UnHerd: The danger of fetishising foreign lands

 When I first arrived here, I tried to focus on foreign reporting, by challenging hysterical Western perspectives of Poland. The Government and, sometimes, the people here are often portrayed as being backwards and xenophobic — and I objected to such characterisations. To the extent that Poles are more right-wing than Western Europeans, moreover, I argued, they have the right to be. A lot of American and British commentary appeared to embody what the social scientist Richard Hanania calls “woke imperialism” — the aggressive promotion of progressive pet causes in countries where there is little appetite for them.

I take none of my criticisms back. But on the flip side, it would be unfair of me to obscure the existence of Polish progressives, who have more right to make prescriptive judgements about their homeland than I, an immigrant, do. On the fringes of Right-wing Western opinion there is a caricature of Poland as an ever-strengthening, “BASED”, traditionalist Catholic idyll — leading one conservative commentator from the USA to claim that “the mood [in Warsaw] is unmistakably buoyant”, as if Polish public opinion is not as divided as anywhere else — and I have no wish to feed such clichés. To be a valuable observer you must tell the whole truth and not just part of it. [...]

An outsider’s perspective can be valuable, inasmuch as if offers a sideways look at familiar problems. And of course, observers can become participants, visitors settlers. It would be wrong to think that a migrant cannot — like a native — love and criticise a country simultaneously. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, for example, combines social criticism with a deep affection for the people and culture of the mafia-assailed island, to beautiful effect.

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Nautilus Magazine: Digging Deeper Into Holocaust History

 The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture. [...]

“Science is the next frontier that will speak about these sites,” Freund says. Geophysical techniques provide a way to locate and preserve sites that have been built over, as is often the case in Holocaust sites across Europe, even locating them under the canopy of vegetation. While certain sites will be excavated, the process of discovering them does not have to be destructive, as with traditional archaeology. Using non-invasive techniques means archaeologists can hold history in situ. Such non-invasive methods are a matter of being sensitive, too. “These are mass graves of people who are victims,” Freund says. “They have been victimized once and we don’t want to disturb them again by disturbing their burials.” [...]

Geoscientists have another ambitious project planned for this summer—searching for a lost cache of information about Nazi crimes and Jewish heroes in Warsaw. Between 1940 and 1943, an organized underground operation, comprising dozens of contributors, collected thousands of documents: photographs, drawings, writings, journals and tabulations, signed and dated. They put them into 2-feet-high metal milk cans and metal boxes, and buried them in the Warsaw Ghetto. Called the Ringelblum archives after historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the caches were buried in three different locations. In 1946, a survivor found the first of the milk cans. According to Freund, the archives were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The second part was discovered in 1950. The archives were used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. No one has found the third cache.

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Social Europe: Fewer Italians than Swedes hold anti-feminist views

Of the eight European countries included in the survey, which had 12,000 respondents, people in Italy were the least likely to blame feminism for men’s feelings of marginalisation and demonisation.

Meanwhile, in Sweden—long seen as a bastion of progressive gender-equality politics—more people (41 per cent) than anywhere else surveyed said they at least somewhat agreed with the statement: ‘It is feminism’s fault that some men feel at the margins of society and demonised.’

After Sweden, about 30 per cent of participants in Poland expressed anti-feminist views, followed by the United Kingdom (28 per cent), France (26 per cent), Hungary (22 per cent), Germany (19 per cent) and the Netherlands (15 per cent). Only 13 per cent of Italian respondents, however, expressed such views and 65 per cent said they either strongly or somewhat disagreed with them. [...]

According to the survey, the majority of respondents in Hungary hold negative views towards immigrants (60 per cent) and Muslim people (54 per cent). These numbers are about twice as high as they are in the UK, where 30 per cent hold such views of immigrants and 26 per cent of Muslims.

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UnHerd: Poland’s rise to cultural power

 Last month, CD Projekt Red released another game, Cyberpunk 2077, to critical and commercial success (if marred, on some consoles, by technical bugs). Even before its release, Poland, surprisingly, was the world’s fourth largest exporter of video games, behind only China, Japan and Hong Kong. [...]

That seems to be changing. Over the past few years, Polish cinema and literature, as well as video games, have earned international acclaim — bringing modern craftsmanship to the nation’s history, and welcoming people to landscapes as brooding and mysterious as Scandinavia’s, cities as beautiful as France’s, and industrial wastelands as poetic as the North of England’s. [...]

None of this has come without controversy. As Polish art has achieved more international recognition, Poles have been divided on the image of their nation that is being portrayed. Take Ida: many conservatives were troubled by the film’s dwelling on the complicity of some Poles in the persecution of the Jews. Activists campaigned for text to be inserted to emphasise that countless others struggled and suffered to protect Jewish people. [...]

One could hardly pass over the political implications of art but one should avoid being incorrect, or condescending, or opportunistic. Filip Mazurek, a Polish critic, has written that “English language reviewers have ignored or even denied” the “metaphysical, quasi-religious” elements of Tokarczuk’s work, choosing to focus on “Tokarczuk as an anti-nationalist.” (Polish critics, Mazurek argues, did the opposite.) Again, this is not a criticism of Tokarczuk, but one can hardly be shocked that conservative Poles have been less than enthused about her international acclaim when it is premised, to a large extent, on her status as a symbol of opposition to their beliefs.

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Jay Foreman: Why does Russia have the best maps of Britain?

 

Social Europe: Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty

 From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic centrality of fishing—which makes up less than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic, English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived. [...]

Even within global politics sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’, while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and interests of the population, not control.

The key feature of the ‘Westminster model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law. Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote; Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.[...]

Given all this, the European public can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central- and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous environment, in Europe and around the world.

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Social Europe: The rule of law: a simple phrase with exacting demands

 How is it then that two EU governments venture to prolong the anguish of some half a billion Europeans, harming their own populations, by refusing to subject themselves to rule-of-law requirements? This cannot be dismissed as the position of two unhinged autocrats, since their veto has significant popular support in these countries, including 57 per cent approval in Poland. [...]

This has been evident in several instances—from lack of concern with the Silvio Berlusconi media monopoly in Italy to France’s semi-permanent state of emergency, Malta’s and Slovakia’s complacency with political murder and the Spanish government’s response to the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Often, the EU is content with narrowly reducing the remit of the rule of law to a simple matter of legality—ignoring routine violations of core values, such as the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech or even the right to liberty and life itself.

Has the EU not thereby set itself up for the current crisis, supplying the ammunition for autocrats to try to absolve themselves from compliance with the rule of law? In turning a blind eye, the European Commission has harmed the union’s very normative foundation, endorsing the blatant abuse of power by the leaders of several of its member states.

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Notes from Poland: Polish cities switch off lights in protest against government’s EU budget veto

 Almost 50 Polish cities this evening turned off the lights at famous landmarks in protest against the government’s blocking of the European Union’s budget and coronavirus recovery fund, as well as against a bill that would reduce the share of tax revenue going to local authorities. [...]

All of Poland’s ten largest cities joined the blackout, including Wrocław, Łódź and Poznań. Among the smaller cities taking part was Sosnowiec, which switched off part of its EU-funded street light grid. [...]

Cities, which are mostly under opposition control, have also expressed concern at a move by the central government to cut the share of tax revenue allocated to local budgets. A bill to that effect was passed by the lower house of parliament on 28 October.

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Social Europe: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi

Applebaum is appalled by the ‘extreme left’ which does not wholeheartedly trust such well-known forces for good as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Every movement or actor critical of the status quo contributes to ‘polarisation’ and is an enemy of democracy; to not believe in American ideals is to be a ‘cynic’. In Applebaum’s idealised narrative of the US there are no illegal wars, poverty or corruption or flaws in its increasingly distorted capitalism. [...]

Applebaum’s only material explanation for the weakening of democracy is ‘social media’, where propaganda spreads and people are radicalised. True, such mechanisms are powerful and often underestimated. But the logic of Twitter and Facebook confirms Applebaum’s own way of seeing the world: the moral and emotional stories of our time are reinforced and these platforms become the perfect scapegoat to avoid thinking about other, underlying factors. [...]

Democracy is not just the right to vote. What matters in the long run is justice, and justice can only be achieved through changes in the material conditions of people’s lives. The real dividing line in politics cannot be between ‘evil’ and ‘good’, moral and immoral. What is needed to save democracy is to create new counterweights to today’s capitalism—which undermines it.

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Notes from Poland: Polish prime minister committed “gross violation of law” in organising elections, rules court

 Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, committed a “gross violation of the law” and the constitution when ordering preparations for elections earlier this year, a court has ruled. [...]

“The manner of [conducting] elections cannot be restricted by any actions of the executive branch,” wrote Rudnicki. “[Poland] cannot be considered a state of law if [state] organs infringe the provisions of the law.”

The judges also declared that the decision to hold a postal-only vote meant that “voters were not guaranteed an equal, direct and secret ballot”, reports RMF24. [...]

However, Ewa Siedlecka, a commentator for the Polityka weekly, notes that the court’s decision is mainly “symbolic”. Some organisations or individuals – such as voters whose personal data was provided to the post office – could launch civil cases. But Morawiecki and other officials are unlikely to face legal consequences, as PiS has created a system that “guarantees freedom and impunity”, she writes.

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Politico: Dutch courts to stop extraditing Polish suspects

 The Netherlands will stop extraditing suspects or convicts to Poland over concerns that the country's courts are no longer independent, an Amsterdam court said on Thursday.

The same court had already asked the Court of Justice of the EU in a similar case in July whether the extradition of Polish suspects must be halted considering that "the independence of Polish courts and thus the right to a fair trial have come under increasing pressure." [...]

Similar doubts about the independence of Polish courts from political interference have been expressed by courts in Germany, Ireland and Spain. [...]

The EU's top court ordered the suspension of a new judicial body created by the Polish government after the Commission expressed concern about its independence.

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Notes from Poland: Poland’s human rights commissioner on the state of democracy, LGBT protests and “dormant civic energy”

 Agnieszka Wądołowska: “Poland in 2020 is a completely different country than it was in 2015,” you said in the Senate in a statement summarising your term as commissioner for human rights. “Poland is no longer a constitutional democracy”, but a state of “electoral authoritarianism” and a “hybrid democracy”. What do you think we have lost in those five years? [...]

For example, with the [ruling] Law and Justice party’s anti-refugee advert, it was impossible to hold anybody who produced it accountable. The prosecutor’s office discontinued the proceedings. And the matter of the antisemitic post of a member of the National Council of the Judiciary will probably not be ruled upon, because the statute of limitations will apply in a few weeks’ time. Even though the case has been known about for years. There are many such examples. [...]

In many cases, the hardest thing is the fact that the changes stop me from helping people as I would like to. Every commissioner used to be able to take a case to the Constitutional Tribunal. Now I must make a rational judgement on whether that might not make the situation worse – because, for example, the Constitutional Tribunal legitimising a given law can make the work of the courts difficult, as they can always directly apply the constitution. [...]

There is one more thing to mention. What is happening is, in my view, a repercussion of the presidential campaign and the fact that the subject of LGBT became an electoral fuel used to heat up the atmosphere and take votes away from the [far-right] Confederation party. A moment ago, we had the Istanbul Convention on the table, now it’s LGBT rights – this all seems to me to be a political game. And I find this regrettable because one should not play with human rights. This is of course connected to a very real, concrete threat to the people who become victims of this situation.

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Balkan Insight: Poland Struggles to Deal With Pedophilia in Catholic Church

 Piotr M.’s case, while shocking, is sadly not unusual in Poland, where hundreds of Catholic priests have been accused of pedophilia, with over one hundred convicted so far in court, according to a map of the cases created by the victims’ rights group, Do Not Be Afraid. According to a 2019 report by the Polish Episcopal Conference, the central organ of the country’s Catholic Church, 382 complaints against priests over sexual molestation were filed with the Church between 1990 and 2018.

Artur Nowak, a lawyer who has supported victims in tens of cases, including Magda’s, told BIRN that these numbers are underestimates and there are probably thousands of cases of pedophilia among priests in Poland, many of which will likely never come to light. [...]

Artur Nowak, the lawyer, says pedophilia is such a big problem in the Polish Catholic Church because young men hardly out of adolescence are forced into a life of celibacy and given no education or support in how to deal with their evolving sexuality. [...]

When the Church pedophilia scandal broke last May, the governing Law and Justice (PiS), whose key politicians have been loudly accusing the “LGBT lobby” of posing a threat to Polish children, was faced with a tough balancing act: suddenly, facts revealed in the documentary indicated the threat was actually coming from inside the Polish Catholic Church, a PiS ally. While PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his party colleagues promised tough action against pedophiles, they were quick to stress that the phenomenon was present everywhere in society and not especially linked to the Church.

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Notes from Poland: Polish bishops call for “clinics to help LGBT people regain natural sexual orientation”

They also call for the creation of “clinics to help people who want to regain their…natural sexual orientation”. Such “conversion therapy” has been rejected by the established medical community as unethical and harmful, and has been completely or partially banned in a number of countries. [...]

The bishops admit that this idea “stands in clear contradiction to positions regarded as scientific, as well as to so-called ‘political correctness'”. [...]

The premise that non-heterosexual orientations are a mental illness has in recent decades been rejected by leading medical bodies, including the World Health Organisation in 1990. The practice of “conversion therapy” to “cure” or “correct” such orientations has also been deemed unethical and harmful. [...]

Further countries are currently considering legislation to outlaw the practice. In 2017, the Church of England declared conversion therapy to be a “discredited” and “theologically unsound” form of “abuse”, and called on the British government to ban it.

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openDemocracy: Poland is moving further towards autocracy

For many years after the collapse of communism Poland's political landscape was characterised by consensus. But consensual politics frayed in the mid-2000s and gave way to contention between two main political parties, PiS and Civic Platform. The rivalry of these two parties has fostered polarisation in Poland. Since 2015, when PiS won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and when Duda first became President, PiS has aggressively pursued its policy agenda (including troubling reforms to the judiciary, anti-abortion measures, and politically targeting LGBTQ individuals), pushing Poland's liberal democracy toward conservative autocracy. In turn, the government's actions have stoked the fires of polarisation. [...]

What about when polarisation gets ratcheted up? The PiS government has been marked by politicisation of gender equality and regression for LGBTQ Poles. Quite often, actions in these areas have been justified on political bases with few appeals to biblical canon or Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, Poland's Catholic establishment (chiefly, the Polish Episcopal Conference) and religious conservative voters endorse and take succour from PiS's reactionary measures. Resultantly, Poland is among the most polarised countries in the EU along religious and gender and sexual orientation dimensions. [...]

Events following President Duda's re-election, such as the arrest of an LGBT activist and resultant protests as well as the persistence of so-called 'LGBT free zones' in several Polish towns, have signaled the continuation of polarisation trends. As long as PiS retains its control of governing authority – which it will do at the national level for at least three more years, until the November 2023 parliamentary elections – polarisation is a useful strategy that allows the party to pursue its conservative autocratic agenda. The liberal opponents of PiS are left to pursue resistance through collective action and to build resilience in local communities.

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The Guardian: In Poland we've become spectators at the dismantling of democracy

 International attention may be focused on Belarus, but in Poland, ministers have just announced an autumn agenda which involves a simultaneous attack on the judiciary and the independent media. It coincides with intensifying pressure on the LGBT+ community in the form of verbal assaults from PiS figures. Demonstrations in cities across the country against the pre-trial jailing of an LGBT+ activist have led not to dialogue, but to the heavy-handed arrests of dozens more. [...]

So why was Duda apologising? Some observers assumed that he wanted to signal a genuine change, a wish to heal the polarisation in Polish society. In our view, Duda’s words carried less the spirit of Gandhi than Oscar Wilde, whose advice was to always forgive one’s enemies, because “nothing annoys them so much”. [...]

The phenomenon applies as much to Donald Trump, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the populist Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands. Essentially, it means that the media becomes a theatre for an ongoing performance aimed at capturing and keeping the audience’s attention. [...]

And the populists’ strategic use of entertainment to win poses a fundamental challenge to defenders of liberal democracy. Calling populists “fascists” and “authoritarians” stopped making an impression on voters long ago. However justified, it became repetitive, uninteresting and therefore, unfortunately, ineffective. If liberal democrats don’t learn about the power of spectacle in the era of dopamine politics, they will fade into irrelevance. And if populism is about creating a spectacle that depicts liberal democracy falling apart, liberalism must provide an alternative spectacle.

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Reuters: Hungary's Orban calls for central Europe to unite around Christian roots

 “Western Europe had given up on ... a Christian Europe, and instead experiments with a godless cosmos, rainbow families, migration and open societies,” Orban said in a speech.

He said the monument, a 100-metre long and 4-metre wide ramp carved into a street near Budapest’s parliament building, was a call to central European nations to strengthen their alliance and rally around what he called the “Polish flagship”. [...]

Orban himself had rarely criticised rainbow, or same-sex families, but Parliament’s speaker - a long-time ally of Orban - had equated gay adoption with paedophilia.

Last weekend, two rainbow flags were torn down from municipals buildings in Budapest, prompting a warning from the U.S. Embassy that neo-Nazi groups should not be tolerated.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Poland in the EU: How to lose friends and alienate people

 This year, when Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was the first to call for an extraordinary EU summit to discuss the EU’s reaction to violent events in Belarus, his words did not generate an immediately positive reaction from other capitals. An extraordinary Foreign Affairs Council is eventually taking place today – but credit should also go to Lithuania, Germany, and Sweden. It is not just the result of successful diplomatic efforts on the part of Warsaw, even if the Polish foreign ministry has sought to present it this way for its domestic audience. If any capital is currently leading on the EU’s reaction to events in Belarus, it is not Poland but the much smaller Lithuania – which merits a separate story about how to punch above one’s weight. [...]

The Law and Justice party formed a government in 2015 with a lofty promise to lift Poland’s foreign policy from its knees. Since then, however, the country’s standing in the EU has hardly improved even a bit. If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. The Coalition Explorer survey of policy professionals reveals that collectively they regard Poland as the second most disappointing country in the bloc, after Hungary. It is also among three countries (alongside Italy and Spain) that are most often seen as punching below their weight in EU politics. [...]

However, as usual, the devil lies in the detail. Apart from a limited group of the EU’s eastern member states (Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria; half of them Polish neighbours), rarely does anyone consider Poland as having the same longer-standing interests on EU policy; and only some of these countries (plus Germany) include Poland on the list of their most contacted partners. This clashes with Warsaw’s ambition to play the role of one of the EU’s post-Brexit ‘Big Five’, alongside Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. [...]

Most notably, the United Kingdom used to be the key western EU member that considered that Poland shared similar interests with it. This translated into strong contacts between the two capitals. Now this alliance has been moved outside the EU framework and, as a result, nowhere in the EU’s western part do policy professionals consider Poland as sharing interests with their country. Germany is the only pre-2004 EU member where Poland is among the most contacted partners – but Poland ranks only fifth, after France, Netherlands, Austria, and Spain (with which Germany does not even have the border). Relations between Warsaw and Berlin are far from perfect, to say the least, largely upon Poland’s own wish.

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Notes from Poland: “No apologies, no shame”: the rise of Poland’s guerrilla LGBT activists

Various legal efforts have been made by LGBT groups to stop the vans, but have largely been unsuccessful, due to the fact that Poland’s laws against hateful and offensive speech do not cover sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although a court in Gdańsk ordered Fundacja Pro to temporarily stop using some of the slogans it claims are based on “scientific” evidence, another judge in Wrocław rejected a case against the organisation, saying that its activities are “informative”. [...]

Speaking with Notes from Poland shortly before her latest detention, Margot explained what she calls the groups’ “no apologies” approach. They have sought to “throw off the discourse of docility and shame” that she associates with the respectability politics of more moderate members of the LGBT movement. But this radicalism does not exist in a vacuum; it has “adapted to the growth of homophobia”. [...]

For some, the insult to religious feeling was a step too far; others questioned the wisdom of strategies that make LGBT people standout, preferring campaigns that present them as “normal people”. One interviewee said they should be looking for issues that they have in common with religion, such as the idea of love.

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Time: #PolishStonewall: LGBTQ Activists Are Rallying Together After Police Violence at Protests in Warsaw

 By Saturday, thousands had gathered in Warsaw to denounce Margo’s arrest and police aggression against LGBTQ people. And although Poland is experiencing a rise in new cases of COVID-19, at least 15 solidarity protests, both big and small, took place on Monday in towns and cities across the Poland, as well as in Budapest and London, New York, Paris and Berlin, with more planned.

While not all activists may agree with Margo’s methods, her prosecution and imprisonment has been widely condemned. “These radical actions are a part of history that has happened in many other countries before,” says Julia Maciocha, chairwoman at the Warsaw-based LGBTQ organization Volunteers of Equality Foundation. In a nod to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York City, several users on Twitter started posting #PolishStonewall in tweets about the weekend’s events and subsequent solidarity protests. [...]

The church in Poland also wields enormous influence over education, law and politics, and about 86% of the population identify as Roman Catholic. Marek Jedraszewski, an archbishop, warned last year that a “rainbow plague” seeks to “control” the population. Since 2019, authorities in one-third of cities across Poland have adopted resolutions declaring themselves “LGBTQ ideology free zones.” In late July, the European Union announced it would not provide funding to six Polish towns that made this declaration.[...]

What activists want now is stronger international solidarity, particularly from European governments. Remy Bonny, a Brussels-based LGBTQ rights activist and researcher who focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, says “we have seen this kind of violence in Russia and Belarus, for example, but not in an E.U. country.” The European Commission should condemn police violence in Poland in the same way it recently denounced the repression of protests in Belarus, he says. Makuchowska says she and other activists are calling on the international community to “help us to immediately release Margo.”

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