Courier from Warsaw

...COURIER FROM WARSAW Jan Nowak / Wayne State UniversityPress / $24.95 Roger Kaplan There are those who claim that World War II never ended...

...We rather vaguely speak of a region called Eastern Europe, but Poles have been dying since 1939 for what is left, alas, of the idea of the Occident...

...These are geopolitical semantics: we are at war, deny it as we may try to...

...Naive Americans...

...Poland was the hot center, the kernel and the acorn, of resistance against the brown plague...

...For the will was probably never there, and the correct American foreign policy--correct in the sense of being in tune with what the nation is willing to commit itself to abroad--is a splendid isolation combined with a willingness to pursue and destroy international pirates without recourse to any more'entangling alliances than are necessary to the task at hand...

...There is nothing going on that Henry Adams had not Roger Kaplan is a writer living in New York City and a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...Shrewd Soviets...

...Later, in perhaps its most well-known establishment-clause decisions, the court struck down state-sponsored school prayers and Bible readings...

...Our perception of that correlation is, unfortunately but surely, part of the correlation...

...For what, to us Americans, is Poland...

...It explains how the Home Army was organized and, especially (since this is where Nowak's involvement was most direct), how propaganda was conducted against the Germans and liaison established with London, seat of the exiled legitimate government of Poland and, of course, of the British ally...

...It represented the objective correlation of forces...

...I do not believe it...

...For Poland, World War II never ended...

...This has nothing or very little to do with the recent appearance of an enormously significant book, Jan Nowak's Courier From Warsaw...

...From a position of isolation, we could not possibly be Iess lucid than we are now...

...the British, that is to say Churchill and Eden and their advisers, did harm to Nowak and his chiefs...

...Or perhaps it has a lot to do with it...

...It 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983...

...But the court moved beyond these to say as well that government may not prefer religion to nonreligion--that it must be, in effect, neutral between them...

...A doomed, perpetually heroic nation, in the plain lying tragically between Teuton and Rus...

...prefer one religion to another...

...As for the British ally, when the chips were down, first over the Katyn affair (the murder by the Soviets of ten thousand officers, the cream of Poland), then over the question of the composition of the post-war government ("Yalta...

...And because it will have to be taken into account by more ambitious social historians yet to come, it may turn out to be influential as well...

...And at "Yalta" (that symbol), what could Churchill do, without Roosevelt...

...A land under the Communist fist...

...If in the end the book is no more than that, if it fails to rise above the level of an eloquent toast to a bygone and better day, it is at the very least grea t fun to read...

...Writing for the court, Justice Hugo Black said that "no tax in any amount large or small can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion...

...Black" propaganda had only a marginal effect on German morale...

...Or our side loses one--South Vietnam, let us not forget itnwe do our bestto explain it was all a mistake to begin with and let's make up and be friends now, only it turns out the other side is busy even as we say it proving that what we are now calling a mistake was an all-too~-accurate analysis of t h e . . . historical situation...

...The court justified its decision on grounds that the state, in this case New Jersey, was merely trying to make sure that children got to school safely...

...Could it have been otherwise...

...Nonetheless, the question of an establishment of religion had been raised, and the court could not resist advancing, for the first time in its history, a comprehensive interpretation of the minimal prohibitions of the First Amendment's establishment clause...

...for all that, at any rate, we are doing pretty well...

...our side--Israel, to take a recent example--wins one, we try very hard to reverse the gain, all the while apologizing profusely for our ally's immaturity and thereby inviting the continuation of international disorder...

...This is the enormous, the momentous, the burning significance of Jan Nowak's war memoir, which culminates in the Warsaw Rising of 1944, when the Communist armies stopped their advance on the banks of the Vistula to watch the Polish Home Army, of which Jan Nowak was a lieutenant and a courier (to London), rise in its passion and go down under the German tanks after two months of betrayal and glory...

...This is not just history--one of the favored literary forms of Poles--but actuality as well: this is the story, which continues, of underground resistance, against foreigners and totalitarianism, for liberty and independence...

...Everson was important, less for its verdict than its rationale, which laid the basis for future court decisions...

...Hamtramck and Stanislawowo, if you are from Detroit or Chicago...

...This is not a .question of semantics at all...

...In sum, Professor Hart has written a graceful tribute to the fifties, a decade that has been ill-used and badly misunderstood by ideologues and ignoramuses...

...Poor Poles...

...already noticed in the manner our political class behaves, there is nothing wrong with our intellectuals that James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers had not already diagnosed, and our foreign policy is largely as Tocqueville said it would be...

...Inspiring as the story (which reads like an international thriller) is, today's readers in Warsaw and Gdansk must also find in it some sobering lessons...

...It is probably a mistake to say that "something happened" around "1968" or "thelatesixties" as it is now pronounced, that wrecked the national will to make this the Anierican Century...

...Among the prohibitions listed by the court were such obvious and uncontroversial ones as that government may not set up a state church or Terry Eastland is editor of the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Virginia...

...In 1948, the court said that public school students may not be released from their classes to receive in-school religious instruction taught by ministers, rabbis, and priests...

...There are those who believe all this ineptitude, this willful blindness, these self-inflicted handicaps, this knee-jerk goo-gooism in international affairs is all due to a sinister concoction of forces gathered for the most part in the elite clubs of the Eastern seaboard: foolish politicians and recklessly irresponsible journalists combining in morbid shortsightedness with pusillanimous mediocrities in the civil service, backed up and confused at the same time by a bored and hopelessly alienated intelligentsia, proving that when the Founders wrote of the "common defense" they knew not what some day the nation would get...

...In any event, Yalta, on paper at least, was neither a betrayal nor a division of Europe...

...or that it blended right into World War III, with the West choosing, for better or for worse, an essentially defensive strategy...

...This must be why this book, first published in a Polish-language edition in London in 1978 and smuggled into Poland, became an instant best-seller when subsequently reissued by the underground NOWA press in 1979...

...Indeed, it became a handbook for Solidarity...

...SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: HISTORICAL FACT AND CURRENT FICTION Robert L. Cord / Lambeth Press / $17.50 Terry Eastland Thirty-five years ago in Everson v. Board of Education the Supreme Court held that state financing of school bus fares of parochial school students did not violate the Constitution...

...hardly missing a beat, it stepped to the front of the resistance against the red one...

...Churchill had to defeat Hitler...