Will the Russian war result in new genocides?

 by Zbigniew Wojcik, Ph.D.

Secrets of the wars in Central Europe.

The political map of the world has changed drastically by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Today people know a lot about the battles during WWI that took place in Western Europe. Much less visible are the war struggles that took place in Central Europe, specifically on the territory of Poland. See e.g. A. Chwalba „The People of Poland War 1914-1918” [1]. Historians, intelligence officers, and politicians did not pay attention to these areas of human habitats, which was a terrible mistake that had led to a much more terrible WWII. An example is a bad decision made by the Prime Minister of the UK, N. Chamberlain, to let Hitler expand into the center of Europe, Sudetenland, and then soon after, encouraged Hitler and Stalin to attack and take over Poland. Thus, the terrible WWII erupted.

Why has all this happened? What can be done to stop massive human suffering starting in Europe and then spreading throughout the world? What are the roots of the geopolitical map leading to the world wars? Can the roots that grow world wars be cut off once and for all to stop the evil growths?  Was anything done already? Could WWIII erupt, and if so, how the nuclear Armageddon of the world could be prevented?

Germany always needs more territory and could go only east, while Russia or the Soviet Union desired new technologies for what they had to go West. These two very big powers of the XX century created the crumple zone between them on the territory of Poland. The population living in the crumple zone repeatedly suffered more than people in any other part of the world in the XX century because of numerous wars, such as WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. The military fronts were coming forth and back there multiple times through each inch of the Polish soil.  Historically, these two European imperia were making “friends” with each other to easily win a war against Poland, but then each of the two needed much more and were going into a terrible war against each other, which was expanding into world wars. Only a much greater power,  the United States of America, that could control this crumple zone, is capable to separate Germany from Russia and prevent the next world war. This idea is expanded in detail by  Wojcik [4].

History repeats itself, including the history of evil struggles. The right approach to prevent mass human suffering in the West is to popularize the history of the key territories of Poland where the war atrocities were most intensive and massive. Poland historically happened to be the most influential on the peace in the world. WWII would not start so easily had Chamberlain been willing to take into consideration facts of the WWI struggles on the Polish territories.

Preventing unexpected bloodsheds and war atrocities

During peace, people are unaware of the atrocities of military struggles. A war brings unexpected bloodshed. An example is a political situation in L’viv close to the end of WWI when the Austrian army was very weak and could not control the city[2]. Ukrainians took the city swiftly by a military and political coup. Then Poles responded by an immediate counter-attack causing Ukrainians to retreat. Jewish minority was also involved in the struggles. The point is, that two subsequent military uprisings could be avoided by proper diplomacy and preventive measures. The war does not facilitate talks for peace. The task to properly evaluate political consequences of forthcoming events should be rather given to intelligence officers who would be capable to relate two or more facts together such as a weakening control by the side losing the war, and the possibility of ethnic uprisings. Then, talks to organize voting could be the right approach, not the military coup or the uprising. The book by Markowski: “Lwow or L’viv: Two Uprisings in 1918” is excellent for education [2].

The evidence with Chamberlain and Hitler shows that the politicians frequently take no responsibility for their lack of ability to learn from historical facts nor for their acts. People are the victims and the only defense of citizens in a democracy is voting. People need honest and not politically biased knowledge, access to full information, and understanding of the consequences if they will not vote for the loyal, smart, honest, and not corrupt politicians. The book by Damian Markowski „Lwów or L’viv. Two Uprisings in 1918” [2], is precious by teaching people that war instead of democratic voting may easily lead to even more than one military uprising, and the way to prevent bloodshed is to vote for the right politicians. People should be much less interested in fake news but instead in good, based on facts, historical information.

The war, like WWII, brings not only genocide of Jewish population. At the beginning of WWII, Germany made the total cleansing of Polish people of any standing: teachers, administrators, business owners, see [4]. The invading  German army performed also numerous and massive cleansings of real and potential political opponents. An example is the massive killing of Polish patriots, officers, and administrators on Stalin’s order after invading Poland by the Soviets at the beginning of WWII. About 22,000 Polish officers belonging to the military elite and administrators were shot and buried near Katyn and Mednoje by the Soviet communists (NKWD). Witnesses were not allowed to testify the truth after WWII, see T. Wolsza, „Encounter With Katyn: The Wartime and Postwar Story of Poles Who Saw the Katyn Site in 1943” [3]. People should know the history to appreciate the power of democratic voting.

Coup d’état is always possible, after which, when successful, the country may be in a situation like under foreign occupation. Regular history classes do not teach how to behave to survive occupation despite purges, persecutions, and massacres. Even more, how to effectively fight the occupant without much exposing yourself and relatives to death? An example of reasonable resistance provides a book by Z. Wojcik [4].

The recommended literature both describes war and occupation atrocities for self-education to know about the threats of war, and also, depicts the sad reality of hostile occupation and the efficient fight against it with the aid of intelligent information and intelligence, which is not available from typical history courses. People are mostly involved in regular life, spending most of their time at work, with family and friends,  unfortunately forgetting about self-education needed to understand the true history, the threats of war, and reasonable survival of hostile occupation. Enemies are extremely active, operating with enormous budgets,  and so these threats are real and very common. Media are mostly fake, filled with propaganda, and do not provide a full and deep insight into political issues.

Underlining the importance of intelligence officers, historians, and journalists.

Can we educate prospective diplomats and intelligence officers to know and understand the history of the most atrocious places in the world and the motivations of leaders behind them?  Knowing the book by A. Chwalba „The People of Poland War 1914-1918” [1] will lead to the development of much better strategies of keeping peace in the world. Readers after finishing the book will get the warning to be prepared well for informed voting during democratic elections.

People should learn from history rather than suffer from the war atrocities again. The role of historians and journalists is to make it possible.  Intelligence communities and diplomacy officers should develop on the appreciation and understanding of the truly enormous role of analyzing history to prevent war atrocities from happening again. Worth mentioning is the achievement of the CIA during the Cold War assisting in the collapse of the Soviet Bloc about the time when the Soviet Union was preparing to attack the West. The nuclear war did not start, and the United States of America has won the Cold War peacefully.  For details of successful intelligence struggles during the Cold War and the role of history seen by the people living in Poland, see the book authored by Z. Wojcik: Slaying the Soviet Beast…” [4]. Note, that the Cold War was also the world war.

After the Soviet Bloc collapsed and Poland become a part of NATO, Germany is formally no longer in the position to attack militarily the center of Europe from the west as in the XX century. But will Germany defend Poland when Russia will continue going west?

References

[1]. Andrzej Chwalba, „The People of Poland War 1914-1918”, Fundacja im. Janusza Kurtyki, 2021. https://www.amazon.com/People-Poland-War-Geschichte-Erinnerung/dp/363183845X

[2]. Damian Markowski „Lwów or L’viv. Two Uprisings in 1918”, Peter Lang, Fundacja im. Janusza Kurtyki, 2021. https://www.amazon.com/Lw%C3%B3w-Lviv-Uprisings-Studies-Politics-ebook/dp/B093CFBZ5N

[3]. Tadeusz Wolsza, „Encounter With Katyn: The Wartime and Postwar Story of Poles Who Saw the Katyn Site in 1943”, Carolina Academic Press, Durham 2018. https://cap-press.com/pdf/9781531015374.pdf      https://www.amazon.com/Encounter-Katyn-Wartime-Postwar-Story/dp/1531015379

[4]. Zbigniew Wojcik, Author of “Slaying the Soviet Beast. A True Story about How the Cold War was Won. What Next”, Liberty Hill, 2019.  https://www.amazon.com/Slaying-Soviet-Beast-Story-about/dp/1545667020

The post Will the Russian aggression on Ukraine lead to genocide in Europe? appeared first on Polonia Institute.

THE CUNNING OF FREEDOM, SAVING THE SELF IN AN AGE OF FALSE IDOLS,

by Ryszard Legutko

Reviewed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Freedom and Aristocracy

One of the greatest tragedies following the implosion of Communism was the failure to “not primarily opening up a free space but reconstructing ‘the old order,’ bringing back what was real, good, proper” (p. 52). Thus, anti-Communism should have been largely, if not entirely, reactionary. Instead, for the lack of conservative elites in places like Poland, liberalism filled the void.

Ryszard Legutko seems to have a ready alternative for the liberal totalitarian affliction of our times. It is res publica, a commonwealth with a mixed constitution. Sadly, he does not devote much of The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2021) to its advocacy. Instead, he brilliantly sets out to dissect freedom and distill an anti-dote to liberalism for us. Unlike Roy Dreher’s attempts to recreate the sui generis Polish dissident paradigm of the 1970s and, perhaps, 1980s, in contemporary America, Ryszard Legutko’s proposition is not ahistorical; it is universal.

First, Legutko pledges to derive liberty from “the classical philosophical tradition.” Then, he dismisses most contemporary thinkers, including his erstwhile guru Isaiah Berlin and, in particular, the latter philosopher’s idea of a dual manifestation of freedom as bunk: “a collection of platitudes and falsehoods” (pp. 2-3).

Next, the thinker wants us to suspend the disbelief: “The argument that the liberal order may be inimical to freedom is not only treated with disbelief but dismissed entirely as a product of an unstable and perverse mind.” The liberal enemy posits that to execute his “modernizing project,” one must make a clean start, a Pol Potian “Year Zero,” without mass terror. However, “the conservative side rejects the clean-slate strategy that the modernizers espouse – that is, the strategy to cleanse the Polish minds from most historical and cultural traits and replace them with the current pieties of liberal democratic ideology” (p. 55). One should add: not only Polish but also American and other.

Then, Legutko delves into the nature and manifestations of freedom. There are three types of liberty: negative, positive, and inner. Lack of coercion denotes negative freedom but fails to set limits to liberty externally. An ability to govern oneself and others reflects positive freedom but, internally, fails to define what the individual’s freedom entails (or, as the author puts it: “positive freedom is a set of qualities and conditions needed to achieve important aims,” (p. 59); and he cautions: “positive freedom makes little sense if it amounts to adapting oneself to changing conditions and to one’s biological inclinations,” (p. 105); and, finally, inner freedom expresses itself in enabling one to stay true to oneself, even if the ability to harmonize freedom with human essence remains confusing. “The third sense of freedom concerns authorship of one’s actions, words, and thoughts…. In the concept of positive freedom, one references external criteria to fashion for oneself a suitably free existence. In the concept of inner freedom, objective criteria do not count” (p. 113).

To understand the distinction between the three freedoms well, Legutko refines the definitions of communism and liberalism from his previous work. “Communism was an artificial construct, conceived as an ideological project and derived from a deeply flawed philosophy that made people live in an artificial reality” (p. 51). Liberalism is “a super-theory that has enforced itself on modern society as the best regulator of human diversity” (p. 170).

In a way, as I see it, liberalism is thus an ideology of conflict management. Nevertheless, it also has a much more ambitious and dangerous dimension. It aims to equalize and deify man in congruence with Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Satre’s precepts. “So, man is nothing, and man is God” (p. 126).

Liberalism further counters nationalism. However, national distinctiveness comes from the culture that shaped each people. “The concept of ‘culture,’ which spread rapidly once conceived, conveyed the complex makeup of a nation’s singular distinctiveness” (p. 156). According to Legutko, “People continue to need a community that naturally unites them through a common language, history, social practices, and is cemented by loyalty, love, and even sometimes by the ultimate sacrifice.” The author qualifies this by agreeing that “populations have no need for nationalism during stable eras but, in times of crises, silly notions may be fed into complacent minds and prompt irresponsible conduct under the pretense of serving one’s country” (p. 157).

Thus, nationalism should endure, but one must be aware of its capacity for abuse. Liberalism rejects such sage advice. It follows its own way.

To achieve its goal of regulating “human diversity,” liberalism champions multiculturalism. That is a fatal flaw. Pace liberals, society is not “a gigantic department store, where people can move freely through every conceivable department whenever they want, in pursuit of the goods they wish to have” (p. 22).

The author explains that “each community has a different understanding and evaluation of society’s values. Besides, each has differing notions of freedom and human nature as well as divergent (sometimes irreconcilable) notions about man’s destiny and what constitutes good political order.” Because of such diversity of view – national, ethnic, and religious – “a utopia built on diversity has never really exhilarated mankind’s imagination and is unlikely to do so in the future” (p. 22).

Thus, confusion reigns. Two contradictory phenomena illustrate this best. First, “we witness the desperate attempts of individuals to manifest the exceptional nature of their true selves through the sincerity of their words and actions.” Second, “we witness a most depressing parade of captive minds, chanting the same cliches in unison and mimicking whatever they have been told to mimic.”

Paradoxically, these are complementary phenomena. “As the process of homogenization has accelerated, individuals have become increasingly less distinguishable in their views, conduct, language, and actions, thus rendering the search for one’s uniqueness all the more urgent” (p. 116).

Legutko claims further that “Liberalism stimulated the process of stripping our social life and ourselves of many elements along the lines that liberal philosophy had envisaged. It had its share, for example, in pushing society towards individualism, in which a collection of self-contained agents collaborated through contracts, akin to liberal philosophy’s social order. We are closer to this order today than ever before” (p. 141). Even more frightfully, “The liberal order requires social engineering to be implemented and this, in turn, means not only restructuring society but marginalizing those who oppose the process” (p. 171).

Thus, liberalism has degenerated into soft totalitarianism. “Most people accept liberalism because it offers an easy and comfortable solution. Its alluring power lies in a combination of two factors. On the one hand, it is meant to address people as individuals, telling them that everyone has both the right and the freedom to become whomever and whatever they want. On the other hand, liberalism is a political system that secures those rights, bolstered by an ideology that regulates people’s conduct, tells them right from wrong, what to love and whom to hate. The combination of these two elements generates a seemingly self-evident conclusion that one should fully identify with the system in order to be free; then, the system will reciprocate by enlarging freedom for everyone. Blending into this system is a natural outcome, given the relatively high degree of loneliness that characterizes the world of negative freedom. It’s a highly disconcerting conclusion” (p. 176).

Liberty is suppressed ostensibly in the name of liberty. Freedom of speech suffers first. Instead, lies serve to uphold liberalism. “Once one particular freedom is confused with the legal framework of freedom, then the language of freedom is likely to become mendacious. And this is what has happened over recent decades in the Western world” (p. 10).

A new form of speech emerged, conditioned and policed by political correctness. “The overall effects of political correctness have been disastrous for freedom, as well as for other basic ideas such as beauty, goodness, and truth” (p. 24).

Liberalism makes promises which are illogical and unmoored from history and faith. One can make a compelling case, perhaps that “all men are created equal.” However, according to the author, it is absolutely unjustifiable to posit that humans “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… among these … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” He finds this ahistorical and false. “There is nothing in the Christian religion that would even indirectly supply grounds for such an outlandish contention, nor is there anything of the kind in the history of philosophy” (p. 31).

Obviously, Legutko believes that America’s Founding Fathers should have just asserted that we were all children of the Lord. Everything else is just fluff, empty promises, particularly under a limited government. And the objective of freedom should be to maintain such a regime. “The Polish nation, for example, was obsessively apprehensive of political absolutism for many centuries, and was inclined to treat every attempt to reverse the state’s gradual dismantling as a sinister plan to restore absolutum dominium” (p. 32).

Radical forces have presumed to speak in the name of freedom and arrogate to themselves the championship of freedom as it reflects their interests and pursuits. “Various interest groups have hijacked freedom and have made the success of their crusades their sole criterion. These groups have somehow managed to convince public opinion – or, more often, the ruling elites – that they pave the way for greater democracy by opening up more free space for hitherto marginalized groups… They [thus] have greatly restricted liberties in practically every area of life, including free speech, free inquiry, and free thought” (p. 10).

As a result, “these and similar processes have had a debilitating effect on people’s minds not only because they have destroyed the language of communication and reversed the meaning of basic concepts. From the very beginning, liberalism has made itself the sole champion of liberty, pluralism, tolerance, and diversity, and the ardent enemy of discrimination, intolerance, and exclusion. This etymological trick – the word ‘liberalism’ stems from ‘libertas’ – the Latin word for freedom – has worked perfectly” (p. 173).

At this stage, liberalism is none of that anymore. Now “Pluralism means monopoly; diversity – conformity; tolerance – censorship; openness – ideological rigidity. In just about every private or public institution, school, or corporation, there are offices responsible for diversity, tolerance, and pluralism. All of them are gruesome ideological agencies, spreading fear and imposing conformity, not unlike their inglorious Communist predecessors” (p. 174).

Instead, liberalism is the ideology of power. “Both international institutions and sovereign governments have created this moral disorder and then anointed it by giving it a ‘European’ label, although their revolution has been a shameless violation of European moral tradition” (p. 35). According to Legutko, “Governments could not achieve these ends without creating a system of meticulous legal regulations and a powerful bureaucracy to supervise the new order… Some of the changes have been really disturbing because they have annihilated the principles which for decades had been considered non-negotiable, even sacred.” (p. 45)

The aim of the radical forces is no less than a revolution. Under the guise of promoting individual freedom, a revolutionary transformation of society is at hand. The revolutionaries aim at the most intimate spheres of life. Private is to be public. Thus, every aspect of human activity shall be scrutinized, exposed, and regulated. According to Legutko, “The champions of the sexual revolution made devastating incursions into social practices, morality, culture, and politics, dramatically changing the world in which we live by liquidating a complex system of obligations and inhibitions that had been built over centuries to tame human sexuality.” (p. 140)

It is sex that serves as the most powerful battering ram of the revolution. “Sex is probably the best illustration of this. Even though it concerns an individual’s particular personal experience, sex has in recent decades transformed into a powerful instrument for creating collective ideologies that regulate life’s most private aspects. Feminism is another good illustration of this tendency. The concept began with the assumption that women’s identity had been hijacked and enslaved by the centuries of men’s perfidious oppression and that women should finally be free to express their feminine concerns and interests and articulate them in a feminine language that was part of a larger all-encompassing feminine world view. But this initially libertarian plan instantaneously transformed itself into a rigid orthodoxy, imposing minuscule rules and regulations not only on women but on society as a whole. It codified the rules of language, rewrote history, and forced others to succumb to new, politically correct versions. It condemned ideologically suspect thoughts, gestures, and emotions and made laws increasingly inquisitorial. Since Marxism’s demise, there has been no other ideological movement in recent history that has managed to produce as many captive minds as feminism.” (p. 117)

Astonishingly, the revolutionaries have accomplished so much of their collectivist agenda because they disguise their postulates as emanating from freedom itself. And they manipulate the language. They tend to attach sublime words to base issues they champion.

For example, “in classical doctrines (supported by common sense) dignity was always about obligations as the principle noblesse oblige unequivocally indicates – but never about rights… Today’s doctrine… could be compared to the ideology of hereditary aristocrats, who claimed that simply through birth, they were entitled to certain liberties and privileges, except that today these have been extended to all human beings… Dignity, in other words, should be about the high and sublime, not the low and vulgar.” (p. 38)

Legutko shakes his head sadly: “There is something odiously dissonant when in the name of dignity, one derives the right to abortion, pornography, prostitution, impropriety or to any other morally dubious practices.” As a result, “What people find irresistible is its simple message: everyone can explain their demands, irrespective of their moral quality, in the language of rights, and once thus formulated these demands acquire both a nobler status and legal protection.” (p. 38)

Further, in an apparent act of deception, the slogans of the liberals contain both absolutist and morally relativist propositions, as it fits their strategic goal. On the one hand, the liberals invoke “human rights,” very imaginatively crafted to accommodate nearly anything. On the other, consider the fact that “All rulings that courts make about matters of life and death are moral judgements, yet the concepts of good and evil are absent.” (p. 28)

Deception works because it is served to the public as a matter of individual liberties. At the same time, it is disguised with a generous dose of moral relativism. And only afterward is it reinforced by totalitarian laws. “Leaving the questions of abortion, marriage, or euthanasia for individuals to decide is in itself a decision that dramatically changes society, a decision comparable to a revolution… After all, one cannot live in a society in which the law allows something that is morally reprehensible. Therefore, soon after such a law is passed, new laws are introduced to make moral opposition to this law more difficult and legally risky.” (p. 27)

The author bemoans the loss of the body/soul duality to modernity within the context of positive freedom. “Universities would not have been possible without a profound acceptance of the body/soul dichotomy.” (p. 69) And further, “Certainly, the university did not liberate a gentleman from earthly entanglements, but it did enable his mind to look at them from a larger, more profound historical and philosophical perspective and thus preclude hasty commitments or rancor. His mind could not be held hostage by the outbursts of popular crazes, ideological crusades, or the premature certainties preached by ephemeral prophets. Nor could it be paralyzed by agnosticism and relativism.” (p. 70)

Legutko equates it with the loss of liberty and humanity. Summing up the historical evolution underway, he warns us that individual positive freedom bears the history of the degeneration of the philosopher, entrepreneur, and artist from antiquity to the present. Only the aristocrat has not succumbed to the spirit of the times.

The author is such an aristocrat. The aristocrat is a master of himself. He rejects and scorns excess (pleonexia) and uncontrollability (akolasia). “The aristocrat was a free man because, unlike an animal, he was capable of mastering himself.” (p. 99) Legutko explains: “Put differently, being a master of oneself meant that the body should be ruled by what was best in human nature; that is, by the soul and its guardians such as reason, logos, lofty ideals, and moral norms…. The aristocrat, therefore, had a noticeable element of lordliness about him.” (p. 100)

Four attributes of an aristocrat stand out: “the rejection of historical inevitability; the defense of the ethic of obligations; an acceptance of body/soul dualism with the soul taking the dominant position; and a classical concept of shame. All of them are interrelated.” (p. 104)

The aristocrat further appreciates metaphysics. Metaphysics is indispensable to the salubrious development of all other elements. It defines them and everything else. “Metaphysics is a philosophical inquiry into ultimate principles and causes.” (p. 158) According to Legutko, “Metaphysical man is driven by the pervasive conviction that the goal of his existence transcends physical and societal limitations and though beyond his immediate grasp, it will determine his destiny.” (p. 158)

Here the author invokes Plato’s allegory of the cave so we would be able to relate to the significance of metaphysics, which liberalism judges superfluous. (p. 160) Paradoxically, the Platonic cave is liberalism incarnated. It created a self-contained world of uniformity. No other points of view are permitted. “By eliminating such perspectives, the cave becomes the entire world and their point of view the only legitimate one. Whoever disagrees and begins ruminating on the possibility of some transcendent fulfillment of human existence, or on being created in God’s image, is diagnosed as suffering from delusion or a serious health defect.” (p. 162)

Legutko further draws a parallel between Socrates and an aristocrat. Over the ages, we witness the replaying of the fate of Socrates, who was forced to commit suicide by democratic mediocrities. He does what is right invariably. “The aristocrat in a liberal democratic society reenacts this ancient drama with Socrates and others as its protagonists. The aristocrat is one of the final defenders of the soul in its classical understanding (with the loftier portion controlling the lower portion).”

The mark of the aristocrat consists of remaining true to himself. That means defending universalism that is applicable under any circumstances. There are immutable and permanent values, and one is sworn to uphold them. “The true aristocrat makes it clear that any decision about his soul cannot be measured in pre- or post-revolutionary terms, by democracy or pre-democracy, liberalism or illiberalism, or by such notions as anachronism, progress, the dustbin of history, or historical inevitability. Whoever defines himself by such criteria (and today it is common practice) deserves to be called a slave in Aristotle’s sense, rather than a free man.”

And finally, according to Legutko, “The aristocrat embraces this philosophy of human nature not only because his refined taste reinforces the distinction between high and low, but primarily because he believes that the principles and qualities which make a free man essentially immune from historical contingencies. In this, the aristocrat differs from the modern man.” (p. 106)

Contrary to him, the philosopher fails his litmus test of timeliness because, having abandoned the body/soul dichotomy, he was tempted into embracing the spirit of the times, whatever it may have been. “Flirting with revolution, violence, and radicalism in the era of aggressive totalitarianism did not serve intellectuals well, including those who believed they had inscribed freedom into human existence by depriving it of its essential properties.” (p. 130)

The entrepreneurs “prefer to adapt themselves to the prevailing conditions rather than strive for something politically and ideologically risky.” (p. 79) Accommodation or even collaboration is their default. As a result, “Entrepreneurs, both individually and collectively as corporations, have willingly joined the ranks of the ideological crusaders’ army and have spent astronomical sums of money supporting the cause. The notion that money is nonideological, so often disapproved in the past, has become completely discredited.” (p. 81)

The betrayal by the artists went even deeper. “Inevitably, natural attraction formed between artists on the one hand, and politicians and ideologues on the other.” (p. 91) The results were disastrous. “Never since the collapse of the Communist empire has there been such a close union between art and political institutions. Not only do artists readily expound racial and sexual liberation, condemn the discrimination of homosexuals and non-white groups, fight imperialism and patriarchy, unmask new forms of inequality, deride Euro-, logo-, and phallocentrism, but they do so with the massive support of their powerful friends and allies.” (p. 95)  Legutko means philosophers, entrepreneurs, and politicians.

Ultimately, liberalism promotes mediocrities. It destroys individualism and replaces it with collectivism under any circumstances. “Once eccentricity became the fashion or the norm, it unleashed a wave of collectivism, not creativity. Throngs of self-proclaimed eccentrics shouting the same slogans against every form of real or imagined ancien regimes have always made a rather depressing spectacle of human conformity and bear no trace of the individual geniuses that [John Stuart] Mill had anticipated with such certainty.” (p. 155)

Legutko never disappoints. His is a true wisdom lover’s serenade of logocentrism. Iron logic flows through his arguments. A champion of classical Greece, the author deploys Fides et Ratio against soullessness and unreason to restore the true meaning of freedom and work out a feasible position of a decent human being under the currently reigning totalitarian liberalism.

The Cunning of Freedom is a rigorous cri de coeur against liberalism’s “minimal self” and for redeeming liberty by the aristocrat.

No bones to pick here.

The post Freedom and Aristocracy appeared first on Polonia Institute.

The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies,

By Ryszard Legutko

Reviewed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Ryszard Legutko is Poland’s leading libertarian and conservative intellectual and a student of philosophy. His The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, (transl. Teresa Adelson (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2016) describes the degeneration of liberalism into totalitarianism.

An existential crisis looms large over Western Civilization. Like most conservatives, Legutko blames ideology for the current state of affairs. According to The Demon in Democracy, “Ideology is a mental structure that allows a combination of conflicting traits – an extreme distrust of ideas and a blind dogmatism” (p. 116).  In particular, the author focuses on the uncanny similarities between communism and liberalism. “The overwhelming presence of ideology in liberal-democratic and communist societies can be easily explained. The main cause is equality, in which both regimes gave a status of the highest value and made a regulating principle. Both systems enforced the liquidation – through revolutionary means in communism, evolutionary in liberal democracy – of social hierarchies, customs, traditions, and practices that had existed prior to the emergence of the new political systems” (p. 132).

Not surprisingly, Legutko is interested most in the Old Continent. He posits that “The European Union reflects the order and the spirit of liberal democracy in its most degenerate version” (p. 87). It seeks “to construct a federal super-state, to create a European demos and a new European man. They are extraordinarily self-confident and arrogant and have no particular respect for the heritage they do not know and do not intend to learn about. They are bureaucrats and apparatchiks rather than visionaries and statesmen. They were not shaped by the European culture of which they have limited knowledge and toward which they do not bear warm feelings” (p. 86-87).

In this context, for example, artists, supposed to be models of creativity and independence, have come close to being a herd of mediocrities indistinguishable from one another, whose minds have been sterilized of all that is new, revealing, and unexpected” (p. 125). So much for the so-called elites.

Legutko sees the existential threat as deriving at the moment principally from liberalism, which he believes, as many Catholic conservatives do, to derive from Protestantism, in particular the Protestant Revolution of the 16^th century (p. 151). However, the author also views communism as liberalism’s evil twin.

As an old saw would have it, communists are liberals in a hurry. But on their side, consciously or not, the liberals also do their bit to usher in a totalitarian utopia. It has now entered an antinomian individualistic stage of the moment. Yet, since panta rei, there may be more surprising as the current European system morphs into a collectivistic tyranny, or ‘a tyranny of the majority” (p. 89). According to the author, “egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually, go hand in hand. To a certain degree, equality invites despotism because to make all members of society equal, and then to maintain this equality for a long time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of society and any aspect of human life… Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian” (p. 133).

As for the people under liberal democracy, generally, they shy away from excellence. They embrace mediocrity instead. “To a mediocre man, an organic assimilation with the system was the easiest way to develop a conviction of being exceptional” (p. 180).

Further, the people tend to be helpless products of enforced ideological uniformity that ideologically expresses itself best, perhaps, as “multiculturalism.” Legutko corrects the word as “mono-polit” (p. 96), a total political construct. “Many ingredients of the multicultural cake are not ingredients anymore but have become the cake itself. Feminism is not the ‘culture’ of feminists or feminist parties or women, but the political platform espoused by governments, the European Union, and many international institutions; the ideology of homosexuality is no longer in the hands of homosexual activists and their organizations but is a major item in national and global agendas… The acquisition of all these catchphrases by the mainstream resulted in – paradoxically – a further homogenization of the modern world, all the more effectively executed because concealed behind the shamelessly fraudulent rhetoric of cultural diversity… Never before in human history did we see a similar phenomenon when millions of people, indistinguishable from each other, using the same patterns of thinking, politically homogeneous and oblivious to any other way of viewing the political world except according to the orthodox liberal-democratic version, are not only convinced of their own individual and group differences and proclaim the unchallenged superiority of pluralism but also want to enforce the same simplistic and tediously predictable orthodoxy on the entire world as the ultimate embodiment of the idea of multiplicity” (p. 96).

Compliance is enforced through the terror of political correctness: it is not a bloody terror, but non-conformity will cost one his job and civic death. So most keep silent. For example, “To be able to give a fairly accurate description of reality, one has to be somehow detached from it, and it is precisely this condition that the ideology invalidates by transforming the majority of people, whether they agreed or not, into participants in the war it itself created. Practically everyone felt coerced to take the right side and reassert his partisanship by surrendering to all the necessary language rituals without any critical thought or disarming doubt… Today, when someone is accused of homophobia, the mere fact of accusation allows no effective reply. To defend oneself by saying that homosexual and heterosexual unions are not equal, even if supported by most persuasive arguments, only confirms the charge of homophobia because the charge itself is never a matter of discussion. The only way out for the defendant is to submit to self-criticism, which may or may not be accepted. When the poor daredevil is adamant and imprudently answers back, a furious pack of enraged lumpen-intellectuals inevitably trample the careless polemicist into the ground” (p. 129).

This is precisely the same terror mechanism that was obtained under the Communist dictatorship, sans the actual physical extermination, at least for now. “Prudent people – both then and now – anticipate such reactions and made a preemptive move before saying anything reckless. Under communism, the best tactic was to start by condemning the forces of reaction and praising socialist progress; then, one could risk smuggling in a reasonable, though somewhat audacious statement, preferably wrapped in quotations from Marx and Lenin. In a liberal democracy, it is best to start with a condemnation of homophobia followed by the praise of the homosexual movement, and only then sheepishly include something commonsensical, but only using the rhetoric of tolerance, human rights, and the documents issued by the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice. Otherwise, one invites trouble” (p. 130).

By Legutko’s telling, liberal democracy embraces minimum anthropology, which entails mediocrity expressed as equality. “Modern man who was the inspiring force of the two political systems [communism and liberalism] was a mediocrity, not by nature, but, so to speak, by design, and from the beginning was expected to be indifferent to great moral challenges and unaware of the danger of moral fall” (p. 177).

A fusion took place, or convergence, if you will, of liberalism and communism, which shared an identical telos: progress. “A similar assumption guided liberal democrats as the communists before them: both disliked communities for their alleged anachronism and, for that reason, thought them, because deep-rooted, to be the major obstacles to progress” (p. 92).

Like communism, liberalism leaves no sphere of human endeavor untouched. Take religion, for example: “the growing infiltration of liberal democracy into religion. Liberal democracy, like socialism, has an overwhelming tendency to politicize and ideologize social lie in all its aspects, including those that were once considered private; hence, it is difficult for religion to find a place in a society where it would be free from the pressure from liberal democratic orthodoxy and where it would not risk a conflict with its commissars” (p. 166). It is all about an insatiable lust for power, you see, cautions Legutko.

To illustrate arguably the most nefarious aspect of the synergistic partnership, it would be helpful to stress Michel Foucalt’s theory on the relativism of power. Whoever controls the summit of power tends to oppress the others. Yet, the process of the exercise of power and its nature remains constant: hence not only an ideological but also functional compatibility of communism and liberalism, as James Burnham has argued.

Legutko stresses that nothing mobilizes like a common adversary, though. “Both sides – communist and liberal-democratic – share their dislike sometimes bordering on hatred, toward the same enemies: the Church and religion, the nation, classical metaphysics, moral conservatism, and the family” (p. 138).

Liberalism assaults the Faith in particular: “This notion that to be for freedom and modernity presumes being also anti-Christian has imprinted itself on the European mind and is as strong today as it was in the past. Anti-Christian rhetoric in the media and politics and anti-Christian art, including paintings, installations, plays, novels, films, articles, and slogans, fills the public space today, making the Christian religion, its institutions, and its articles of faith objects of endlessly multiplying derisions and accusations. Homosexual activists see Christianity as the source of homophobia and feminists as the foundation of patriarchy. Countless intellectuals accuse it of totalitarianism, reactionary sexual ethics, pedophilia, an Inquisition-like mentality, witch-hunts, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, intellectual infantilism, a morbid fascination with guilt, and numerous other sins… The crusade against Christianity verges on the absurd: liberals continue to make new conquests and to colonize more and more areas of human life, leaving practically no territory outside their control, and the more they grab, the louder they rant against Christianity, flogging it with new accusations, invectives, and blasphemies” (p. 159). This is precisely what the communists did, too.

Both liberalism and communism view progress as a historical inevitability. Both regard everything in the universe as political. The latter is a paradox. “The logic of liberalism is that whatever seems to be the most nonpolitical, sooner or later will become political. The logic of democracy – with its notions of participation, inclusion, and representation – only strengthened this tendency. The language was the first to go down this road: initially thought of as potentially descriptive and neutral, it soon came to be seen as the major political weapon used by the oppressors against the oppressed… But at the beginning, at the very top, is the thought with which it all began – a thought-crime, a mental sin that constitutes the first act of disobedience to holy political principles. Whoever seeks the remedy must start with the political therapy of people’s minds” (p. 101).

Liberalism liberated people from politics to let them enjoy the private. But some people used liberal democracy to elevate the private to public and, hence, political (p. 105). For example, this is nowhere more evident than in the sphere of sexuality which dominates our public discourse.

At the current stage, liberalism reduces itself to a system of instant “gratification” (p. 108), or what I prefer to call a dictatorship of pleasure.  “The sexual revolution is arguably the most extreme manifestation of the episodic nature of man. To surrender one’s life to sexual pleasures meant once and for all abandoning any attempt to give one’s existence a unifying meaning; this pleasure is, like no other, related to what is short-lived and ephemeral” (p. 109).

Work, entertainment, and consumerism, and sex become manifestations of liberalism or, instead, it’s utilitarian imperative that leads it to socialism and, hence, to the utopianism of egalitarianism fulfilled (pp. 107-108). But at this stage, liberalism clashes with an internal contradiction. Liberalism is supposed to stand for freedom; instead, it has embraced egalitarianism. The latter hates freedom and diversity. Its nature requires it to smash any manifestations of non-mediocrity.

What will happen to democracy under such circumstances? Persecution of non-conformists will never end. Indeed, it will accelerate with the witch hunts against the exceptional while broadening the definition of the enemy ad infinitum. “The spirit of suspicion will not disappear because there are always newer areas to conquer and deeper sources of inequality to discover””(p. 136). Who is the suspect? Virtually everyone.

This mechanism operates through a clash between ideological constructs and real-life phenomena. “Just as the ‘proletariat,’ ‘women’ is an abstract concept that does not denote any actual existing community, but only an imagined collective made an object of political worship among feminist organizations and their allies. But the paradox is that this feminist woman, being a figment of political imagination, is considered by the feminists to be a proper woman, a woman in a strict sense, the truest woman, just as for the communists, the Marxist proletariat was the truest representative of the working class. By the same token, a real woman living in a real society, like a real worker living in a real society, is politically not to be trusted because she deviates too much from the political model. In fact, a non-feminist woman is not a woman at all, just as a noncommunist worker was not really a proletarian” (p. 94).

Paradoxically, the defeat of the USSR and Communism and the end of the Cold War, which Legutko believes came about in no small measure because of the might of the United States, strengthened liberalism. It now could pretend it was the only product on the market, a fiction reinforced by sexy theories about “the end of history” of the likes of Francis Fukuyama (pp. 139-140).

Both Faith and nationalism are anathemas to liberalism. However, history shows that “Poland’s Solidarity movement would not have been possible without its members’ strong patriotic and religious motivations” (p. 143). Yet, even the Poles succumbed. “To have freedom meant for the Poles not to have a government that would subject these [traditional] institutions, laws, norms, and social mores to thoughtless social engineering. But this is precisely what happened when the communist regime was replaced by the liberal-democratic one” (p. 143).

Liberalism (like communism) is here to stay, at least for a while. “The real change will come only when the current view of man spends itself and is considered inadequate” (p. 181). And then?

The post Totalitarianism and Liberty appeared first on Polonia Institute.

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy,

by Andy Ngo

Reviewed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

                     Antifa Galore

An intrepid investigative journalist Andy Ngo has written a shocking expose of America’s Antifa, or the “Anti-fascist” movement: Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy (New York and Nashville, TN, Center Street, 2021).

I should qualify this: it is shocking for a casual reader.  For me, it is business as usual.  Not only did I study its original paradigm in interwar Germany, but I also witnessed its modern-day iterations in Europe in our times.

According to Ngo, “antifa are an ideology and movement of radical pan-leftist politics whose adherents are mainly militant anarchist-communist or collectivist anarchists… Their defining characteristics are a militant opposition to free markets and the desire to destroy the United States and its institutions, culture, and history” (p. 8).  The journalist stresses that “not all of its followers participate in violence. In fact, most don’t and instead work on delegitimizing liberal democracy and the nation-state through ‘charity’ and relentless propaganda” (p. 8).

The current avatar of Antifa in the United States is a highly-decentralized motley crew of anarchists, communists, and other violent revolutionaries.  It lacks a national structure; instead, it is set up as a plethora of amorphous community organizations with clandestine structures of several levels, each requiring initiation.

Each cell is led by an informal, secretive hierarchy of community organizers.  It is unclear whether a collective leadership principle applies in each structure or a single leader dominates.  Probably it can be both, depending on a location and particular circumstances.

Ngo tells us that at least a few leaders keep in touch through electronic means and endeavor to coordinate some of their activities.  The leaders can either mobilize their followers from above, most likely by prompting intermediaries, to action, or they can join and take over a pre-existing grassroots explosions and channel it into the desired direction.  However, that is a question that the FBI should answer.

The Antifa dialectically takes advantage of the system.  It parasites on it, including by getting taxpayer subsidies for its front organizations.  “Despite claiming to be an ‘autonomous zone’, CHAZ [an Antifa-founded enclave in Seattle] was a welfare state parasitizing on Seattle taxpayers” (p. 42).  Elsewhere, in Portland, for instance, money donated to “the cause” and “charity” is embezzled, and Antifa community organizers disappear without a trace (p. 56).

The organization’s tactics are purely revolutionary.  This includes arson attacks on state and other infrastructure, including charitable organizations and others like St. Andre Bessette Catholic Church in Portland (p. 76).  According to Ngo, “Antifa know the effect that smashed windows, breached businesses, and fires have on crowd mentality.  Each act serves as blood in the water.  It can turn protesters into rioters. That’s why antifa teach this in their literature that is disseminated widely online and in real life” (p. 16).

Nevertheless, at this stage, Antifa makes an effort to dial down violence.  It stops short of killing.  “The plan now is to create a decentralized system of cells and affinity groups who share in the same ideology through disseminated propaganda and literature.  They recognize the accelerationist tactics like mass killings of police or political opponents are too high risk.  The goal is to inflict maximum damage without death and to maintain the momentum of riots to drain government resources and law enforcement morale” (p. 156).

Of course, it does not mean that the revolutionaries do not kill at all.  From time to time, they slaughter and rejoice at their deeds.  Following the killing of a conservative pedestrian, Aaron Danielson, in Portland in August 2020, “they celebrated his death through dancing, song, and the burning of American flags” (p. 183).

Paradoxically, Antifa is decentralized similarly to America’s neo-Nazi, racist, white supremacist, and other extremist movements.  Further, Antifa’s plan for the destruction of democracy and the United States follows the script laid out in an anti-liberal novel, The Turner Diaries (1978): a decentralized convergence of mass demonstrations and attacks by revolutionaries on the centers of power, culminating in the takeover of Washington, DC.  I believe Andy Ngo has largely overlooked the connection.

Ngo calls Antifa “a phantom movement by design” (p. 18).  “This is the phantom cell structure of antifa that makes them analogous to global jihadism.  A unifying ideology and political agenda ties together individuals, cells, and groups” (p. 84).  He also traces its origins to Sweden, at least in their Portland stronghold (pp. 82-83).

Its decentralization notwithstanding, its activists style themselves as the fist of the international revolution driven by “critical theory,” “intersectionality,” “class struggle,” race struggle, and ‘sexual radicalism (pp. 83-95).  They advocate violence (or a “calibrated level of violence,” p. 64), including property destruction because property derives from “whiteness.” Looting and burning challenge thus “white supremacy” (p. 126). They also hate American patriotism: “On August 4, 2018, antifa black bloc militants beat a leftist ally at one of their protests using a spring-loaded club. Why? Paul Welch made the mistake of carrying an American flag” (p. 153).

According to Ngo, “American antifa has the communist and anarchist origins of European antifa, but it has evolved to include contemporary social-justice politics from critical theory.  Intersectionality flows through American antifa. The revolution they are fighting for will not be led by workers but rather trans, black, and indigenous ‘folx’ of color” (p. 127).

The Antifa works closely with Black Lives Matter (BLM), which likewise opposes “free speech” and aims at “abolishing law enforcement, American jurisprudence, national borders, and free markets in the name of anti-racism and anti-fascism” (p. 129).

Since most Antifa activists seem white, one should ponder the uncanny resemblance of their propositions to the “Helter Skelter” ideology of Charlie Manson from the 1960s.  This convicted murderer and sectarian judged the blacks and other minorities to be mentally unfit to lead a revolution and, hence, he offered his services as a leader.

At any rate, the American Antifa revolutionaries invoke Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse along with his stricture, in the name of tolerance, not to tolerate those who disagree with the revolutionaries (pp. 24-25).  Thus, they are firmly versed in the leftist intellectual offerings of contemporary times.

Their modus operandi is straightforward: “If antifa’s operationalized tactics can be described as a multi-prong machine working through violent and nonviolent means, the lubricant keeping it all going is information warfare.  A military concept, information warfare refers to the use, denial, exploitation, or manipulation of information against an opponent.  That includes hiding information as well as spreading disinformation and propaganda to wage war.  And no one does [better] propaganda for antifa than sympathetic journalists and useful idiots” (p. 210).

A case in point is the baseless accusations of Nazism levied against Marine veteran Justin Gaertner, who lost both legs in combat in Afghanistan, by the Antifa-sympathizing Ivy Leaguer Talia Lavin, a former employee of The New Yorker Magazine (p. 216).  The false smear paved the way for the employment of Talia as a journalism professor at New York University in 2019.

Unlike Ngo, I have studied both sides of the coin: Antifa and anti-Antifa.  Both tend to be revolutionary phenomena of the left, except that a minority splinter of the latter can be counterrevolutionary, firmly embedded on the right.  Please bear with me as I explicate because Ngo’s grasp of the movement’s roots is his weakest spot (pp. 99-102).

The original Antifa emerged from the street violence of the 1920s and 1930s in Weimar, Germany.  Initially, it was a multipronged battle pitting various orientations against each other.  Each leftist group had its own separate fighting militia.  The rightists responded in kind by fielding highly de-centralized veterans’ outfits – the Freikorps.

The monarchist and conservative Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) were the weakest.  It duked it out with all others, but – like the liberals and most progressives – the right-wingers increasingly came to rely on the police and the army to reign in the leftists.

The latter were revolutionaries: anarchists, international socialists, and national socialists (Nazis).  For the longest time, Moscow ordered its Communist fighting squads of the Rot Front (Red Front) to crush not just the Nazis but also socialist and anarchist militias.

It was a free for all on Germany’s streets.  Whoever won the day attracted goons from other fighting groups.  So the Nazis joined the Communists and vice versa; the socialists and anarchists fluctuated as well.

In the early 1930s, scared by Hitler, Stalin changed tack.  A “Popular Front” came into existence in Germany, with Antifa as its leading fighting group.  It was harnessed by the Komintern, the Soviet secret police, and their Willi Münzenberg deception machine, which eulogized the revolutionary thugs as “freedom fighters.”

By then, it was too late.  The Nazis won power.  Yet, the legend of the Antifa and the Popular Front lived on.

Before the recent Time of Troubles in the United States, hardly anyone had heard about Antifa.  They tended to stew in their own sauce; they stayed away.  The Old Continent is relatively small; even a casual passerby would notice their traces, in urban areas in particular.

In London in the summer of 1980, I observed two adversarial youth subcultures, the skinheads and the punks.  Modern-day Antifa harkens from the latter.  Oddly, its contemporary American iteration also includes sports fans, while European soccer hooligans tend to stand on the opposite side.

Naturally, there were exceptions, for instance, Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP).  Dressed identically as other skinhead crews, they were virtually indistinguishable from their opponents as they brawled violently with them.  Unlike SHARP, their adversaries hated Israel and the Jewish people while eulogizing the Palestinians.  That has now changed as Antifa oozes scorn at Israel and touts its “anti-Zionism” as a badge of honor.

All that I found out only in the early 1990s when I was back in the United Kingdom.  I further remember the French scene.  In particular, I recall vividly when, on January 21, 1993, to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the murder of King Louis XVI by the revolutionaries, monarchist and Christian nationalist kids took over the Panthéon in Paris.

This used to be the Church of Saint Genevieve, which the French revolutionaries desecrated and turned into a mausoleum to celebrate their own secular saints.

Some hard-core extremists from the United Right Group (Groupe Union Droit – GUD) joined the occupiers, further reinforced by royalist youth and other assorted sympathizers from Spain.  The police failed to dislodge them.  The demonstrators agreed to leave the Panthéon under safe-conduct, and that is when the cops beat them up.  Assorted Trotskyites and other proto-Antifa types later set upon the scattered remnant.

I saw Antifa casually swaggering in Cophenhagen several times.  In the mid-1990s in Berlin, while visiting family friends, I heard complaints about Antifa routinely attacking police officers, taking over private properties for squats, and burning cars.

In 2014, I witnessed Antifa types hanging out with Middle Eastern types in Vienna, wearing “Arafat” scarves in solidarity with Palestinians.  Their squat was marked with “Bourgie raus!” (Middle class, out!) graffiti.

In 2011, a visiting Berlin Antifa crew in Warsaw attacked Napoleonic wars reenactors, who marched in Poland’s Independence Day parade.  They were chased away.  Within a few years, indigenous Polish Antifa groups appeared.  They specialize in violent attacks against patriotic marchers and abortion opponents, for instance, assaulting the latter with a hammer in 2020.

So much for Antifa’s propaganda of “terrorism without violence.” In fact, “driven by intense hatred, antifa want their targets to fear living a normal life” (p. 197).

Generally, Antifa would be a minor problem if it were not for liberal encouragement and protection.  We should target the liberal enablers.  This includes not only notorious organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which should have its tax-exempt status yanked for countenancing revolutionary terrorism.

We should also bring to account liberal and progressive politicians, district attorneys, and county, state, and federal prosecutors and judges, who go easy on Antifa terrorists.  Also, we should consider improving our chances to neutralize and persecute Antifa activists.  We should deploy drones against them for surveillance during demonstrations and riots and undertake infiltration of their structures by law enforcement at all levels.

The Antifa thugs count for little without their liberal protectors.

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy is for the ordinary people who need to wake up.  “If one isn’t tuned to the nuances of the American political and culture war, for example, people like my own parents, the default position is to view antifa as the ‘good guys.’ With the obligations of family life and work, few have time to actually investigate beyond the headlines and leading paragraphs” (p. 211).

We in America owe Andy Ngo a debt of gratitude.  I wish more kids of the Vietnamese immigrants were more like him (and I met some of their parents who were so while with the Amnesty International at UC Berkeley in the 1980s under the tutelage of my boss, Sister Laola Hironaka, who was the first, already in 1979, to popularize the plight of the Vietnamese “boat people” – and not Ginetta Sagan and Stephen Denney in 1982 as Ngo believes, (p. 226) – or more like Cuban-Americans, still squarely on the anti-Communist side of history.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Washington, DC, 3 December 2021

The post Antifa Galore, by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz appeared first on Polonia Institute.

About the European Union

by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Another tiff between the European Union and Poland (and, similarly, Hungary) amply demonstrates that the problem of European governance is systemic rather than extrinsic. It is imperial centralization vs. national sovereignty and authoritarianism vs. democracy.

To comprehend the roots of the present crisis, and to keep himself informed, an erudite layperson should read at least four monographs about the European Union: first, John Laughland’s The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea (London: Warner Books, 1998); second, Pierre Manent’s Democracy without Nations: The Fate of Self-government in Europe (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007); third, John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and, fourth, Todd Huizinga’s The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2016).

A bit on each author is warranted. Laughland is a conservative British nationalist free marketeer and gold standard nostalgic; Manent is a Christian democratic French nationalist; Gillingham is an American scholar and libertarian; Huizinga is a former US diplomat and social conservative.

Laughland lays out the poisoned roots of Europe most succinctly. “The European idea” is inimical to nation-states and democracy. Sovereignty expresses itself in the ability to control borders and to enact legislation through a national government. “The European idea” supports open borders and aspires to override national legislatures.

Instead, according to Manent, the European Union endeavors to exercise democracy via supranational structures. That is a doomed undertaking because democracy grows organically from local self-government. Furthermore, self-government reflects national aspirations. Without nationalism at the grassroots, there is no democracy which, after all, expresses itself best by addressing local concerns, uniting them together at the national level to give them their peculiar, national and cultural, dimension. Democracy by fiat from above is not viable for it divorces the people and their everyday concerns from the decision-making process at the top.

That is precisely what the Eurocrats love. European integration has been an elite project from the very beginning. Gillingham is best at explicating it.  He focuses on the obscure process of the creation and operation of the EU, including its inner workings. The process is still in place and, thus, applicable to the new members as well.

What may still be shocking to the newcomers is routine practice for the old members. The nation-states of Western Europe that accessed the structures of the EU before 2004 bore earlier the brunt of continental integration. In the process, their elites became largely pliable. They subordinated themselves gradually to the “European idea” and the surreptitious process, the so-called “Monet method,” dubbed after its main sponsor, Jean Monet, of implementing it.

According to Gillingham, the “Monet method” is the key to understanding the EU’s modus operandi.  Its secret is to appear to be acting tactically when you are moving strategically. Usually, the Euro-enthusiasts wait for a crisis to unveil a new stage of their project.

In the late 1940s, with America’s help, Western Europe’s economy began to rebound.  However, a glut of coal and steel occurred. Layoffs and unemployment in the industry threatened social peace, which the Communists were eager to exploit. Hence, a need arose to rationalize the process.

In 1951 the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was launched as a provisional emergency measure. When the crisis had passed, instead of dissolving the structure, it became a permanent European bureaucracy bankrolled by national governments. The first bureaucratic plank of the future EU was thus put in place.

The process has repeated itself with exact precision. As Gillingham recounts, an agricultural crisis of the 1960s gave birth to another European emergency institution inexplicably retained as permanent.  Furthermore, like Lego blocks, it was joined and coordinated with the ESCC.

Others proceeded punctiliously according to the same rules of discretion and desirability. Upon completion of each plank, their architects, led by Jean Monet, would publicly swear that it was all unprepared and coincidental and ultimate in the bureaucracy creation. They were misleading, of course.

As Gillingham, Monent, and Huizinga show, each stage was carefully planned and premeditated. It was also concealed from national electorates. In private, Monet and his confederates would gnostically sneer at the plebs who could not possibly comprehend the awesome sublimity of “the European idea.” Hence, the people should not be told, for they would be confused and, most likely, adversarial.

So much for the transparency and democracy behind the “Monet method.”

Further, the purveyors of “the European idea” loath and demonize nationalism. Both Manent and Laughland argue that “the myth of nationalism” which the EU purveys serves as a tool to undermine national sovereignty and replace nation-states with an empire. Although the empire is supposed to be pan-European, it will be led by Germany, the continent’s most wealthy state.

Thus, Berlin gets to impose a blueprint of the imperial enterprise. Instead of nation-states, regions will be favored. Raume (spaces) and even Grossraume (great spaces) will become basic units of the empire. There will be further political unification and economic harmonization. Zollverein (customs union) for the members-only will prevent free-market competition. The Germans detest the balance of power and free markets as a British invention preventing Germany from controlling Europe.

Britain’s balance of power paradigm is predicated on the idea that no single power controls Europe. Free markets serve as a litmus test here: any nation, and, really, any individual, his or her nationality notwithstanding, should be able to compete economically anywhere in Europe. Sovereign nations should maintain control of their borders but not impede free trade.

However, the German search for harmony precludes any of this. Hence, “the European idea” tends to reject free market in favor of soft autarchy, seaborn power in favor of land-based power, and Adam Smith in favor of Friedrich Liszt as well as Alfred Thayer Mahan in favor of Karl Ernst Haushofer.

According to Laughland, Berlin also hates competition and conflict. However, democracy is the conflict resolved through the ballot box. Conflict is the essence of being human. Ideas need to clash. Alternatives need to compete. That is not possible without conflict. To claim otherwise is to court a totalitarian solution.

Gillingham also argues, however, that the initial thrust behind the European integration was free markets. He is correct to a point. However, in the “European thinking,” free markets were an element of the puzzle rather than a model itself.

In practice, they are highly regulated. In theory, at the inception of the “European idea,” free markets were to play a crucial role. Nevertheless, they also were supposed to operate within a supranational structure. We should recount briefly.

There have been several attempts to unite Europe. The Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation were superseded by Napoleon and Hitler and Lenin and Stalin.

It was the Nazis and Communists who envisioned a “United Europe” – red or brown. Moreover, it was not the nationalism of nation-states but the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich that drove the “European idea.”

Laughland goes into gory details of how Europe’s national socialists and fascists hailed “the European idea.” Why? This is because they were the enemies of freedom and democracy. They wanted a planned economy and a total dictatorship.

What about other liberal Euroenthusiasts? Sadly, they also succumbed to such temptations, usually in a mild corporatist form. At best, they preached the idea of subsidiarity with the Vatican’s blessings, which Laughland abhors with more than a whiff of good, old-fashioned English anti-Catholicism.

Just for the record, he should save his ire for other subjects. Subsidiarity at heart teaches us that the central government should only exceptionally interfere at the grassroots because local problems should be addressed in situ by the little people concerned, which is also the essence of self-government, as Manent never tires of reminding us.

Nonetheless, the Eurotechnocrats do have their heroes. The most prominent among them were the pioneers: Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Józef Rettinger, and others. Von Coudenhove-Calergi was a Habsburg loyalist who envisioned a united Europe as one of the five global empires ruling the world.

On the anti-totalitarian side, the French effort matched the Austrian and German contributions to uniting the Old Continent. Early on, two significant orientations emerged. The Mount Pelerin Society consisted of libertarians and monarchists such as Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. The latter was a Catholic Habsburg loyalist, while the former two tended to one-worldism.

At any rate, at this stage, the Mount Pelerin Society envisioned the restoration of the status quo ante of 1914. There would be monarchies and nation-states in Europe; borders would be retained and national sovereignty, but there would be no customs, and free trade would obtain. Anyone from within the European zone could work, study, or live anywhere she or he wished. Decentralization would apply.

However, according to Gillingham, there was stiff competition. France’s Jean Monet led it. He envisioned a Europe that would be organized along French lines. It would be top-heavy and organized from above. Centralized and bureaucratized, Monet’s new Europe would operate according to a plan.

While reluctant to advertise his vision openly, he grounded it initially in the language of Christian democracy and social solidarity. Thus, he was able to enlist under his (false) banner the likes of Italy’s Alcide de Gasperi, France’s Robert Schuman, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer.  Thus, national politicians helped usher in a supranational project in Europe.

Nowadays, the leaders of the project talk about it quite openly. Their ambition is boundless. As Todd Huizinga argues, the European Union is but a testing ground for global governance. Everything that flies on the Old Continent will be applied at the global level.  The idea is to subject the entire world to legal measures as contrived by the leaders of the European Union. Hence, a Spanish judge could get Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet detained in Britain, while the EU feted Poland’s last Communist dictator, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

As a rule, each social engineering project arises discreetly away from the scrutiny of local parliaments and other democratic oversight bodies. It is then unveiled, funded, and rammed down the throats of the unsuspecting populations.

Lately, of course, it has been the agenda of the sexual revolutionaries. Characteristically, in Central and Eastern “New Europe,” there is no more trickery and obfuscation at work as was much the case earlier in Western Europe. The post-Soviet zone nations are simply told to shut up and obey the EU Diktat or else.

Even if the people are allowed to vote on an issue in national referenda, the EU takes no defeat as the final word. Usually, the electorate votes until it gets things Brussels-right, as was the case in Denmark and Ireland.

Another trick is to ignore the electoral defeat altogether, for instance, on France’s constitutional issue, and try to implement the EU agenda via bureaucratic means, as Gillingham has noted. Hence, even if the idea of a European constitution falls flat on its face among the voters, it can be introduced as EU regulations via bureaucratic fiat. One way or another, Brussels gets its way. Moreover, that is usually Germany’s way as well.

Huizinga thus warns us that by violating all rules of parliamentary democracy and national sovereignty, the Eurocrats have succumbed to a “totalitarian temptation.”  Laughland stresses that the temptation has a distinctly German feature. At the same time, Manent bewails self-government’s death, and Gillingham laments that the free marketeer’s dream is buried in the graveyard dug by a European Superstate.

Consider yourselves warned.  So should the Poles and Hungarians and anyone else who tries to emulate them. Brexit happened for a reason.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Washington, DC, 24 October 2021

The post About the European Union, by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz appeared first on Polonia Institute.

The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939

by Terry Martin

Reviewed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

A representative of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s revisionist school and a Canadian of Mennonite German colonist-Russian/Ukrainian roots, Terry Martin, in his well-researched and pioneering The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2001) covers the saga of the Soviet nationalities policy under Stalin until the Second World War. He is interested in affirmative action policy (polozhite’l naia deiatel’nost,  pokrovitel’stevennaia politika,  pp. 16-17). This was a gigantic social engineering scheme that, while privileging the minorities, entailed reverse discrimination of the Russians.

Therefore Martin dubs the Bolsheviks as “internationalist nationalists” (p. 15). He also admits that the affirmative action policy was designed to influence perceptions so that the Soviet state would not be considered an empire or, more precisely, a continuation of the Russian Empire (p. 19). The author also admits that the Affirmative Action Empire was “a strategy to prevent the emergence of a potentially dangerous obstacle, non-Russian nationalism” (p. 20).

Having won the Bolshevik struggles for power, Stalin continued Lenin’s affirmative action policies. He was also the Party’s leading expert on nationalism and nationalities.  But soon, the new Soviet leader found the nationalities’ policies inadequate to running the USSR. They increasingly alienated the subjugated Russian population.

Most Russians felt sufficiently free of the past and engaged in the new system to chafe under what they viewed as the tyranny of the minorities, which was perceived as an injustice. This did not only concern the embittered pro-Bolshevik participants of the Revolution and the Civil War but also primarily the indoctrinated young, who, by then, had undergone years of Soviet “education.”

While endeavoring to fulfill the central objectives of Soviet policy (collectivization and industrialization), Stalin clashed with the goals of the Soviet nationalities policy. Thus, he deemphasized and then eliminated the affirmative action drive. The Soviet dictator resolved first to halt (p. 307) and then ethnically to cleanse korenizatsiia. That means the policy stayed, but the nationalists (real and imagined) who implemented it were purged, and many exterminated. Incidentally, the Koreans were the first to be “ethnically cleansed” (p. 334).

By the same token, Stalin ended the official discrimination of the Russians and uplifted them. It took the Second World War to elevate Russia, Russians, and “Russianness” to the supreme position in the Soviet Union, where they remained until the end. But that is yet another dialectical story of the Communist twists and turns.

Within this framework, Martin focuses on the “indigenization” (korenizatsiia) campaign (p. 10), or, as Stalin himself referred to it, “nationalization” (nationalizatsiia”) drive (p. 12).

Martin assures us that Stalin was not “either soft or cynical” on korenizatsiia. Sure, he was dialectical.

Like most Soviet schemes, the Communists moved at a breakneck pace. They were insanely proactive so their slaves would have no respite to organize themselves against the Red masters.

Soviet nationalities’ policy encountered numerous obstacles. How does one preserve justice and parity between the majority and the minorities (and among the minorities), say, in Ukraine, where the cities were Russian and Jewish and the countryside Ukrainian?

And who is the majority? Well, it depends on geography and level of national consciousness. Generally, Moscow and its stooges encouraged korenizatsiia in the East but not in the West of the USSR. Practically all Soviet officials were “sabotaging Ukrainization” while encouraging Kazakhization via financial assistance (p. 128). Yet, the Communist bureaucrats, for the most part, denied native requests to decolonize Central Asia by expelling Slavic settlers and seizing their land to hand it over to the Kazakhs and other eastern natives.

Further, the Kremlin promoted native cadres to top positions (except the technical posts because of lack of local talent and experts). It was crucial to creating perceptions of native Communists in power, rather than colonial Russians or other minorities, such as Jews (p. 222).

Martin then pits the center vs. and vis-à-vis the periphery. According to his revisionist analysis, “local conditions were decisive in both East and West” (p. 177). If the author means that the Kremlin’s policy was adjusted to the localities, he is right. Unfortunately, this is a standard device to detract our attention from Stalin to “little Stalins” of Fitzpatrick’s imagination. Ultimately, it was not his local clones but Josef Dzhugashvili himself who called the shots.

All this neatly illustrates the limits of korenizatsia and its dialectical and cynical dimension in the Kremlin’s nationalities policy.

The monograph is quite good at the tactical and operational levels but lacks strategic understanding of the topic at hand and fails short of the goal in terms of methodology.  An apparently impressive volume of documents and materials consulted reminds one of a sampling expedition rather than a comprehensive analysis method. The sheer volume is simply too overwhelming to render itself readily to a synthesis. At a first look, Martin’s mad dash through a multitude of archives appears spectacular, but, on the second look, it yields an impression of a cut-and-paste, as well as a cherry-picking endeavor.

Thus, one should not consider Martin’s discoveries and conclusions as anything but preliminary. To be sure, some of it is not his fault. The best remedy to such flaws would be to rely on many case studies of localities, clans, tribes, and nationalities. However, at the time of writing, hardly any existed. So his is a premature synthesis.

Also, predictably, Martin avoids scholars, no matter how expert, whose methods, conclusions, and ideas diverge from his own. My colleague Paul Goble, America’s leading conservative and anti-Communist expert on non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet eras, is the most significant omission and the most visible non-person in The Affirmative Action Empire.

There are other problems as well. Martin tends to take Communist policies and propaganda utterances at their face value. He sees the Bolsheviks as true internationalists while openly fostering, out of the goodness of their hearts and progressive sensibilities, minority nationalisms.

The historian thus fails to grasp that both Lenin and Stalin, first and foremost, were interested in maintaining themselves in power. Power was indispensable to arrive at the Marxist utopia. Everything else was subordinated to it in a relativistic manner. Martin even quotes Stalin to that effect, but it appears that the scholar draws no lessons from the dialectical and relativistic implications of the words of the Soviet dictator in January 1934: “It would be stupid to give a formula that would be valid for all times. Such formulas do not exist. The greatest danger is that deviation against which one ceases to battle and which therefore grows into a danger to the state.” (p. 361).

As far as it impacted their nationalities policy, the Bolshevik leaders felt that since ethnic Russians (really, the Whites) fought against the Reds in the name of Russian nationalism, Lenin and Stalin supported the nationalisms of the minorities as a counterweight to the majority Russian enemies (again, the Whites). The Communists invented minority nationalism to partition Russia into “national” republics and keep the ethnic Russians in check to control their conquests.

Let us stress that, at the initial stage, the Bolsheviks projected their White enemies onto all Russians. However, in reality, the Whites were a relatively small minority of Russians, a point we shall return to shortly.

Although for these reasons, the Russians were officially discriminated against in Soviet Russia, at the same time, they were also advantaged under Bolshevik rule. This was because ethnic Russians, particularly in places that constituted minority populations in the colonial areas, tended to support the Bolsheviks and their revolution. At least some of them were rewarded with the appropriate party and government posts and endured in them despite official discrimination of the Russian people. Further, the Russian language was the Bolshevik lingua franca of control and command. By the force of inertia, it became a privileged tongue. Through its medium, Communism was purveyed on the conquered land. “Increased centralization undercut linguistic korenizatsiia” (p. 175).

But to understand the dialectical twists and turns of such phenomena, one must backtrack to Lenin, the Revolution in Russia from February 1917, the Bolshevik coup d’etat of October 1917, and the Civil War until 1922.

The reality was that the Bolsheviks conquered Russia with prominent minority support and much Russian backing. However, initially, they treated the Russians as a conquered people and discriminated against the Russian nationality, including its culture. Conversely, they favored national minorities until the Second World War.

Let’s look at this apparent paradox of the Russian support for and their discrimination by the Communists. The patterns of voting for the Constituent Assembly in 1917/1918 show that in the ethnic Russian region centered in Moscow, it was overwhelmingly ethnic Russians who cast their ballots for the Bolsheviks. In Central Asia and the Far East, as Richard Pipes has shown, it was also ethnic Russians who fought for the Reds both against the Russian Whites and non-Russian, native separatists. It was the (albeit usually hostile to Communism) “bourgeois specialists” who ran the machinery of the Communist state.

In particular, the (rather unwilling) officer-draftees in the Red Army defeated their former colleagues and friends from the Tsarist armies, the Whites. Sadly, most Russian officers stuck with the state, even if it was Bolshevik, instead of joining the Whites. Most of the officers were coerced into the ranks, but before the Communists turned efficient at terrorizing, very few had the initiative, resolve, and gumption to launch the White Movement. Most remained neutral and, then, they simply did as the Reds told them. Thus, the ethnic Russians were indispensable to the Bolshevik victory as its active or passive enablers.

On the other hand, sections of each minority ethnicity joined the Bolsheviks, usually gradually and incrementally. Three main ethnic minority groups tied their fortunes to the star of Lenin.

First, a few were original Social Democrats, anarchists, or other leftists, active in the radical movement from its inception in the late 19^th century. Second, many were new revolutionary recruits who saw Communism as the shining light of the future in 1917 and after. Third, progressive nationalists and even religious reformers (e.g., Tatar Muslims) deluded themselves they could implement their platform within the context of victorious Bolshevism.

Of the latter group, some became national Bolsheviks and others progressive “bourgeois” nationalist fellow travelers (“smenovekhovtsy”). Soon, after they outlived their usefulness, they were repressed and eliminated. Parenthetically, their role vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks was somewhat analogous to Vichy France’s intellectuals’ attitude toward the Nazis (p. 191, 231).

When the Communists set up the Soviet Union as a fake federation – in part to deceive the minorities and in part (in the Soviet Union’s western borderlands) to offset the charm of the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and subvert the newly resurrected Polish state – Lenin resolved to institute “affirmative action” to promote the national minorities and to disadvantage the ethnic Russians. Why did he choose to alienate the Russians?

According to the Bolsheviks, the Russians were tainted as colonial and imperial masters of the recent past. They were reactionaries and persecutors of the minority peoples of the empire. The triad of Autocracy-Orthodoxy-Nationality warped their consciousness. The Russians could not imagine themselves and their victims outside of this oppressive paradigm. They were incapable of progressing toward the revolutionary goal of Communism without shedding their reactionary consciousness.

Much work would have to be done on the Russians before they could be saved and ushered into the Marxist utopia. Meanwhile, they should be held down, and their former victims elevated through affirmative action. Thus, Soviet Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic became the first-ever state to implement such policies on a massive scale.

The Bolsheviks believed that, first, they were creating the world’s most equal and just state; second, they were obliged to right all the wrongs inflicted on minority people by Tsarist Russia; third, the Communists were ushering in a paradise on earth which required to expedite the transition of all the peoples of the former empire, including the most primitive and less advanced, into proletarians.

But to accomplish that, the revolution had to go through a nationalist phase. The minorities (even hunter and gatherer clans and nomadic tribes) would have to progress initially to the stage of “bourgeois” nationalism. In congruence with the Marxist scheme of history, they would have to shed tribalism (or “feudalism”) first to attain advanced national consciousness. Without that, they would not reach the ultimate proletarian stage of consciousness, climaxing in Communism.

In a word, the national question was a peasant question. Industry was indispensable to create a proletariat out of peasants. That would eliminate the national question. (p. 147).  Or, to put it the way that Martin would agree with, albeit falsely reducing mega-murdering Communism to mere modernization, one needed native nationalism to start producing proletarians to modernize their lands.

As dictated by the Marxist-Leninist dialectics, virtually all peoples of the USSR were goaded into becoming modern nations. The Communists went so far as to discourage assimilation actively into the Russian mainstream. Martin writes about their “resolute hostility to even voluntary assimilation” (p. 16).

To this end, aside from central administration in Moscow, each “union republic” had its own minority bureaucracies and institutions, including cultural ones. In addition to the “union republics,” including, perhaps most prominently, Soviet Ukraine, the Soviet state was divided into many “nationalist” entities.

Hence, there was a proliferation of thousands upon thousands of  “national” soviets, particularly at the lowest village level. In this manner, the USSR was peppered with minority strongholds embedded in majority territories. This pitted the imperial minorities against the Russians and minorities against other minorities, e.g., the Armenians vs. the Azeris.

Lenin’s Marxist ideology drove his theoretical assessment of reality. Having seized power violently, he was in a position to act upon his fantasies and implement them in practice, violently if need be.  The objective was to create entities “socialist in content, national in form” (p. 155).  Hence, a Yiddish-language theater would be authorized, but only to spew Bolshevik propaganda. A Polish soviet would be permitted in a village, but it would have to kowtow to the Party. And so forth. Thus, “Nationalism will be disarmed by granting the forms of nationhood” (p. 8).

Thus one should view Bolshevik nationalities policy as a form of deception. Its end product favored the Communists themselves while victimizing the rest. Consider the Soviet attitude toward Jews: “The Bolsheviks firmly opposed anti-Semitism, both as one of their favored symbols of Tsarist depravity and because the large numbers of Jews in the Soviet government made anti-Semitism a proxy for anti-Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks’ economic and class policies, however, with their hostility both to trade and to former traders, led to the economic annihilation of the Jewish shtetls and the stigmatizing of a majority of their inhabitants as Lishentsy (those deprived of their electoral rights [sic! any civic rights])” (p. 43).

It is worth stressing that Martin considers Soviet Jews as relatively privileged (e.g., in terms of being least likely to be targeted by secret police terror and other forms of repression (pp. 388-389).  The reverse was true for Soviet Poles (p. 283).  They were the foremost “diaspora nationality” to suffer in the Great Terror (1937-1938).

The scholar assumes that Soviet Jews must have suffered many deaths because of their status as an educated group but cites no concrete evidence to support his contention. Here, once again, hardly any scholarship existed on the topic when The Affirmative Action Empire went to press.

The same goes for the “anti-Polish operation of the NKVD.” Essentially, as far as the death statistics, Martin relies on a single article by Nikita Petrov. This otherwise fine scholar mistook a preliminary tally of ca. 111,000 Polish victims executed for the final death list. Many scholars have copied his mistake since, including Andrzej Paczkowski in The Black Book of Communism, another under-researched synthesis. It does not matter that Petrov has corrected himself following detailed revelations in a superb monograph on The Anti-Polish Operation by my friend, Tomasz Sommer (soon to be published in English). Sommer has established with much certainty that the Polish victim count was about 200,000.

That is not to deprecate Martin’s scholarship in toto. All-new research is valuable for it creates more opportunities to delve into the unknown. For example, the scholar dangles a tempting morsel of a virtual one-liner on a Ukrainian and Polish anti-Soviet uprising in the countryside in 1935 or about the alleged Polish spies in the Kuban (p. 293, 301). One would like to know more, but the author simply can’t oblige.

The historian also knows little about the Polish community in the USSR (pp. 46-47). He seems incapable of differentiating between nobility and petty gentry. Thus, he dismisses Soviet rants about petty nobles as fanciful (p. 42).

They were not, as petty nobles proliferated both in Soviet Belorussia and Ukraine. Once again, Martin delved into the Soviet archives, cherry-picked about a topic he had a poor grasp of, and embarrassed himself. But that is not his fault: there are neither case studies nor general monographs on the topic in English, and precious few in Polish (including those published before 2001 by late Professor (Father) Roman Dzwonkowski and Mikołaj Iwanow).

Martin is further confused about Polish national consciousness. He believes, for example, that many victims of the anti-Polish operation of the NKVD were not Polish at all. He questions whether people who listed themselves as Poles and Catholic in a Soviet census were really Polish and not Belarusians.

Actually, they were. It was never sexy to claim Polish nationality in the USSR. The Poles were one diaspora nationality that experienced hardly any benefits of affirmative action. They were treated with hostility throughout. Thus, those who self-identified as Polish, through their free will, took a serious risk. And many suffered for it. Nonetheless, The Affirmative Action Empire contains enough tidbits about the Polish minority for any fair-minded reader to be horrified at the enormous scale of their martyrdom at the hands of the Communists (pp. 283, 315, 320-322, 327-328, 336-340, 364).

More seriously, Martin’s views on the Soviet genocide are instead revisionists. He sees Stalin’s mass murder vis-à-vis the minorities as merely “ethnic cleansing.” For example, “from 1935 to 1937, the hard-line party and NKVD were supervising the ethnic cleansing and mass arrest of the Soviet Union’s diaspora nationalities” (p. 22). Weirdly, however, he admits that in crushing the resistance, the Communists developed the concept of the “enemy nation” (p. 308). Thus, logic dictates that mass murder committed against an “enemy nation” should qualify as genocide, a concept at which, alas, Martin balks.

The historian also gives credence to the lowest possible statistics of death in the Soviet terror campaigns. For example, he believes that only over 700,000 were shot, including ca. 111,000 Poles. Martin fails to remark that even if we take such low estimates seriously, then 111,000 Polish victims out of the total of around 900,000 Soviet Poles make the Poles, astonishingly, the primary victims of the Great Terror.

Here’s his reasoning for an earlier spasm of Communist mass murder: “The 1932-1933 terror campaign consisted of both a grain requisitions terror, whose primary target was the peasantry, both Russian and non-Russian, and a nationalities terror, whose primary target was Ukraine and subsequently Belorussia…. Nationality was of minimal importance in this [grain requisition] campaign. The famine was not an intentional act of genocide, specifically targeting the nation. It is equally false, however, to assert that nationality played no role whatsoever in an anti-korenizatsiia hard-line critique combined with the immediate pressures of the grain requisitions crisis in Ukraine and Kuban, whose particularly intense resistance was attributed to Ukrainization” (p. 305).

Finally, it is also intriguing how Martin misconstrues Soviet policymaking. He believes there was a hard-line policy (the Party and the NKVD) and a soft-line one (state administration and other institutions). He imagines that “the official sanctioning of coexisting and contradictory policy lines meant that the true policy line emerged from a dialogue between them.” And then he sagely adds: “The historian, like the local party official, has to learn the center’s signals” (p. 22). Indeed, he must. But Martin has failed to learn, for one should see the Communists’ soft-line as deception and hard-line as reality. That is called an integrated strategy.

There are a few spelling mistakes in The Affirmative Action Empire. I’ll stick to the ones pertaining things Polish. For instance, the author misspells Józef Piłsudski’s name throughout, usually dropping the diacritic, but at least one as “Pilsudski” (p. 228). As a rule, he drops Polish diacritics (e.g., p. 36 n. 25). He also translates “great-power chauvinism” instead of “Great Russian chauvinism” (velikorusskii, p. 358). But that’s rather minor in comparison to the overall spirit of his work, rife as it is with predictable revisionism somewhat offset by laudable insights.

All in all, Terry Martin’s monograph posits more questions than it answers. It also posits more problems and begs for further research. Ultimately, it is a book about Soviet nation-building and Communist nation-destroying. New national constructs were to lead to internationalism, while old traditional nations had to perish to pave the way to the same.

The post Minorities as Tools and Victims appeared first on Polonia Institute.

The Camp of the Sane and the Camp of the Saints; Poland and the Erosion of Western Sanity,

by Max Denken

Reviewed by Ursula Oleksyn

Once in a decade a book comes along that opens a window to something that was unseen before because there was no window. Such is Max Denken’s The Camp of the Sane and the Camp of the Saints; Poland and the Erosion of Western Sanity, 2015-2020, a samizdat work that no mainstream publisher would touch in the times of our Neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution.

Since the book is mainly about Poland’s struggle against a wide international front attacking it since the PiS government took power, it matters that Denken was born in communist Poland to survivors of what he calls “the twin Holocausts,” with his whole family gone other than parents and a few cousins. That half-Jewish/ half-Polish (Slav) background is common to other writers, e.g. Jan Gross and Adam Michnik, but they seem to identify with their Jewish half from the left while Denken identifies with his Polish half from the right  His abbreviated CV is in the preface of the book and it alone could serve as a basis for a gripping book.⁽¹⁾

As the title itself implies, the book’s account of the contemporary war-on-Poland is set in the larger context of what Oswald Spengler called already in 1918 “The Downfall of the West.” Denken posits that the downfall is so advanced now that it has become irreversible. It’s not just an opinion; the book is crammed with facts and most of its assertions are referenced in 1,000 end-notes. That downfall is driven by Denken’s “Camp of the Saints” which is an all-West extension of the title of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel about the suicide of France through an invasion of “migrants.”

Denken dwells on the reasons for the West’s downfall in total disregard of political correctness and all the contemporary Orwellian newspeak. He describes America’s self-sabotage and Western Europe’s/ European Union’s even faster self-destruction. He examines with particular attention Germany’s suicide and the paradox of it being Poland’s main foe in Europe even now, after so many times it aggressed Poland in the past.

Smashing the pretenses of contemporary Germany in a way perhaps never before attempted in English, the author takes apart the European Union’s case against Poland as well as those of the international media, American and European politicians, prominent journalists and academics. The most controversy will arise out of his critique of the Jewish case.

Unlike other defenders of Poland, Denken does not deny that there was salient antisemitism (his preferred spelling) in pre-war Poland and that the antipathy continued during and after the war. But then he does something daring: he explains why.⁽²⁾ Denken argues in unprecedented (in English) detail that “Zydokomuna” is not an “antisemitic slur” but was the reality of life in Poland before, during, and after the war, with particular attention to the Jewish nomenklatura of horror in Poland in the years 1945 -1955. While not denying that the German mass-murder of the Jews of Jedwabne may have entailed some Polish participation, unlikely though he underlines this to have been the case (3), he also sheds light on why there were strong anti-Jewish sentiments:

“During the 1939–1941 Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, including infamous Jedwabne, Jews collaborated with the Soviets, snitched on patriotic Poles, and even became local functionaries of the brutal, occupying communist power—all activities properly recognized as treason.

Some percentage of humans are base creatures, and the horror of the German occupation of Poland was so unique that it didn’t take just the basest to succumb, but the weakest psychologically too. To keep harping about the base or weak Poles during the occupation without as much as a mention of the base or weak Jews and without putting it all in the context of Germany’s unprecedented evil and the fallen nature of men generally is rank intellectual fraud.”

In another context, writing about U.S. Senator Ben Cardin’s efforts in the cause of “restitution of Jewish property”:

“The ‘historical revisionism’ accusation [against Poland] was a Jewish battering ram for softening Poland to the claims of loot-seeking Jewish interests represented by Cardin. [snip] The [IPN] law was enacted not to revise history, or whitewash the actions of weak, corrupt or evil Poles who had acted ignobly under the German occupation, as some Jews did too, but to deter the historical revisionism of those who accuse the Polish state or people of complicity in the Holocaust.”

The author presents Poland as the key pillar of the “Camp of the Sane” he posits, with Hungary being the second and Czechia and Slovakia completing the Visegrad-4. He extends that further over the whole quarter of Europe that was under Soviet rule from 1945 to 1989. The Iron Curtain, he avers, fulfilled an inadvertent benign function: quarantining all those countries and therefore protecting them from what he calls the “progressive brain virus” that has destroyed the rest of Europe and the Anglosphere as well. Citing an essay by Milan Kundera for support, he sees in the Camp of the Sane the only currently visible possibility for the survival of the Western peoples and their Christian-European civilization. In the near term, the Three Seas crescent — the Intermarium – is the political structure that ought to be mobilized for that task.

While the book is a ringing defense of PiS-governed Poland, Denken does not shy from criticizing the PiS government. He slams their barring of the front door to EU’s “migrants” but opening the back door to “foreign workers” from some of the most backward countries of the Third World. He criticizes the post-Szydło PiS’s meekness toward the EU; timidity toward Soros; subservience to the U.S.; vulnerability to hostile pressures by Jewish organizations; unwise, constant aggravation of Putin’s Russia, especially in defense of the land of UPA where they worship Chmielnicki, Bandera, and Shukevych. Denken criticizes as well the tendency of the Polish Right to keep bashing Protestants as though the 30-Year-War didn’t teach us a lesson. He recommends that we realize instead that we are all facing the same multi-layered enemy.

Jews seeking to demonize Denken for his negative view of Jews in the Polish context, or antisemites thinking that they have found an ally, will be disappointed. He criticizes in the book the antisemitic tendencies of some segments of the Nationalist Right, his essay criticizing Kevin MacDonald’s “Jewish evolutionary strategy” theory is a classic, and he has waged word battles with obsessive antisemites in the comments pages of his many published articles and social media posts.

Denken’s eclectic background and erudition bring a special flavor to various topics in the book. His scathing review of the damage that feminism has done to the West is based on the Taoist concept of Yin–Yang. The author did not crib that from some book; he was married into a traditionalist upper-class Japanese family, lived in Japan for years, and made frequent visits to Korea and China. His critique of the 2019 Paris conference of Poland bashers camouflaged as “The New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship” is informed by his knowledge of French and deconstruction of French deconstructionism. His chapter about the Jedwabne controversy starts with quotes from the Hebrew Bible. His takedown of the EU’s and its allies’ “rule of law” attacks on Poland rests on detailed knowledge of their hypocrisy and quotes Thomas Jefferson against them.

The scope of the book is so wide and so crammed with knowledgeable detail that it defies any attempts at a comprehensive review. You may not agree with every point Denken makes but his book will stimulate your thinking and reveal what you may not have known. Reading it will not be lighthearted fun, but it will be worth your time.

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To obtain a printed copy, contact the publisher at info@campsane.com. The e-book version may be purchased from Kobo.com.

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(1) In addition to what’s in the book I included some details I learned in an interview with the author.

(2) Denken told me that he is unhappy with the too-brief way he treated the Polish–Jewish relationship in the 50 years before the war. However, because that would have entailed enlarging the field of analysis to include economics, demographics, imperial Russian and later the Polish Sanacja politics, the 1919-1920 Soviet invasion of Poland, religion, the perils of multiculturalism and more, he had no choice but to skirt that or else the book would have far exceeded his target of 500 pages. He had to drop similarly already-written chapters about the “progressive” world’s war on Hungary and on Trump, and other chapters too.

(3) Now, a new book has come out – Jedwabne, Historia Prawdziwa — that pretty much cancels out any possibility of Polish participation in the Jedwabne massacre. Written by three top-notch names in Polish journalism and academia, the book is based on exhaustive research.

The post The Camp of the Sane and the Camp of the Saints; Poland and the Erosion of Western Sanity appeared first on Polonia Institute.

by Zbigniew Wojcik

  The Basics of neo-communism in Central Europe

 The assassination of the non-communist President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, in the so-called “Smoleńsk catastrophe” in April 2010 was a coup d’état. The post-communist, Bronisław Komorowski, immediately took power in Poland as acting president. Five years later, in another democratic election in 2015, the Polish people elected a genuine non-communist president and prime minister. As a result of the hard lessons learned, a possible later coup by assassinating a legally elected president is virtually impossible. Moreover, statistical polls show that non-communists politically dominate Poland, so assassinating a non-communist president would not favor communists in a special democratic election. However, this does not mean that the communists have given up: they seek power through neo-communism. Leszek Misiak’s book “Losing the Church … or the Fall of Poland,” 2019, is the foundation for creating the ideological and practical tools of neo-communism in Poland.

Neo-communists try to convince citizens that communism is the best political system and just what the people need. Misiak created a neo-communist manifesto to guide this movement, aimed at post-communists and Catholics. Misiak pretends to be a believer in God and shows his Catholicism to make his manifesto convincing. He glorifies the famous Catholic leader, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyńyski, calling him the Cardinal of the Millennium.

At the same time, Misiak attacks the Polish-born Pope John Paul II. The article “Lost Shepherds: the Vatican as Narcissistic Political Lobby” by Joseph D’Hippolito explains this key distinction: Under communism in Poland, “workers protested against massive increases in food prices, from 30 % for vegetables to 110 % for high-quality meat and 150 % for rice.” At the time, Edward Gierek (at the time, Poland’s Communist leader) asked Wyszyński “… to convince the workers to return to work because the nation needs food and clothing.”

Wyszyński then publicly announced: “You have the right to strike, but you also have the duty to think about feeding and clothing your countrymen.” Pope John Paul II did not listen to the communist leaders. Quite the opposite, he acted to get rid of them. I recall his anti-communist message delivered in 1979 in Warsaw: “May your Spirit come down and renew the face of the land. This land.” Neo-Communism cannot tolerate this insubordination by a Catholic leader, the Polish Pope.

Neo-communism causes much confusion for the reader who is not well acquainted with the positions and attitudes of these two leading Polish religious leaders, and Misiak does not reveal the role and purpose of his book intended to be a political manifesto.

The Synchronization of Radical Leftist Activities in Poland and Internationally

Radical leftists in the West direct their actions towards gaining total power, using gender theory and racial discrimination as their primary weapons. Conservative movements of people who believe in God are disappearing. All this is not true in Poland, a predominantly Catholic country. Even now, the Catholic faith in Poland is undergoing a visible revival, becoming the only hope of freedom for the West in the future. Russia, where the return to Christianity is swift and straightforward after ridding the world of the Leninist revolution, is the hope of freedom for Eastern Europe and Asia and proof that people in the West can wake up from communist trends and stop succumbing to evil.

Surprisingly, the Polish pope and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev turned the Russian people into a stable barrier against the rapidly spreading of communism in the world. Had it not been for the war between Russia and Ukraine, Eastern Europe would have been a permanent base for people’s spiritual survival. Thus, only Poland and Hungary are undoubtedly the countries cultivating the true values of humanity since Western Europe has rejected Christianity. The vital principles favoring family values and the right to life no longer supports Western civilization. While the law constantly adapts to the needs of liberals demanding unlimited abortion rights, the Decalogue remains stable for millennia.

If the neo-communists gain complete power in Poland, the last barrier in the West will fail against total liberalism with unlimited access to abortion and communism. Note that Hungary is a small country with less than ten million citizens, while Poland has almost forty million. Therefore, the weaknesses in the work of the neo-communist Misiak must be publicly exposed.  The West is now defenseless against biologically harmful gender ideology, racial theory raising social tensions, growing radical leftist movements spreading communism, domination of fake-news combined with liberal education, non-Christian religions, and corrupt politicians, with all these factors working effectively and simultaneously. Deprived of authentic and widely respected political leadership, the West is giving way on all fronts without a military fight.

 Neo-communists’ assessment of the significance of Poland’s transition to capitalism

The neo-communist Misiak views the defeat of communism in Poland after World War II and the peaceful transition to capitalism as a disaster, not a victory. Misiak blames the Catholic Church in Poland for all the people’s hardships during the long and arduous transition period. Even the Polish Pope John Paul II is attacked. A response is needed to these attacks because they may seem convincing if the reader does not have enough political knowledge or experience in dealing with aggressive and false accusations.

Misiak makes the Church responsible for the massive robbery and destruction of Polish national assets after the Round Table (p. 84). The fact is that the communists robbed both the Church and Poland’s citizens after World War II. Misiak’s primary accusation was that approximately 70% of Church property was returned to the Church. In comparison, no more than 10% of private property was returned after the Round Table, suggesting that the Polish Catholic Church received its property back as bribes to support the Round Table. Nevertheless, Misiak failed to account for the fact that the confiscation of Church property was well documented. Many factors caused damage in Poland after the Round Table agreements. I know of a case of a modern Cable Factory in Ożarów (near Warsaw) sold for next to nothing to an entity abroad and then destroyed to its very foundations. Before the sale, the cable factory was handed over to its workers, which should not have happened because the plant was built with the money of all Poles. Subsequently, the workers who came into possession of this national property committed theft. They sold the shares that they received en masse for the purchase of alcohol, resulting from a conspiracy by post-communist politicians led by President Kwaśniewski. The buyer, a foreign entity, got rid of the competition of this modern factory in Poland by dismantling it and selling it all as useless parts.  The Polish Catholic Church did not participate in this dirty transaction.  At that time, communist justice in Poland was fully functional and is still so.

Communist officials love only their power; the people’s wealth under their rule is always the last thing they pay attention to, despite the worthless promises they usually make. The workers of the Ożarów factory wrote a letter to post-communist President Kwaśniewski asking him to stop the destruction of the factory. However, he refused to save the people from the misery of mass unemployment. On the other hand, people living under communism were not completely unprepared to own a factory or understand the value of the workplace. However, it is also true that simple workers should never have owned a factory or had responsibility for it.

Freedom of elections and a bloodless transition to capitalism are all that Poles living under communism could have obtained and maintained. Unfortunately, most people are not prepared to be capitalists, to own and run factories. Staying under Soviet-style communism was also not an option for Central Europe: food was rationed in Poland, and communist officials had no moral authority due to their total control through terror. Under the Soviet occupation, people had no political options due to Poland’s lack of free elections. Only once did the weakness of the Soviet bloc appear for constructive and bloodless change – when Saint John Paul II ruled from the Vatican: an opportunity arose, and the chance was taken.

The fact is that democracy that allows free elections is gaining more and more support in postwar Poland, despite many efforts by the post-communists to return to complete totalitarian rule. Several years after the communists accepted the Round Table agreement allowing free elections, they began to realize that they had permanently lost their dictatorship. The neo-communists are now looking for ways to regain their power by weakening the forces keeping them from total control of Poland. They have discovered that the Catholic Church in Poland and its faithful are their primary opponents. So they addressed this issue in Misiak’s book.

The neo-communists now understand that the way to regain power is to reduce people’s trust in the clergy and undo the Round Table agreement. The neo-communist Misiak now reduces the importance of the Round Table agreement for a fully democratic electoral process in Poland. Instead, Misiak introduces and exaggerates the far-reaching liberalism spreading after the Round Table. Misiak fails to see that liberalism is taught in liberal schools still dominated by communists who remained because of the peaceful transition to capitalism. Instead, Misiak blames the Catholic Church for liberalism. He argues that there would have been no liberal catastrophe had it not been for the Round Table, and there would have been no Round Table had it not been for the support of the Catholic Church’s clergy to reach an agreement.

Misiak ignores the winning of Poles’ freedom during the Round Table. Neo-communism cannot weigh freedom differently: freedom is not worth mentioning because communism is wholly opposed to democracy.  The author quotes (p.29) and is guided throughout his book by Gregory Orwell’s saying: “the most perfect form of lying is silence.” The author knew what he was doing.

Controlling Poland’s transformation into capitalism

The neo-communist states: “There is no excuse for condoning the looting of the country and the destruction of the nation” (p. 203). However, Poland’s transition to capitalism from under Soviet rule took place under the control of communists (including Jaruzelski, Wałęsa, Kwaśniewski, but mainly Jaruzelski). The transition was not accomplished by the Catholic Church, as neo-communist Misiak suggests by using the word “acquiescence,” even though the clergy supported the nation spiritually through the hardships of change. In the first chapter, “Instead of an Introduction” [Zamiast wprowadzenia], he blames the Catholic Church in Poland for supporting the Round Table.

Misiak also points out that the Catholic Church does not allow total liberalism because it does not support or teach it. Misiak rightly criticizes the movie “Kler” for promoting a falsified view of Catholic priests in Poland. Misiak’s role is to teach and propagate neo-communist ideas about the Round Table, an essential gathering of various authorities that sealed the peaceful defeat of communism in Poland.  You cannot refute the apparent truth about the leading positive role of the clergy and the Catholic faith of the Polish nation. Neo-communism in Poland does not reveal the leading role of liberal education under Soviet rule in destroying the morality and faith of the nation, as is happening in the West and on a world scale. The neo-communist keeps these methods of the liberals under wraps.

The communists had the political power and authority to enable Poland’s transition to capitalism; therefore, they had to be allowed to take what they wanted and agree to free democratic elections. As a result, they robbed the country to some extent, though not entirely, because the transition was without bloodshed. Freedom does not come for free. Misiak was unaware of the details being played out behind the scenes, unseen but powerful, specifically the involvement of US intelligence. During my 1986/87 interviews with the CIA in Kansas, I proposed this passage: individual influential communists would take what they wanted and what they could in exchange for agreeing to free democratic elections in Poland (see my book: “Slaying the Soviet Beast…”).

The clergy’s cooperation with the communists

During the Soviet occupation of Poland, some bishops and archbishops collaborated with the communist regime. For example, when I started working at the Academy of Sciences in Poland, after graduating from the Warsaw Polytechnic, I was assigned to an interview with Bishop Dąbrowski. The professor’s secretary signed me up for the meeting and informed me that the high Church official was expecting me. I was shocked to see a very luxurious office located on the most expensive street in Warsaw. I instinctively understood that a bishop should have a desk in an official Catholic-owned building headquarters, not necessarily on a representative avenue.

“This is not a dedicated Catholic bishop,” I realized, and I decided to behave more like a progressive young man. I realized that the bishop wanted to know my attitude toward the communist government as a Catholic.  It was a brief political and religious interview with an official I had not seen before to decide whether I could work in a government institute, and I passed the test. Yes, the political services of high-ranking priests to the communist government in Poland were a fact of life.  A flashy provocation should have elicited the expected reaction from a young man who disliked communism, but the incitement failed. Bishop Dąbrowski was gentle in his attempt to test my political stance; the few words I said were enough for him to decide that I was a politically innocent young man.

Communist security services often blackmailed the clergy into cooperation. Leading communist Julia Brystiger, known as “Bloody Luna,” instituted large-scale infiltration of Catholic seminaries in Poland by communist agents. Homosexuals were frequent victims. The communist security services murdered many priests after finding evidence that they were a threat to communism (e.g., Zych, Suchowolec, Niedzielak, Palimąka, Kij, Kowalczyk, listed by Misiak).  The neo-communist blames the clergy – the victims, not the communist security services – the oppressors.

The neo-communist strongly opposes the killing of patriotic clergy such as St. Jerzy Popiełuszko. However, if communism is to rule a “socialist” country, how to prevent the horrific killing of priests and patriots? An impossible task under totalitarian rule, and our neo-communist promises wonderful communism like the one in Poland after 1956, assuming that the killing of priests and patriots by tyrants will be forbidden. But how? Historically, communists have always been full of promises and have always ended up with totalitarian orders; Misiak promises such a form of communism in Poland after 1956, which is a terrible promise. The neo-communist supports his point of view with a critique of the freedom that resulted from the Round Table agreement.

Secret communist collaborators were allowed to work on both sides

Neo-Communist Misiak is furious with the bishops who collaborated with the communist dictators because these Church authorities contributed to the Round Table deliberations and contract. An agreement had to be reached. The neo-communist writes about Poland being enslaved and deprived of property after the Round Table, but this is not true: it was the Soviets who enslaved Poland before perestroika. Only under capitalism did people start working for their businesses. The communist authorities felt politically safe by having secret collaborators, thanks to whom they had total control in Poland.

They felt safe when they had collaborators among the priests who could practice the faith in the country. So they trusted their collaborator-priests also during the Round Table negotiations. The bishops-collaborators helped bring about the agreement with the communists who gave freedom to the Poles; in this way, they worked effectively on both sides. The question is: Were the collaborator-bishops genuine and fully trusted by the communist bureaucracy?

The communists infiltrated the clergy in Poland and were present in all Church organizations. Bishop Dąbrowski is an example. The communists exploited all weaknesses, especially individual clergy guilty of sins among them, such as  homosexuality. Now the neo-communist Misiak perversely blames the clergy for homosexuality. Since the Round Table was a disaster for the communists, our neo-communist attacks the Catholic Church in Poland for participating in the negotiations and approving the bloodless agreement. The neo-communist cannot see that Poland has achieved sovereignty.

The clergy which collaborated with the communists, so welcome in the communist times, is particularly attacked by the neo-communist because they turned out to be traitors to communism during the Round Table negotiations. The Round Table agreement was conceived as an agreement between communists and their fully trusted collaborators that effectively turned against communism. During the Round Table talks, the communists and collaborators were given the task of distributing government property among themselves without bloodshed or excessive vandalism. In the heat of the robbery, they lost their former grip on power and total control.

Episcopal support for the Round Table

 Our neo-communist does not wonder why the entire Episcopate supported the Round Table, not only selected clergy, homosexuals, and collaborators. The neo-communist focuses on the Church, homosexuals, and collaborators as if they constituted the whole Episcopate. However, the clergy in Poland also includes Saint Jerzy Popiełuszko and other patriotic priests who fought against communism.

The book supports Cardinal Wyszyński by suggesting that Catholics in Poland support communism when a great religious leader rules the country along with communist leaders. Then the religious leader exercises spiritual power over the people, but under the complete supervision of the communists. If the author had only revealed his neo-communist view without providing a picture of the religious life of the Polish people, the average Catholic reader would have immediately stopped being interested in the book. Instead, the book offers a mixture of his terrible neo-communist propaganda with information about the unquestionable moral and religious authority of Cardinal Wyszyński, a Catholic leader, hoping that his diabolical rhetoric will convince the reader.

The neo-communist writes about “the nation’s betrayal by the Church delegates at the Round Table” (p. 24). Nevertheless, this was not a betrayal; the Church bought freedom for the Poles. The numerous victims among the clergy testify to the ultimate determination and power of the communists and that they would win any direct fight within Poland. Everyone knew that Father Jerzy Popiełuszko was brutally tortured six days before communist security forces finally killed him. The communist hero, Lech Wałęsa, took over his position in “Solidarity”. Of course, it was clear to everyone involved in the Round Table talks that “Solidarity,” the most vigorous opposition movement in communist Poland, had been tricked into being caught under the total control of communist security (e.g., by Lech Wałęsa).

The first true “Solidarity” quickly dispersed or emigrated, and the second “Solidarity” was largely infiltrated by communist security agents, resulting in it becoming inactive under Wałęsa’s administration. Misiak identifies two waves of “Solidarity” (p.80). How could Church delegates betray a nation fighting to guarantee freedom for Poles? Note: the primary winner and guarantor of the Round Table promises were most likely not the Church but the invisible US intelligence services. Misiak largely ignores this powerful authority, lists the unproven sins of the clergy, and is silent about the Poles gaining their freedom. The communists intended to murder the clergy opposition in Poland by ordering the torture and murder of Father Popiełuszko. Communist authorities in Poland began to feel the pressure of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Vatican, and US intelligence, understanding that they had to deal with forces much larger than the clergy. The neo-communist Misiak misses the point of the political solution to the problem.

The Lisbon Treaty

Misiak is correct in his objection to the Lisbon Treaty that the EU does not refer to Christianity as the root of European culture (p. 33). The Lisbon Treaty is a surrender to non-European cultures and religions attacking Europe with many forms of immigration. Poland and Hungary remain the last bastions of Christianity in Central Europe, which the neo-communist is silent about.

 A barrier to the development of communist Poland

 A neo-communist directly praises the communist system in Poland after 1956 (p. 36), claiming that Polish technology flourished under Soviet occupation. I am a computer and software specialist with a Ph.D. in computer science, having several research papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Poland purchased semiconductor technology from the Soviet Union that was antiquated. Most science, technology, and manufacturing are now based on computers. Poland lacked semiconductor and computer technology. Therefore, the late 1980s was the right time to get rid of the Soviets and join the West. A minicomputer was built in Poland as a research tool and system in due time, an achievement indeed (the K-202 invented by Jacek Karpiński, which would compete with the PDP-11).

However, the communist bureaucrats did not know what to do with it: there would have to be production technologies in Poland that required computers, and there were none. Furthermore, vice versa: the lack of computers in the Soviet bloc was a barrier to the development of science and technology, and the Soviet economy had no incentives due to central planning. Moreover, the K-202 was made of expensive semiconductors produced in the West because the Soviet bloc’s semiconductors were too primitive. Semiconductor technology was an insurmountable barrier in the Soviet bloc, as evidenced by the fact that Karpiński did not produce many K-202 systems, although he had tremendous support in Poland. He worked for the communists as a spy on US territory.

I know of a gigantic old artificial silk factory in Chodaków, now Sochaczew, which poisoned hundreds of workers for decades. Of course, no one wanted to buy that factory after the Round Table because of the careless poisonous technology cultivated by the communist system.

Misiak’s attempt to return to Soviet communism in Poland is a bad venture. Misiak also praises the communists for eradicating illiteracy in Poland, but the truth is that a four-grade elementary education functioned in Poland before World War II.

 The neo-Communist’s great hostility toward Pope John Paul II

 Misiak confronted the Polish pope with his statement: “The Holy Spirit to this day has not descended on our land, has not renewed it” (p. 191). To prepare the reader for this message, the neo-communist wrote earlier that Poland “…is turning into a financial, economic ruin…” after the Round Table under the European Union (pp. 19, 82).

Not true; I remember that food was rationed in Poland before my trip to the US in 1986. I had to hunt for each everyday product daily and stand in long lines. The average citizen could not afford to buy a car. Now, Poles can buy everything in stores, and the streets are filled with cars. The facts prove that after the words of John Paul II in 1979 in Warsaw, our land experienced a fundamental renewal. After the communists permanently separated me from my family in Poland, I prayed to the Holy Spirit for wisdom. American intelligence could do anything and promised to reunite my family in exchange, I understood, for strategic information during the height of the Cold War (see the book by Zbigniew Wojcik, “Slaying the Soviet Beast…”[Zabijanie sowieckiej bestii..”]).

Could the CIA have ignored strategic knowledge gained from me? The communists and then the neo-communists were unaware of how such information could exist at that time. Strategic information about how they could lose absolute power required the involvement of Pope John Paul II. The neo-communist knew of the presence of CIA officers in the Vatican during this time (p. 183). A miracle was necessary to reunite my family separated by the Cold War, but the “renewal of the land” had to be done by the people, and the goal set by the Polish Pope in 1979 in Warsaw was achieved. Polish patriotic priests are no longer murdered by communist security forces, which is significant evidence that our land has been renewed.

The chapter “The Roots of Evil” [“Korzenie zła”]  is a critique of the Second Vatican Council. The author disagrees with the tendency to treat all religions equally. According to Misiak, Protestants are too liberal. The author sees the Muslim invasion of Europe as a consequence of Vatican II. In particular, he argues that treating the Muslim religion as equal to the Catholic and Protestant religions is doomed to fail.

 Nothing constructive exists in the book except neo-communist propaganda

 The neo-communist book lists biased complaints about the situation in Poland after the Round Table, much of which is presented without any substantiation. Moreover, while the observations made are true, the author makes no effort to point to the real sources of the problems that would help solve them. For example, Misiak notes that too many Poles became liberal after the Round Table agreement. A true observation. However, Misiak blames the Round Table for this issue and the clergy who supported the negotiations, not the liberal education that remained in the hands of the communists during the long post-communist period.

I had to stop reading the neo-communist book

The neo-communist strongly promotes Archbishop Wielgus, describing him as the best choice for the position of Metropolitan of Warsaw.  Wielgus has admitted that he spied for the communist security services and resigned from office. He initially denied the accusations. The neo-communist supports the clergy’s collaboration with communist security services, even though the Vatican has announced embarrassment over Wielgus. This was a clear signal for me to stop studying this book, being about in the middle of it. Should I trust the Vatican or Misiak?

After reading several chapters of this book, it became clear that the author is a radical neo-communist proposing a return to Soviet communism in Central Europe. Being aware of the author’s neo-communist point of view, the book no longer seems attractive. However, it is worth knowing that communism in Central Europe is not over. It is fighting for a comeback with the help of neo-communist propaganda. This struggle will intensify because of the overwhelming trends toward unchecked total liberalism and modern communism in the West. Therefore, people should be aware of current political trends and methods.

Bibliography:

 1. https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/4113-lost-shepherds-vatican-as-narcissistic-political-lobby . Joseph D’Hippolito, “LOST SHEPHERDS: the Vatican as Narcissistic Political Lobby,” September 28, 2018.

2. https://www.archbalt.org/archbishop-resignation-prompts-embarrassment/

3. Zbigniew Wojcik, “Slaying the Soviet Beast: A True Story about How the Cold War was Won. What Next?” Liberty Hill, 2019.

4.  Leszek Misiak, “Tracimy kościół czyli zawał Polski”, Oficyna Aurora, 2019

5. http://www.slayingSoviet.com

The post Neo-communism in Poland appeared first on Polonia Institute.

Encounter with Katyn, The Wartime and Postwar Story of Poles Who Saw the Katyn Site in 1943

By Tadeusz Wolsza

The Katyn Forest Massacre, An Annotated Bibliography of Books in English

By Andrew Kavchak

Reviewed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

The rule is that one gets ensnared in various ways anytime anyone has anything to do with the Katyń affair. The latter denotes the notorious mass murder and genocide by Stalin and his henchmen of at least 22,000 Allied POW officers of the Polish army and a subsequent cover-up in which the USSR and the UK, the US, and other Western Allied powers colluded to bury the truth. Katyń became the by-word of Soviet and Western perfidy against the Poles, even if it was just the tip of an iceberg as far as crimes against the Polish people are concerned.

Yet, despite the efforts of the mighty of the world, we now know much about crime.  However, the truth will always come out even if it takes time to emerge from the bowels of Communist and Allied mendacity.

In pursuit of the truth, two new works have recently been published regarding Katyń: by Professor Tadeusz Wolsza, a Polish scholar, and by Andrew Kavchak, a Canadian grandchild of one of the victims, Stanisław Kawczak.  First, a disclaimer: I know Professor Wolsza personally; we cooperate on the academic board of the Second World War Museum in Gdańsk. As for the latter writer, I have corresponded with him some to help him popularize his work.

Andrew Kavchak’s The Katyń Forest Massacre: An Annotated Bibliography of Books in English (Middletown, DE: By the Author, 2020) is an indispensable tool for foreigners, general readers, and academics to learn about the mass murder of Polish POWs by the Soviets.  It is also helpful for Polish scholars and history buffs to learn about the historiography of Katyń; to bemoan the scarcity (fewer than 40 titles over eighty years!) of publications on this particular aspect of Soviet terror.

First, there is a brief introduction to the killings and their aftermath. Then, the writer lists the resources chronologically and elaborates on them competently. Some of the titles he discusses pertain to Katyń specifically; in a few instances, only segments concern the massacre, for example, Wesley Adamczyk’s memoir, where he bemoans the loss of his father, who was shot by the Soviets but spent most of his recollections on his own travails as a child in the Gulag and afterward. One wishes Kavchak spent more time delving into the profiles of some of the authors. For example, it does matter that Professor Stanisław Kot was a leftist who, nonetheless, spoke the truth about Katyń.

Kudos to my friend Alexander “Maciek” Jablonski of Canada’s Oscar Halecki Institute for all his encouragement for Andrew Kavchak’s work. Yet, credit must go to the author himself, who successfully turned his pain into our public gain: “As I am of Polish origin and had a relative who was among the victims, I felt it was my duty to develop a thorough understanding of what happened at Katyń. In the process, it helped me to understand Polish history, politics, and culture better. Knowledge about Katyń is also a prerequisite to ensuring that future generations would be aware of the story. As one writer put it, ‘we are not permitted to forget.’ The deception that reverberated around the Katyń story for decades was neither the beginning nor the end of attempts by the Kremlin to fool the masses. The phenomena of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have been a standard component of its modus operandi since the Russian revolution. The culture of deception may even find its roots in earlier times as attested to by the legend of the ‘Potemkin villages.’” (p. 12). Hear, hear!

In his Encounter with Katyń: The Wartime and Postwar Story of Poles Who Saw the Katyń Site in 1943 (Durham, NC: Janusz Kurtyka Foundation for Carolina Academic Press, 2018), Tadeusz Wolsza focuses not on the victims but the witnesses of Katyń. And, pace the title, the historian casts a broad net including Poles and individuals of other nationalities who visited, under German jurisdiction, the site of the massacre in 1943. Altogether the monograph retraces the histories of over 50 people involved in this sordid business. Grounded in impressive research in Polish Communist secret police archives, Encounter with Katyń consists of two stages: an investigation and a cover-up.

The investigation took place in situ at Katyń and afterward, where the experts and others worked with the sordid evidence. They participated in exhumations, examined decomposed bodies, and scrutinized various items retrieved from mass graves. Some of the experts brought the evidence back home, e.g., a Danish physician carried a skull of a Polish officer back to his institute in Copenhagen.

The cover-up commenced immediately upon Berlin’s propaganda barrage releasing information about Katyń in April 1943. Moscow hypocritically cried foul. Stalin mendaciously accused Hitler of the crime; the Kremlin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in Exile in London for daring to ask for an independent investigation by the Red Cross.  Western Allies would not touch Katyń with a ten-foot pole. They knew the truth and buried it. Besides, they also abandoned their most faithful ally – Poland, who was “First to Fight.”  The cover-up continued after the war. It entailed, aside from cyclical Communist propaganda salvos about the alleged Nazi guilt, a sustained campaign to force the Katyń witnesses to recant or, if that failed, discredit or even eliminate them, which we shall return to shortly.

At the outset, Wolsza shows us the initial reactions of the witnesses to the crime and their subsequent fate. Generally, the visitors were a mixed lot. Some were distinguished experts with impeccable credentials in their fields, including forensic medicine. Others were journalists and popularizers, who were brought in with hopes to serve as Nazi propaganda tubes. There were also a few workers and other lower-class people. In other words, the visitors represented a broad section of European society.

Some Polish witnesses accepted the German invitation only after confidential consultation with and permission from the Polish Underground State authorities. A few others were explicitly ordered by the clandestine Polish Home Army to join the expedition. Almost all the latter tended to wear several hats, including working in secret Polish organizations and German-sanctioned institutions (e.g., the official charity, Rada Główna Opiekuńcza [Main Charity Council — RGO]).

Further, in addition to the denizens of German-occupied Poland, the participants included representatives of countries, such as France or Denmark, conquered by the Third Reich. Furthermore, there were the subjects of Axis states, Bulgaria and Hungary, for example, and neutral nations such as Spain and Switzerland. Lastly, Allied POWs, both officers and enlisted men, Americans, Brits, and others, flew in from their Oflags and Stalags in the Reich to Smolensk to shock them with the Soviet perfidy.

Most of the witnesses became convinced of Soviet culpability while assessing the evidence personally. Some issued an expert opinion on the crime, while others refused to. A few collected the evidence from the latter group, hid it, and wrote reports for the Polish underground.

Some went on the record publicly to denounce the mass murder. A few consciously propagandized for the Nazis. Specific individuals were merely craven collaborators who would do anything to ingratiate themselves with Berlin. Others were genuine anti-Communists who believed that the Soviet Union was a greater evil than the Third Reich. That last group consisted of most of the neutrals, Axis, and occupied witnesses.

At any rate, Germany amplified the anti-Communist narrative, including the churlish slur that “Jewish Bolsheviks” were behind the Katyń murders. However, with the demise of Hitler and his comrades and the defeat of the “One Thousand-Year Reich” and its satellites and allies, there was practically no institutional or state backing for the truth of Katyń to be heard.

The Soviet secret police immediately fanned out across the Intermarium to find the witnesses to Katyń and made them recant. Not surprisingly, the NKVD was quite successful. Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, and Hungarian experts took back their testimonies. To the great fanfare of red media, they announced that they had been wrong and the Germans, not the Soviets, perpetrated the Katyń murders. Most of those who recanted enjoyed comfortable careers or at least quiet lives under the Communist occupation. Those who did not were given the treatment, including jail time after collaborationist show trials. That concerned mostly journalists and other propagandists.

However, most experts and other Katyń witnesses who found themselves out of direct reach of the Soviet secret police experienced a different ordeal. Many did not change their mind but tried to blend in and retreat into obscurity. Some of them refused to lie and continued publicly to maintain the truth of Soviet guilt.  The wrath of Stalin and, later, his successors was upon them. And it was sustained for nearly half a century until Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted the truth.

The stalwart experts, who refused to give in, were invariably branded as Nazi collaborators or outright “fascists,” real or imagined. In one case, an Italian scholar experienced ostracism and severe employment problems. In another case, already in the 1970s, a Danish professor, who had witnessed Katyń, lost his daughter in a mysterious car “accident,” which he was convinced must have involved the KGB.

The Western Allied governments participated in the cover-up for almost as many years as the Soviet regime. In the United States, it started early in the game when FDR himself suppressed the truth and exiled an American diplomat and his former close friend to Samoa to prevent him from talking about Katyń. At the time, in the US Army’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes, Communist agents published a cartoon of a Polish officer, very much alive, who perpetrated the Katyń “hoax.”

When in May 1945, an American POW witness to Katyń, Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet, Jr., followed up his secret, war-time messages, dispatched surreptitiously from his Oflag about the mass murder, with an exhaustive report delivered personally to his superiors in Paris. The document simply vanished. This scandalous cover-up came to light thanks to Krystyna Piórkowska, a Katyń victim’s child, whose invaluable research Tadeusz Wolsza relies upon.

American Communists, their progressive sympathizers, and some liberals wanted to make sure the truth about Katyń would never surface. A few years after the war with the Madden Committee and the anti-Communist push by Senator Joseph McCarthy, it finally did. By the mid-1950s, American conservatives and anti-Communists presented inconvertible evidence about the Soviet guilt for Katyń. Alas, the US lost its anti-Communist focus, and the mass murder disappeared from the public square. It reemerged only in the late 1980s.

It was even worse in Great Britain, where Her Majesty’s successive governments, in their craven appeasement of the Soviets, not only passively hid the truth about Katyń but also actively harassed British subjects who spoke about the crime and participated in commemorative ceremonies to honor the Polish POWs killed by the NKVD.

Of course, the worst ordeal befell those who remained in Soviet-occupied Poland. Not only was the truth suppressed and the mendacious narrative of German guilt purveyed, the Communist government actively censored, persecuted, and terrorized the families of the victims, as well as all others, who endeavored to remember Katyń. Anyone bringing up the executed officers openly could expect a visit from the secret police; anyone brave enough to remember the victims publicly risked arrest, beating, ostracism, job loss, and slurs of “Nazi collaboration.”

Overall, Encounter with Katyń is a worthy contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the massacre of Polish POWs by the Soviets. However, it is a pity that the monograph lacks a coherent conclusion. Perhaps it is a harbinger of more to come.

Both Tadeusz Wolsza and Andrew Kavchak have done a fine job restoring and maintaining memories about Katyń, which is perhaps a singular example of the true nature of the Soviet Communist system both domestically and internationally. Thanks to both authors, and other intrepid souls like them, we shall not be deceived.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Washington, DC, 13 April 2021

The post The Legacy of Katyń appeared first on Polonia Institute.

By Klaus Richter

Reviewed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

  Throughout history, empires have been the norm in international relations, while nation- states a rarity. Small and even medium nation-states exist at the whim of the imperial powers that be either as their temporary satellites or subordinates of an international order or both. Therefore, the drive for integration is the most permanent and predictable fact of international affairs.

Yet, as excited or unhappy as small actors may be in their subaltern roles, they often react to overweening imperial appetites by countering it with self-assertion of sovereignty. The powerful see that as “fragmentation,” “particularism,” “nationalism,” and other signs of making trouble in the world dominated by empires. It is also annoying from the point of view of the imperial players’ economic efficiency, who prefer to deal with likewise huge economic units rather than fragmented, small areas. Large economic units are much more viable than small ones. Still, they tend to disregard the interests of smaller units, riding roughshod over them to pursue profits and efficiency. Let us keep this in mind as we delve into yet another study of the Intermarium.

In his superbly researched and persuasively argued Fragmentation in East-Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), Klaus Richter analyzes the phenomenon of the interaction between national sovereignty and fragmentation during the First World War and its aftermath. “The book will tell the story of the consequences and responses to this fragmentation both thematically and chronologically.” (p. 8) The historian penetrated seventeen archives and referred to at least 83 different newspaper titles multiple times, making his monograph also a commendable exercise in Zeitungsgeschichte. He is fluent with secondary sources, both old and current, and, as far as I can tell, hardly missed anything of historiographical importance with, perhaps, the seminal study of Western (lack of) investments in Poland by Leopold Wellisz, Foreign Capital in Poland (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938) (a disclosure: the latter author is our family). In addition to German, English, and French, Richter is at least serviceable in Polish and Baltic languages, which is a feat in itself. His methodology is logocentric and empirical, which is quite refreshing in post-modernist academia. Each point he illustrates with a multitude of individual examples.

The scholar is interested in continuities and discontinuities at economic, social, political, and diplomatic levels in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The pivot of his story is the Great War. One reason is that “The First World War transformed the East-Central European demographic structure like no previous historical event.” (p. 107)  But there were others as well.

Richter argues that the newly independent successor states merely followed the logic of events, trends, and institutions that they had inherited from their former imperial hegemons. After they were rejected as inviable by the international system as reflected in the League of Nations, the East-Central European successor states turned sharply toward étatisme and even autarchy.  The state everywhere became the organizing principle. Small nations made themselves viable by using the state to organize and reorder their jurisdictions within.

Although liberalism had been the dominant ideology, in particular in the economic realm from the second half of the 19^th century, it gradually was undermined by statism, in particular as far as defense sectors were concerned. The trend for state intervention and centralization increased exponentially, of course, with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The virtual collapse of the liberal economic system yielded to an outright autarchy as the combating powers vied for supremacy and, in the process, denied usual markets to the enemy. Klaus Richter calls it “state socialism” and names Walther Rathenau, Germany’s war-time economic dictator, as its creator. (p. 207)

After the fall of the Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Habsburg realms, the successor states acquired their war-time systems and arrangements. They set themselves up on the foundations of statism. “However, beyond repatriation, policies empowering the titular nationalities yielded limited results. It was rather the states themselves that succeeded in taking control of much of the economic agency lost by others in the process of fragmentation…. Thus, the states became the most important economic actors in the region, while the private sector, hoping for a return to a liberal pre-war order, was sidelined. With its emphasis on centralism and territorial engineering, Polish statism provided an ideological and scientific foundation of policies that harnessed fragmentation.” (p. 311)

Arguably, Germany’s occupation had made the most indelible mark on the nascent nations. By mid-1915, Berlin conquered from St. Petersburg the lands that had belonged once to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, partitioned by the powers at the end of the 18^th century. In particular, the conquest comprised of central Polish lands, sans the Lublin area ruled over by Vienna, and a chunk of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including ethnic Samogitian and Lettish lands as well as about half of White Ruthenia up to Pinsk. Thus, the German occupier established two distinct administrative units under its aegis: the Kingdom of Poland in the west and the Ober Ost in the east.

After the punitive treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Bolshevik Russia in March 1918, the Second Reich extended its jurisdiction in the east of the Intermarium to the rest of the old Grand Duchy, past Minsk.  In the north-east its power stretched virtually to the outskirts of St. Petersburg, which entailed dominating the rest of the home of the Letts and the country of the Ests. Additionally, in the south-east, again in the condominium with Austro-Hungary, Germany occupied Ukrainian lands. Thus, it extended its dominion not only to the Black Sea but also into the Caucasus. Ukraine was turned into a puppet state under the German diktat. The freshly captured north-eastern areas were subordinated to the Ober Ost.

Everywhere the Germans instituted a military government. Its ideal was an autarchy. They centralized and instituted far ranging controls over all aspects of economic, social, and political life. Its ambition was to control everything and everyone. The German military authorities significantly constrained free population movements and seriously curtailed free trade, forcing traditional merchants and salesmen, most of them Jewish, to resort to smuggling and price gouging. “German economic policies thus aggravated local antisemitism in a sustained way, as Jews were increasingly linked to speculation and war-time profiteering. This marginalization of Jewish merchants, an aim that Lithuanian nationalism shared with other East-Central European nationalisms, did not go unnoticed.” (p. 113)

In the Ober Ost, much of the centralizing animus was aimed at the Poles, particularly the landed nobility as the leading Intermarium elite representing the past glories of the old partitioned Commonwealth and providing leadership for the local people. Their estates were either confiscated or subject to enormous taxation. The nobility were also forbidden from trading on the free market. Instead, the Germans ordered them (as, indeed, everyone else) to surrender the fruits of their labor, forced food quota in particular, to the occupation authorities. These constraints brought the historical Polish engines of the largely agricultural and sylvan economy to a grinding halt.

At the same time, the Germans encouraged minority folk nationalisms, in particular Lithuanian and White Ruthenian ones. The occupiers, however, favored the minorities only to the extent that Lithuanian and Ruthenian institutions, cooperatives in particular, could facilitate a more efficient exploitation of the economy and labor in the Intermarium as well as maintain their anti-Polish attitude. (p. 211­)

In the Estonian and Latvian lands, the Germans initially supported the Baltic barons, who owned most of the land. Later, to maintain some influence in the post-war period, they switched to backing Germanophilic native leaders. Some of these were outright servile; others opportunistic, eager to use Berlin as a steppingstone to independence as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Throughout the war and occupation, the Second Reich, aside from a few empty declarations, consistently avoided empowering their captive subjects and allowing them to form their own governments. Berlin did allow for collaborationist bodies.  In the Kingdom of Poland, they did play important self-government and institution-building roles, but in the Ober Ost, they were almost wholly rubber stamp puppets of the occupiers. Nonetheless, it was partly from these German-sponsored institutions that free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would eventually emerge after their multi-cornered wars for independence.

In any event, all this German effort became moot following the collapse of Central Powers in November 1918.  The Hohenzollern empire and its system were no more. “The construction of the Brest-Litovsk order as an anti-Polish order intensified the antagonism of Polish nationalists and their counterparts in the eastern ‘borderlands’ (especially Lithuania and Ukraine). Elevated to a political level through German-sponsored state-building, the conflict between Poles and their eastern neighbors expanded from a socio-economic conflict to a political conflict between states. After the German defeat, the conflict continued, reflecting in battles for international recognition of statehood and boundaries. These battles were fought not only against a skeptical Western Entente, but at last, as much among the new states themselves, as they faced and exploited allegations of Bolshevism, antisemitism, or of functioning as little more than a tool for continued German geopolitical scheming.” (p. 57)

Although the control of these lands would be terminated after the Kaiser lost the war, the occupation system left in place endured well beyond. “The German occupation established structures – for better or worse – the new states adapted.” (p. 309)

At this point of Richter’s narrative (or at least in his conclusion) one wishes in vain to compare the creation of the Baltic states and the reemergence of Poland with the decolonialization processes in Africa and India. For instance, it could put into a broader relief the continuation of partition and occupation time laws in the lands of the old Commonwealth. (p. 294)  However, Richter does admit that to manage the Białowieża Forest the Germans called in their experts with colonial experience, namely in forest exploitation in Cameroon. (p. 158)

Meanwhile, folk nationalist parliamentary republics appeared in the Baltics that earned the peoples’ support largely by turning on the traditional elites and foreigners. In Latvia and Estonia, that meant expropriating the German barons, foreign investors, and manufacturers. In Lithuania the main target of the Samogitian folk nationalists was the Polish nobility. They were expelled “under pogrom-like conditions” (p. 84) in the process that Richter refers to (jointly with similar actions in the other Baltic states) as “ethnic cleansing.” (p. 255) Those undertakings were “the most transformative policies enacted in interwar East-Central Europe.” (p. 301) They also should be seen as endeavors to integrate the successor states within, just as they became fragmented without. Thus, the historian shows that the so-called “land reforms” served as an integrative nation-state building tool. In this manner, the Baltic successor states plied not only national liberation but also social revolution.

In distinction, a point largely missing from Richter’s monograph, instead of waging a national socialist revolution, the Poles struggled to restore their old Commonwealth. This included reestablishing its external and internal frontiers. Failing to grasp it, the historian chafes that “Polish bureaucrats delineated the state’s administrative units in a way so as to deliberately obfuscate former [partitioning] borders.” (p. 138) It is indispensable to bring back the old patterns and paradigms to shake-off dependency rather than maintain a foreign diktat’s legacy. That should be obvious. In at least one place the author understands such realities, however: “The future Polish state would thus continue the work of Antoni Tyzenhaus, the Lithuanian Grand Duchy’s last treasurer, who had established the first factories around Vilnius and Grodno.” (p. 163)

Richter also fails to appreciate that the driving force was not ethno-nationalism but cultural nationalism grounded in history. For example, he keeps misapplying the term “ethnic Poles” to the Polish landed nobility in the Ober Ost. (p. 257) But they were gente Ruthenus or gente Lithuanus natione Polonus. Treating them as “ethno-nationalist” Poles is completely anachronistic. Thus, the historian is mistaken when he writes about “ethnicization” (p. 61) in regards to the Polish perception of the Kresy [Eng.: the Borderlands]. It is plain wrong to posit that the Poles “imagined” the Kresy to be ethnically Polish. Instead, they believed them to be Polish in a cultural and historical sense. And by “Polish” they meant the old Rzeczpospolita.

Richter does stumble upon such evidence of pre-modern Polish self-identification but has problems interpreting it quite properly. Instead, the best he can do is to argue that “People’s clear belonging to the new states’ body of citizens was increasingly seen to reflect in the decisiveness with which they opted for a state’s citizenship. Citizenship was seen as tied to national self-identification and could thus be neither conditional nor tied to economic considerations.” (p. 100) That is correct. Polishness was chiefly a conscious cultural choice, and neither solely an ethnic nor an opportunistic one. The word “obywatelstwo” (citizenship) denoted one’s descent from the “Polish” nobility who enjoyed rights, unlike the commoners. In the early 20^th century, those rights accrued to anyone who consciously fought for the restoration of the Commonwealth, and, hence, an independent Poland.

In reality, the Polish elites were multi-ethnic but also uni-cultural: Polish and, hence, Western and, usually, Latin Christian. The most common denominator among the common Polish common folk was, firstly, the Catholic religion and, only secondly, the ethnic origin. The latter factor of Polishness dominated at the grass roots level chiefly in the Kingdom of Poland and western Galicia, but not in the Grand Duchy. There, Polishness was largely a cultural choice and reflected an individual’s historical legacy and a preference for the West over “the East,” aka Russia. The author largely misses such subtleties. He is also rather confused about the Grand Duchy mentality, particular the conservative krajowcy option, and the ethno-nationalist Lithuanian (Samogitian) orientation. (p. 45) He falsely treats them interchangeably. However, the former is cultural and inclusive, the latter ethno-nationalist and exclusive.

Thus, with respect to the role of ethno-nationalism, comparing the Baltics to Poland is a game of apples and oranges. The resurrected Polish Republic was not an ethno-nationalist state. It was a somewhat diminished old Commonwealth with the Polish (Western) cultural element dominant. Ethnic minorities comprised overall 30% of the population, but in the east they constituted a clear majority. Each harbored irredentist, or at least centrifugal and folk nationalist tendencies, which gravely impacted Poland’s poor image in the West. “Poland and the Baltic states had attempted to shake off their solidifying international images as chauvinistic and particularistic. Yet the entrenching narrative of ethno-centrism brought about by the internationalization of the refugee and minorities questions proved as disastrous for them as the League’s failure to act on minority questions proved for the national minorities… In this climate, German revisionist arguments that the new states were bound to fail as a consequence of their political immaturity gained appeal among an international audience… Even if non-organized, violent expulsions largely subsided with the consolidation of independent statehood in 1920, the narrative of minorities under threat had only started to gain traction.” (p. 105)

Also, because Poland and others, sans serious foreign capital, were slow to rebuild their economic potential, Western charges of inefficiency and autarchy abounded. In reality, however, in all-new countries, there emerged a state-private partnership in the economy. National minorities, who had held commercial sway over those lands and peoples before 1914, continued to be viable players. However, “titular nationalities” made some inroads into their bailiwicks in the interwar period. The common people tended nonetheless to stay away from trade and commerce, in particular, as well as the cities, in general. “It took the Second World War and Soviet coercion to move peasants into destroyed cities and take up urban professions in significant numbers. However, the most significant factor in enabling the titular nations to take control of trade was the Holocaust, which wiped out the many obstacles on the route to commercial empowerment… The economic marginalization of the national minorities thus did not reflect a social strengthening of the titular nations. Rather, it went hand in hand with a staggering degree of state involvement in commercial matters.” (p. 202)

Since foreign capital sneered at emerging opportunities with disdain in the interwar period, much of the private effort tended to be native: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish capitalists, including Jews in the last-mentioned group. Their efforts varied, but some of them succeeded eminently, in particular these with government connections. In some cases, there was well-founded fear that foreign capital could breed foreign dependency, an unacceptable price for the newly freed nations. “Ultimately, such anxieties arose from fears that Germany’s Mitteleuropa project was far from dead yet – rather, its structure was stripped down to a purely economic form.” (p. 173)

Further, which Richter notices readily, the Second Republic was a rather large state. “Perhaps surprisingly, the Second Polish Republic also faced allegations of ‘small statehood,’ even though  its interwar territory encompassed almost 390,000 square kilometers and thus as much as interwar Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and all the Baltic states combined, and only 20 per cent less than the Weimar Republic. The ‘smallness’ of states thus did not derive from territorial size alone. Rather, it was a metaphor for the disruptive, fragmenting effects of their borders, for sprawling bureaucracies, and alleged particularistic pettiness. The new states did not disrupt Europe’s economy because they were ‘small states’ – rather, they were deemed ‘small’ because they were seen as obstacles to the continent’s recovery.” (p. 147)

Accordingly, German propaganda conflated Poland with the Baltics and reduced them to Saisonstaaten. The crux of the charge against them was economic. They were not viable because of their bloated bureaucracies, irrational borders, statist economics, and failure to revive trade and manufacturing to pre-1914 levels. “The allegation of Polish ‘statism’ enshrined a whole set of negative notions ranging from a ‘state of thieves’ to an ‘illegitimate state.’  ‘Statism’ became a vital keyword in the rhetoric of German territorial revisionism as well as of British and American liberal circles. Polish economic propaganda abroad struggled with an increasingly entrenched stereotype of Poland as Europe’s most protectionist state. Poland’s protectionist policies, it countered, were neither indicators for socialism nor authoritarianism, but represented a vital tool to overcome the fragmentation caused by the Partitions, which had turned historical Poland into ‘three different economic organisms’…. It is striking that the intensity of the free market rhetoric of the interwar Polish state increased in parallel with interventionist practice.” (p. 216)

At the same time, the West countered its perceived fatal flaws in the successor states’ economic structureby advocating free economic zones. “In the early 1920s, calls for the creation of extraterritorial units to facilitate transit trade in an age of fragmentation had become louder. Due to their simple logic, turning coastal cities into free ports increasingly seemed the most promising solution for the disruption of global trade links and for the problems of landlocked riparian states faced.” (p. 238) Therein laid the logic behind denying Gdańsk (Danzig) to Poland, which led to a zero-sum game vis-à-vis Gdynia. (p. 224)   Incidentally, the case of the access to the sea of Poland, Lithuania (Memel), and other Baltic states demonstrates plainly the loss of utility of the slogan of national self-determination and anti-Bolshevism in favor of the paramountcy of economic considerations among the Western powers.

It is no wonder that the idea of the newly established successor states’ utter uselessness enjoyed wide currency among Western intellectuals and opinionmakers. “International representations of territorial fragmentation directly contributed to a pessimistic view on the future prospects of the new, territorially smaller, and economically truncated states, and thus of Europe in general. The challenges of economic reconstruction, which seemed unsurmountable against the background of territorial disintegration, led to an unequivocal consensus across the Western Entente and Germany that none of the political formations that emerged from the ruins would be able to survive on their own. As former imperial provinces or regions, they constituted parts of an allegedly coherent economic and political organism now torn apart. On their own, heads and limbs were bound to wither and die.” (p. 141)

This was the case, in particular, in the Anglo-Saxon world, which pined for the good old days of the Russian empire and its inexhaustible markets predicated on free trade. “In the interwar years, politicians from East-Central Europe frequently found the legitimacy of their state’s existence challenged purely because of their inability to mitigate the consequences of the loss of the Russian market for the economic recovery of Europe.” (p. 202) This was tantamount to blaming a dentist for your own car problems. In other words, fueled by German revanchist propaganda by the liberal Weimar Republic, English and American governments, bankers, and capitalists blamed Poland for the fact that Communist Russia prevented the restoration of salubrious economic relations in that part of the world.

Unfortunately, Richter fails to elaborate on the Kremlin’s role in this process. After the Polish victory of 1920, the Soviet factor is almost entirely missing from Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915-1929. Instead, the scholar focuses mainly on Germany. “The real threat to the new states arose neither from the national minorities, nor from the League of Nations, but rather from German political support for territorial revisionism.” (p. 297) It is true, as far as it goes. But Berlin could not have succeeded without Moscow, as history shows. This includes not only, ultimately, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, but also, in the meantime, promoting a malicious image of Poland through use and abuse of propaganda.

According to the historian, the successor states “were seen as economic disasters that had repercussions far beyond East-Central Europe. International images of Poland and the Baltic states as ‘small states,’ as particularistic and immature, stemmed from the failure to mitigate these economic disruptions as well as from representations of the experience of border crossing itself. This contributed to a political and geographical imaginary of East-Central Europe as a region that was fragmented, bureaucratized, and dominated by an irrational ethnic nationalism.” (p. 155)

And further, “Both views, although idiosyncratic, were highly representative concerning their core assumption: that the independent existence of ‘small states’ in East-Central Europe [Intermarium] was a transitory phenomenon and that the historical trajectory, temporarily skewed by the war, continued to point towards territorial integration. In a region such as East- Central Europe [Intermarium], which, geographers claimed, lacked natural borders, the imposition of ‘artificial borders’ meant a historical regression to be measured in centuries rather than decades. Most likely, the trajectory of integration would be corrected once Germany and Russia regained their power. The German concept of the region as ‘seasonal states’ (Saisonstaaten) was widely shared in the Anglo-Saxon world. Thus, most foreign policy experts initially advocated the ‘natural course’ of the restoration of Russia comprising the Baltics. Until then, independent Baltic states were but ‘temporary phases’ that lacked ‘elements of finality.’” (p. 150)

As a result of such perceptions, new states’ birth pangs were chalked up to their allegedly inherent pathologies, thus reinforcing the hostile propaganda narrative. An international consensus emerged, paving the way for future German and Soviet aggression, that small units were not viable. Therefore, they must be reordered by larger entities. “Although it has received much less attention, such normative views concerning the survivability of ‘small states’ had an equally disastrous impact on the other ‘border states’ that emerged from the peripheries of the disintegrating empires.” (p. 142) All that translated into a self-fulfilling prophecy that came to pass during the Second World War and its aftermath.

Nonetheless, in the interwar period, despite the hostility of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, and the sneering irritation of the Anglo-Saxon powers, the successor states learned how to cope under most inopportune circumstances. “The effect of territorial fragmentation reverberated into the 1920s. Reconstructing them allows for a view on East-Central Europe as a previously highly interconnected region. The severance of these connections prompted a reconfiguration that diminished many economic centers and created new ones at unprecedented speed.” (p. 250)

Arguably the greatest tragedy was that the Intermarium states failed to unite to face the common enemies: “From the view of the German and the Bolshevik governments, a unification of the breakaway states in whatever form would have been nothing short of a disaster. German politicians feared that if the Little Entente, founded by Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia in 1921, were to integrate Poland and the Baltic states, it could form a closely integrated anti-German bloc stretching from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea. As a consequence, they observed abounding divisions between the new states with blatant glee…. East-Central Europe became known as the archetype of a particularistic region unwilling and unable to unite.” (pp. 152-153)

There are interesting analogies that Richter brings up. For example, he points out similarities of 1918 to the post-1989 period. After the First World War, “the message was clear: East-Central Europe had to be reintegrated into its larger neighboring states – not only for the sake of the latter, but for the sake of a prosperous and powerful Europe based on principles of law and national progress. Importantly, this was a view that many Europeans shared on all sides of the political spectrum.” (p. 312) Translation: Poland and the Baltic states had no right to exist as sovereign nations.  The historian finds this useful to interpret the post-Cold War order. Like in 1918, the world questioned whether, as nation-states, newly liberated countries of the Intermarium were feasible: hence, the push to join the European Union.

In addition to the points brought up above, there are a few other problems with the historian’s arguments, but no one is perfect. For example, it is high time to abandon the concept of the “Corridor,” which is a successful German propaganda moniker for Polish Pomerania. A corridor one walked or traveled through. Pomerania is an actual place where people, mostly Polish, have lived for centuries. Also, repeating stories of alleged Polish “pogroms,” in Pinsk in particular, without proper research is conduct unbecoming of a logocentric and empiricist scholar. But that is a topic for a separate treatment.

All in all, Klaus Richter has given us a solid political, social, and economic history of a part of the Intermarium on micro and macro scales between 1915 and 1929. We hope there will be more to come of monographs like his.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Washington, DC, 10 March 2021

The post Fragmentation vs. Integration appeared first on Polonia Institute.