A dangerous mix of anti-semitism and “insane nationalism”

What a “frightening and depressing” sight it was to see ordinary Poles marching alongside fascists in this month’s Independence Day parade, said Małgorzata Sikorska in Polityka (Warsaw). The 60,000-strong crowd included schoolchildren, pensioners and parents wheeling pushchairs. Perhaps they just didn’t see the black-hooded youths wearing fascist symbols and carrying banners with such slogans as “pure blood” and “white Europe of brotherly nations”, nor notice the presence of extreme Rightists from Hungary, Slovakia, Italy and Britain (the far-right leader Tommy Robinson was on the march), shouting “sieg heil” and racist slogans. Perhaps they weren’t looking when extremists hit out at female anti-fascist protesters. Alas, it’s far more likely that they saw all these things and that it just didn’t bother them.

The annual march is now seen as a celebration of Poland’s freeing itself from imperial rule at the end of the First World War, said Keno Verseck in Der Spiegel (Hamburg), and its rebirth as a nation. One of the parade’s main sponsors believes that the recent influx of Syrian Muslim refugees into Europe is part of a conspiracy driven by Jewish financiers bent on destroying Europe’s Christian character. (“We want God”, a line from an old Polish religious song, is the march’s new slogan.) The parade, started in the 2000s by the All-polish Youth group, was at first no more than a small gathering of the far-right, but last week the event went mainstream. Instead of treating it as a calamity, as it had done before, state television hailed it as a “big march of patriots” and encouraged Poles to turn out to show their “patriotism”. “A beautiful sight”, Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak called it. And far from restraining those shouting racist and fascist abuse, the police arrested the anti-fascist counter-protesters.

The resurgence of nationalism is no accident, said Maya Vinokour in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). The ruling Law and Justice Party, led by Jarosław Kaczynski, has been pushing Polish politics rightward since its founding in 2001. In a 2005 opinion poll, half of Poles rightly believed that most victims at Auschwitz were Jewish; by 2015, nearly as many thought it was primarily a site of Polish suffering. Tours at Auschwitz, which is in southern Poland, now “present a vision of history centring on Polish trauma” – a revisionist account that is silent about the murderous pogroms Poles carried out against Jews long before the Nazis invaded. Kaczynski encourages Poles to reject any historical account that shows them at fault – we Poles “never have to be ashamed of ourselves”, as he puts it. Still, Polish anti-semitism is today nowhere near as bad as in Hungary, where extremists rally regularly in their thousands and “terrorise” Jews, said Cnaan Liphshiz in The Times of Israel (Jerusalem); nor as in Ukraine, where they attack synagogues. And it was heartening to hear President Andrzej Duda, once seen as Kaczynski’s puppet, publicly denounce the “insane nationalism” and anti-semitism on display last week. These noisy marchers make a big stir, but we must not deceive ourselves into thinking they speak for all Poles.