Memory,Party Politics,and Post-Transition Space: The Case of Poland

Past as the Language of Politics

Participants and observers of the Polish political scene perceive it as a space of intense competition. ²¹ This competition concerns parties’ temporal orientation and their judgment of communism, more so than it concerns their programmatic differences. One may go as far as to claim that the past organizes Polish political space, so much so, that conflict between PiS and PO—a split post-Solidarity camp, and a ruling and an opposing party—is characterized, and experienced, as “tribal warfare.” ²² This tribal warfare concerns the ruling and opposing parties, but also the third major player, the former communist party—the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). ²³ A coalition between PiS and PO is unimaginable; a coalition between PiS and SLD is now unthinkable. In the context of only mild programmatic differentiation, this is remarkable indeed.

My respondents described the past deployed in politics using a variety of always-bellicose metaphors: a “bomb,” a “flail,” a “hammer,” a “stick,” a “shield,” a “weapon,” a “bogey,” a “cage,” a “slur,” a “stigma,” a “threat,” an “excuse,” and a way to “compromise,” “discredit,” “mobilize,” “sort/divide,” “deny voice,” “create an enemy,” “humiliate,” “erase.” The mildest description saw the past as “used too often.” Nor is the power of past- or memory-talk diminishing. All respondents agree that the past, or more specifically anti-communism, becomes more valuable as a political resource the more time passes since transition. ²⁴

In this section, I show the productivity of memory language in Poland. I first divide the political field and explain the parties’ programmatic and political identities. I do this to support my contention that parties’ programmatic positions are not differentiated sharply. I then show how parties use their approach to temporality and judgment to fashion enduring political distinctions. This dynamic context matters, for although I devote the rest to my paper to PiS, the party does not operate in isolation. Rather, it creates itself discursively, that is, in relation to others. ²⁵ PiS shapes the field of political competition and establishes its political distinction, while it constitutes its adversaries out of the existing players.

I concentrate on major parties only, especially those who have had electoral successes. There are many smaller parties in Poland, but they can be fitted into general clusters of affinity. ²⁶ PiS is in power at the time of writing; it was in government previously from 2005 to 2007 and held the presidency from 2005 to 2010. PO was in government since 2007, and held the presidency between 2010 and 2015. ²⁷ SLD held power from 1993 to 1997, and again from 2001 to 2005; it held presidency from 1995 to 2005. Between 1997 and 2001, government was led by a loosely understood predecessor to both PiS and PO—Electoral Action Solidarity. ²⁸

Figure 1 divides the field according to parties’ main programmatic preoccupations gleaned in their programs. As mentioned before, the parties do not differ greatly in terms of state and market, although PO is friendlier to the market than either PiS or SLD. The parties differ somewhat in their approach to the world, in that all want to engage with it, but PiS is the more suspicious than others. The most salient programmatic difference locates in the way the parties approach the Church, civil liberties and the state.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1

Political field divided by issues

PiS resembles a Christian-Democratic party. ²⁹ It is socially conservative, friendly to the Church, skeptical of the EU, and pro-local market. I call their approach to the EU cool in that they derive political advantage by presenting the EU as threatening and styling themselves as defenders against those threats. These discursive maneuvers should not be confused with an actual desire to exit the EU or stop participating in its structures. PiS is on the record as not wanting to join the Euro zone, ³⁰ but given the zone’s recent difficulties, this is hardly surprising. PiS declared a robust social agenda—in that it paid attention to poverty and unemployment—but this was driven by its social conservatism and concern for what they termed “crisis of family.” Although not a welfarist party, ³¹ it promotes a strong executive and an efficient state. ³²

PO may be characterized as neoliberal. It seeks to limit the state and promote market solutions to economic and social problems. ³³ It is mildly less friendly to the Church than PiS and mildly less socially conservative. ³⁴ It paints itself as open (and contrasts this openness to PiS’s narrowness), but this is mostly declarative. While in office, PO made few moves to limit the church’s influence on policy and/or expand civil liberties. For instance PO has not challenged religious instruction in schools, or the most limited reproductive rights in Europe. ³⁵ Its latest electoral platform includes limits on state financing for the Church, but this is a recent development. ³⁶ It declared support for same-sex partnerships, only to vote against them. ³⁷ In keeping with its image of openness, the party is staunchly pro-EU, at the level of both declarations and actions. ³⁸

SLD is close to a liberal party—friendly to business, firmly committed to the EU, and, more than PO or PiS, suspicious of the Church. Their commitment to civil liberties is ambiguous: strong in the declarative sense, and cautious in terms of policy action. Thus, the party voted for legalization of same sex partnerships in 2013, ³⁹ but did not undo restrictive abortion regulation. ⁴⁰ This is true even though its program and historical narrative abound with references to women’s rights. ⁴¹ The current program talks of extensive state intervention to ensure economic well-being of citizens, but these concerns are always mitigated by the need to balance budgets. ⁴² President Kwaśniewski explained in our interview that it is the responsibility of an individual to grow and realize her aims. The role of the state is to prevent discrimination and soften the most nefarious edges of market discipline. ⁴³

This brief foray into programmatic identities—or the ways in which parties specify and propose to solve issues facing the polity—shows that parties locate on the right side of the political spectrum and differ mostly in terms of their approach to civil rights. SLD is definitionally liberal, PO is open in a declarative sense, and PiS is the most conservative. And yet, this conservative party got 39.7 percent of the popular vote from a population of which 76 percent favors in vitro fertilization, ⁴⁴ 79 percent sees markets as serving only the rich, ⁴⁵ and 82 percent disapproves of priests commenting on elections. ⁴⁶ And yet, this party with only mild programmatic differences from its competitors is in a state of “tribal war” with them.

The perception of strong—categorical even—political distinctions, made visible in references to tribal war and metaphors I listed in the opening of this section, suggests that party competition occurs on a different register than that of programmatic identities. This competition occurs at the level of political identities, which parties fashion by orienting themselves temporally and by narrating and judging communism.

All major players narrate the past, and all of them condemn communism; but the narration of the past and the content of their judgment differ. These two moves allow the parties to constitute the field of competition predicated on the past-talk and to constitute enduring identities in relation to each other (for visual representation, see Figure 2). PiS is definitionally tuned to the past and paints communism as anti-Polish; PO is nominally for the present but it narrates communism as immoral because it is not free and it is not pro-market; and SLD is the party of the present that turns to the past strategically to selectively repudiate Stalinism as evil and foreign. Parties that do not condemn communism explicitly ⁴⁷ —Agrarian Party (PSL), Together (R), or Your Movement (TR)—are not dominant players. Some have been kingmakers—PSL was part of three ruling coalitions, with SLD and PO - none have ever been king.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2

Political field divided by judgment of communism and temporal orientation

PiS—to whom I devote more attention below—defines the political problem of the country, and their own role in solving that problem, in terms of persisting communism. The party claims the system, which they consider (and narrate as) the most evil and inimical to Polishness, is not yet over in Poland. It is perpetuated by communists and their current day party, SLD, shielded in its position of power by former dissidents, and now allies, PO. This way of narrating the story gives PiS access to the language of existential crisis—nationally inimical forces are again, or still, occupying the state—and it polarizes the field. It shortens the normative distance between PiS’s adversaries—on PiS’s telling PO and SLD become as if one—and extends the distance between those now combined adversaries and PiS, the nation’s savior (see Figure 3). ⁴⁸ This polarizing move injects a blaming dynamic, which no contender can ignore. Both SLD and PO need to counter PiS’s moves, and in doing so, they enter PiS’s game.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3

PiS’s discursive maneuvers and roles

PO is oriented to the present nominally, but it relies on past-talk politically. On the one hand, the party uses communist economic ineffectiveness to justify the speed and bent of its present policies; on the other hand, it uses the regime’s end to cast PiS as irrational (because PiS denies the thoroughness of transition—a self-evident fact for PO). ⁴⁹ Rather than substantiating communist economic ineptness, or better yet explaining and justifying the cost of the market reform and state retrenchment, PO narrates communism as immoral because it is not-market. ⁵⁰ The past morally inflected ineptness, and present-day necessity of change, emerge rhetorically rather than substantively. As do the roles of the players: PO’s mode of narrating communism allows it to occupy a rational middle position between the irrational PiS, and immorally inefficient SLD (see Figure 4). ⁵¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4

PO’s discursive maneuvers and roles

SLD is turned to the present substantively, and to the past instrumentally. The party styles itself as modern and present-day oriented, but it is also—and this is new for the party—very deliberate in treating the past as a resource. The party uses history to undermine PiS’s strategy to have them cast as automatically evil and foreign, and to neutralize PO’s attempts to paint them as inept. In narrating their past, SLD repudiates communism, while simultaneously retrieving some of its positives. This gives them purchase on a political identity predicated on being a party of the supposed “left,” opposing thus constituted “right” of PO and PiS. As I showed above, the reference to leftism is a function of the story telling, and not so much the party’s platform. Their constitutive outside lies in the past, and exclusionary post-Solidarity parties (see Figure 5). ⁵²

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5

SLD’s discursive maneuvers and roles

The three main participants of the Polish political scene narrate the past for political ends. They turn to the past, or to communism, and the various ways in which they consider it to be evil, and in doing so they fashion enduring political identities for themselves and their adversaries. Turning to the past establishes anti-communism as the organizing paradigm of the political field; establishing one’s anti-communist credentials distinguishes the clusters from each other, and specifies their relations. All in all, it establishes the past as the language of politics.

Past as a Strategy of Politics

Until now I have argued that the past is the language of political competition in Poland. I have shown that the main political players differ mildly programmatically, and yet they perceive the field of politics as a field of warfare. I have shown that they fashion that field and their categorical distinctions within it by orienting themselves temporally and by narrating and evaluating communism. I have also asserted that the past as the language of politics is a particular achievement of the party that has just won power. In this section, I turn to that party to substantiate my claims about its achievement. In paying close attention to the party’s program “Health, Work, Family: PiS 2014 Program” ⁵³ (in this section), as well as the affiliated elites’ narrative of communist history (in the next section), I demonstrate PiS’s moves to the past and to anti-communism. These moves involve the denial of transition and the personalizing (or ontologizing) of communist affiliation. They ensure that political adversaries emerge as enemies, not only of PiS, but of the nation itself. This aggressive stance locks the game: It places PiS’s adversaries in a defensive position, no matter the substance of the accusation. This powerful discursive construction rests on an understanding of communism as immanently anti-Polish and therefore irremediably evil. I trace the narrative that supports this judgment in the final section of this paper.

I engage with two types of sources. I first look to the most recent party platform in which the party presents itself to the electorate. I undertake deep textual analysis, paying attention to the way the party narrates itself, the way it diagnoses the polity, and the way it assigns roles to its adversaries. The narrative procedures and underlying assumptions that I specify are not new—they have appeared in the lustration and decommunization campaigns of PiS’s predecessors and PiS itself, ⁵⁴ and they undergirded the explicit calls to end the allegedly communist-captured Third Republic ⁵⁵ —but their discursive force and dynamic potential emerge only in the process of such deep reading. I supplement my exegesis of the party’s program with conversations with its politicians and intellectuals. I show that patterns of perceiving reality and constituting political difference as a function of personal identity, which I detect in the program, are replicated in the speech patterns of party elites and allies.

PiS’s program begins with seven pages of Values. It invokes human dignity, personal and communal freedom, ⁵⁶ equality (which remains a value even though the concept is marred by a connection with communism ⁵⁷ ), justice, which is reformulated as equality of opportunity in pursuit of material and other goods. This pursuit has to be tempered by respect of morality, the best arbiter of which is a “universal” (Catholic) Church. ⁵⁸ Community is a value. Its collective structure—the nation—is understood as “a community of culture, language, historical experience, political tradition, civilizational values, and experienced fate.” ⁵⁹ It is not understood ethnically, but national belonging is inseparable from Christianity. ⁶⁰ The Polish community has two historical enemies—the Nazis and the communists. After the dual occupations of WWII, the communists are said to have violated all basic values and repressed the nation, which continued to resist. Much of that resistance related to the defense of Catholic values. ⁶¹ State is also a value—indeed, given Polish history, it is a supreme value—and needs to be protected. ⁶² It is in urgent need of reform, however. This reform is the party’s top priority. ⁶³

The Values’ section establishes PiS’s programmatic identity as Christian-Democratic-like, but it also begins to signal its preoccupation with communism. More specifically PiS’s values become articulated in a subtle conversation with communism. Thus human dignity is listed both as the primary value and as a value especially abused under “totalitarian” communism. Communism is listed next to Nazism as national historical foe, but only communism is elaborated as especially aggressive to values. Finally the time of Peoples’ Republic is placed in a list of foreign occupations and partitions. This way of presenting values suggests communism as categorically egregious to Polishness, and foreign.

The program becomes more explicitly concerned with communism in its Diagnosis section. In twenty-nine pages of text, the framers propose that the Polish state is weak—unable to reproduce the nation and ensure its economic prosperity—because it has not cleansed itself of communism. In a not-so-subtle way, the program denies the thoroughness of transition, and it names the culprits.

The program explains that after the fall of communism in 1989 it was generally assumed that changes had to concern two institutions: the market and democracy. The state as such was not renewed. The program asserts that the judiciary, bureaucracy, military, security and police forces, as well as bank managers, remain unchanged from communist times. They captured the material spoils of the transition, and they, their social and familial circles, continue to occupy key state positions. ⁶⁴ This was most visible in the process of privatization of industry, most of which is said to have been taken over by the old communist apparatchiks (the SLD and their clients). Crucially, this new elite co-opted former dissidents who are now PiS’s main adversaries—PO. ⁶⁵ Having secured political and economic power, thus joined elites also monopolized the media. On PiS’s telling, the theft of the economic, political, and symbolic resources is constitutive of the post-communist moment in Poland. ⁶⁶ Its second characteristic, which the authors refer to as post-coloniality, ⁶⁷ concerns identity. The new/old elites are loyal to “external forces,” which is evident in their denigration of Polish values and unquestioned adoption of European ones. ⁶⁸ It is also visible in their results: the demographic crisis of the nation and its economic underperformance. ⁶⁹

The Diagnosis section provides a key to understanding PiS’s political strategy and identity. If one were to analytically isolate the beginning of this mutually constitutive process, it lies in the assumption that (a) communism is evil and categorically hostile to Polishness (I will trace and decode this assumption in the next section, but such an understanding was already foreshadowed in the Values section); (b) transition from communism has not happened, or it has been incomplete, because the communists, SLD, captured economic, political, and cultural levers of power. They have (c) co-opted some of the former dissidents, PO, who protect SLD and perpetuate the weak state. What unites the communists and their new allies, apart from the grasping monopoly of power, is their (d) vassalage to foreign, non-Polish powers.

In this way of narrating the current political predicament, communism, anti-Polishness, and foreign servility emerge as a self-reinforcing attitudinal package, one that combines, and through this combination taints, both political adversaries of PiS. It matters little that the hostile elites are now liberal or neo-liberal; the association with communist past stains, while it is reconfirmed as anti-Polish because it is servile to others. It is the assumed evil and foreignness of communism that does the majority of discursive heavy lifting in this construction. Not the totality—the charges would be damning if SLD/PO were said to be servile to British liberalism—but they would not be so saturating. As such, the authors of the program do not spell out the similarity and affinity between SLD and PO: SLD derives from the former communist party and is automatically evil; PO does not purge communists, and therefore becomes an indistinguishable ally of evil. Both are now “understandably” servile to the EU, just as SLD’s predecessor was to the USSR before transition. Linking them suffices to create a single enemy, against whom there is only one savior, the PiS.

In more general terms, these discursive maneuvers turn the political field to the past, or more specifically, by denying transition, they make the past present. And relying on the discursively established evil of communism, they personalize the guilty, and make them into enemies—not only of PiS, but of Poland. This is an effective strategy, which puts adversaries in defensive positions even though no substantive charges have been laid.

This mode of presenting (and solving) the problem was confirmed in my interviews with PiS’s political elites and their allies. ⁷⁰ Wiesław Johann, former Justice of the Constitutional Tribunal, claimed that “some people who presided over courts during Martial Law are still on the bench. The same is true for the prosecutorial staff.” ⁷¹ He explained the danger in that the new cadres learn from the old and adopt the old ways of “keeping the government happy.” ⁷² This makes the then PO government like the communist one in two ways: it protects the old personnel, and it allows the new cadres to be shaped in the image of the old. They are to keep the government happy, rather than maintain judicial independence. PiS Deputy Krzysztof Szczerski made a similar point more directly: “There was no rupture in the continuity . . . ; there was no definitive rejection of the moral foundation of the old [regime].” ⁷³ Rafał Ziemkiewicz, prolific author and contributor to many conservative publications, said that there was no repair of communist legacies. “[There was] a return to the wheel-ruts, or tracks of the PRL.” He waxed poetic, calling it “materiality of memory.” The best example he gave was of the then ruling “mono-party.” ⁷⁴ He was referring to PO as he was invoking the communists.

Antoni Macierewicz, Defense Minister in the current government, the deputy chief of PiS in 2013 (when we talked) relied on all of the discursive moves I identify above. Just as under partitions and during communism, Poland, he felt, was divided. It was inhabited by two communities. One was numerically small but powerful; the other was a “mentally occupied society.” He said: “Groups that implemented this got their claim to legitimacy in the 1990s from belonging in opposition. From the fact that during communism, for a period of time, they were in opposition. Hence they spoke of opposition in positive terms—then. Now, their base is no longer oppositional, on the contrary, they are rooted in the structure of power, including administrative power, and in finance and economic situation. So now they have to legalize [protect] what they own, what they have. So if in the early 1990s Jaruzelski competed with Michnik, ⁷⁵ in the second half of 1990s he became a “man of honour”; and since the day before yesterday, he became a “model Polish patriot.” ⁷⁶ He continued, “The past changes in the direction of approval of communism,” further explaining, “If somebody sees the top of the Palace of Culture and Science daily, ⁷⁷ then Stalin appears approved. If not approved, then at least normalized. Especially as it is allowed in free Poland: since free Poland does not remove it, it must be okay. The greatest criminal retains his monument and the heroes of independence do not.”

Minister Macierewicz moved to discuss the past in general and communist evil in particular, unprompted. He considered the end of communism in Poland a fiction. He charged that this fiction was perpetrated and allowed by former dissidents, now evil’s accomplices, who have captured the state. He wove a powerful narrative in which again—just as under communism—the minority occupied the majority, and the majority entered the catacombs to survive. On his telling, there was no transition, only a change of occupier. His narration was made from the position of the only party that could deliver society from such a dual evil.

The examples above demonstrate PiS’s attempts at using memory-talk to create a “constitutive outside” among current power holders. The method at its most basic involves branding enemies as communists or their direct ideational descendants. This designation does not need explaining—it carries an automatic, transparent, and deadly moral load. In the next section, I explain how communism becomes so productive; in other words, I explain how it becomes so particularly evil.

Past as a Substance of Politics

In the previous section, I showed how PiS presents itself to the electorate and how it assigns roles (identities) to itself and its adversaries. I also showed how it relies on anti-communism, or the assumption that communism is evil and still rules Poland, to cast itself as the only party worthy of rule. In this section, I explain PiS’s assumption. I trace how the milieu of cultural entrepreneurs surrounding the party narrates communism and how, through this narration, it makes communism essentially anti-Polish. ⁷⁸ This section explains why calling someone a communist has such offensive potency in Poland. It also explains how PiS’s reliance on memory-talk transforms the space of political conversation into the space of non-negotiable identity politics.

I claim that PiS assumes that communism is evil, by making it equal to, or worse than, Nazism. It then makes it foreign and imposed. Lastly, it makes it coincidental with Jewishness. The three-step process ensures that communism emerges as inherently (existentially) anti-Polish. ⁷⁹ The procedures employed by PiS’s cultural entrepreneurs to accomplish this involve creating a symmetry of suffering between Poles and Jews, ⁸⁰ and by balancing (Janicka, using a sports analogy, called this process checking ⁸¹ ) of one story with another, so that the latter relativizes and de-emphasizes the former. I trace each step below and emphasize the deployment of such discursive procedures.

To tease out this narrative I rely on a large and richly illustrated publication, called “It All Began in Poland” (2009). The publication was funded by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the European Centre of Solidarity, and the National Centre of Culture—all state, or state-funded, institutions. The book was distributed free of charge. It commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. ⁸² IPN, the main institutional force behind the publication, was not, in 2009, coterminous with PiS and it was not PiS’s ideological outpost. For one, its director is selected through a parliamentary procedure involving all parties. But the organization has a broad past-oriented mandate, with scholarly, educational, prosecutorial, and political-vetting arms, all of which are judgment oriented. Thus, for the purpose of the classification advanced in this work, IPN in its mandate fits PiS ideational makeup. Furthermore, as demonstrated by Friszke, IPN (and the Museum of Warsaw Uprising) attracted many historians who shared PiS’s view of history and politics. ⁸³ I treat IPN as a reflexive milieu weaving the historical narrative undergirding PiS’s vision. ⁸⁴

The narration of communism begins in 1939. On this account, the Polish nation lost independence through German invasion on 1 September followed by the ‘knife in a back’ offensive by the Soviets on 17 September. ⁸⁵ The author calls what happened that September the loss of national independence, the occupation, the “fourth partition.” ⁸⁶ He calls what happened in 1944 the beginning of a second occupation. ⁸⁷ These characterizations historicize the War and subsequent PRL, by harking back to the 1772–1918 loss of statehood. The two events, or moments, become the newest iterations in a long chain of national victimization by foreign treachery and conquest. ⁸⁸ The placement of communists in the line-up of existential foes, a line-up that includes the Nazis, is a first step in making communists emerge as detrimental to Polish national existence.

The placement of WWII in the chain of like events de-exceptionalizes the War. Contrary to all evidence of its uniqueness in world and Polish history, the seminal event now blends into the other occupation, so much so that the period of 1939–1945 and 1944–1956 become as if one. Indeed, they are presented as such. Zbigniew Gluza, a historian, and chief of Memory NGO, Karta, claimed: “the end of the war altered nothing: one occupation changed into another.” ⁸⁹ Jan Żaryn, professor of history, who worked for IPN, working in IPN and one of the authors of “It All Began in Poland,” elaborated and specified, “The key period of the recent Polish history falls between 1939-1956. In that time two totalitarianisms destroyed our national elite. The collective murder, the genocide, created a space into which a new intellectually and morally homogenous generation entered. This generation was socialized to forget national history, to eschew its cultural and institutional continuity, and to reject God, Honour, and Fatherland. . . . Instead it was brought up godless and adoring communism, as it was its principal beneficiary.” ⁹⁰ The quotes combine the periods, but as I will show next, the genocidal appetites are explicitly blamed on only one of the two foes—communism. ⁹¹

The establishment of the hierarchy of moral guilt, which casts communism as worse than Nazism, emerges in the narration. Paweł Wieczorkiewicz, one of the authors of “It All Began in Poland,” a professor of history at Warsaw University until 2009, and a frequent contributor to media debates, who in 2005, on national television, proposed that Poland should have allied itself with Hitler against Stalin, ⁹² describes the two occupations as follows: he blames the Nazis for loss of territory, germanization, which often included mass deportations and expropriations, terror and executions, especially of the intelligentsia, ⁹³ as well as economic exploitation and the concentration camps. ⁹⁴ He does not describe the camps, except to say that Auschwitz was originally designed for Poles. ⁹⁵ At the end of the war the Germans become responsible for planning to exterminate Poles ⁹⁶ and for actually destroying Polish cities. ⁹⁷ All in all, the Germans are presented as enemies, but also as a disciplined (or even civilized) occupying army, even though they are reported as having killed more than five million Poles (this figure is said to include Jews ⁹⁸ ). Comparing the occupying armies, Wieczorkiewicz writes, “the Red Army, in contrast to Wehrmacht, did not observe any rules and procedures.” ⁹⁹

The Soviet forces are also blamed for territorial losses ¹⁰⁰ —but these loses are seen as larger, more enduring, and involving historically Polish lands ¹⁰¹ —mass deportations to gulags, terror, and killings. ¹⁰² We are told that the aim of Soviet policy was to so alter the occupied lands that no return of Poles would be possible. ¹⁰³ Similarly to Żaryn, Wieczorkiewicz uses the word genocide and biological extermination only when referring to the Soviets: ¹⁰⁴ thus, camps to which Poles were sent in Russia were characterized as genocidal, ¹⁰⁵ the Katyń massacre of the Polish officers was named a genocide, ¹⁰⁶ and Stalin was said to envision a biological solution for Poles when he refused to aid Polish forces in the Warsaw uprising. ¹⁰⁷ Wieczorkiewicz claims that “in the final analysis the result of the campaign [defense of Poland in September 1939] was decided by the Soviet invasion.” ¹⁰⁸ In agreement with above, Jarosław Kaczyński, when he headed PiS in opposition, considered communism “the worst current in Polish thought.” ¹⁰⁹

The German occupation does emerge as worse than the Soviet one, but only in reference to Jews. They are mentioned early in the narration, when they begin being moved to the ghettos in 1939. The conditions within the ghettos are declared horrific and the cause of skyrocketing mortality rates. ¹¹⁰ A fuller exploration of Jewish plight begins with a reference to the General East Plan, which assumed germanization, and (unfulfilled) extermination of 80% of Poles. ¹¹¹ It then proceeds to the description of Jedwabne and the 1941 murder of Jewish neighbors by Poles, ¹¹² provoked by (a) gruesome story of torture and murder of a pregnant woman and a priest, perpetrated by the Soviets (the details are recounted), and (b) popular beliefs that Jews were communist-sympathizers. ¹¹³ Third, the narrative moves to the actual extermination of the Jews in the death camps, ¹¹⁴ accompanied by a short reflection that Jews “accepted their fate with resignation.” ¹¹⁵ The story then switches to Poles, whose already weak bonds to the Jews were strained considerably by the draconian penalties for aiding them, but who offered help nonetheless. But there were also opportunists who prayed on Jewish victims—they were condemned by all Polish authority figures (except far right nationalists). Overall, we are told, Poland conducted itself better than most other occupied countries. ¹¹⁶ The narration then moves to describe the “weak and ineffectual” 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and tallies Jewish losses. ¹¹⁷

I recount this narrative paying attention to its structure for two reasons—the narration signals (and buries for now) the connection between communism and Jewishness in the Jedwabne reference; it is also representative of the ways in which Polish Jewish issues are narrated more generally: they are segregated from the collective story, and they proceed in an episodic and stepladder fashion. Every event seems to be coded as a one or a zero, and they have to balance themselves out. Thus, Poles were intended to be exterminated, Jews actually were: balance. Poles murdered Jews, but Jews liked Soviets, who killed Poles: balance. Poles betrayed and robbed Jews, but all authorities condemned it: balance. ¹¹⁸ The discursively established equilibrium hides the inequality of positions and fates.

Once the war with the Nazis ends, communists consolidate power by skillful manipulation and ruthless pacification. They also fight, capture, and kill armed Polish units who continue to fight them into the 1950s. These units, the unquestioned heroes here, are referred to as Condemned Soldiers, condemned as killed and vilified in Soviet propaganda. ¹¹⁹ It is here that the term totalitarian appears and affixes to communism—the Party is said to have monopolized all political, economic, and social institutions and subordinated them to Marxist atheist ideology. ¹²⁰ The party is said to have done so by manipulation and force. Żaryn explains: the “Soviet people” occupied all upper positions of security forces, while Poles were recruited as spies only. ¹²¹ There were 85,000 of those agents and collaborators and they kept files on close to five million Poles. ¹²² By 1956, 300,000 political victims pass through prisons and dungeons of the security forces, and close to 20,500 of them die. ¹²³ I re-create these details to impart the sense of richness of description of postwar terror, a richness that was not present in chapters relating to World War II. ¹²⁴ I also want to bring attention to the Soviet people (a political category) contrasted with Poles (a national or ethnic category). This pairing of confused categories is a second instance, which foreshadows the process of making communism coincide with Jewishness.

The similarities between the foreign occupations—and the fact that they are occupations—are reinforced in the Polish nation’s response to them: on the one hand, heroic, uninterrupted, widespread, organized, and armed struggle for independence lasting from 1939 to 1956; ¹²⁵ on the other, uninterrupted, widespread organized and peaceful (violent only at the behest of the state) struggle for independence, which erupted in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980. ¹²⁶ The national struggles against the foreign occupiers were consistently and steadfastly supported by the Catholic Church—after the elimination of Condemned Soldiers—the only legitimate carrier of the national spirit and moral authority. ¹²⁷ The authors spend considerably more attention narrating the war, followed by the first ten postwar years. This narration establishes communist rule as occupation, and an occupation by a foe worse than Nazis. Both characterizations point to the fact that the foe is foreign and regime imposed. Such casting removes the need for detailed narrating of the state of the economy, societal changes, responses, etc. On the authors’ telling, the nation is the hero. The nation is attacked, the nation resists, and the nation maintains its innocence and purity from hostile foreignness. I now turn to how that hostile foreignness is established.

The difference between the two foreign regimes lies in Polish–Jewish relations. Here is Jan Żaryn:

Meanwhile Polish Jewish relations deteriorated after the war: “the NKVD with the assistance of remaining Jews, is preparing a bloody orgy”—read the AK reports, and later the reports of national underground. In total, up to July 1946, about 250,000 Jews lived in Poland, either having previously concealed themselves in Polish families, or else having arrived from the USSR. Across Poland banditry was spreading; Jews were also among its victims. The tension was aggravated by the complex questions of ownership. At the same time, both the official Jewish organization (the Central Committee of Jews in Poland—“CKZP”) and a significant proportion of Jewish individuals either supported the communist authorities or else simply joined their ranks. Many worked in the UB (where about 40% of management posts were held by communists of Jewish descent) and also in censorship and propaganda, slandering the memory of the PPP, the AK, and deceitfully remaining silent about Soviet massacres (the Katyń massacre was officially ascribed to the Germans). This intensified anti-Semitic attitudes which—with clear support of the UB—could have led to the uncontrolled impulses toward the pogroms. Such was the case, especially in Kielce. On 4 July, 1946, after rumours had spread through the town of a Polish child being kidnapped, riots occurred in which over 40 people died. ¹²⁸

I reproduce this lengthy quote because it unwittingly ¹²⁹ recycles many Polish anti-Semitic tropes and in so doing, ties Jewishness to communism, making both doubly foreign and odious.

First, the report claims the authority to name a Jew. Until now, Jews were made into the collectivity by the Nazi Nuremberg laws, and they were narrated as packed in ghettos, described as passive, murdered. They now become named and counted by representatives of Polish titular majority, regardless of their self-identification. Second, the report establishes the authority to pronounce the truth: AK, or present-day historians, are authorized to speak, and what they claim is presented as facts; Jews made into communists are not authorized, and what they claim is propaganda and slander. Thus, Jews are named, or unmasked, and then they are reported to have survived by passing for Poles, by supporting and/or becoming communists, or by arriving as occupiers. They lose their voice—which is to say, their personhood—as they become coincidental with NKVD readying “bloody orgies.” ¹³⁰ Third, Katyń forest is mentioned and used in two ways: it invokes Polish suffering (see Janicka’s checking, or Zawadzka’s symmetry) and it reinforces the Jew as communist enemy myth: If Jews were communists, and they (self-) evidently were, and if the communists killed the officers, then Jews killed the officers. ¹³¹ Thus, a description of the post-war pogrom in Kielce, perpetrated on Jews by Poles, becomes an opportunity to blame the Jews. ¹³²

It bears repeating that the quote is taken from a publication released for the benefit of Poles and foreigners. Its exclusionary load is entirely invisible to the people who wrote and edited it. My point in reproducing and decoding it is not to impute anti-Semitic views to particular authors, but to elucidate the process, by which elites discursively establish moral guilt and worth and how those judgments become hidden and presented as truth. This process is all the more visible, as it was unintended. This matters methodologically. If widely distributed publication presents the past in ways just described and it produces no reaction, then this absence of reaction suggests that we are observing a taken-for-granted script. Absence of surprise, or rejection, suggests that what the publication presents is seen as uncontroversial and as true. In this sense, the publication is not anecdotal or exceptional, but emblematic of political formation that produces it.

The most salient point of the narration is to make communism essentially anti-Polish. This source of evilness—the existential enmity to the Polish nation—is the party’s foundational belief and a source of its enduring political identity. PiS cultural entrepreneurs establish their foundational belief as truth, by narrating the past so that communism appears equal, and indeed worse, than Nazism. They then make it coincidental with Jewishness, rendering it doubly foreign and hostile. The party then launches this moral weapon against present-day political adversaries, who, on this telling, become unworthy of being members of national community, not to mention worthy of rule.

Conclusion

In an effort to illuminate the results of the most recent election in Poland, I turned attention to the Polish political field. That field, I argued, is constituted by parties who fashion their political distinctiveness—what I called political identities—through the manner in which they orient themselves to temporality and the way in which they judge communism. I conceived their mnemonic relationship as a memory game. The degree to which the past is audible in the memory game depends largely on PiS, because PiS is paradigmatically past-oriented in tone. PO, SLD, and others react to PiS’s moves—indeed they are forced to react since they are rendered existential enemies of the nation—but they do not increase the volume of past-talk voluntarily. After demonstrating the dynamics of the Polish mnemonic game, I shifted gears and explained why a turn to the past could be so productive. After all, one may imagine past-oriented discourses that do not make political adversaries into existential enemies. In Poland they do. To explain this, I conducted a deep reading of PiS programmatic material and analyzed the tropes of its historical assumptions. I showed how PiS ontologizes ideological difference, and how in the process it turns party politics into a highly polarized field of identitarian politics.

PiS increases or decreases the volume of past-talk based on strategic calculations that are external to my analysis. ¹³³ The current political moment and incumbency are its most likely considerations. Thus in 2005, PiS was competing for power with PO, its erstwhile post-Solidarity partner, at the moment in which the incumbent SLD was thoroughly compromised by the Rywin Affair. ¹³⁴ PiS’s main adversary in that contest was another right-of-center party from whom it differed in style. ¹³⁵ PiS solved the problem of mild stylistic differentiation by calling for an end to the “Third Republic”—an invented regime of SLD and its allies, PO, in a move identical to the one I theorized in section one. ¹³⁶ In other words, it turned the volume of memory-talk up. But in 2007, PiS was the incumbent. It competed with PO using a law and order and anti-corruption agenda, not the past. It turned the volume of past talk down and lost. In 2011, it was seeking office shortly after the Smoleńsk plane crash. It was perhaps too much to expect a nostalgically organized party to not capitalize on the catastrophe so very ripe for historicizing. Its messages, however, were muddled: the party program was turned to the past, ¹³⁷ but the campaign was uneven. ¹³⁸ The result was, again, a loss. In 2015, PiS seemed to have learned from the previous elections, and it ran a campaign consistently organized toward the past and toward moral judgment. Returning to the winning strategy of 2005, it identified a threat—persistent communism—and a solution—itself.

My analysis, therefore, does not mean to displace, but to complement, interpretations and explanations of election results, and voter preferences and choices. Particular elections are lost or won based on a variety of interacting factors: from broad institutional variables of world or regional institutions and broad contingent variables of world economic, ecological, or humanitarian crises, to local institutional arrangements and demographic and turn-out patterns and local contingent variables of party resources, strategies, incumbency effects, or the simple need for change. All these factors matter in articulating causal explanations of election results. My analysis contributes to this conversation by identifying a new factor—the mnemonic language of politics and its polarizing effects.