Ignoring the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw is simply the most recent questionable choice by Polish authorities, desperate to rewrite WWII historical past to raised match trendy political imperatives. Nonetheless, patriotism it isn’t.
Items of the Purple Military and the First Polish Military entered Warsaw on January 17, 1945, ending greater than 5 years of German occupation. Seventy-five years after the actual fact, nonetheless, Warsaw is selecting to not honor its liberators.
Fairly the other, in truth: trendy Polish authorities insist that their nation was a purely harmless sufferer of each Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, asserting their ethical equivalence.
This type of historic revisionism is clearly politically motivated. Whereas the Polish Individuals’s Republic (1947-1989) was a shopper of the Soviet Union in the course of the Chilly Struggle, the Third Polish Republic hastened to change into a vassal of the US upon its conclusion, becoming a member of NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004.
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Within the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US Protection Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bluntly pointed to assist from “New Europe” international locations like Poland as a approach to dismiss objections from France or Germany. Whereas Warsaw might bask on this adulation from Washington, its relations with each the EU and Russia have been extra strained consequently.
Revising WWII historical past is of explicit concern to Moscow. Trendy Russia has dismantled a lot of the Soviet Union’s legacy, however refuses – with good motive – to dishonor the practically 27 million lifeless within the conflict to defeat Hitler.
Think about if France selected to dig up the graves of US troops that landed in Normandy on D-Day due to a modern-day political spat with Washington, and also you’ll perceive why Russians are fuming at Poland’s revisionism and elimination of monuments to Soviet liberators.
Simply final month, Moscow and Warsaw exchanged diplomatic demarches after Russian President Vladimir Putin described interwar Polish diplomat Jozef Lipski as an anti-Semite and a Hitler sympathizer. But, there isn’t a denying that Lipski was each; or that Poland was the primary nation to signal a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1934; or that Warsaw was an keen participant within the 1938 partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich.
“The woman doth protest an excessive amount of, methinks,” as Shakespeare would put it.
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Remember the fact that Russia and Poland have a historical past of mutual rivalry going again centuries. Russia celebrates the 1612 victory over Polish invaders as a nationwide vacation, whereas Polish armed forces feast on the anniversary of their 1920 victory over Soviet cavalry beneath Warsaw.
But there’s extra to this than mere historic grievances. Though Prussia and the Austrian Empire additionally took half in partitioning Poland and wiping it off the map by 1795, trendy Polish nationalism is nearly solely Russophobic. Whereas there’s romantic discuss in Poland in regards to the “Kresy” (borderlands) misplaced to the Soviets after WWII, nobody in Warsaw would counsel giving East Prussia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg or Silesia again to NATO ally Germany, or reclaiming Wilno (Vilnius) from one other NATO ally, Lithuania — a lot much less lay declare to present-day Western Ukraine.
Worse but, Poles who protest this sort of revisionism, or dare say a sort phrase about something involving the Soviet liberators or the Individuals’s Republic, appear to get threatened into silence by the institution decided to impose its personal model of historical past.
Warsaw went as far as to ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the September commemoration of the 1939 Nazi invasion, however refused to ask Putin to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. Honoring Germany this manner appears absurd, contemplating that Nazi plans for a “thousand-year Reich” within the east concerned exterminating the Poles in a lot the identical approach because the Jews.
Russian critics have painted Polish efforts as makes an attempt to rehabilitate “fascism.” Whereas there isn’t a denying that many NATO and EU international locations overtly domesticate nationalistic tendencies nowadays – Croatia and the Baltic States come to thoughts – and that Germany itself has “laundered” a lot of its personal WWII legacy by NATO operations within the Balkans and elsewhere, on the finish of the day I respectfully disagree. To this historian, the habits of Polish authorities appears to be like extra like shameful sycophancy in direction of their latest overlords.
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Think about the truth that the Polish authorities has campaigned to have the US arrange a everlasting base on its territory, even proposing to name it “Fort Trump” in an try and flatter the sitting US president’s ego.
In the meantime, by tearing down monuments to Soviet “occupiers,” in addition they spit on the reminiscence of tens of 1000’s of Poles who fought and died alongside the Purple Military to free their homeland from Nazi Germany.
There may be nationalism, after which there’s patriotism, however that is clearly neither.
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