A bizarre and destructive law entered into force in Poland on March 15. Called the lustration law, as in a purification ritual, it requires some 700,000 citizens to fill out a form that asks, “Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security services?” The forms will go to the Institute of National Memory, where they will be checked against communist secret police archives. Citizens who refuse to answer the question or lie may be banned from their professions for 10 years. The new Polish lustration law reminds of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt. But for many Poles, the purging power that President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother, PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski, have infused into the law holds a different meaning. The Kaczynski twins are wielding totalitarian tools to excise from Poland’s body politic all vestiges of the totalitarian past.

If there is a defensible motive for the Kaczynski twins’ lustration law, it is to weed out old secret police officers and communist apparatchiks. But the Kaczynski purge encrusted in the law promises revenge instead of justice, an abuse of political power in place of respect for the rights of the individual. Democratic friends of Poland should be admonishing the Kaczynskis that they are acting more like totalitarians than democrats.