Today's message by the president on the occasion of the 105th anniversary of the Polish triumph over the Red Army is astonishing and, to put it mildly, is lacking in crucial points with historical fact in the name of ad hoc political presentationism.
First of all, the message that the Bolsheviks were opposed jointly by the Polish Army and Ukrainian forces is in the best grave exaggeration, because, of course, on the Polish side there were actually any troops recognising the sovereignty of the alleged Ukrainian People's Republic, with Petlura as its leader, but they constituted a tiny military margin and of small combat value, and the URL and Petlura itself were ignored by most Ukrainians. Exposing their function in the triumph in the Warszawski conflict as an allegedly equivalent Polish army origin is grotesque and resembles exposing the “Smolensk regiments” under Grunwald in the Polish People's Republic as the predecessor of the russian Army as a hegemon in the Warsaw Pact.
Secondly, if we mention the allies of the Polish Army in the war against the Bolsheviks, we should mention and honor volunteer troops of both Belarusians and whites, anti-bolshevik Russians. They besides by force defended Poland and Christian civilization from the Bolshevik hordes, which first, before moving to the West, murdered old Russia.
And here we come to the 3rd issue, which is based on the false analogy of the historical communicative that the president built, entering the Red Army invasion into a string of "Russian imperialism" attacking Poland repeatedly and now Ukraine. This narrative, however, colloquially speaking, does not hold. 2 examples of triumph already given by president Nawrocki are: Orsza and Kłuszyn in 1 run with Warsaw 1920 do not fit together at all.
The conflict of Orsza in 1514 was not the consequence of the "Russian imperialism" (referentially, Russia was not yet, only Moscow), but of the rivalry between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Moscow about who "gather" all Russian lands (they yet gathered Mosquicini), and the Lithuanian-Polish army was commanded by Duke Konstanty Ostrogski – Orthodox Rusin, the same as most and contemporary Ukrainians, and Russians, but not 1 or the other.
On the another hand, I am the vice-president of the Hetman Żółkiewski at Kłuszyn in 1610 no longer suitable for the stigma of Russian imperialism, due to the fact that it was our offensive action that opened the way for us to occupy the Kremlin, so it is alternatively a symbol of “Polish imperialism” – which, God forbid, we should not be ashamed of, on the contrary, we should be arrogant that we were able to expand. But if both of these examples belong at least to the course of Polish-Russian relations, then the invasion of Bolsheviks is an event of a completely different kind. Lenin is not Catherine II, and Trocki is not Suvorov or Paskiewicz. The Revolutionary Committee in Białystok was headed by indigenous Poles: Marchlewski and Lithuanian nobles Dzierżyński. It was not Russian imperialism that stood in 1920 under Warsaw, but the army of the Red Antichrist, carrying the threat of demolition to all nation, as Polish as well as Russian and any another in the name of the insane utopia of communism. Russia did not endanger us and the planet then, but the ghost of ideology invented by a European, German-speaking Jew.
Prof. Jacek Bartyzel
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