In a piece entitled “In Defense of Poland’s Ruling Party,” Agnieszka Kołakowska, a Polish writer and translator based in Paris, says Poland is often portrayed as a country without due process, democracy, free speech, and a free press.
The country is being described “as suffering under censorship, corruption and nepotism, under the yoke of a far-right government,” she adds.
Meanwhile, none of this is true, Kołakowska asserts.
She asks: “Why are so many in Brussels and the United States intent on making Poles the bad guys of Europe?”
Kołakowska argues in her piece that extremist parties have made inroads in Greece, Austria and Germany, and that the most popular party in Italy is led by “a far-right immigrant-basher.”
In Britain, she claims, “the opposition party is led by an anti-Semitic, hard-line Marxist.”
Kołakowska also asserts that there is “worrying authoritarianism” in Hungary, and that anti-Semitism is “on the rise across the bloc.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, the “liberal left” is “attempting to substitute identity politics for democratic process and to impose censorship (in the name of anti-discrimination),” according to Kołakowska.
“But everyone seems to have an obsession with Poland,” she claims.
She argues that, under the country’s ruling conservatives, “the forgotten poor in the countryside” feel they are better off and safe for the first time since 1989.
Kołakowska also observes that there are no political prisoners in Poland and that people are free to demonstrate in the streets like everywhere else in the European Union.
There is due process and equality before the law, and the universities as well as the courts and media in the country are independent, with no censorship, according to Kołakowska.
“Poles are sick of being branded as unenlightened, primitive, bigoted, nationalistic, anti-Semitic, right-wing extremists just because they don’t think patriotism is a dirty word," the writer insists.
(gs/pk)
Source: politico.eu