THE KING OF POLAND
August 30, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Poland has hefty historical reasons for the support it has been giving Ukraine since the war began. However, one of those reasons is the proverbial ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. As vulnerable as it is to Russian ambitions, Poland also has a long record of military and imperialist acts against Ukraine.

Beginning as far back as the 1340s, Polish hostilities were repeated in 1430, culminating in 1569 as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth split Ukraine off into the Crown Kingdom of Poland. By 1648, Poles were warring against the Zaporozhians until their uprising was defeated in 1654, at which point Ukraine fell from Polish rule to Russian. Poland re-entered the fight for Ukrainian territory that churned from 1657 through 1686. The First World War saw Poles fighting both with and against Ukrainians, and from then until 1939, the Second Polish Republic aggressively gobbled up much of Ukraine. All this mixed history erupted in 1942 and 1945 when Ukrainian nationalists attacked Poles in what current Polish President Andrzej Duda has said must be “firmly and clearly stated” as ethnic cleansing.

But more of Duda anon.

Russia, the Transcaucasus, the Asian lands, the Baltics, Poland and all of Europe has and will be fundamentally affected by the war in Ukraine. Not only because modern Ukraine was arbitrarily set up as a mass human shield, but also because over the course of the war it has -of necessity- tied the matter of survival to the birth of a new, moral, model of the nation-state ethically integrated into the emerging world. Ukraine’s response has led us to another period of hope for a ‘new man’.

So, there are other battles rolling. This potential new ideal, this new integrity, is certainly being fought by nations which have grown used to unthinking comfort and convenience, or whose trajectory has been along the convenience of alarmingly right-wing authoritarianism. Both models are having their cosmetic artifices exposed by the war –Ukraine’s rebirthing. And they look ridiculous in the light of phosphorus bombs.

As Ukraine’s most practical supporter, Poland will be forced to look deep into the mirror of its own contradictions. In 2015, Duda rose to the presidency on a tide of ethno-religious conservatism, his Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice Party) escorted by the piratical ship of the United Right Coalition. Duda’s party is a constituent member of the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR Party) –formerly the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE)– which is actually a seditiously anti-European force within the European Parliament, and whose idea of ‘reforms’ is fighting against any benevolent principles being enacted. Within Poland itself, Duda has, among many oppressive cases, derided all questioning media, polluted judicial and anti-corruption standards, spearheaded the outlawing of any mention of Polish involvement in World War Two atrocities, and joined the bulwark against Europe-wide migrant quotas and refugee distribution (later exploited in a comic scheme by Belarusian President “Idi” Lukashenko).

Unfortunately, such contortions tend to preclude any human steps forward, and instead always seem to sink into the quicksand of absurdity. Little known outside of Poland is that Duda also formally appointed a King. On November 19, 2016, before thousands of enthusiastic people who’d mustered in Kraków, Jesus Christ was literally coronated, and has since that day been the official King of Poland.