In English

Poland has been a target of ill-founded accusations that exploit the history of WWII and unfair interpretations of the relations between the Poles and the Jews for quite a while now. Every year sees the wartime Poland being described in international media as Nazi Germany’s accomplice in the Holocaust.

Not only awards, but also participation in the Chopin Competition is a serious step in the career of many musicians.

n many European countries the question concerning Muslim immigrants and refugees, Muslim minorities, Islam and radical political Islamism become a central political problem and one of the main points of public debate. It comes up frequently even in people’s everyday conversations in France, Belgium and Germany etc. This is not the case in Poland. For Poles is not a central matter of political dispute, and it does not – at least in the present – attract much public attention.

The penal code concerning Poles and Jews was written on three pages with the word ‘death’ appearing seven times there.

As Warsaw seeks to diversify its security and economic ties, it must increasingly consider enhancing its engagement with key non-Western powers. India can emerge as a crucial partner in this regard in Poland’s emerging Asia-connect plan.

In an EU where passportless travel has been disrupted by the need to test, isolate, quarantine cases, a widely recognized proof of vaccination will offer a route to normal, pre-pandemic life to those who will get the vaccine.

For all that we may be surprised when even well-versed music lovers in (say) London, Paris or New York remain entirely unaware of Moniuszko, this is not a uniquely Polish problem. Few countries are better at promoting their music than Poland.

Despite the pandemic and the UK leaving the European Union, the Visegrad countries strive to further tighten cooperation with their British partner even more than ever before. Thanks to many converging political, economic and security interests, as well as increasing knowledge about Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and more broadly the whole of Central Europe, one can count on maintaining close relations also in the future and a growing mutual inspiration.

If I were to concisely present the modern face of Central Europe, including Poland as the biggest country in the region, I would say as follows: it is the community of shared success and the community of shared aspirations at the same time.

As elsewhere, the COVID-19 crisis sharply disrupted the country’s development path. However, Poland has done well at limiting economic losses so far and we expect GDP to fall by 3.5% this year before rebounding by 2.9% in 2021 and 3.8% in 2022.

During the pandemic, when access to loans is even more difficult, promising businesses have a better chance at a stock exchange where investors take decisions based on a company’s potential and business model rather than its past as banks do.

Despite the break-up of empires following World War One and the imposition of the Iron Curtain after World War Two, geography reasserted itself after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Central European economy reintegrated.

In the Communist bloc countries, everything was a kind of a game of pretense, one to be understood by only those who experienced oppression on a daily basis.

In 1945, nearly thirty years from the creation of the Soviet Union in 1917, communism, understood as a political regime and a state form, divided the European continent in two. Marked out by terror and blood, the boundary was like a deep wound that made the nations of Eastern Europe suffer, whilst the inhabitants of Europe’s western part were shocked.
A microcosm of this great geopolitical rift was the city of Berlin where the essence of the Iron Curtain was encapsulated by the Wall and where human drama and tragedy caused by communism could be observed as if under a microscope in a laboratory. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was pulled down thanks to the tenacity of the West led by the United States. This perseverance was embodied, both symbolically and physically, by Roland Regan and the great Polish Pope John Paul II.
For almost fifty years, communism kept the world and, consequently, Europe split into two blocs. Importantly, hostile behaviour was the domain of states or governments: social-communist on the one hand, liberal-democratic on the other.
Nations themselves remained mostly undivided as both in the East and the West they were traditionally (and especially from the beginning of the modern era) inspired by the principles which communism denied and suppressed: freedom understood as personal and civil liberty, freedom of religion and artistic creation, freedom of thought and expression, entrepreneurship and private property. Indeed, communist ideology is a huge and tragic gash in modern European history.
Today, thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes, understanding the evil represented by communism can help bring the nations of Europe closer together. I believe that, once we decide to condemn communism irrevocably, as we were right to do in the case of National Socialism, the unanimous rejection of this non-liberal, anti-European, anti-Christian, criminal and inhuman ideology could strengthen relations both between people and the nations of Europe.
The Gordian knot of communism was never definitely cut either by European culture or politics. Only by solving the problem once and for all can we find the unifying element that is still missing in the positive dialectic among European parties represented in the European Parliament. Just as all European parties (with the exception of few and small neo-Nazi groups) stand united in their condemnation of National Socialism, so they should stand in their complete rejection of communism and its deadly ideology.
The problem is they do not, not now anyway. Unfortunately, we are still very far from such awareness and Europe is still torn internally by this disease of the soul which is communist ideology. In order to analyse its persistence in contemporary Europe, we must start with a straightforward question: why did we not treat communism in the same way as we treated National Socialism (which was the only right thing to do)?
When I equate the two systems, I want to emphasise both their criminal and genocidal similarities as well as differences in how they applied the methods of social control and mass extermination. I believe that it is precisely out of respect for the unique nature of the Shoah, that is the Holocaust, that we must also condemn communist crimes and genocidal killings unconditionally.
It is only when the matter is finally settled in all seriousness with no understatements, that communism can become a monster to be feared, a tragedy that must never be allowed to happen again. This may serve the purpose of uniting Europeans against their genuine common enemy (which is, of course, communism, but also the radical Islamism of today). We must make Europeans understand that communism is a virus, a foreign body in the midst of true European traditions and an enemy of Europe’s civilisation.
The final condemnation of communism should therefore be a political goal the EU must strive for. On the one hand, the nations of Eastern Europe expect a historical judgement which would prevent communism from returning in any form whatsoever to oppress them again, and on the other, western nations should get to know this ideology, be afraid of it and suppress its outbreaks in their respective countries.
Motivated by this line of thinking, last year, together with my late friend Vladimir Bukovsky, we drafted and made public a document calling for a Nuremberg trial of communism, a trial whose value would be not only historical but political and moral. Condemnation of crimes perpetrated in the name of communist ideology is a necessary step required by civil and moral conscience of people living in the free world. Our collective conscience should learn lessons from the unsolicited experiences of Central and Eastern European countries.
However, attempts to reach this goal have long met with a lot of resistance in Europe. The progressive world of culture and the media, in all its various forms, has always supported cultural Marxism. It has refused to equate communism with Nazism, limited its criticism to the so-called real socialism and offered communism a helping hand by presenting it as the ideal of goodness and justice.
This monstrous historical and theoretical lie made it possible to propagate communism in Europe and all over the world. It is now high time to expose it and tell the world the truth, allowing it perhaps to condemn this ideology forever.
The text is published simultaneously with the Polish journal of opinion “Wszystko Co Najważniejsze” as part of the project “We are telling the world about Poland”.

A serious problem and paradox of the modern EU is the fact that, despite constant emphasis on the importance of diversity, it cannot accept the diversity of legal and constitutional systems rooted in the traditions of different countries.

It is only by putting citizens and justice first that we can make the European Green Deal stand the test of time and avoid a multi-speed Europe. Energy transition offers an opportunity for EU member states to develop and exploit their full economic potential.

If it hadn’t been for sovietisation, the Three Seas Initiative would have been created several decades ago.

We need much more time for the differences caused by “the Iron Curtain” to fade away. In this sense, we can still speak of a Europe divided into two blocs.

In Central and Eastern Europe, communism did not so much collapse as simply go bankrupt. While Western countries continued to develop, communist states exhausted their ability to function.