The magnitude of today’s plane crash in Poland is mind-boggling; as I understand it, 10% of the country’s government was wiped out. But I’m not entirely clear as to which government leaders perished, or what their American equivalents would have been. If a tragedy of similar magnitude took place in the U.S.A., who would we lose?
And how would it affect this year’s upcoming elections?
It looks like our equivalents would be President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an Under-Secretary of State, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Along with a bunch of Congress-critters and well-connected businessmen.
So I’m guessing the top dog in Poland is the President, rather than the Prime Minister?
From my limited reading on German newspaper coverage of Polish politics, the relative power of the President of Poland seems to be on the order of the French president, i.e. powerful when the majority in Parliament is with him, less so when it is not (as has been the case since 2007). Definitely more powerful than the head of state in most parliamentary systems, e.g. he not the prime minister is the head of the executive.
From the BBC article on the crash;
In a nutshell I guess.
All I know is he had the power to stun me when I signed on and the first thing I saw were the words “President Killed in Plane Crash” before noticing the word “Polish” at the beginning of the headline.
Don’t forget the First Lady, Deputy House Speaker, a former President, Deputy-Secretary of Education (we don’t have a federal Culture Dept.), the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, President-pro-term of the Senate, several prominant clerymembers (aparently US military has it’s own archbishop too), and several artists & celebrities.
Poland is a parliamentary country while France (and Russia &c) are semi-Presidential systems. As a general rule, presidents are weak or even figureheads in the former, and generally more important than the PM in the latter.
I take it something like this probably wouldn’t happen in the US? They split up the cabinet to avoid situations like this?
One important figure who died in the crash was Anna Walentynowicz. Her firing from the Gdansk Shipyard in 1980 lead to the labor strikes that lead to the creation of Solidarity.
This is actually false: Poland does not have a parliamentary system, it is a semi-presidential system too, like Russia and France, and the president has considerable power especially when he has a majority in Parliament. That said, there is a prime minister, which many (not all) presidential systems don’t have, and this person is at least potentially quite powerful (think of Russia’s current PM, for instance). That makes it impossible to give the US equivalent of the Polish president.
This is probably what you meant: Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA - Wikipedia
And they were flying on the Polish equivalent of Air Force One (A 20 year old reconditioned Russian jet being flown by a pilot that wouldn’t take “NO” for an answer)?
Even though it’s a country, Poland is more in line with one of our smaller states. This is more akin to when the Missouri governor died in a plane crash in 2000.
Which of the states has a population of 38 million again?
And is an individual member of NATO?
The trip to Russia was to attend a remembrance of the Katyn Massacre, an event which thankfully has no real equivalent in American history. But I suppose one might compare it to Air Force One crashing while flying into Honolulu to take part in a Pearl Harbor memorial. Or perhaps the Israeli “Air Force One” crashing while traveling to Germany or Poland to take part in a Holocaust memorial. At least in the 2nd case, the Israeli military heads might not accompany the Israeli political leadership.
Yes. That’s the horrible twist to this story.
My parents edited a book on the Katyn massacre when I was a young boy. Reading the manuscript was one of my earliest introductions to humanity at its worst.
Katyn was the deliberate killing* by Russia* of the cream of Polish leadership for the specific purpose of leaving the country decapitated and without natural leaders when Stalin planned to move in on it and seize it. Until now, neither the Soviet Union nor modern Russia ever owned up to what had been done. The Nazis actually uncovered evidence of the massacre during World War II, but the Allied powers downplayed the issue or remained silent due to the necessity of war. You know it’s bad when Nazi Germany momentarily holds the moral high ground over you.
But Putin finally seemed ready to admit Russia’s culpability and try to heal some of the bitterness. I have read some of the news about the decision, but I for one do not know his motivation or how much responsibility he intended to admit. Nevertheless, a chance at real healing seemed in the offing.
The government and other natural leadership of Poland gamely responded. This wouldn’t be the end of Katyn in historical memory, but it had the possibility of being a watershed moment, of offering some psychological easing of the horrible, permanent loss that did so much damage to Poland over the last 70 years.
And then this. Decapitated again! And in Russia!
It’s exquisitely horrible, even if it is an accident. It’s so horrible that the coincidence alone makes it hard to believe it’s really and truly an accident. So far I haven’t seen anything to indicate otherwise, but let’s be realistic about Putin’s track record – it’s not totally out of the question. Bad things happen to a LOT of the people Putin doesn’t like.
I am following this story with a mix of morbid dread and a sense of unreality, and I’m not of Polish extraction, myself (although I quite fondly remember a fierce Polish-American girl I once dated).
California. But California’s economy is three times the size. Not a member of NATO, though.
It grew while I was away! That said, it is not typically considered one of the “smaller” states, is it? (also, it is 36,961,664 (2009 est.), per wikipedia, which is less than the 38 million I was asking about).
No; it is, in fact, by far the largest, by population. And as you note, it still falls just short of Poland’s.