In Defense of Polish Plumbers

They reflect the instincts of Polish voters.

Today, as many as 96.7 of Polish citizens declare to be Poles, and 97.8 declare that they speak Polish at home (Census 2002).

Free migration in the EU means that Polish plumbers will not only catch up with French plumbers, but also with Polish bankers.

Ordinary Poles, by contrast, are strongly pro European.

About 500 of the 5280 Poles chose this option.

At first, only Poles were imprisoned and killed there.

For us Poles, their most shocking example was the murder of 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners of war whose ashes lie in the cemeteries of Katyn, Miednoye and Kharkov.

Therefore, Poles were allowed to stay and were spared the fate of other Europeans.

Today, descendants of those Poles who stayed are living in Cazale and Fond des Blancs.

Prior to World War II, ethnic minorities made up a significant proportion of the Polish population.

She was also an active member in committees of Polonia in France dedicated to the Polish cause.

So Polish influence in Union councils is at rock bottom.

I believe that Poles will once again defend their right to be treated with dignity.

One exception was a military force of Poles from the Polish Legions that had fought in Napoleon's army.

But these anti communist antibodies also worked against the universal acceptance among Poles of liberal democracy.

We have seen wars of extermination like the one that Hitler and the Nazis waged against not just Jews and Gypsies, but Poles and Russians.

Moreover, many Poles feel they have little to show for the government s support.

The number of Poles as a percentage of the total population fell to just 0.5 after the reconstitution of Poland in 1918, when many returned home.

Because the Polish leaders refused to exonerate the Russians, Stalin accused the Poles of collaborating with the Germans in trying to shift the blame for Nazi crimes onto Russians.

Millions of young Poles and Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians, Englishmen and Americans gave their lives so that nations could live in peace, security and respect for human rights.

But it reflects a widespread sentiment among many Poles, including those who are staunch supporters of close ties to the US.

Only the Poles can harm Poland s reputation and influence, and one must say that they have excelled at it of late.

Beginning in 1939, members of the Polish speaking minority, especially members of the Union of Poles in Germany, were deported to German death camps.

It is another when the European project means that French workers face competition from Polish plumbers, Romanian farmers, and Turkish shop clerks.

As former Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski noted recently, there is a sense among many Poles that the US takes Poland for granted.

The shock therapy of the Balcerowicz Plan unsettled Poles, but it brought the country s terrifyingly high inflation under control.

And no one can deny the religious authority of Pope John Paul II as a spur to Poland s rebellion against Communist dictatorship in the 1980 s.

For the Poles and other Easterners, the threat was Soviet imperialism a threat soon realized in Brezhnev s crushing of the Prague Spring.

He understands that Stalin was a criminal, that his order to murder Polish officers in Katyn was an act of depravity that has no excuse or explanation.

After three months, the Poles were forced to sign the Treaty of Buchach in which they agreed to surrender Kamyanets Podilsky, Podolia and to pay tribute to the Ottoman Sultan.

The country has fully reconciled itself with America s strategic shift away from the European continent, even though Poles are as obsessively fearful of Russia as ever.

Kasia Babis, a Polish illustrator, published a poster in English calling people to join the Black Protest, depicting some of the legislation's likely consequences.

The name was unofficially used afterward for denoting the territory, especially by Poles, and today is used by modern historians to describe different political entities until 1918.

On that bright Sunday morning, as spring turned to summer, voters wasted little time in dispatching Poland s communists to the abattoir.

The 1945 Yalta decisions, taken over the heads of Poles by the three major Powers of the anti Nazi coalition, in effect allowed the subjugation of Poland by Stalin's dictatorship.

The ideological evolution of the Polish students led in the opposite direction from efforts to improve socialism in the name of true Marxism to anti totalitarian opposition and the construction of a free civil society.

The results of an Organization for Security and Co operation in Europe (OSCE) survey from 2004 showed that Poles worked the second most hours per week of any nationality worldwide.

In 1914, with the onset of World War I, those powers found themselves on separate sides, and all tried to recruit Poles into their ranks, promising increased autonomy after the war in return.

There were always exaggerated claims that bringing in the new members would be a costly affair, just as petty and narrow prejudices blemished the willingness to open up Europe s borders for Polish plumbers.

The regime s darkest response, an anti Semitic purge, resulted in an exodus of more than 10,000 people, who were also deprived of their citizenship.

There were also problems with the transfer of volunteers from other Russian Imperial formation (requests were commonly denied), and the project to recruit volunteers from Polish prisoners of war from the Austro Hungarian Army was refused.

This is why many Central and Eastern Europeans now view even social democracy with suspicion. Even as Barack Obama is worshipped in Western Europe, many Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians think he is some kind of socialist.

It was created in late 1914 from volunteers gathered together due to several initiatives, most notably of which was that of the pro Russian Polish National Committee, supported by Polish National Democrats.

There were always exaggerated claims that bringing in the new members would be a costly affair, just as petty and narrow prejudices blemished the willingness to open up Europe s borders for Polish plumbers.