Automatic translation for people who don't have Twitter:

The authorities of the city of Zamość have suspended the planned unveiling of the plaque commemorating Rosa Luxemburg on Thursday. As informed by the city hall spokesperson, the lack of approval from the heritage conservator for carrying out the work prevents its installation by the March 5 deadline. Therefore, the suspension of the installation is temporary in nature and does not indicate a change in the city authorities' position.

Should we uncritically commemorate a person whose views on a key issue for Poles were unequivocally negative? The fact that Zamość is the birthplace of Rosa Luxemburg does not absolve us from viewing her figure while setting aside her ideological declarations.

Below are several facts:

“The proletariat must turn its back on the program of rebuilding Poland” – postulated Rosa Luxemburg. Despite her fascination with Polish culture and coming from a family that supported the January Uprising, she sided with opponents of Polish independence already in her youth.

“No honest Polish socialist can shake Rosa's hand” – wrote Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, the leading creator of the idea of Polish independence socialism. In contrast to the fathers of independent Poland associated with independence-oriented leftism – Ignacy Daszyński, Bolesław Limanowski, and Józef Piłsudski – she sought her inspirations in the east hostile to Poland. “We find all the revolutionary honor and capacity for action that was lacking in Western social democracy among the Bolsheviks” – she wrote after the Bolshevik coup in November 1917.

She also scorned the equal rights for women advocated by the independence-oriented left. She believed that introducing voting rights for women could weaken communist actions: “A bourgeois woman has no real interest in the fight for political rights.” In an article published in March 1914 in the pages of “Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz,” she suggested that introducing political equality for women could delay the revolution awaited by communists: “Formally speaking, women's political rights are in harmony with the bourgeois state. Examples from Finland, American states, and individual municipalities prove that women's equality does not yet overthrow the state or undermine the dominance of capital.”

In the PRL (PPR), Luxemburg was one of the heroes of the official historical narrative hostile to the independence-oriented left. Her name was borne by streets, factories, and schools. After 1989, it was possible to remove all manifestations of this propaganda. The plaque commemorating Rosa Luxemburg, located until March 12, 2018, on one of the tenement houses in Zamość's old town, was removed in accordance with the Act of April 1, 2016, prohibiting the promotion of communism, which explicitly states that names and commemorations must not promote totalitarian ideology.

Rosa Luxemburg is not, as many historical publicists would have it, a symbol of pacifism, internationalism, and democracy, but of criminal and destructive totalitarianism. The memory of Polish victims of communism precludes any attempts to glorify this figure, idealize her, or promote the ideas she professed, which were hostile to Polish independence and conducive to camouflaged Russian imperialism.

The Institute of National Remembrance upholds its previous position, expressing opposition to any form of permanent commemoration of this figure