AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis
On September 14, 1953, a hand-picked committee of Soviet military court judges and prosecutors charged Polish Bishop Czeslaw Kaczmarek with a long list of crimes that included cooperation with American intelligence, collaboration with Nazi occupiers during World War II, and an attempt to forcefully overthrow the government. For his crimes, Kaczmarek was sentenced to 12 years of hard labor, and his name was the subject of a relentless propaganda campaign discrediting him throughout Poland.
Of course, as was the case with nearly every Soviet show trial, none of it was true. Kaczmarek’s real crime was discouraging Poles from helping the Soviets, whom he accurately predicted would try and transform Poland into a Soviet Republic following the expulsion of the Nazis. During World War II, he had encouraged Poles to choose peaceful forced labor on German farms, hoping that the population could survive the war.
Equally false was the accusation that he had spied for the United States. His real crime was meeting with U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss-Lane to honor his moral courage and heroism. Far from actively orchestrating the downfall of the Soviet regime, Kaczmarek was the leader of the underground movement Catholic Action, which promoted the Christian order and opposed both atheistic Nazism and Bolshevism. Instead of violent upheaval – a central tenet of Marxism – Kaczmarek advocated for peaceful protests against the depravations of the Soviets, including raising awareness about the Katyn massacre of over 20,000 Polish military officers and other Polish patriots at the hands of the Soviet secret police.
In short, Kaczmarek’s true transgressions were his outstanding integrity and dignity, rarely found in those times, that made him a leader and inspiration for millions of Poles who desired to break free from Soviet oppression. To his Soviet persecutors, these were dangerous traits, and inspired an active campaign to slander his name. The media presented Bishop Kaczmarek as a calculated, dangerous criminal, traitor, and degenerate.
The show trial which followed the accusations against Kaczmarek was illustrative of the many thousands of show trials which defined the post-war Stalin years. One by one, the victims of Stalin’s paranoid delusions were trotted out to deliver forced confessions of imagined crimes, before being sent to decades of hard labor or even execution.
Today in the United States, Americans are witnessing the successor of these trials in Democrats’ months-long crusade to tie seemingly every Republican lawmaker and voter to the events of January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol. At the center of this witch hunt is former President Donald Trump – the person who poses perhaps the greatest threat to the left’s grip on power and thus must be the recipient of the greatest vilification, no matter what the facts say.
For Trump, the record of success was clear. In the three years prior to the pandemic, he had reversed the creeping socialism in American politics by returning to sound economic principles, unleashing an economic boom that had not been seen in decades. With tax cuts and pro-growth economic policies, he began to restore the United States’ status as the leading economic powerhouse in the world. After decades of globalization had sold out American businesses, U.S. manufacturing – and particularly American energy – was regaining its footing.
But like the Stalinists in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, Democrats and their stooges in the media portrayed these positive changes as the result of nefarious actions. Right from the beginning, they decried Trump’s victory as the result of “Russian collusion,” insisting that he had worked hand-in-hand with the Kremlin to subvert the American democratic system.
In many ways this is when the real “show trial” of Donald Trump began – a trial that would be extended to anyone associated with him and take many forms in the following years. In 2019 came the next climax with the first impeachment effort against him – an effort that ultimately backfired and, as was the case so often under Soviet rule, revealed the corruption of those launching the accusations.
Now, with Trump out of office, comes the culmination of the American left’s show trial. The goal is clear: to banish Trump and all who supported him to the political equivalent of hard labor – or, if possible, to physical prisons. Already this has been the case with many involved in the events of January 6, who have been imprisoned in solitary confinement and denied bail for simply being present inside the Capitol complex.
The hearings themselves of the so-called “select committee” on January 6 bear an eerie similarity to the sight that must have greeted Bishop Kaczmarek as he stood accused seven decades ago. Right down to the corporate news producer hired to make the hearings a made-for-TV event, the entire thing has been manufactured as a public spectacle, not a legitimate quest for truth.
Like in Bishop Kaczmarek’s trial, neither video nor any other evidence support the show trial’s narrative. The false claim of an armed and organized “insurrection” to supposedly overthrow the United States government is baseless on its face, yet the members of the committee and the mainstream media repeat it incessantly.
The committee has also strategically excluded certain evidence from its proceedings, most glaringly Trump’s urging of his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. Out of hours of testimony, the Committee releases seconds-long clips that lack context or nuance, hoping to spin the narrative by attention-grabbing soundbites. They have refused to share transcripts and been suspiciously secretive, only allowing certain made-for-TV moments to be seen.
In all, it appears that the Soviet-style show trial is just the latest trend that the American left has adopted from their socialist counterparts in Europe. But as these trials exposed the corruption inherent in the Stalinist regime, so too are they revealing the corruption in today’s Democratic Party. Some news outlets are already reporting how the January 6 committee hearings are actually driving voters further toward Republicans. Should this trend continue, it may be that Democrats will soon find that their effort to manufacture the downfall of Republicans instead leads to a collapse in support among their own dwindling number of voters.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.