The second volume of studies and sketches “Polska. The Middle Kingdom” seems to be a book from another era. Compiled from essays and interviews by people such as Jarosław Wolski, Ariel Drabiński, Piotr Gursztyn, but also professional soldiers such as Colonel Dr. Hab. Juliusz Tym or a conversation with generals: Rajmund Andrzejczak (before his partisan actions before the elections), Tomasz Piotrowski and – finally – Wiesław Kukuła, show how advanced the debate on Polish defense was. Well, it was. The seriousness of the era before December 13, 2023 is striking with the infantile, unreliable and even deceitful approach to Polish security among the dignitaries of the current government. Kukuła’s story seems to be an indescribable Polish defense potential, undescribed and unconscious to the extent that Americans rather than Poles profit from the tradition of Polish resistance to the Third Reich. According to the general, a recently drafted NATO document containing the Operational Concept of the Resistance Movement, intended as the “bible” of unconventional combat and resistance movements in temporarily enemy-occupied areas, is based, among other things, on Polish history.
When you read it:
you can see how many echoes there are, how many references there are to the traditions of Poland or the Baltic countries, for example, the Forest Brothers, the Home Army, resistance movements in the Scandinavian countries, etc., and how the state should prepare itself in this area today.
Elsewhere in the interview, General Kukuła says:
When Poles take a course in the “Green Beret”, the Polish model of the resistance movement is studied and instilled in their minds. In Poland, this is not included in any course. It is a shock that the Americans begin to tell us about the Home Army, and in Poland there is no culture to present the achievements of this movement. Americans have compiled statistics and calculations about how the actions of the Polish Underground State influenced the end of the Second World War and how their actions weakened the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.
This is not the only text in the above-mentioned book that shows how decades of neglect of the Polish defense have been overcome with difficulty and resistance in the past decade. But we must hold on to this book more as a testimony to a previous era than as a voice in the current debate.
An interesting block of text consists of essays and interviews with South Koreans who are treated as representatives of the ‘middle state’. [takiego jak Polska – red.] on the other side of the world.”
1. Meanwhile Nowadays, cooperation with the Koreans is under discussionbecause you have to trade with Germany and not buy modern weapons from proven American partners.
2. Then the Homeland Defense Bill was implemented, Today, swamps are developing among Tusk’s PR specialists in the easte, which will cost only five times as much as the dam on the Belarusian border, although the Kosiniak-Kamysz wetlands are intended to hold back the Russian army, not subversive immigrant groups.
3. We don’t know who will finance these swamps – it should have been the European Union, as Tusk assured, but of course that was not true.
4. The Citizen Platform institution already reports participation in the German Iron Dome over Europe, while this dome does not yet exist on paper.
5. European liberals, unlike Trump, will not respond well to the future US president’s expectations regarding greater involvement in NATO, relying on their own weak defense concept.
6. Information about plans to cut spending on the Polish military leaks to the media – in what sounds like a teaser for a bad horror movie where it is known from the start that the main characters are misbehaving and asking for danger.
7. Sergeant Mateusz Sitek, who died defending the border, has already paid for the low morale in the army and the insecurity of uniformed positions.
8. The deputy prime minister and head of the Defense Ministry tearfully begs TV activists collaborating with Lukashenko’s saboteurs not to help immigrants evade Polish soldiers, and in another conversation encourages them to pack backpacks to facilitate the evacuation.
9. As we know from leaks from Ukraine, the support of Polish institutions for the defending country has decreased. My Ukrainian interlocutors who previously cooperated with the State Agency for Strategic Reserves not only no longer receive the previously promised products, but sometimes contact has been completely broken off.
Is this a dream? Were we all under the illusion that the British press had described some twelve months ago that the EU’s strongest army had established itself on the Vistula River? Should we buy 500 Himars or give hundreds of tanks to Ukraine to stop the Russians in Kiev, Kherson and Donbas? What kind of state functions so dependent on the changing wheel of electoral fortune that a few percent of fickle voters can eventually lead to the dismantling of even such a fundamental issue as defense? Today, Poland needs luck more than ever to maintain its defense potential and survive without a Russian attack. We need internal crises in Russia, Ukrainian victories, instability in German politics, the failures of Macron (what a useless leader!), a pro-interventionist White House – we need a whole range of externally favourable conditions, because at the moment we cannot count on internal ones.
Source: wPolityce