POTATO SPLASH: Polish President Lech Kaczynski 'in plane crash'

[Razgovory]

It brought a great more attention to Katyan then before.

[Martinus]

It brought a great more attention to Katyan then before.

You can't even spell that right. 

[Martinus]

Also, most people who were buried in the Wawel Crypts after the end of the monarchy were actually moved there from their graves long after their deaths - this is unprecedented and a political move.

There are already street protests against the decision, and a Facebook group against this, started 3 hours ago, already has 30,000 members.

[Razgovory]

Good Lord, a Facebook group!

[jimmy olsen]

Good Lord, a Facebook group!

[Neil]

There are already street protests against the decision, and a Facebook group against this, started 3 hours ago, already has 30,000 members.

Maybe it will be as successful as the Facebook group to stop Harper from proroguing Parliament, or the one to have George Bush arrested and charged as a war criminal.

LOLZ

[garbon]

Perhaps facebook groups have relevance in Eastern Europe.

[DisturbedPervert]

What about tweets?  This can't possibly be stopped without them

[Martinus]

Plan to Bury Leader With 'Heroes' Splits Poland
By MARCIN SOBCZYK

Poland's late president Lech Kaczynski is to be buried alongside the nation's most revered kings and generals, in a decision Tuesday that instantly fractured the national unity surrounding the death of leader who in his lifetime was controversial.

Mr. Kaczynski and his wife Maria Kaczynska will be buried Sunday at Wawel Castle in Krakow, southern Poland and will rest with "heroes," Krakow's Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz said Tuesday. The couple died Saturday in a tragic plane crash along with 94 others.

The White House said in a statement Tuesday that President Barack Obama will travel to Poland for Sunday's funeral, "to express the depth of our condolences to an important and trusted ally and our support for the Polish people, on behalf of the American people."

Mr. and Mrs. Kaczynski will join nine of Poland's kings and several military leaders entombed at Wawel Castle's Cathedral. They will be laid in a crypt next to the tomb of Marshall Jozef Pilsudski, Cardinal Dziwisz said. Although a dictator, Marshall Pilsudski is a giant of modern Polish history. He is widely considered to have secured Poland's independence in 1918, after more than a century of partition by Russia and Germany. He also is credited with defeating the Bolshevik Red Army.

"Is he really worthy of the Kings?" read a banner held up by a few dozen protesters, who gathered outside the castle Tuesday evening to protest Mr. Kaczynski's burial at Wawel.

Tuesday's decision, made by the president's family, came as Russian investigators said they had found a third black box from the Tupolev-154 that crashed Saturday in western Russia. The plane was carrying a large Polish delegation as it attempted to land in dense fog at Smolensk airport in Western Russia. They had planned to attend the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which Soviet secret police killed some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war.

Usually, aircraft carry only two black boxes and it wasn't immediately clear what function the Polish-made third box served. Investigators said they would send the box to Poland for examination, with Russian experts present. The other two boxes have been examined in Moscow. So far, investigators have focused on pilot error as the cause of the crash.

"The president, who died a heroic death when flying to Katyn to pay homage to the martyrs, and his wife will get a dignified place for their eternal rest," said Cardinal Dziwisz. "The final decision is that the most dignified place is Wawel, where he can rest together with those who have achieved so much for our fatherland—kings, heroes, commanders."

Though announced by the government representative and Krakow mayor in the morning, it wasn't until evening that the decision was confirmed. A spokeswoman for the presidential chancellery declined to comment on the reason for the delay, but the choice of resting place was instantly controversial.

"It is damaging to the memory of the late president to forcefully try to make him look like the father of the nation... he wasn't," said Jan Hartman, professor of ethics at the Jagiellon University in Krakow, adding that the decision looked "political." Mr. Kaczynski is from Gdansk, on Poland's northern coast.

Presidential elections, which had been due in the fall, must be held by June in the wake of the president's death. Mr. Kaczynski had planned to run again, but was trailing in opinion polls. It isn't yet clear who his political party, Law and Justice, will choose to replace him as a candidate. One possibility is the late president's identical twin brother and former prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Political commentators who opposed President Kaczynski while he was alive, but have avoided making any comments that could be seen as negative since his death, attacked the choice of Wawel as a burial site. A Facebook group launched Tuesday, called "No to Kaczynski at Wawel" had 8,000 members by evening.

"A dispute is unavoidable," said Daniel Passent, a commentator for the left-leaning weekly Polytika, because Mr. Kaczynski had been a divisive figure until his death.

Krakow was Poland's capital until the end of the 16th century and the cathedral of the royal Wawel Castle. Among those buried in the Cathedral are Sigismund the Old, who ruled Poland for more than four decades in its 16th-century Golden Age, and Jan Sobieski, famous for his victory over the Turks in the 1683 Battle of Vienna. The most recent figure buried in the castle's Cathedral is Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland's World War II leader in exile and another hero of Poland's defeat of the Red Army. He died in a plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.

President Kaczynski was an active member of the Solidarity movement that helped to topple Poland's communist regime. He was elected president in 2005, ruling for two years alongside his twin brother, until Jaroslaw Kaczynski's government collapsed. Since then Lech Kaczynski had ruled in an uneasy cohabitation with political opponents. The twins' anticorruption platform was popular, but the zeal with which they pursued their conservative agenda drew passionate opposition.

Cardinal Dziwisz, who said the choice of Wawel Castle came as a surprise to him, urged respect for the family's decision.

"I trust the entire society, especially of Krakow, will accept this decision," he said. "A heroic death shouldn't divide us. Divisions don't serve anyone, especially in those circumstances."

Also on Tuesday, the casket of First Lady Maria Kaczynska was flown back to Warsaw from Moscow. As for her husband, crowds gathered along the route to pay their respects and threw flowers on the hearse carrying her coffin.

The First Lady's casket put next to that of her late husband in the Presidential Palace's Column Room, where the 1955 Warsaw Pact was signed and the scene of the 1989 Round Table that helped to dismantle communism in Poland. Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski took part in those talks.

From WSJ

[Martinus]

Poland's Unity Is Disrupted by Plans for President's Interment
By NICHOLAS KULISH and DAN BILEFSKY
WARSAW — Public discontent erupted on Tuesday for the first time in the grievous aftermath of the plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland's president and dozens of top politicians and military leaders, as hundreds of people in Krakow protested the decision to inter the president and his wife in a crypt holding the remains of many Polish kings.

Opposition was building over the plan to lay President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, to rest in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, which also holds the remains of leading historical figures like Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the post-World War I leader of Poland, and Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, leader of the government-in-exile during World War II.

Those opposed to placing the often divisive Mr. Kaczynski in such august company demonstrated Tuesday night outside the Palace of Bishops, the seat of the Krakow curia. Witnesses at the protest said they were chanting "Krakow, say no!" and holding signs reading, "Is he fit to be a king?"

Sylwia Plucisz, 32, a lecturer in English who learned about the protest after joining a group of more than 20,000 on Facebook called "No to Kaczynski at Wawel," said she thought it was wrong to bury the late president in a rarefied place for national icons.

"They are exploiting Wawel for political ends, and I don't think it should be used in this way," Ms. Plucisz said in a telephone interview. "Wawel is the heart of Polishness, and nobody should be buried there, especially President Kaczynski, who was a divisive person. He deserves to be buried with dignity, but not there."

Opposition to the plan raised the specter of a state funeral on Sunday marred by protests, even as world leaders, including President Obama, are expected to attend. And the difficult process of replacing crucial members of the government could become much harder if the political atmosphere was poisoned by the dispute.

Mr. Kaczynski and his wife were devout Catholics popular among more conservative voters. But his tough stand against gay rights alienated many social liberals and his zealous drive to purge former Communists from the media and the civil service angered opponents on the left.

Mateusz Zurawik, 24, an accountant and sometime political blogger, said that burying the president at Wawel would glorify someone who in life was far less popular than he has become in death.

"Burying him there would be overestimating him and smacks of megalomania," he said. "This is too big a thing for any president. He doesn't deserve to be there. It is not the will of the Polish people."

But many Poles supported the idea as a fitting tribute. "If Sikorski is buried at Wawel, then why not Lech Kaczynski? He died as a president while performing his duties and not while going on holiday," said Aleksander Jablonowski, who stood outside the Presidential Palace in Warsaw on Tuesday night.

The president's death on Saturday morning in a plane crash in western Russia that killed 96 people had prompted exceptional unity across Poland in the days immediately after the accident.

But privately, supporters of Mr. Kaczynski's nationalist-conservative Law and Justice Party grumbled that not all the sympathetic outpouring was sincere. Opponents of the president bit their tongues in the face of a national tragedy, in which members from several parties across the political spectrum were killed, along with the flight crew, the president's security detail, clergy members and senior generals.

Wawel is a national landmark, where kings once held their coronations, and is the cathedral of the Krakow Archdiocese, where Pope John Paul II was once archbishop. The decision to inter the Kaczynskis there was approved by John Paul's longtime personal secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the current archbishop.

"I trust that the entire society will accept this decision with understanding," Cardinal Dziwisz said Tuesday, according to the Polish news service PAP. "During such occasions, we should unite, and never divide. Divisions serve no one."

The body of Poland's first lady was flown to Warsaw on Tuesday. As with the arrival of her husband's remains on Sunday, mourners lined the route from the airport to the Presidential Palace, throwing flowers at the hearse carrying her coffin. Their bodies lay in state in the palace for Poles to pay their respects.

A special joint session of the lower and upper houses of Parliament was also held to honor the dead, with photographs of the members of Parliament killed in the crash placed on their seats.

Michal Piotrowski contributed reporting.

From New york Times.

[Razgovory]

Ordering your plane to land in a forest and then dying because of it doesn't seem to heroic a death.

[grumbler]

Ordering your plane to land in a forest and then dying because of it doesn't seem to heroic a death.

Neither does ordering your plane to land in the ocean and then dying because of it, yet Sikorski is buried as a hero.

[Grey Fox]

Philby did it.

[Martinus]

On second thought, as a modern leftist, why the fuck should I care if they bury an isolated, pompous prick who got the job because of his brother among other isolated, pompous pricks who got their jobs because of their fathers.

[Syt]

Titanic handles the event with proper decorum:

Poland without leadership - What now?

Merkel: The president, the military leadership - all dead!
Putin: You the West, we the East? As usual?