Polish President's Plane Crash - Deja vu for Global System
A commentary by Howard Davis
Posted April 15, 2010
For several years, sudden unexpected events have rattled the world, leading many pundits to draw parallels to the 1930s and '40s. Last Saturday's terrible crash of the Polish presidential plane on its way to the 70th anniversary of a World War II massacre had a tinge of déjà vu.
Shaking Poland to its religious core, the fiery plane crash April 10 that killed Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, along with his wife and much of his nation's political and military leadership, was as weird as it was tragic. The president of Eastern Europe's leading economy and many dozens of Poland's elite, including the head of the central bank, were suddenly obliterated in a plane crash through the astonishingly poor judgment of pilots in attempting to land their Russian-made jet.
Without visual contact and with no auto landing navigation system operating, it appears the pilot decided to land while flying completely blind in dense fog. Slamming into a forest of trees at well over 150 miles an hour and crashing more than a thousand feet short of the runway, the crew had defied the direction of Russian air traffic controllers to land in Minsk or Moscow.
Skeptics and cynics have speculated that the Polish plane crash tragedy was a Russian plot, Russian equipment failure or the result of "VIP passenger syndrome." This describes the psychological pressure on a pilot to get his VIP passengers to their destination no matter what.
Could not overcome history
The weirdness of it all is compounded by the déjà vu memorial that Kaczynski's plane was racing toward in Russia's Katyn forest. The delegation was commemorating the massacre of more than 20,000 of Poland's elite military officers exactly 70 years ago this month in 1940 during the beginning phase of World War II. Stalin's Soviet death squads were ordered to slaughter them in an attempt to eliminate Poland's brightest, contributing to Hitler's evil vision to eventually exterminate all Slavic peoples.
Last Saturday, it appears that neither a geopolitical enemy nor an act of God caused the death of Poland's leadership. It was apparently caused by human error. Instead of memorializing this most violent period in European history, they in a way repeated it.
"This is so very much like Katyn, where our head was cut off," former Polish President Lech Walesa said to the Associated Press.
Weird world then, weird world now
All this brings to my mind the global system now racing forward into a fog of political, economic and religious ferment and technological change. World leaders are piloting civilization with no clear destination. Even the best among them often cannot see the runway. Their overarching concern is to avoid a crash repeat of the 1930s that plunged the world into depression, political upheaval, genocide and history's greatest war, which ended with using weapons that incinerated entire cities in an instant.
Poland's tragedy strikes at the center of one of the crowning achievements of the new Europe, which began with the Polish anti-Soviet movement aided by a vigorous Catholic Church. It so successfully broke communist control in Poland that it propelled the complete destruction of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe over 20 years ago.
Post-Soviet Poland is the most religiously conservative, vigorously democratic state in the old eastern bloc—and it's prospering. It was the only EU member state with positive GDP growth in 2009. Poland has a higher proportion of entrepreneurs than any other European state.
Poland's now dead president was one of the greatest champions of NATO, of capitalist economic principles and of tight relations with the United States. He asserted fierce independence from Russian domination and German hegemony.
Like the wicked sequence of global events of the 1930s, Poland's plane crash killing its top leadership demonstrates the sobering reality that today's world can change in an instant.
Lucy Wiciel , a Polish immigrant now living in Windham, New Hampshire, said the crash should "serve as a global lesson because no country should put all of its leaders in one plane."
Unfortunately, world leaders today are all on the same plane. They are on a jet hurtling forward into a future with no common vision in a confused fog of expectations and competitive impulses toward a destruction they can't escape.
What's next? Phase 2 of the Great Depression 2.0? An Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program? A terrorist attack killing millions?
Carefully watch where you are piloting your plane. The prophecies of the Bible are happening like clockwork.
You need to read Are We Living in the Time of the End? It helps clear away the fog and confusion, and shows what we can do to avoid a catastrophic crash in our own lives
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