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Author: Piotr Augustyniak

Migrants on the border (of the Polish imagination)

What makes Poles help Ukrainian refugees yet indifferent to the fate of migrants on the Belarusian border? Is this determined solely by the right-wing propaganda, which portrays the Ukrainians in good terms and those in Belarus in essentially bad ones?

The release of Agnieszka Holland’s film The Green Border (Zielona Granica), which depicts the human drama of people pushed across the Polish-Belarusian border and the helplessness of activists willing to help them – helplessness resulting from the specific political decisions of the Polish authorities – has been met with unprecedented heckling and brutal attacks in Poland. The outrage of the country’s highest-ranking politicians from the United Right coalition was clear.

November 16, 2023 - Piotr Augustyniak

Overcoming imperial trauma

Perhaps Poland’s own troubled relationship with Europe and European values, flirtations with quasi-Russian authoritarianism, nationalism and xenophobia, underpinned by aggression, prejudice and contempt – are all symptoms of our unresolved contest with imperial Russia. In other words, we are not Eurosceptic at all. We would truly like to be Europeans, but are restrained by unfinished business with Russia.

News of the Russian invasion of Ukraine caught me off guard in Greece, to where I travelled for a few days of spring and peace, the deficit of both we often find chronic. We are experiencing a seemingly eternal pre-spring, arranged for, by and into variable tones of depression, aggression, despair and sterile dynamism. This is underlined by a repressed impression of pointlessness, sterility, perpetually alternating frost and thawing of the spirit. We anticipate war and an inability to find peace.

July 14, 2022 - Piotr Augustyniak

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