The Myth of the Immaculate Pantheon. Polish Outrage as a Spectacle of Hypocrisy.

A great article by Jerzy Wójcik, a prominent Polish media leader who helped transform Gazeta Wyborcza into one of Europe's largest digital news platforms and has spent decades leading journalism, civic engagement, and human rights initiatives across Europe. What makes his message especially important is that it comes not from a Ukrainian voice, but from a respected Polish voice that understands both the dangers of russian imperialism and the importance of historical truth.

The Myth of the Immaculate Pantheon. Polish Outrage as a Spectacle of Hypocrisy.

A media storm has broken out over Polish-Ukrainian relations once again. Kyiv’s recent decisions in the field of memory politics have provoked a familiar, ritual spectacle of moral outrage in Warsaw. From newspaper columns, social media feeds and television studios pours a stream of lectures, deep sighs over “Ukrainian ingratitude” and warnings about the “lost capital of trust”. The tone never changes. Polish commentators cast themselves as the only righteous and faultless teachers of history and morality, trying from the safety of a Warsaw desk to shape the identity of a country fighting for physical survival. This hysteria is not just detached from the realities of total war. It reeks of national hypocrisy and a complete absence of pragmatism.

The myth of “ammunition for radicals” and the publicist’s alibi.

One of the most repeated arguments in this dispute is supposed concern for the fate of Ukrainian migrants and refugees in Poland. Commentators, faces full of feigned worry, insist that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decisions “give ammunition” to Polish nationalists – the Confederation, Grzegorz Braun’s circle, the radical wing of Law and Justice. This is either extreme naivety or, more likely, pure cynicism.

Poland’s far-right movements need no impulse, pretext or invitation from Kyiv to attack Ukraine or to question the presence of refugees. For these formations, hostility toward systematic support for their eastern neighbor is a permanent, unchanging plank of the political program and a reliable source of electoral fuel. The goal is fixed. Only the narrative adapts. If the Ukrainian authorities handed them no historical pretext, Polish radicals would attack with equal energy on economic grounds, on disputes over Ukrainian grain, on alleged social privileges, on the labor market, on imaginary cultural threats. They will use anything, because that is what they build their political capital on.

So the alarm raised by these publicists – that “the ghost of the perpetrators will now haunt us” – works as a convenient smokescreen. It lets them write harsh, slanderous commentary under the cover of “concern for the relationship”, when in reality they are either being driven by the radical narrative or simply scoring points in an internal party game. And blaming Ukrainian politicians for the fact that a Polish nationalist might attack a Ukrainian worker or student on a street in Warsaw or Wrocław is both an intellectual and a moral absurdity. Polish radicals are responsible for their own aggression. No one else is. Shifting that responsibility onto Kyiv is an attempt to whitewash one’s own homegrown extremism.

The European Union is not a club for historical purity.

The second pillar of Polish indignation is paternalistic blackmail: “Ukraine will not enter the European Union with Bandera.” Hearing these words from Polish politicians and commentators, it is hard to miss the crushing asymmetry and the double standard. To demand that the Ukrainian state assemble a flawless pantheon of heroes, perfectly tailored to Polish sensibilities, as the price of admission to European structures – when we ourselves walked in carrying an enormous load of our own dark and controversial figures – is hypocrisy, plain and simple.

Polish historical policy of recent decades offers far too much evidence of how selectively we apply the idea of moral purity to national heroes:

Roman Dmowski. The chief architect of Polish nationalism, whose deep and systematic antisemitism laid the foundation of his political thought, has his monument, his roundabout and his railway station in Warsaw today. His figure is part of an official, state-sponsored cult. In 2004 no one in Brussels, Paris or Berlin thought to block Poland’s accession because Dmowski sat in the pantheon of the fathers of independence, even though his views plainly clashed with postwar European values.

The Holy Cross Brigade of the NSZ. This formation, which in the final months of the Second World War entered into open tactical collaboration with the Third Reich and retreated west under the protection and logistical support of the Wehrmacht, later received official commemoration, a place at state ceremonies and veteran status in the Third Polish Republic.

The Cursed Soldiers. The cult on which the entire modern identity of the Polish right is built includes figures such as Romuald Rajs, “Bury”, responsible for the brutal pacification of Orthodox, Belarusian villages in Podlasie and for the killing of civilians, including women and children. To our Belarusian neighbors he is plainly a criminal. Yet the Polish state has no intention of disowning his mythology under outside pressure.

Józef Piłsudski and the gamble at Riga. Marshal Piłsudski, a national icon, signed the Peace of Riga with the Bolsheviks in 1921, which in effect meant the betrayal and abandonment of Ukraine’s ally Symon Petliura. Poland handed Ukraine over to the Soviets for slaughter and opened the road to the later nightmare of the Holodomor. Piłsudski personally apologized to Ukrainian officers in the internment camp at Kalisz – “I am sorry, gentlemen, I am very sorry, it was not supposed to be like this” – but the historical fact stands regardless.

The European Union has never been a club for historical hygiene, with a vetting committee that checks the biographies of street patrons for moral purity before admission. If that were the criterion, the Union today would be a row of empty chairs. Italy has never fully reckoned with the legacy of fascism. The colonial shadow still lingers over France. Spain still wrestles with the ghosts of Francoism, and Croatia carries the memory of the Ustaše. Every one of these countries lives with its own historical monsters, and confronts them in its own way and at its own pace. To impose such an ultimatum on Ukraine at the very moment it is fighting for its existence is a neocolonial attempt to dictate to a sovereign state how it should remember its past.

War realism versus moralizing from a safe couch.

Polish publicists show a total lack of realism about war. Ukraine is fighting a total war in which the survival of its nation, its culture and its borders is at stake. Facing a threat like that, a country desperately needs founding myths, symbols of uncompromising resistance and of the fight to the very end. In Ukrainian public consciousness the UPA tradition today functions almost exclusively as a symbol of the unyielding struggle against Moscow, not as a reference to the anti-Polish ethnic cleansing in Volhynia. When today’s Ukrainians invoke these slogans, they are thinking about the soldiers defending Bakhmut or Kharkiv, not about events from more than eighty years ago.

The behavior of Polish commentators who demand that Kyiv, in the middle of an existential war, tailor its historical policy perfectly to the sensibilities of Warsaw is infantile. Do the recent decisions of the Zelensky administration make it easier for the Polish side to argue for and sustain support for Ukraine on the international stage? Of course not. They create needless tension and complicate the diplomatic picture. But they are Ukraine’s own decisions, made with its internal front and the morale of its army in mind. Adult, mature diplomacy means navigating conditions like these and pursuing your own interests despite the differences – not sulking in public because a neighbor has failed to follow your historical script.

A pragmatic compass: we help people, not ideologies.

Through all this fog of inflated slogans, moral blackmail and historical score-settling, the case has to be put plainly and brought down to the basic, concrete level. My final summary, and the foundation of this whole argument, comes down to one simple statement: we help people because they are in need, and everything else will change many times over.

We support Ukraine and take in refugees not because we endorse every decree signed by President Zelensky, every resolution of that parliament or every line of the narrative produced by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. We do not help ideologies, flags or political constructs. We help real people fleeing Russian bombs who need a safe roof over their heads. This is a basic humanitarian duty, and it cannot be held hostage to historical negotiations.

At the same time, from a purely pragmatic, geopolitical point of view, supporting Ukraine is in our deepest security interest. Every destroyed Russian tank and every repelled assault on the Donetsk front pushes the threat further from Poland’s borders. These are facts and hard realities, not feel-good stories about historical reconciliation.

Everything else – the official declarations of politicians, tactical alliances, public moods and certainly the interpretations of events from decades ago – is fluid. It will shift, churn and change many more times over the coming decades. To make our help for human beings, and the strategic interest of our own country, conditional on whether Kyiv fits neatly into Polish historical expectations is the height of irresponsibility and political immaturity. It is time to drop the role of moral reviewer and start acting on facts and basic decency.