This week on the Flip, as those of us who love our website have come to call it, each writer was given an assignment – the following pre-sentence:
“When I read about the death of the Polish president, I thought…”
From there, it was up to him (or her). We thought it would be fun to see where our resident genii went; you’ll have to judge for yourself if we were right.
Now it’s Annick Labadie’s turn.
When I read about the death of the Polish president, I thought, “Damn, I wish I could read Norwegian.” I was walking around Bergen’s seaport, killing time before an 8 a.m. ferry, desperately searching for coffee whose price wouldn’t further emaciate my anorexic student budget. Once inside a 7-Eleven[1], a stand of popular Scandinavian newspapers stood right below the coffee machine and pastry kiosk. Their front pages were of small significance at the time; Tiger Woods was on my mind.
After flipping through the paper to the sports section, annoyed with my ignorance of the latest development in Augusta, It became evident that the world’s attention was directed elsewhere. Page after page featured pixelated flowers, burning candles, plane debris, mourning adults and Polish flags, with each image boxed in by an illegible title like this one: “Presidentens fly hadde ikke landingstillatelse”.
Patiently raiding the pages for some sensible conclusion, searching for those subtle Germanic ties between English and Norwegian, I figured out this much: somewhere in Russia, Polish president Lech Kaczynski had died in a plane crash. As for Tiger’s latest putting exploits, the papers provided no clues.
Now, an awful lot of politicians die in plane crashes. Here’s a short chronological list of plane crash-induced deaths[2].
1957: In the midst of heavy campaigning, a plane carrying Ramon Magsaysay, president of the Philippines, crashes into Mount Manunggal.
1959: The plane of Barthélemy Boganda, president of Central African Republic, explodes in mid-air. To this day, speculations that the plane was shot down persist.
1961: Dag Hammarskjöld, United Nations Secretary General, perishes in a crash in the Zambian jungle. It is hypothesized that victims were shot prior to the plane’s collision with the ground.
1966: Abdul Salam Arif, president of Iraq, dies mysteriously in a helicopter accident.
1967: Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s daddy, suffers a similar fate.
1969: René Barrientos, President of Bolivia, hits a high-tension wire with his helicopter and doesn’t exactly survive.
1977: The plane transporting Džemal Bijedić, premier of Yugoslavia, crashes into a mountain during a snowstorm.
1980: Francisco Sa Carneiro, prime minister of Portugal, dies in Lisbon under “sinister circumstances.”
1981: As mentioned in John Perkin’s bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hitman, President of Ecuador Jaime Roldos is killed after repelling American oil tycoons from free access to the country’s resources. The fiery airplane crash is thought to be the work of the CIA. General Omar Torrijos, Panamian leader famous for negotiating gradual sovereignty over the Canal, dies in strikingly similar circumstances three months later.
1986: Mozambique’s president, Samora Machel, perishes in South African land after a pirate signal disorients the pilot at landing.
1988: In an act of sabotage, the plane of Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, president of Pakistan, crashes ten minutes after take off.
1993: Rich Snyder, president of In-N-Out hamburger chain, dies in Santa Ana. This crash wasn’t exactly political in nature, but is noteworthy nonetheless.
1994: Burundi president Cyprien Ntaryamira and Rwanda president Juvénal Habyarimana are shot down by missile while descending on Kigali airport.
2001: The plane carrying Ibrahim Shamsul-Din, deputy defense minister of Sudan, crashes on takeoff during a sandstorm.
2004: Boris Trajkovski, president of Macedonia, dies when his plane crashes into mountains while attempting to land in Bosnia.
2005: Dr. John Garang, vice president of Sudan, does the exact same thing.
2010: The core of Poland’s government dies on the ground it had come to commemorate.
You get the picture. Some will say political figures fly more frequently than most, often in difficult conditions. Others will point out that plane crashes are an extremely convenient plot for a seamless coup d’état. Ask the directors of documentary film Loose Change, who propose an alternative theory to the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Or maybe don’t ask them anything at all.
It comes as no surprise then, that the news of a crash that wiped out Poland’s top leaders, including the serving president, elicits a few skeptical responses. Especially since those leaders were heading to Katyn, Russia, for the commemoration of the 22,000 political murders carried out by Stalin’s NKVD secret police seventy years earlier; the plane was Russian; the airport being used was a Russian military strip; Polish national television has already reported that journalists’ cameras have been confiscated by the Russian military; since there was no fog that day; since … well the list goes on. In the opinion of countless bloggers inching their way up the rungs of the contrarianism-as-news-that-matters-more ladder, “the whole thing reeks.”
Those harboring dissent towards official news reports on the tragedy – the likes of PrisonPlanet and TheFluCase content generators – will point to the delicious irony of my primitive Norwegian finding. They’ll claim I knew more truths about the crash after attempting to read a paper in a foreign language than I ever could have had by deciphering its entire content. They’ll say I’m better off with a 140-character tweet than with a full New York Times column. In their minds, the Reuters/AP corporate news mill is a laughable body of lies; an octopus of propaganda spreading its sticky tentacles and spouting its ink, veiling any sensible truth with dark fiction.
An old college roommate recently populated my inbox – in English – with the thoughts of such people. She shared a few links to popular conspiracy theories on the Polish president’s recent death. This led to more theories, and still more theories. After all of this reading, I could be convinced that the Polish pilot, Capt. Protasiuk, was actually a three-toed vegan midget Soviet spy in disguise.
Conspiracies range from Illuminati involvement to oh-so-slightly more sober theses on Kaczynski’s fiscal policies and his ties to Washington. In honor of all Polish conspiracy theorists who, in the words of Telegraph blogger Damian Thompson, “rush to conclusion — and I do mean rush,” here are a few growing explanations for the president’s death. In the spirit of the web-based content I’ve previously raided, links to original sources may be absent at times. I apologize, and hope you’ll take my word for it, just like the authors of that content expected me to.
NWO Conspiracy
The New World Order (NWO) conspiracy predicts the emergence of a “bureaucratic collectivist one-world government” as the natural result of a conspicuously Orwellian evolution. The term NWO, stolen from politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill back in the 1950s, refers to the end of the Nation State at the hand of Big Brother. In 1991, televangelist Pat Robertson (!) published a best-seller, The New World Order, that drew some wacko-licious ties between Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the Council of Foreign Relations, and a few others he was convinced were embroiled in an intricate plan to Rule The World. All of these shenanigans in preparation for the arrival of the… Antichrist. Ever heard of Barack Hussein Obama? Antichrist. Ask Pat Robertson.
These days, a modern, slightly less US-centric version of Robertson’s Dan Brownian scheme explains that the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) — in charge of what followers call the “bankster loan sharking operation,” UN, and presumably the World Health Organization are in fact a global cartel of political elite slowly clinching its grasp onto the world’s levers.
Where does Poland come in? The IMF and Euro currency are allegedly at the front line of this NWO movement. With this idea in mind, conspirators surmise that Poland, one of the only members of the European Union to present economic growth in 2009, was in no rush to embrace the Euro as a natural progression of its EU membership[3]. Additionally, instead of going on an IMF loan binge during the financial crisis, like most of its Eastern neighbors, Poland’s central bank even had the cheek to offer the IMF a loan to help those struggling neighbors. President Kaczynski and national bank president Slawomir Szkypek, both virulent opponents to Euro adoption, were among the plane crash victims. A day before, the two had agreed to a scheme that simply tipped the patience scale of these NWO tycoons. Poland’s currency, the Zloti, would be weakened to benefit its exporters, at the expense of its trading partners — the EU[4].
Much too conveniently, in the next few weeks, Kaczinsky and Skrzypec will be replaced by pro-Euro party members better aligned with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his NWO cronies.
I guess we should expect political figures from Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom — states that do not use the Euro — to suffer similar fates in the near future. On the other hand, that party pooper called Greece should expect vaporization for holding everybody back. Or maybe they’re just sinking deeper into IMF loan addiction, which would be… good? But here’s an even better thesis. Maybe the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland was actually triggered by NWO scientists who’ve taken over the entity responsible for closing European airspace – the Volcano Ash Advisory Centers (VAAC) – so as to enchain EU economies further into the IMF’s pockets. Just a suggestion.
The KGB Did It
The Daily Telegraph reveals that a Polish member of parliament, Artur Gorski, is blaming Russia for “engineering the air crash that killed president Kaczynski.” Explanations covering the why and who are flying in every possible direction. With a bit of patience, plow through the 91 comments following that Telegraph article. There’s an ideological war going on. Perhaps this endemic distrust of official stories is to be expected, as the relations between both countries have been more than strained over the past century. Those Russians historically haven’t been all that nice or honest with those Poles. Stalin was a one wet blanket.
But how could have mother Russia done such a thing? Well the Soviet-built Tupolev-154 used by Poland’s head figures to reach Katyn had been serviced in Russia in December 2009. Someone could easily have installed some kind of instrument of sabotage. Plus the airport used for landing was a military one. There were gunshots heard right after the plane crash. And Putin himself is now commanding the official crash enquiry? What a joke! Well that’s what they’re saying.
As for why this would have happened, a few bloggers claim that the Polish delegation was causing Russia much grief, as it was attempting to push for compensation for the Katyn massacre. One different, somewhat megalomaniac thesis is also mentioned: Russian premier Vladimir Putin[5] thought that the Polish memorial would overshadow the memorial held by the Russian government a few days earlier. Others still claim that motivation stemmed from much more than the massacre memorial itself; Kaczynski was working in association with the Barack Obama administration and was no friend of Russia. As soon as he took over the presidential headquarters, he pushed to forge better alliances with Ukraine and Georgia, setting the mood for their future entrance into American-Led NATO. Further aggravating Putin was the fact that the Polish government had agreed to go ahead with a U.S. missile defense system. Sarah Palin could see the whole thing from her living room. Maybe she’s the anti Christ. Somebody ask Pat Robertson.
But Russia had even more reasons to grieve over the present Polish government; in recent years, Kaczynski had been quarreling with the Kremlin over Russian-imposed bans on Polish goods. The man regularly accused Russia of economic bullying, and so he ended up being bullied too. Find the euphemism in that last sentence.
America Did It
Forget the KGB and the NWO. America did it. Of course it did. America always does it. Need I say more?
In the wake of this terrible tragedy, many look for answers wherever they can find them. Some are soothed by official reports. Others are simply further disturbed by them. A few of these distrust mongers have a space, the blogosphere, where they may channel those feelings. In the face of all this online excitement, of this sensationalistic emulation of the sensationalistic media it hopes to denounce, I’m no longer certain where to look for truths, as evidenced by the previous 2000 words. Perhaps in a world where the ability to broadcast information precede the ability to critically appraise it, the Internet is slowly becoming a space where conspiracy can grow alongside those trusted sources it denounces, for better or for worse. Right now, often for worse.
In any case, a sobering thought by Damian Thompson becomes relevant. Perhaps conspiracies, in the midst of misfortune, “are so much more emotionally satisfying to traumatized people than the likely truth: that the Polish politicians — like so many politicians in less developed countries — were accustomed to risking their lives in dodgy planes.” Here’s another theory. What if this distrust, this propensity for conspiracies between the two people, actually led to a crash? What if those Polish pilots and that Polish president figured those Russians airport controllers were lying, as usual, when they said the plane should go to Minsk to land? What if they figured the Russians were bluffing out of a petty need to ruin the their Katyn memorial? What if the bloggers mourning the Polish leaders with accusations were reliving the crash’s truest cause: distrust?
As for me, I think I uncovered the essence of the tragedy upon one look at the Norwegian newspaper, for then I knew all that is certain: a large part of the Polish government is dead. And no matter what is said about the causal elements, those deaths are truly tragic.
[1] Irrelevant Norwegian factoid: there are over ninety-eight 7-Elevens in the country, or one per 47,000 Norwegians [Wikipedia] .
[2] If you’re interested in stuffing your brain cells with more facts on politicians or plane crashes, click on either word.
[3] Kurt Nimmo, Did the Political Elite Kill President Kaczynski
[4] Flatcap, Poland’s Leaders Move to Weaken Currency, Then Die in Plane Crash
[5] According to a friend of mine, whose opinion too is important, Putin looks like Dobby, Harry Potter’s house elf.
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“As for Tiger’s latest putting exploits, the papers provided no clues.” …that line made me laugh, so nice job. I also appreciated the Dobby reference.