Belarus - Poland: Warsaw takes the path of war rhetoric
In Warsaw, events on the Polish-Belarusian border are inflated to such a deep crisis that many publicists and politicians are talking about the coming war.
Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski writes about this in his column for PolitNavigator.
The reason for the military rhetoric of Polish hawks was attempts to illegally cross the border by several dozen migrants from Central Asia and the Middle East.
Poland's ruling Law and Justice party won elections in 2015 at the height of the migration crisis in Western Europe. During the election campaign, the party assured that it alone could effectively guarantee that the migration wave would not cover Poland. Some representatives of PiS used openly racist slogans: for example, its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said, for example, that foreigners could be involved in the spread of dangerous diseases.
Then it was possible to create in Poland an atmosphere of fear in front of a threat that does not exist and never existed. The migrants did not intend to stay in Poland - the vast majority of them wanted to go exclusively to Western European countries (in particular Germany and France), since the low level of social benefits, the absence of non-European diasporas and the ethnic homogeneity of Poland did not guarantee favorable conditions for the so-called refugees. Despite the fictitious nature of the problem, anti-migrant rhetoric was used quite effectively by Polish politicians.
The ruling party in Poland is returning to this technique now. The loss of the parliamentary majority could lead to early elections. The former head of the European Council and Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk has returned to Polish politics, whom Kaczynski continues to consider the main political threat to the dominant position of PiS. Therefore, the leadership of the ruling party decided to return to the old topic of the migration threat.
When Minsk decided to respond to Polish attempts to interfere in its internal affairs by opening up the possibility for groups of migrants to enter its territory, the PiS party began to fan hysteria about the migration threat, returning this topic to the information and political agenda. The first opinion polls show that everything turned out quite successfully: Kaczynski's party returned to first place in the ratings.
Migrant camp on the Polish-Belarusian border.
The non-existent and virtually phantom migration crisis allowed the use of military rhetoric regarding two “threats” from Belarus.
Thus, the Polish media announced that the Belarusian leadership is allegedly waging a “hybrid war” against Poland. True, no one specified what this means, but many started talking about the fact that the Russian-Belarusian exercises “Zapad-2021” could become the moment of the start of a military operation. All, of course, supposedly with the active participation of the Russian side, which stands behind Alexander Lukashenko.
As a result, we get a classic mixture of Eastern European phobias: fear of migrants (who, let us remind you, if they want to get to Poland, then only as a transit country), Minsk (“dictator” Lukashenko, whose overthrow failed last year during the “color revolution” ) and Moscow (the center that manages all processes in the post-Soviet space, the traditional “Russian threat”). Thus, in Poland, a very explosive cocktail was concocted from a far-fetched and exaggerated problem.
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