The Last Man Standing

I've been reading about Marek Edelman since I was a kid. He's always been among my heroes.

He is the last surviving leader (perhaps last surviving participant) in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1942 - where a slum full of doomed Jews fought, and mostly died, to throw off Hitler's plans for their peaceful extermination (John Ales played him in the surprisingly superb TV miniseries based on the battle), . He also fought in 1944's Warsaw Uprising, and was deeply involved with the early-eighties Solidarnosc movement that, in hindsight, served as the first crack in the Iron Curtain. He also advocated strongly in favor of the (eventual, tardy, sluggish) European interventions against the atrocities in Yugoslavia and Kosovo.

So when he talks about fighting for freedom, I listen.

This, via Chrenkoff, comes from a Polish TV interview:

Interviewer: Many people do understand that, but they don't understand why the Americans have to go to the other side of the world and fight over Iraq now.

Edelman: And why did they go to Europe then? Who defeated Hitler and saved Europe from fascism? The French? No, the Americans did. We thanked them then because they saved us. Today we criticise them because they're saving somebody else.

Interviewer: Returning to the question about having Polish soldier on the ground in Iraq. Many Poles don't want them there.

Edelman: If they don't want them there, let's just keep waiting and then let's see from which direction the rockets and the bombs will come from - will we in the end be lorded over by Saddam's viceroys or Bin Laden's, just as we were once lorded over by Hitler's viceroys.

Interviewer: Do you really believe in such a scenario?

Edelman: It's possible. If we will keep closing our eyes to evil, then that evil will defeat us tomorrow. Unfortunately there's more hatred in men than love. Those who murder understand only force and nothing else. And the only force that is able to stand against them is the American democracy.

About the French?

Edelman: France used to be a great power, culturally and intellectually. And what happened to them? They didn't want to fight for their own democracy, they thought it wasn't really their war [in 1939]. And they lost everything, because when you bend over and take it - even once - then you're finished. And what's that whole talk about the difference between American politics and European politics? There is no other politics but international democratic politics. If we withdraw from Iraq now, what do we have left? Cosying up to Iran and Saudi Arabia? ...

There's more. You owe it to yourself to read it.

Posted by Mitch at June 1, 2004 10:14 AM