocaust industry."

 

He called Gazeta Wyborcza, where a number of prominent Polish Jewish journalists work, "an unusual example of the Jewish fifth column in Poland."

 

The papal nuncio in Poland, Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, wrote a letter to the Polish episcopate asking that it work "to overcome difficulties caused by some transmissions and the views presented by Radio Maryja."

 

Still, the government has taken no action against Radio Maryja like that it took against the television station where Szczuka committed her anti- clerical satire, and the suspicion that the discrepancy reflects an unspoken cultural and political alliance between the government and Rydzyk's radio outlet is widespread.

 

"It is probably right to say that that is the real reason," Wojciech Dziomdziora, a lawyer and the only one of the National Broadcasting Council's five members to oppose the fine levied against Szczuka, said in an interview.

 

"The legal situation really didn't allow us to take action against Radio Maryja, but probably that was a very comfortable situation for the council."