Anti-hagiography

Sometimes our ‘saints’ need to be disrobed. 

Gunter Grass, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, has recently admitted to serving in the Waffen-SS during the last days of World War Two.  This story is being dressed up as exposing Grass as a hypocrite.  I argue that the story is does nothing of the sort.  But it does contain the spectacle of another, similarly moustachioed Central European 20^th Century living ‘saint’ inadvertently flashing the gallery the some of the more vulgar parts of his character.  This post is not about the revelations volunteered by Grass, but the reaction of Lech Walesa to this stone being ploughed to the surface.

Lech Walesa has said that he feels uncomfortable sharing honorary citizenship of Gdansk with Gunter Grass.  He argues that Grass would never have been awarded honorary citizenship if his past had been known and that Grass ought to give up the title.  Grass, incidentally, was born in Gdansk.  Walesa was not.   

The name of Lech Walesa carries with it great moral authority.  His leadership of Solidarity against the oppression of Soviet-dominated Communist Poland resulted in the award of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize.  He is a saint in the popular historiography of the struggle against tyranny and for freedom. 

But that is not the full picture of Lech Walesa, not even of Walesa the politician.  His struggle against tyranny was also a struggle for something a little more specific that nebulous ideas of freedom.  He fought for a traditional, conservative and, above all, Catholic Poland.  This does not mean to say that as a result of this political alignment Walesa did not deserve the critical support of those with other visions of the good society as he lead Solidarity against an oppressive one-party, foreign-dominated state. 

But, in a Savonarolaesque narrative, if not in methods, Lech Walesa as political liberator now needs to be recast in an image he is seldom seen; Walesa the reactionary.  To do these we need only counterpose Walesa’s most recent intervention in public debate with that of sixteen months ago.  The reactionary Catholicism of Walesa runs him little risk of excommunication.

On the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI, Lech Walesa is quoted as saying; “This is a good choice. He will continue the mission of our dear Pope”.  Remember, Ratzinger is a man who publicly and consistently criticised the liberation theology of Latin America.  Remember, this is a man who, as head of the institution formerly known as the Inquisition, helped to purge from the Church those priests who argued that the Church had to play a role in fighting poverty and oppression.  Remember, this is a man who holds to hard-line conservative beliefs on contraception.  Remember, this is a man who has not held his tongue when expressing anti-Turkish views, arguing that it as a cultural threat to ‘Christian’ Europe.  Remember, this is a man who described homosexuality as an ‘intrinsic moral evil’.  Remember this is a man whose conservatism calcified as a reactionary response to the increased freedom of the 1960s.  He was one of the most reactionary and conservative candidates for Pope, but Lech Walesa hailed him as a ‘good choice’.  And, last of all, Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht.

Lech Walesa offers a generous response to a nasty reactionary bigot with a Nazi past being made the spiritual and political head of his faith.  Lech Walesa condemns a humane and tolerant writer, the author of an avowedly anti-Nazi book. 

This has nothing to do with whatever organisation Gunter Grass might have been coerced into becoming a member.  If it did, Lech Walesa would have condemned the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope and described the way in which he now felt uncomfortable as a member of the Catholic Church. 

But he did not, because Lech Walesa is a religious reactionary.  And this cannot be stated enough at a time when Walesa is using his moral weight to condemn another man in the eyes of the world.  To re-iterate; Walesa welcomed the election – to the position of leader of the faith Walesa holds – of a man with a Nazi past who currently holds bigoted, reactionary views.  And yet he has condemned a man with a Nazi past – with whom Walesa shares only tenuous, non-binding relationship – even though he now holds firm left-wing, progressive and tolerant views.