A mosaic of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus erected to the memory of Polish soldiers who helped to liberate a Dutch city from the Nazis has been vandalised with Black Lives Matter graffiti.
The 1954 mosaic depicting the Virgin as Our Lady of Częstochowa — better known as the Black Madonna — was defaced with spray-paint and its plinth branded with the letters “BLM” in the city of Breda.
The mosaic memorialises the Free Polish forces of General Stanisław Maczek’s Polish 1st Armoured Division, which liberated the city from its Nazi German occupiers in 1944.
The National Catholic Register quoted Breda’s mayor, Paul Depla,“ as saying that the vandalisation was “particularly sad for the Polish community, for which the monument is of great value”.
Daniel Kawczynski, the Polish-born Conservative MP and Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Poland, told Breitbart London that he was “deeply saddened that the perpetrators of this vandalism clearly don’t understand the powerful meaning to so many Poles of this monument which they have desecrated.”
“So many Polish soldiers died liberating Holland from the evils of Nazi occupation. The Madonna being vandalised adds to the shame for anyone like me who is a Christian, this is deeply hurtful,” he added.
A former chairman of the General Maczek Museum, Frans Ruczynski, was still more forceful, saying the act of desecration was “very insulting”.
“Polish people are very religious. Every Sunday they go to church, with hundreds in Breda,” he said.
“Why would you want to hurt them? We don’t know if it comes from the left or right corner. But when it comes to Black Lives Matter, I don’t understand it. The Black Madonna has nothing to do with oppression at all.”
Poland has no history of African colonisation — and has indeed frequently been invaded and at times subjugated to a greater or lesser extent by neighbouring polities including the Austrian, German, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish empires.
Shaun King, a prominent Black Lives Matter supporter with over one million followers on Twitter alone, recently called for “All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, his European mother, and their white friends [to] come down,” branding them a “gross form of white supremacy”, “tools of oppression”, and “racist propaganda”.
The Bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, denounced King’s “call to violence and destruction” as “secular iconoclasm”.
“Our statues, pictures, stained-glass windows, churches, icons, and devotions are holy to us,” he said. “They remind us of God, His love for us in Christ, and the nearness of the divine.”
Statues of historic figures from obscure British merchants to President George Washington are being torn down across the United Kingdom, the United States, and the wider West throughout the ongoing Black Lives Matter disorder sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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