by Michael O’Shea
“Even by today’s low standards, this is shockingly delusional,” I thought after reading Kati Marton’s diatribe against the current Polish and Hungarian governments in the Los Angeles Times last week.
Most such pieces are relatively standard and don’t warrant a response. This one, it seemed to me, mutilated the charred corpse of the truth. As a Polish citizen and Polish speaker who has lived in Hungary, I concluded it was too much to overlook. Allow me to share some of my experiences from these two countries, which most often bear no resemblance to the ones Marton describes.
Polish Government Gets Plenty of Criticism
The author portrays a Poland where opposition figures are under attack. She must not have spent time in global financial hub Warsaw, postindustrial-artistic Łódź, university town Wrocław, or reliably leftist Gdańsk, all places where the ruling conservatives are personae non gratae.
Perhaps she missed the trinkets mocking the cat-loving Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński that are sold in Warsaw souvenir shops and the ubiquitous “PiS Off” (PiS is the abbreviation of the Law and Justice party, which leads the current ruling coalition) scrawled on graffiti-strewn walls, Gen Z T-shirts, and Instagram hashtags. Anti-government messaging, campaign related and otherwise, is omnipresent.
If the ruling government is semi-authoritarian, it has a funny way of expressing it. An anti-abortion advocate or anti-Clintonian internet troll in the United States — or a Canadian trucker or Irish biological-reality proponent, for that matter — has more to fear from the ruling government than an opposition activist in Poland or Hungary.
“During a recent trip to Poland, I was shocked by the sometimes poisonous anti-European — and, specifically, anti-German — tone of public discourse,” asserts Marton. First, opinions on these subjects vary and depend significantly on geography. The author’s anecdotes are certainly at odds with the aggressive pro–European Union marketing (the word “propaganda” is overused in these debates, but this instance is a toss-up) campaigns touting precisely the opposite. “I live in [Polish city], but I am alive in Europe,” reads one such billboard ad visible in various parts of the country.
Furthermore, anti-German sentiment comes with the territory, as you can see in Polish political discourse. Centuries of invasion, partition, and the occasional devastation of Warsaw will do that, and modern-day big-brother capitalism from Germany doesn’t help. Major media outlets are often German owned. The sentiment derives from much the same source as Poland’s internationally celebrated defiance of Russia. Podległość wobec Berlina (Subservience to Berlin) is not an idea the ruling conservatives invented.
Marton probably didn’t meet any Polish farmers, whose passion for Ukrainian democracy doesn’t put food on the table as they buckle under the weight of Ukrainian agricultural dumping. One can choose not to side with the farmers in this instance, but denying it is a real issue harming real people is frivolous. (For what it’s worth, the heavily agricultural region closest to the Ukrainian border is deeply religious and politically conservative — some might say deplorable.)
Marton again waxes fanciful in her assertion that “Poland’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has left the presidency to someone else … thereby shielding his influence from vigorous scrutiny.” On the contrary, Kaczyński receives plenty of “vigorous scrutiny” from the opposition, such that one might forget that he is neither prime minister nor president. Opposition ads attack him first and last. His face is lampooned on Polish magazine covers. He is the talk of talk shows. The Left unfailingly ties policies it dislikes to the man. He is many things, but shielded from vigorous scrutiny he is not.
Perhaps Marton’s most egregious invention is the assertion that “[a]nother PiS victory might also weaken Poland’s position as a bulwark against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperial designs.” What Poland has the author been following during the last two years? If the PiS government warrants any scrutiny for its approach to the Russian war, certainly it is because, as an American colleague chided me last year, “Your Poles are going to get us into a world war.” As any casual follower of Polish politics can tell you, there will be no shortage of bulwarks, regardless of the electoral outcome this fall. If the Polish Left and Right agree on one subject, it is hatred of Russia.
