We live in a time of brutalization, in a time of the barbarization of Poland’s domestic politics. The attempt to put a political opponent into custody (the case of Minister Zbigniew Ziobro), a seriously ill man, in an atmosphere of mocking his illness, and to turn that custody into a punishment – that is precisely a striking example of such barbarization.
It has been just over a century since Artur Górski’s book Ku czemu Polska szła (1917) first appeared – an extraordinary essay about Poland that became an absolute bestseller in the Second Polish Republic. It told the story of the various forces that tore the Commonwealth apart at times and at other times gave it the strength to endure despite the odds. What bound our homeland together, what gave it the strength to resist evil, were values. “Thus, both in republicanism within and in Christian politics without,” wrote Górski, “it was ultimately about defending a certain way of life and of the human being, founded, as we saw in Kochanowski, on one’s own responsibility before God and before the fatherland’s laws, accepted voluntarily,”. The strength of Poland, then, lay in the fact that, grounded in Christian values, it stood for freedom and human dignity, and it always put respect for life and human dignity first. This is how we differed from the barbarian hordes from the East: we understood all these values and remained faithful to the principles that followed from them – we respected human life, cared for honor, treated women, the weak, the elderly, and the sick with courtesy. Even toward the enemy we behaved differently than he did. We observed those chivalric rules even during World War II.
We told ourselves, “We cannot be like them,” meaning the Germans or the Soviets, who often behaved like beasts stripped of human instincts. Thus we were not driven by a feeling of savage, barbaric revenge. General Władysław Anders taught his soldiers that. We took revenge on the enemy in nobly conducted combat – eye to eye, face to face. Not by impaling the enemy on a stake, Cossack-style or Tatar-style.
Today, unfortunately, we live in a time of brutalization, in a time of the barbarization of Poland’s domestic politics. The attempt to put a political opponent into custody (the case of Minister Zbigniew Ziobro), a seriously ill man, in an atmosphere of mocking his illness, and to turn that custody into a punishment – that is precisely a striking example of such barbarization. “A person suspected of a crime already becomes a criminal,” such statements are uttered in this context, and one’s hair stands on end. For God’s sake, Poland, where are you going?