After reading the article published in the July–August issue of "Głos Bolesławca", entitled "The Order of the Smile Knights’ Industrial Region", I began to wonder how this smallest industrial region in the world (a two-hectare plot containing School No. 8) had managed to achieve such impressive production results in the form of successfully pushing as many as six candidates submitted by pupils of what was, after all, a provincial school through the order’s chapter.
Solving this intriguing riddle did not take me very long, however, because after working for several decades in an industrial plant I had had the opportunity to learn about the factors determining production success, namely a talented manager, the right technology and a workforce devoted to its plant.
As for the first factor, everyone who knows the head of the industrial region will agree that he is an exceptionally talented person, especially in the field of propaganda of success. As for the technology used in this case, it was based on a self-perpetuating mechanism: serve the producer and you will receive an order, although there were exceptions to this rule, since neither Kurt Waldheim nor Mikhail Gorbachev ever made any contributions to the benefit of the "eighth", but exceptions merely confirm the rule.
Certain reservations can be made only about the so-called human factor, namely a workforce composed exclusively of minors who—in accordance with international conventions—may not be employed in industrial production, while there can be no doubt that the production of Order of the Smile knights was conducted in the industrial region on an industrial scale. This is, after all, a legal objection, whereas circumventing the law is a national specialty of Poles, and therefore one cannot hold it too much against the head of the industrial region, especially since he was guided by a highly noble goal—to shine on a broader stage.
Unfortunately, the Bolesławiec monopolist in this field also happened to turn out some defective products, which was presumably caused by the considerable scale of production and poor quality control. One such defective product was undoubtedly the Order of the Smile awarded to Kurt Waldheim, who—as it later turned out—had been an officer of Nazi military intelligence operating in the Balkan countries, an institution that was certainly the principal architect of the conflict staged by the Germans between Serbs and Croats, in accordance with the age-old principle of divide et impera.
For this reason, boasting of possessing "a cordial letter and a portrait with a handwritten dedication from Kurt Waldheim" arouses profound disgust, especially because displaying this trophy before the readers of "Głos Bolesławca" took place at the height of the bloody Yugoslav drama, begun fifty years earlier by specialists from the formation to which Kurt Waldheim also belonged.
It is also worth noting that the author of the article, who usually signs himself with the initials PS, seems this time to have used the initials of an editorial colleague, which can easily be deduced from the style and manner in which the matter is presented. This demonstrates yet another valuable skill of the former producer of Orders of the Smile, who—as can be seen—has mastered to perfection the art of molding his surroundings into activities serving mainly to highlight his own person.