Opinion: The enemy within

Although periodic elections under the rule of law have replaced political murder, democratic politics has no similar remedy for the problem of treason.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is the best presentation of the problem of treason in Western literature. This is because Shakespeare's treasonous villain is at once Shakespeare's greatest hero in the play: Brutus. Brutus changes his friend Caesar for liberty, thereby ennobling treason. Poles who actively struggled against Communist tyranny were also traitors, but like Shakespeare's Brutus they were traitors for liberty.

Other Poles betrayed those traitors to the secret police. These collaborators are to be found in documents contained in the National Archives and their civic rights are duly reduced. The government intends to expand verification to academics, police officers, journalists and businessmen. Their goal is to cleanse all walks of public life of collaborators.

Theater, for its part, is returning to the essence of the problem. The 8th Day Theater in Poznań is preparing a new play about collaboration, based on the National Archives, and aimed at analyzing the nature of treason.

The theater's endeavor is laudable, the governments' might not be. The theater seeks to examine the subject of treason in order to help citizens avoid the vice; the government might well proliferate it. This is because the National Archives are not a credible historical record, only a collection of rumor, innuendo and fact, created by the secret police to divide and conquer Poland on behalf of the Soviet Union. The archives are manipulated for partisan purposes - as the recent accusations against the patriot Jacek Kuroń demonstrate.

Poland chose to dissolve the communist tyranny by way of a bloodless revolution to avoid the anarchy of bloody revolution. Bloodless revolution is inherently imperfect because it presumes clemency for the agents of tyranny and excuses the cowardice of collaborators. The current government looks askance at the round-table compromise that was the founding act of the new Republic and wishes to weed out collaborators. By doing so, it risks perpetuating the Soviet interest - dividing Poland and making Poles fear their friends - despite their true enemy having collapsed long ago.

Peter S Rieth, Zbigniew Raszewski Theatrical Institute