“We want God”, “Great Independent Poland,” “Death to the Enemies of the Fatherland!” “Christ is Poland’s King”, “Deus vult” (Latin for God wills, a battle cry of the Crusaders)these are the principal banners carried in the annual Independence March that is held in Warsaw and also in other cities on 11 November, Independence Day.
Also, in the one two days ago, at the head of the marching column you could see a few white flags sporting the red Jerusalem cross.
Tens of thousands of people, waving tens of thousands of white-and-red national flags young and old, of all walks of life, with whole families take to the streets.
The people participating in the march think of themselves as patriots (the word which in Poland still has positive overtones) paying tribute to the fallen heroes.
To the western media these are Nazis, racists, anti-semites and islamophobes. An abomination for the European Union.
What has positive overtones in Poland (patriotism, faith, family), has negative ones in Western Europe and the other way round. Migrants, LGTBQ and gender mainstreaming is not welcome in the area between the Oder and Bug Rivers. The EU values cannot be farther from Poland’s values and vice versa.
The Independence March denigrated by the Western media was favourably covered by the Polish government and other national media, except for those which are far to the left and very much pro-European. The former shored up the positive aspects of the event, the latter only looked for incidents to blow them out of any proportion and join the chorus of their western counterparts in condemning “fascists” and “white supremacists”.
A thirty-six million nation in the heart of Europe (i.e. with a population approximately the size of Spain’s) is throwing down the gauntlet to the EU establishment and its view of European unity based on cultural and religious indifference and anti-nationalism.
While in France or Belgium Muslims pray openly in the streets, Turkish nationalists stage large rallies waving Turkish flags in the heart of Dutch cities and construct mosques, with empty Christian churches as sad witnesses thereto; Poles pray the rosary on the borders of their countryand march, proudly displaying national emblems and flags, demanding God and rejecting multiculturalism.
At the time when the Soviets were establishing the communist political system in Central Europe someone said (someone ascribed these words to Stalin himself) that communism fits the Polish nation like a saddle fits a cow. Is the attempt to Europeanize Poles another attempt at saddling the cow?
