Dear Colleagues,
The image of Poland in films influences many people. This is why I encourage you and your friends kindly to sign and to email my attached letter to Mr. Scott Roxborough. His article about the film Corpus Christi, which is under consideration for an Oscar, publicizes falsehoods about both the Smolensk Catastrophe and contemporary Polish society and politics which harm Poland and the Poles. At their meetings in 2012 and 2014, the Polish American Congress’s Council of National Directors enacted resolutions calling on the United States Government to support the establishment of an independent international commission to investigate the Smolensk Catastrophe.
Cordially yours,
John Czop
Mr. Scott Roxborough
Europe Bureau Chief
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Dear Mr. Roxborough,
I am writing in response to your 2 January 2020 article, How ‘Corpus Cristi’ Director Hopes to Bridge Poland’s Cultural Divide, published in the 13 January 2020 issue of Hollywood Reporter. Your description of the 2019 film Corpus Cristi, written by Mateusz Pacewicz and directed by Jan Komasa, is devoid of critical detachment. This is why your article is a disservice to those in the West who want to know the truth about “Poland’s Cultural Divide”.
In Corpus Cristi, Messrs. Pacewicz and Komasa show a rural versus urban cultural divide in order to occlude what really is at stake: the struggle of freedom loving Poles, present in both town and countryside, to remove former communists, also entrenched in urban and rural Poland, from their positions of privilege and power.
Moreover, Messrs. Pacewicz and Komasa clearly propagate the message of the former communist elite. Why do you collaborate in their lurid project by writing: Poland’s national divide is played out in miniature in ” Corpus Cristi”, with the tragedy of the car accident standing in for the 2010 Smolensk catastrophe, the plane crash that killed 96 Polish dignitaries, including then President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria. Kaczynski’s twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, weaponized the national tragedy, using it to leverage political power for his right-wing Law and Justice Party, which now runs Poland (and has been heavily criticized by the European union for cracking down on free speech and LGBT rights).
Messrs. Pacewicz and Komasa trivialize, minimize, and misinform the public about the Smolensk Catastrophe by comparing it in their film, set in rural Poland, to an automoblie accident. Corpus Cristi shows credulous villagers, who are duped by a former convict masquerading as a fake priest, expressing competing views on the causes of the automobile accident in which seven young villagers died. Your article legitimizes viewing the Smolensk Catastrophe as an aviation accident like the film’s automobile accident. Today, there is no debate on the causes of the Smolensk Catastrophe. This Catastrophe was no accident; against the facts, the makers of Corpus Cristi perpetuate the Smolensk Lie, which benefits former communists, in league with Putin’s Kremlin, who continue to occupy important positions in today’s Poland.
Recently, the world’s leading expert on aviation accidents, Frank Taylor, a British citizen, concluded that the Smolensk Catastrophe was NO ACCIDENT. Instead, Taylor is convinced that President Kaczynski’s plane exploded above the runway of Smolensk North Military Airfield, in the western part of the Russian Federation, as the result of the detonation inside the aircraft of two or more bombs.
Your article about Corpus Cristi takes on very serious issues, which affect the security of Poland and the Atlantic World in the context of increasingly aggressive and reckless Kremlin revanchism. You and the Kremlin still insist, against the facts, that the Smolensk Catastrophe was an accident, and not a mass assassination.
The 10 million Polish Americans in the United States, who consume Hollywood products, will be dismayed if you do not, BEFORE THE 2020 OSCARS, publish a correction to your article in which you make it clear that the Smolensk Catastrophe was NOT an accident, but a mass assassination and a crime without punishment.
If you do not do so, it shows that your article deliberately legitimizes the tendentious views supported by former communists who are trying to hold on to power in Poland through duplicity by propagating the Smolensk Lie. Against the facts, it is the transformed communists who see the Smolensk Catastrophe as an accident and who want to make deals with the Kremlin on natural gas rather than ensure Poland’s energy independence through the Three Seas Initiative. This is why your article threatens the security and sovereignty of Poland, and the best interests of the USA and all the other NATO countries.
Sincerely,
John Czop