By Miguel Murado

WHEN it comes to politicians, one is accustomed to hearing all kinds of accusations, but the case of the soon to be President of Poland really takes us aback. In Warsaw they accuse Lech Kaczynski of nothing else than plagiarism, a behaviour so far expected only from writers, musicians and the Da Vinci Code. Namely, the claim states that the Code for an Ethic Conduct recently made public by Kaczynski is a word by word copy of Tony Blair’s Ethics and Procedure Guidance for Ministers (needless to say, a text far less successful than the Da Vinci Code).

Well, the first comment that springs to mind is that If, ethic-wise, plagiarism is bad enough already, to incur in plagiarism precisely with a code of Ethics must be the ultimate unethical act. You’ve surely heard about the millions of jobs that are lost every year because of DVD and CD piracy (as a result, and according to my own reckoning, next week there won’t be anyone left working in the recording industry). Compared to that, this Polish affaire seems less damaging but it is far more significant. Think, if only, of the standards that such an important person is setting for our young students, most of who probably never heard his name and some of whom don’t even know were is Poland.

In Spain they have a saying that goes “All that is not tradition is plagiarism”, but Kaczynski, who is a Conservative, seems to be able to multitask; he is a Traditionalist and at the same time a plagiarist. And yet, and precisely because it is him we’re talking here, the issue has an angle that invites further reflection; because Kaczynski himself is a plagiarism who, as it is well known, shares a political career with his identical twin Jaroslaw.

A lot has been written about “clone politicians” who invent themselves copying other politician’s public image, but no one has gone as far as these two brothers, so similar that people in Poland fear they might take turns in the presidency without anyone noticing. Which takes us to the big question: Nature is the Great Plagiarist. It repeats a tree after another, water molecule after water molecule. And we, human beings, are nothing but a process of gene replication in which the little variation that there is comes as the result of mere chance. Thus, one doesn’t know whether to condemn Kaczynski, who already has his body copied from another man, for copying another man’s ideas too.

The author involved, Blair, for the time been, has not complained, as far as we know. He probably thinks that Kaczynski at least paid some attention to his Ethics and Procedure Guidance for Ministers. Judging from their behaviour, it seems that Blair’s Ministers didn’t read it or didn’t understand it well. Maybe Blair himself, the man of the “Kelly affair” and so many other not-so-ethical cases, didn’t read it either. Maybe he simply copied it from someone else.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 17 December 2005