POLAND – July 2002

ATTAC HIJACKED

"The concepts of the fatherland, the state, the nation, and first of all patriotism, are under threat. … We declare that defending the economic and political sovereignty of Poland is a necessary condition for membership in our Association. … We stress that ATTAC is a Polish association, which seeks first of all to defend Polish interests, the sovereignty of decisions of the Polish society, Polish culture and tradition as well as Polish property."

The above statement does not originate from a far-right nationalist propaganda outlet. In fact it is a quote from a recent statement by the Polish branch of ATTAC, the supposedly progressive anti-globalisation movement.

Though internationalism is supposed to be a corner-stone of ATTAC, it is clear that its name in Poland has been hijacked by a group of far-right activists, some of them known to anti-fascists for a very long time.

The Polish branch of ATTAC was established in the spring of last year. Soon after its creation, it became apparent it was being infiltrated by the far-right, causing some progressive campaigners like intellectuals Stefan Zgliczynski and Zbigniew Kowalewski, to withdrew from participation even at that early stage.

Among the founding members of ATTAC-Poland were people with a long record of collaboration with publications and organisations of the extreme right. Also, members of ATTAC-Poland’s leadership became editors or regular contributors to Obywatel (The Citizen), a magazine with a clearly extreme right-wing slant.

One founding member of ATTAC-Poland and, at the same time, a regular contributor to Obywatel is Jaroslaw Tomasiewicz. A few years ago, he was active in fascist organisations such as Przelom Narodowy (National Breakthrough) and among nazi skinheads. He has also published articles in the virulently antisemitic magazine, Mysl Narodowa Polska (The Polish National Idea), published by Boleslaw Tejkowski, Poland’s most notorious Polish antisemite and boss of the fascist Polish National Community (Polska Wspolnota Narodowa, PWN) which has been responsible for numerous acts of racist violence in the streets of Polish cities.

Tomasiewicz has also written for other fascist publications like the hardline Krzyzowiec (The Crusader) but most recently his writings have appeared in a new magazine Templum which is linked to Poland’s most active fascist group, Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (National Rebirth of Poland NOP). The NOP is a part of Italian terrorist Roberto Fiore’s International Third Position (ITP).

Tomasiewicz has also collaborated with extreme-right publications abroad, for example, with Perspectives, a magazine founded by former members of the National Front in Britain, and the German extremist bulletin DESG-Inform.

Tomasiewicz is a prolific author who occupies his time spreading ideas inspired by the so-called Third Position and by the west European New Right. Under the guise of building an “anti-system opposition” based on an “alliance of the extreme right and of the extreme left”, he has undertaken ideological and political penetration of left-wing, especially anarchist and ecologist, circles. In addition, attempting to increase his credibility he has succeeded in getting his articles published across the wider political spectrum.

Currently, he is a co-editor of ZaKORZENIEnie (Rootedness) which poses as a forum for the promotion of minority cultures. In fact it promotes the idea of “ethnopluralism”, a term coined by the French New Right around Alain de Benoist and his GRECE think tank. “Ethnopluralism” assumes that each political territory must be “pure”, that is ethnically homogenous. According to ZaKORZENIEnie’s policy statement, an individual does not have the right to change his ethnic or cultural identity without the consent of the ethno-cultural community to which he belongs.

Together with his co-workers, Tomasiewicz regularly contributes to Obywatel whose editorial board includes Maciej Muskat, the chairman of ATTAC-Poland, as well as other founding members of the organisation like Stefan J. Adamski, deputy chairman of its Programming Board. The deputy chair of ATTAC-Poland, Joanna Duda-Gwiazda, and the chairman of its Programme Board, Andrzej Gwiazda, are also among contributors to the magazine which publishes material signed collectively by ATTAC-Poland. This fact, together with the composition of the editorial board and the choice of authors, suggests that Obywatel is a semi-official mouthpiece of the Association.

It appears that many people who write for and read Obywatel are genuinely interested in issues like globalisation and the environment. Nevertheless, side by side with material on anti-globalisation and ecological issues, Obywatel regularly provides space for articles that have a clearly fascist, racist and antisemitic content. Several examples should suffice.

The first issue of Obywatel, published in 2000, began with the cover bearing a motto by Jozef Mackiewicz, a Polish writer and wartime Nazi collaborator, sentenced to death by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), the mainstream resistance organisation in wartime Poland. Mackiewicz, also crops up as a moral and political authority in later editions of Obywatel in articles by Olaf Swolkien, a co-editor of the magazine and chairman of the Jozef Mackiewicz Political Club.

In the first issue of Obywatel, Tomasiewicz’s close aide Remigiusz Okraska, an ex-anarchist, published a favourable review of Szczerbiec (The Sword), an official publication of the NOP and renowned for denying the Holocaust. Consecutive issues of Obywatel carried sympathetic reviews of other extreme-right and antisemitic magazines like Odala (published by Polish supporters of the British nazi David Myatt), Rojalista and Templum.

In one of his articles, Okraska defends French fascist Front National führer Jean Marie Le Pen, claiming that the FN leader has only been labelled a fascist because “he wants to remove the governing establishment from power”. In another article, he waxes enthusiastic about the bombings perpetrated by Ted Kaczynski, the infamous US “Unabomber”. Okraska ends his praise of the American terrorist who, he says, was “acting in defence of a worthy cause”, with the following statement: “Undoubtedly, we will return more than once on the pages of Obywatel to the fate and the message of Kaczynski…for now we can only rejoice in the fact that at least one of our compatriots (the Unabomber’s parents had emigrated from Poland, and he himself proclaimed his Polish identity in his terrorist activities by. booking hotel rooms using the name Conrad Korzeniowski) has proven to be a real man.”

Okraska’s promise was fulfilled in the next issue of Obywatel which contained an excerpt from the Unabomber’s manifesto with the following significant passage: “For our message to reach the population at large and to increase its impact, we were obliged to kill people”.

In another issue of Obywatel, a new idol is introduced to the readers: Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. “Until the very end,” says the magazine, “he conducted himself with dignity, unlike the families of the so-called innocent victims. In this, so-called, democracy, there are no innocent victims because the people govern or, at least, they bear responsibility for the government and its representatives.”

In Obywatel issue number 2/2001, one can find advertisements for books published by Narodowa Scena Rockowa (NSR – National Rock Scene), the most important Polish producer of nazi skinhead records. One of NSR’s publications touted there is Bunt (The Revolt) with the sub-title “A book not only for fascists”. The book, written by Tomasz Szczepanski, alias Barnim Regalica, a former leftist turned nationalist-pagan activist, is a compilation of political fiction short stories, often likened to William Pierce’s Turner Diaries.

In July 2000, Szczepanski was captured on the cover of the weekly Wprost with a group of his supporters giving the Hitler salute. A few months later, a Warsaw court declared that the anti-fascist journalist Marcin Kornak was right to describe Szczepanski’s politics as “chauvinist and antisemitic”.

In Obywatel issue number 2/2001, there is also an interview with Andrzej Gwiazda. Gwiazda. a former deputy leader of the Solidarnosc trade union, is current president of ATTAC-Poland’s Programme Board. In the interview, he makes a typically antisemitic statement suggesting that Jews rule Poland: “When people ask me if there is antisemitism in Poland, I ask them: ‘Just imagine that I go to Israel and I want to be a Minister’. The burst of laughter that follows this question is the best answer.” The same issue publishes a “Declaration” by Obywatel’s editors of demanding a repressive penal policy from the state, including the re-introduction of death penalty.

This article is then followed by an article by Tomasz Gabis, editor of the extreme-right publication Stanczyk. In his own magazine Gabis regularly rants against “the rotten mechanism of parliamentary democracy”, “unmasks” what he calls “the Holocaust religion” and promotes Holocaust denial by quoting the likes of David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Fred Leuchter. Stanczyk is well known for eulogising fascists like Franco, Pinochet and Le Pen.

On the pages of Obywatel, Gabis promotes the political philosophy of the German “conservative-revolutionary” thinker Carl Schmitt. In the same issue, there is, additionally, an article by Marek Glogoczowski, a member of the board of the magazine Wspolnota (The Community) published by the above mentioned Boleslaw Tejkowski of the Polish National Community (PWN).

It is difficult to grasp how this kind of material can be condoned or accepted by a respected international democratic movement for social justice. In December 2001 a letter was written to the Polish and French leadership of ATTAC asking for clarification of their position regarding extreme right infiltration. It was co-signed by representatives of the anti-fascist Never Again Association as well as editors of the national trade union weekly Nowy Tygodnik Popularny and the leading left-wing intellectual review Lewa Noga. The letter has never been answered, apart from personal attacks on its authors on the Polish ATTAC website. Curiously, the authors of the letter were accused of being “Stalinists” and “Trotskyists” at the same time.

In the aftermath of the letter, Remigiusz Okraska resigned from membership of ATTAC, but the overall policy of the association and its link with Obywatel has remained virtually unchanged while Okraska has risen to the position of being Obywatel’s editor-in-chief. If anything the nationalist stance of ATTAC-Poland seems to have hardened, as illustrated by the unequivocal declaration quoted at the beginning of this article.

ATTAC-Poland still has some members coming from the left, for example, activists of Workers’ Democracy (Pracownicza Demokracja), the Polish sister organisation of the British Socialist Workers Party, but any remaining opposition to far-right influence within the movement seems to have been sidelined.

The French leadership of ATTAC has not only never responded to criticisms for allowing right-wing extremists to hijack the ATTAC label in Poland but it continued to pump money into its Polish sister organisation, including paying for a trip to the World Social Forum in Brazil in February 2002.

It remains to be seen how long this unholy alliance will last.

(article published in Searchlight magazine)