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Author: Tomasz Kamusella

America embraces imperialism and ditches Europe

In 2025, America abandoned Ukraine and Europe to Russia and chose the imperial past as a future. It is a turning point. Washington nodded eagerly in agreement with Moscow’s insistence on dividing the world into 19th-century-style spheres of influence. AI rapidly replaces hydrocarbons as the main source of wealth and influence. Only states with stockpiles of nuclear weapons remain genuinely sovereign.

January 23, 2026 - Tomasz Kamusella

Krupp fuels far-right narratives in Germany

In the north-eastern German city of Greifswald, the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg’s minimal acknowledgment of its patron's crimes against humanity, committed during the Second World War, indirectly feeds into the political climate that facilitates the meteoric rise of the far-right AfD party. This calculated institutional forgetfulness nurtures extremist revisionism, highlighting the crucial intersection of memory politics and momentous political shifts in contemporary Germany.

December 18, 2025 - Tomasz Kamusella

The global AI race and infrastructure weaponization

The scramble for ever-more efficient Large Language Models (LLMs) is today’s new arms race. In the wake of Washington’s abandonment of global leadership and the rules-based international order, this race blurs the line between cold and hot confrontation in the new 21st-century world of three continental blocs. This race is a sign of the ongoing weaponization of all extant and new infrastructure, increasingly harnessed for warfare, be it hot, cold or hybrid. As a result, it is harder than ever to ascertain what peace means nowadays.

July 11, 2025 - Tomasz Kamusella

The Holocaust and scripts in Europe: writing on the wall?  

In today’s Europe hardly anyone gives a second thought to the letters people use to write, as they are almost invariably from the Latin alphabet. This is followed by the use of Cyrillic in Bulgaria and Ukraine, and the Greek alphabet in Cyprus and Greece. Yet, until the Holocaust, Hebrew was the continent’s third-largest script by number of users.

April 18, 2025 - Tomasz Kamusella

Polish language and nation: a rather recent pairing

Standing fast by Poland’s national “master narrative”, the country’s schools teach that the Polish nation, defined as all the speakers of the Polish language, is a millennium old. Yet, this pairing of the Polish nation and language dates back only to the late 19th century.

In Polish popular opinion, the view that the Polish nation consists of all the speakers of the Polish language is not controversial. Hence, the Polish speech community is unreflectively equated with the Polish nation. In turn, all the territories where speakers of Polish reside compactly are deemed to rightfully constitute the Polish nation-state. 

February 28, 2025 - Tomasz Kamusella

From Poland-Lithuania to science fiction

Science fiction is a genre that aspires to predict the human future through the lens of expected technological progress. Few realize that it emerged from the tragic experience of Poland-Lithuania’s Jewish community during the dark 20th century.

December 13, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

China, Iran and Russia: a curious alliance?

Many have expressed surprise at the emerging alliance of Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, which are three starkly different regimes. Do they have anything in common apart from authoritarianism? It is all too rarely noticed that above all China, Iran and Russia are the world’s sole surviving land empires.

October 31, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

Democracy or autocracy: what is the choice about?

After the fall of communism, democracy seemed to have won the day all over the world. Thirty years later, autocracy have steadily replaced democratic regimes and is on the rise in Western Europe and the United States, where democracy originated. Many naively believed that autocracy and democracy are mere labels, a choice that would not substantially impact our day-to-day lives.

August 12, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

Russia won the propaganda war in Barcelona

Following Russia’s inexcusable invasion of peaceful Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian flags, ribbons and other signs of solidarity with this country under attack have been proudly displayed across democratic Europe. Shockingly, they are absent in Barcelona. Instead, quite open public support is lavished on neo-imperialist Russia.

June 10, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

Empire or democracy

Democracy and imperialism are mutually exclusive. No empire was, is or can be democratic. The British Empire was not, the imperial People’s Republic of China is not, nor will imperial Russia become a democracy, even when a self-professed democrat is installed at its helm. The necessary precondition of democratization in an empire is decolonization.

In February 2024, the death (or rather, extrajudicial killing) of the leading Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny sent shock waves across the democratic world. It could have been a subdued affair, as in the case of the Chinese 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Beijing arrested him on trumped up charges in 2008 and withheld medical care, leading to the dissident’s premature death in 2017. The Chinese authorities did not want to turn Liu Xiaobo into a martyr for democracy. Hence, he was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. No grave means no pilgrimage site.

April 11, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

Russia: weaponizing democracy to better fight the West

Russia ditched democracy as not fit for the country’s needs. As a result, the Kremlin identified elections and relatively brief terms of office as the system’s weak points. Since the 2010s, Moscow has learned how to use the openness of the internet and democracy for destabilizing the West. It costs little and brings huge returns. The Kremlin has successfully weaponized democracy for attacking Europe and North America.

April 3, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

Antisemitism: the foundation of the Polish nation?

The modern Polish nation was ultimately forged out of a union between former Poland-Lithuania’s nobility and Slavophone Catholic peasants. This process of creating ethnic Poles was anything but easy, with antisemitism often used as a means of overcoming the estate chasm between nobles and peasantry.

January 17, 2024 - Tomasz Kamusella

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