Eurasia Press & News
There’s no denying that PiS’ faux nationalist project has utterly failed. Patriotic Poles won’t be distracted by vague foreign policy victories that have yet to even happen and might never transpire, nor will they let PiS’ rabid Russophobia influence them into forgiving it for their country’s forced Ukrainization.
It’s impossible for anyone to seriously describe Poland’s ruling “Law & Justice” (PiS per its Polish abbreviation) party as “nationalists” after they willingly allowed their country’s Ukrainization by hosting over 3 million refugees from that former Soviet Republic. Warsaw’s population jumped by 15-20% according to Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski as quoted by the New York Times (NYT) in their article about this issue titled “Warsaw’s Welcome Mat Risks Unraveling Under The Pressure Of A New Wave Of Refugees”.
The outlet also revealed some other intriguing facts, including Trzaskowski’s concern that “these costs (related to accommodating so many refugees) amount to hundreds of millions of dollars” and that “Warsaw’s largest pediatric hospital has put Ukrainian patients on its waiting list for liver transplants, sometimes ahead of Polish children.” A Ukrainian refugee in Poland whose son has a rare liver disease also revealed that medics at the hospital in Kiev that was treating him left to treat soldiers at the front.
None of these facts paint the situation in a positive light, though the NYT seems oblivious to that otherwise they probably wouldn’t have included them in their piece. Warsaw is at the breaking point, both physically and financially, while Poles become second-class citizens in their own country since Ukrainian refugees are now being prioritized for emergency medical treatments. Furthermore, it’s morally reprehensible that Ukrainian doctors are abandoning sick children to treat wounded soldiers.
PiS can’t do anything about the last-mentioned fact but it’s entirely responsible for the other three. Grey cardinal Jaroslaw Kaczynski tried to present himself as the most patriotic defender of Polish nationalist interests since independence-era hero Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, but in reality, all that he’s done is shamelessly sell out those same interests that millions of Poles fought, sacrificed, and ultimately died over the centuries to protect after Poland’s dangerous experiment with radical multiculturalism.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with multicultural societies per se since Russia is proudly multicultural and has been for half a millennium. They only become problematic whenever liberal-globalists like PiS, which unconvincingly masquerades as a conservative-nationalist movement, radically impose this upon society at the expense of their own citizens. That’s precisely what’s happening in Poland right now too as proven by the NYT’s latest piece.
PiS’ supporters didn’t help it narrowly win re-election in summer 2020 just to be subsumed by a deluge of Ukrainians, many of whom support their ethno-fascist authorities’ glorification of Hitler’s local collaborators who participated in World War II’s genocide of the Polish people (nearly a fifth of whom were exterminated during that conflict in the span of less than six years). It’s revolting to the extreme to see Ukrainians treated as a privileged people at the expense of native Poles, especially at hospitals.
In a desperate attempt to distract the population from their newfound status as second-class citizens in their own country as well as its highest inflation in over two decades, PiS is doubling down on its Russophobic rhetoric to the extent that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki recently bragged about how Poland has set the global standard for this form of fascism (though of course not describing it as such). The only thing “nationalist” that’s left about PiS is its extreme rhetoric against Russia, it seems.
That might not be enough to retain the support of its base, which it needs in order to win the next elections in fall 2023. Those patriots that are utterly disgusted at how shamelessly PiS sold out their precious Poland’s national interests to a neighboring people who literally hate Poles due to their ethno-fascist historical interpretations might “defect” from the party and support truly patriotic ones instead. This is PiS worst political nightmare but it might not be able to avert it after all that’s happened.
Kaczynski thought that he could leverage the millions of Ukrainians that his government agreed to host as some sort of geopolitical tool to carve out Poland’s envisioned “sphere of influence” across the “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI) states in Central & Eastern Europe. This ambitious project risks backfiring though if his supporters break ranks with PiS and support truly patriotic parties during the upcoming elections instead, which could bring the openly liberal-globalist opposition to power.
18 months isn’t enough time for him to pull off anything impressive on the foreign policy front. Plus, Poles (like all people) care more about their immediate socio-economic situation than abstract foreign policy concepts. Most don’t want to pay for Ukraine either, let alone the millions of refugees that have flooded into their country. It’s a tragedy that some Polish children will inevitably die, God forbid, because Ukrainian refugees were prioritized for emergency medical treatments instead.
There’s no denying that PiS’ faux nationalist project has utterly failed. Patriotic Poles won’t be distracted by vague foreign policy victories that have yet to even happen and might never transpire, nor will they let PiS’ rabid Russophobia influence them into forgiving it for their country’s forced Ukrainization. It’s all but certain that the unprecedented influx of so many foreigners into the country, especially those who literally hate their hosts, will lead to multidimensional security challenges with time.
Irrespective of whether it wins re-election during the fall 2023 polls, PiS will go down in history as the party that opened the gates to Ukraine’s invasion of Poland that completely transformed its socio-political situation. Its supporters trusted that Kaczynski would protect them from the radical multiculturalism that PiS railed against in Western Europe only to find out that he never truly had any such intentions and actually plotted this entire time to replicate the exact same thing at home.
Granted, he’s doing so with so-called “civilizationally similar” people, but most of them also just so happen to be ethno-fascists who hate Poles with a passion due to their radical interpretation of history. They’re “sleeper cells” who’ll “awaken” at a “politically convenient” time, perhaps if Poland ever wises up and decides to remove these refugees or at the very least restrict their privileges so that they can finally be equal to the Polish people instead of continuing to reign supreme over them.
At that moment, Poland might become embroiled in the same migrant-driven riots that Western Europe has become infamous for. There’s also a credible risk that the highly trained and motivated Neo-Nazis within those crowds could spark a serious security crisis, especially if they employ any of the arms that they might have smuggled into the country from Ukraine. Should that worst-case scenario transpire, then Kaczynski would be personally responsible for creating this literal fifth column inside Poland.
The lesson to be learned from all of this is that sometimes the smoothest talking “nationalists” might just be liberal-globalists in disguise exactly as Kaczynski has just exposed himself as being. PiS might have had some promising policies but they’ve since been revealed to have been superficial without any substance whatsoever. The party has literally betrayed everything that it claimed to stand for, and no sincere Polish patriot can ever support it again after it allowed the Ukrainization of their country.
