Author: Joey deVilla

Here’s something fascinating yet spooky: the newly-elected Polish government has opened its military archives from the days of the Warsaw Pact, which includes a 1979 scenario called “Seven Days to the River Rhine” based on the ridiculous assumption that NATO would be the aggressor in a nuclear exchange. Here’s a map that outlines the scenario…

According to the Telegraph:

Radek Sikorsky, the Polish defence minister, displayed a map of USSR strikes which shows a barrage of Soviet multi-megaton nuclear strikes on key river lines, including the Rhine and the Meuse, and a Nato counter strike with smaller more accurate nuclear warheads on the Vistula as it runs through Poland.

The Nato strikes are supposed to have been mounted to interdict the movement of Soviet reinforcements from Russia to the battle front.

The whole scheme, codenamed Seven Days to the River Rhine, is predicated on the idea that Nato would be the aggressor and that the Warsaw Pact, under Soviet control, would respond only in self-defence.

Yeah. Right.

Sikorsky didn’t consult with Moscow before opening the archive, which is sure to ruffle some feathers in Russia. In an article in The Independent, who covered the event in the sensationalistically-titled Soviet Plans to Annihilate Europe Revealed, Sikorsky is quoted as saying:

“We need to know about our past. Historians have the right to know the history of the 20th century. If people did some things they were not proud of, that will be an education for them too.

I think it is very important for a democracy for the citizens to know who was who, who was the hero and who was the villain. On that basis we make democratic choices.

I think it is also important for the health of civic society for morality tales to be told: that it pays to be decent and that if you do things that did not serve the national interest, one day it will come out and you might be called to account.”

Maciej Ceglowski, former hacker, painter and all-round interesting guy, commented on the Washington Post article that refers to secret outside-the-law prisons run by the CIA.

The article teases by saying that these prisons are in “eastern

European democracies”. The Post knows which specific democracies, but

won’t divulge them at the request of the U.S. government, for reasons

of security. Maciej writes that there is a considerable body of

evidence that suggests that his home country, Poland, is one of the

eastern European democracies in question.

Like most first-generation immigrants from oppressive regimes to North America

— myself included — Maciej holds America and its

principles — if maybe not its current administration — in high

regard. (He and I also hold Canada in rather high regard, but he trumps

me for having coined the Ceglowski Axiom,

“Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from Canada”.)

That’s why his closing paragraphs ring particularly true to these ears:

There’s an almost absurdist irony to the situation. The reason Poland

and other countries in Eastern Europe are so unabashedly pro-American

is that for fifty years, America stood for the antithesis of this kind

of behavior. Poles knew full well about secret prisons, torture,

incarceration without trial, and secret services that operate outside

the law, and they looked to the United States as a society that stood

against this kind of arbitrary exercise of state power.

Fifteen years later, we have television shots of

Polish and American generals standing side by side in in fraternal

solidarity in Iraq, and now perhaps hosting a special little Polish

branch of an American secret prison system. There’s a deja vu to this

that I hope other Poles will find as upsetting as I do. And I get to

feel the shame from both directions, since my adopted country is

colluding with my native one to break the laws of both.