Man of the Month: Professor Giertych

AS THE MONTH of July draws to a close, we’d like to announce the Polish scientist and politician Prof. Maciej Giertych has been anointed our ‘Man of the Month’. Professor Giertych, who holds two degrees from Oxford and his PhD in tree physiology from the University of Toronto, is a Member of the European Parliament and recently took part in that inauspicious body’s debate commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the commencement of the Spanish Civil War, a debate which even the BBC’s Europe editor slated as “one of those debates that seem rather pious and pointless”. While the usual gang of characters spouted their unthinking praise for the tyrannical and genocidal Communist and Anarchist forces, Prof. Giertych had the decency to stand up and set the record straight.

“Thanks to the Spanish Army and Franco the Communist attack on Catholic Spain was thwarted,” Prof. Giertych told the European Parliament. “The presence of such people in European politics as Franco guaranteed the maintenance of traditional values in Europe and we lack such statesmen today. Christian Europe is losing against atheistic socialists today and this has to change.”

“I thought it was necessary to remind listeners in the EU Parliament,” the Professor said later, “that this was not an anti-democratic movement, but a movement that was in defense of certain values that are inherent in the Catholic way of seeing things pertinent to government to run civil society. The uprising was a defense of Catholic Spain, so the civil war in Spain was a conflict between Catholic Spain and communist Spain.” The Professor also used his speech to praise António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal’s Catholic dictator who, like Franco, managed to keep his country free from the devastation of the Second World War. (Salazar was also a very close friend of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, who claimed in his memoirs that if Salazar had lasted a few more years, Rhodesia would still exist today).

Prof. Giertych is a Member of the European Parliament for the League of Polish Families, one of the political parties in Poland’s tripartite coalition government. His son, Roman Giertych, is both Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education of Poland.

General Eisenhower and General Franco