Storm Clouds Over Poland 🇵🇱

An anti-government protest in Warsaw, Poland, January 11, 2024.  The yellow sign reads “German Money, Soviet Methods.” Photograph: Dominika Zarzycka/Shutterstock

80 years after the apocalypse of World War II and the crushing weight of half a century of communist occupation, which ended just 35 years ago, Poland has enjoyed the longest period of peace and prosperity in its history. But storm clouds are again gathering fast.

Living standards have risen dramatically since 1989 and Poland’s economy is one of the bright spots in the European Union, projected to surpass even the UK by 2030. This vitality however is not buttressed by generations of accumulated wealth, institutional continuity and a unified common culture. 

The fact that Poland exists at all is a miracle, but the severe damage inflicted on Poland materially and psychologically since the early 20th century has not healed, and may never.

One of the consequences of ceaseless drama and foreign intervention in Poland’s affairs has been a type of public schizophrenia in political matters, especially in its most recent history.

Contrary to popular legend, the Solidarity trade union movement of the 1980s did not force a clean break with Soviet communism. The compromises made with the communist authorities, culminating in the Round Table Agreements, represented a highly manipulated and incomplete transition to a healthy, constitutional republic. The consequences of these compromises reverberate throughout Polish society to this day.

There was no justice and settling of accounts with communists who had actively betrayed Polish independence by loyally serving the Soviet Union, in many cases having directly ordered killings and persecutions. In fact, the same people retained influence, built wealth in privatized state enterprises, kept their pensions in retirement and even retained the right to be buried in the Powązki Military Cemetery, Poland’s Arlington. 

Many of the communist officials buried there in prime plots with honors, participated in the brutal subjugation of the Polish underground during and after World War II. Tens of thousands if not 100,000 or more Poles were killed and executed after World War II ended. 

The precise number will never be known as the murders were done in secret, records were either not kept or were destroyed, and Poland’s status as a police state at the time prevented any independent research from being carried out for decades after the events had occurred.

Roughly 250 of these Polish patriots, after suffered weeks or months of unimaginable torture in the Mokotów Prison, were executed and their bodies were secretly transported to Powązki and buried in unmarked pits at the site known as ‘The Meadow’ (Łączka), near the cemetery wall. It was only in 2012 that exhumations began, carried out by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) to begin identifying the remains based on DNA collected from surviving relatives

I translated an article about this in a post in 2012: “The Medallion in the Skull” and wrote about it again in 2015: “Exhuming the Victims of Communism in Poland”

Part of my video on All Souls’ Day in Warsaw also features the Powązki Military Cemetery:

Herculean efforts were made for generations to protect Poland’s history, traditions, culture of fighting for independence and loyalty to the homeland while the country was enslaved by foreign empires. This was mostly done at the family level, in secret schools, among emigres, especially in Western Europe and the United States, with the most significant common denominator being the Catholic Church through local parishes, priests and nuns.

Out of the past 230 years, Poland has only been an independent state for 55 years total, and only for the last 35 years consecutively. Less than two generations have been able to begin forming the foundations of a civil society, practically from scratch. This luxury of societal continuity is totally taken for granted in the West.

I’m reminded of this every time I see a sign for a local business here in the San Francisco Bay Area stating how long they’ve been in operation. A travel agency “since 1939” (the year WWII began in Poland) and an auto insurance firm “since 1923” (just a few years after Poland regained independence after a century) were two that I saw yesterday. This is practically unheard of in Poland. 

Most companies and brands with a historic tradition were often defunct for many years before being revived at a later date. Aside from small family businesses, often tied to agriculture, domestic services, textiles or simple merchant stalls that eked out a subsistence living for its members, the ones that emerged from the First World War and began to grow in the Interwar Period (1918-1939), were annihilated during WWII or seized by the communists afterwards.

The primary reason that my dad’s family left Poland and immigrated to California at the encouragement of a relative here, was the constant harassment of the communist authorities against my entrepreneurial grandfather, a Polish officer before the war and a POW in a German camp for its duration. 

My maternal grandmother’s sister left Poland for Greece with her husband after he was given an ultimatum to sell his prospering chocolate factory to the government and permanently relocate out of the country.

Far from being a clean slate once the Soviet system finally began to fall in 1989, Poland was saddled with the baggage of nearly half a century of communist propaganda pumped into the brains of children, starting from the first grade and continuing unabated through their entire education. 

In Textbooks as Propaganda: Poland Under Communist Rule, 1944-1989, Joanna Wojdon highlights the all-pervasive nature of communist indoctrination in the Polish educational system.

In these conditions, even with the most patriotic, liberty-minded parents (unfortunately this was a minority after years of mass killings, deportations, emigration and self-imposed exile), it was impossible for impressionable minds to not soak in much of these toxic ideas and behavioral conditioning.

One consequence of generations of collectivist programming is a deeply ingrained suspicion towards entrepreneurs and private businesses. Words like ‘bourgeois’ (burżuj), ‘nouveau riche’ (dorobkiewicz), ‘private entrepreneur’ (prywaciarz), ‘wealthy man’ (bogacz), ‘exploiter’ (wyzyskiwacz), trace their origins at least to the Bolshevik revolution and still inform the attitudes of many Poles.

Even more common than the words themselves is the mentality which assumes that businesspeople make their money by depriving someone else. While Polish entrepreneurship is certainly in its golden age today, a substantial proportion of the population still has a strong expectation for the state to take care of their pensions and healthcare needs, and that private business has some vague connection to dishonesty.

While most Poles disdained the realities of the communist system, it was not necessarily for ideological reasons, rather, because of the low quality of life that it afforded. At least 2 million Poles were official members of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Communist Party) in 1989. Party membership afforded benefits and opportunities (especially in education, employment and foreign travel) that were impossible otherwise. 

The reason that my maternal grandfather, Kazimierz (also a pre-war officer and POW) didn’t get his PhD in Poland, although as a brilliant engineer he would have been an ideal candidate, is because he wasn’t willing to sign up to the Communist Party. Such an idea was anathema to a man steeped in the military code of honor of pre-war Poland. This limitation severely curtailed his opportunities and also deprived Poland of a great asset. Multiply cases like these by millions.

The nomenklatura that took advantage of these possibilities by at least nominally declaring loyalty to the Party, did not disappear. They largely morphed into self-styled “democratic liberals” once the winds of change began to blow. For example, Leszek Miller, a card-carrying communist for 20 years, was in the Politburo (the pinnacle of power) of the Communist Party from 1989-1990. He now represents Poland as a member of the European Parliament. 

It’s hard to believe that out of a country of 36 million, the best candidate to represent Poland is an old communist apparatchik. It’s just one indicator of how little some things have changed.

Regular revelations from the communist-era archives (mostly held by IPN) spotlight the unsavory connections (most often as secret informants) between public officials and the communist security services, but rarely serve as more than a temporary embarrassment that is most often denied and forgotten. Serious attempts to carry out a comprehensive vetting (lustracja) of past ties of public officials to the state security services have failed.

While there are very few true-believing, Soviet Union-loving communists left in Poland, a huge proportion of Poles suffers from a form of Stockholm Syndrome that manifests itself in unquestioning loyalty to the European Union and a self-loathing that denigrates Poland in comparison to Western Europe. The former Big Brother in Moscow has been substituted by the one in Brussels.

Polish historian Andrzej Nowak recently cited a study conducted by the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which revealed that approximately five million Poles are not only ashamed of Poland but actively hate (!) the country and don’t want to know its culture or history. That’s 14% of the entire population. 

A group that is more than twice as large, 28%, are described in the study as “withdrawn pessimists”. These people have turned away from public life, live day to day and in general have little hope for the future. Nowak concludes that the new government would have had no chance to win without their votes and that the arduous task of the coming years will be to convince these groups that there is a better way.

For now, the people that are down on Poland or checked out completely, wear rose-colored glasses that view the EU as a role model and guarantor of Poland’s security and prosperity (this role is in reality played by NATO and the US in particular). They are blinded to the reality of who is standing behind the blue curtain with gold stars, 🇩🇪 Germany.

German energy cooperation with Russia was inaugurated exactly 54 years ago today on February 1, 1970, when the first major gas pipeline deal was signed. 

The Germans assured concerned NATO officials, worried about the security implications of the arrangement (this was the middle of the Cold War after all), that energy imports of Russian gas would never account for even 10% of the total. Yet, by the eve of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany was dependent on Russia for roughly half of all of its energy imports. 

Germany has transferred hundreds of billions of euros to Putin’s Russia in payment for energy. These vast sums of money have enriched and entrenched the oligarchic system there and fueled a revitalized imperial war machine. Waging the brutal campaign in Ukraine would have been impossible without regular bank transfers from their best client in history. 

Astoundingly, in the face of this, the greatest geopolitical blunder in modern European foreign policy, Germany is practically exempt from criticism and is continuing its drive for the centralization of power in the EU, and elimination of the veto rights of member states. 

Enter the new coalition government in Poland, which was brought to power in the parliamentary elections last fall, and has been systematically deconstructing everything that their predecessors, the Law & Justice (PiS) party created from 2015-2023. 

Headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council and previous prime minister (2007-2014), the new government is a patchwork of urban leftists, agrarian socialists and post-communist comrades associated with Tusk’s Civic Platform, the largest party in the coalition (although still less popular than PiS). 

The German head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, anticipated Tusk’s return at the European People’s Party congress in 2022 saying, “…and Donald remember, when we see each other again, we’ll see you as you said, as a prime minister!” 

Statements like these only reinforce the belief that proclaimed commitments to “democracy” and “rule of law” by EU bureaucrats are but empty platitudes. 

Among the brazen and unconstitutional bulldozing conducted by the new government thus far, was the police seizure of Poland’s public television, TVP, last December when broadcasts were abruptly cut off. Since returning to the air, an all-new cast of presenters has been installed to toe the new party line. 

While the TVP Info cahnnel in particular, had been stridently pro-PiS, in the context of the entire Polish media market, they were the only major alternative news source that broadly appealed to the plurality of voters who have cast their ballots for PiS for the better part of a decade.

The primary opposition media, TVN, is owned by the US-based Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. multinational news conglomerate. It’s not a coincidence that the color scheme used in their logo and news broadcasts mirrors the blue and gold of the EU flag, which dovetails with their uniformly pro-EU (and concurrently pro-German) messaging. 

While the media dynamic in Poland was far from perfect beforehand, with a foreign-owned, left-leaning, pro-EU TVN on one side and a state-funded, centrist-conservative TVP on the other, it did offer a kind of balance of two opposing media narratives. The situation has now returned to the pre-PiS era of an “independent” private, government-supporting media, and a state-funded, pro-government media.

Besides a number of smaller magazines and newspapers, the largest conservative media source in Poland is now TV Republika, a much more modestly funded outfit than either TVP or TVN. A number of ousted TVP anchors and personalities have now found a home there. The largest number of views comes from their YouTube channel.

The sledgehammer extended far beyond explicitly political news to bludgeon, among others, the “Pytanie na Śniadanie” (PnŚ, “A Question for Breakfast”) morning program. This totally apolitical program featured a rotating team of energetic, enthusiastic hosts whose programming revolved around cultural events, mental and physical health issues, holidays and cooking, featuring numerous interesting guests from a broad cross section of Polish society.

What I mentioned about generational continuity in business also applies here to culture. Millions of Poles had grown accustomed to their favorite presenters who have matured and developed their talents over the years. Annual traditions had begun to develop and common national touchstones from historical anniversaries to the successes of Polish athletes and programming related to holidays were developing their own rhythm. Among the ones that I liked the most were Ida Nowakowska’s 4th of July and Thanksgiving segments with her Californian husband, where various traditions were shared with the Polish audience, which, unlike in Western Europe, is still strongly pro-American. 

The public broadcasting careers of these admirable and dynamic young Poles have been abruptly cut short. This has nothing to do with ratings being down or changes in the direction of society, these are purely political decisions meant to actively shape social mores. 

A recent segment in the revamped PnŚ featured a gay couple unfurling a rainbow flag. These types of stunts are an overt insult to Poland’s largely traditional and Catholic population. There’s no shortage of media for this type of content and these and other minority groups face no oppression in Poland. Throwing it in the face of Poles however seems intended to court a backlash, a highly provocative and socially toxic political tactic.

Another victim for the chopping block was TVP World, Poland’s only major news service in English. Again, the broadcasts were largely apolitical, focused especially on the Ukraine War. It is unknown whether it will ever return to the air, and if it does, it will almost certainly be purged (along with years of accumulated experience and know-how) of anyone remotely associated with PiS.

The list of offenses and brutality against decency, the rule of law and societal cohesion is long and growing by the day, and we’re barely 7 weeks into this new order. 

I haven’t even touched on the signals emanating from the government that they wish to delay or even cancel plans to build Poland’s first nuclear energy plant and Poland’s first real airport super-hub, the Central Communication Port (CPK). I will go into greater depth on these in a future Eastern European Affairs Newsletter.

These two strategically imperative projects alone can decide whether Poland makes the civilizational jump into Europe’s elite economies. They also have serious implications for whether Poland will have the resources and logistical capacity to face the ages-old threat that has reared its head again in the East.

America can’t afford to ignore what’s happening to one of its most loyal allies, especially in an increasingly hostile world where dependable friends are very hard to come by.

Whose interests do these radical moves serve? Certainly not Poland’s. 

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Updates

With the carved wooden reproduction of the Monument of Gratitude to America 🇺🇸🇵🇱 in the Hoover Tower lobby at Stanford, January 2024

• A few months ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Andreas Papadopulos for Czech TV about Poles returning to Poland. I spoke about the important project I am working on to restore the Monument of Gratitude to America on Herbert Hoover Square in Warsaw. Watch the video here: https://t.co/fmlsiMis5q

• In an online article, the Niezależna website highlighted a tweet of mine from last year listing the reason why Poles abroad should return to Poland: https://bit.ly/4boFimg

• I was recently invited to the III Zjazd Badaczy Polonii (3rd Polonia Researchers Conference) in Kraków, organized by the Instytut Pokolenia (Generation Institute). I shared my story about how I made the decision to emigrate to Poland, my ancestral homeland. The talk is in Polish (I’ll create an English subtitled version in the future) you can find the Polish video and the English text here: https://bit.ly/3SIK32E

• The project to rebuild the Monument of Gratitude to America in Warsaw continues, but we are facing bureaucratic challenges. If you have a Facebook account I would really appreciate it if you like our page. The content is mostly in Polish but every like helps: https://bit.ly/OdbudujmyPomnikWdziecznosciAmeryce

I am continuing to translate and teach English while splitting my time between Warsaw and Northern California. I will be an uncle soon so I am in the Bay Area for now.

If you’d like to support my work then please forward this newsletter to anyone you think may be interested. I appreciate it!

Feel free to write to me: nick@researchteacher.com

Thanks for your support,

Nick Siekierski