Defend Polish communists!

Gerry Downing and Andy Brooks on the line

By New Worker  correspondent

THE POLISH embassy in London was picketed last week by demonstrators protesting against the reactionary Polish regime’s persecution of socialists and communists and the mass desecration of monuments erected in memory of Polish International Brigaders, communist partisans and the Red Army that liberated Poland in 1945.

    New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks and Gerry Downing from the Socialist Fight movement led the protest, that was also supported by the British Posadist movement, opposite the Polish embassy in London’s West End. Gerry Downing and Dermot Hudson from the NCP took the mike to denounce the “decommunisation” law that bans all communist symbols from public display and the crackdown on communist and socialist activists in Poland in a lively two-hour protest that attracted considerable attention from passers-by.

        Last year four members of the Communist Party of Poland were give nine-month suspended sentences for propagating communist ideology on the internet and in their newspaper, Brzask (Dawn).

    Poland was once a people’s democracy where everyone had a job with a welfare state that provided free education, a health service and benefits from the cradle to the grave. Now the country is a paradise for the landowners, capitalists and petty exploiters who rule the land.

The sell-off and destruction of Poland’s public sector has forced millions of Polish workers to seek work in Britain and the rest of the European Union. Though the Polish regime can count on the support of the Catholic church, which itself is a major landowner in the country, it fears a resurgent socialist and communist movement, and that’s why they’ve launched a campaign to virtually outlaw all communist and revolutionary socialist parties.