Rape with consent

Many Poles hoped that the obvious and unceremonious trampling of the Polish Constitution and the country’s laws by Donald Tusk’s left-liberal government would be met with condemnation by the West, or at least by those Western actors who defended the “rule of law” in Poland with such fervor at a time when the idea that there was a threat to it was a product of propaganda rather than facts. Unfortunately, those Poles are being sorely disappointed.

 

Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz

Of course, here and there one may come across those who want to distance themselves from it as well as vague remarks such as “breaking the law is not the right way to restore the rule of law.” But the overall tone of the major media outlets – those that reach a mass audience – smacks of Orwellian language.

Installing a dictatorship by a coalition of Polish parties that are members of the European People’s Party and other European parliamentary groups that tend toward the left is called “restoring democracy”. And “restoring democracy” is what justifies the need to break the laws that are considered favorable to Law and Justice (PiS).

The takeover of institutions and accompanying personnel purges have been described by an expert on Polish affairs writing for the French bank Crédit Agricole as “unraveling the vast anti-democratic net that was woven during eight years of PiS governance.”

Meanwhile, the left-liberal media’s Warsaw correspondents explain to their audiences that the quick removal from offices, courts, and even museums and theaters (!) of all those who were promoted there over the past eight years, as well as their replacement by members of parties that narrowly won the last elections, is a necessity. In their eyes, doing so in breach of the regulations, terms of office, and statutory guarantees not only does not violate rule-of-law standards, but is actually restoring the rule of law.

Poland’s de facto state of emergency under left-liberal rule

There are two reasons for this. The first, and simplest, is the colonial instinct, which was revived in the former European empires after the European Union’s eastward expansion. Or perhaps it is not so much a colonial instinct as colonial interests.

All European economies are currently mired in a structural crisis, and Germany, with its ambition to play the role of “Europe’s locomotive” as well as its driver, is stuck in the deepest of crises.

In none of these countries, least of all Germany, are the elites ready to make the slightest admission that they have done anything wrong and to then pursue corrective measures. The only thing they are able to come up with is to inject additional resources into a collapsing system.

German Vice Chancellor for the Economy Robert Habeck, when asked whether the plan to pump multi-billion dollar subsidies into the German economy at the expense of smaller EU countries violates the European Community’s basic principles, gave a very characteristic answer: “You have to look at the European economy as a whole. EU countries do not compete with each other; it is only the EU economy that competes with the Chinese and American economies.”

Leaving aside the obvious megalomania behind this vision of the EU competing with the world’s biggest powers, this statement means that, in the EU’s eyes, the plundering of the economies of Greece, Italy, and Spain in favor of Germany, which was accomplished via the common currency, or the plundering of Poland in favor of Germany, which is now to be carried out by the Tusk government, is something as morally justifiable as the transfer of investment funds from the poorer Subcarpathian and eastern regions of Poland to Warsaw, which was executed by several Polish governments before 2015 in the name of boosting the country’s metropolitan areas.

The Germans consider – and they say this quite openly – that since they drive the economy of the whole continent, their growth and prosperity will translate into the others’ growth and prosperity as well. It is therefore justified, fair, right, and beneficial to inject all the European resources that can be squeezed out of the smaller countries into the German economy.

All the facts and figures which prove in black and white that the “stupid, backward” Poles who rose from the post-Soviet ruins have achieved a fantastic pace of development, and that the German Übermenschen’s times of fantastic prosperity have been exploited to consolidate the systemic stagnation and waste that is ruining both their country as well as the rest of Europe, do not shake this conviction in the slightest.

The German problem with Poland. Even liberals despised Poles

The second reason they are rooting for Tusk’s thuggery is even more important: as I used to say, Poland is a “trendsetter of nations.” For specific historical and social reasons that I have discussed in my books and vlogs, what happens in our country is then repeated in the West. And the West in general is today witnessing the convulsions of liberal democracy.

In fact, this is nothing new: the political system created in the twentieth century is simply undergoing the same developmental phases as previous systems. Such phases are repeated throughout history with a regularity similar to the seasons and the vegetation cycle in nature.

When one system exhausts its capabilities, or when it finds itself unable to cope with technological innovation and its social impact, a new elite is produced. In the case of liberal democracy, this was the bourgeois elite whose strength was public opinion, and whose founding moment in Europe was the campaign for France’s Captain Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted in a desperate effort to maintain the legitimacy of the old aristocratic elite.

The new elite becomes the representative of emancipatory social aspirations and, by realizing them, takes the place of the previous one. It then comes to the conclusion that with its assumption of power and privileges there has been an “end of history” and that things cannot get any better. The elite then ossifies at the top of the social ladder and its members gradually become cretins.

When the elite’s cretinization has become such that the social base no longer believes in its qualifications (and this historical moment has recently occurred in the West, in particular with the financial, migration, and social crises), the people begin to look for some other, better authority, and then the incumbent aristocracy raises the cry that some populists (“Bolsheviks,” “anarchists,” “Jacobins,” “rebellious boors” – never mind the names) are harming the only possible and only correct sanctified world order.

The “enlightened” ones of our time, whom I have come to call the “liberalocracy,” consider themselves to be the only ones entitled to govern states, Europe, international institutions, and everything in general. They have been living for some time in alternating states of dismay – as when Trump, Le Pen, the AfD, or Jarosław Kaczyński gain in strength – and hope, as when they manage to push the aforementioned back once again.

But there is less and less of that hope left now, and it is being said quite openly in Germany that the only way for the establishment to avoid losing power to the AfD is to outlaw it. Similarly, in the United States the decrepit Democrats are now counting on a judicial ban that would prevent Trump from running in the upcoming election.

In a word, the West’s “democratic” elites are becoming increasingly accustomed to the idea that in order to save democracy, they must remain in power by force. This is why they look at Tusk and Poland as a training ground, wondering whether this can succeed.

Donald Tusk’s left-liberal authoritarian revolution: Poles are facing something completely new

Only in this light can we understand the proper, ominous meaning of the words of the Berlin correspondent of the Spanish news website El Indepediente: “A solid Poland with a strengthened democratic experience after having gone through the shadows of illiberalism will be vital for Europe’s future. France and Germany have realized this.”

 

This article was first published in Polish in the Do Rzeczy weekly in January 2024.