‘A battle between good and evil,’ specified the third man. He was different. He didn’t work in television. He wasn’t even a Pole. He was American.
All three men were in their mid-thirties. All wore leather bomber jackets. All were erudite, energetic and utterly sure of themselves. All had been thrust overnight into power.
‘Europe is a leviathan overrun by the mass migration of Muslims,’ stated the American: preppy button-down Hilfiger shirt, educated Midwest accent, hyperspeed delivery. ‘Poland will not surrender itself to this cultural suicide.’
We were in a lavish media wine bar near to Warsaw’s trendy Plac Zbawiciela, home of skinny jeans, coffee baristas and TV studios. Around us well-to-do executive producers huddled at cosy tables in soft pools of light. Up-and-coming directors asked white-aproned waiters to uncork bottles of Pauillac and Pomerol. A news anchorman balanced on a bar stool by the open grill waiting to be called for the mid-evening bulletin.
As plates of tapas were laid on our table, the American said he’d read my earlier books and would like to discuss them. But I knew that they didn’t want to chat about plot devices or character development. I understood they wanted to change my mind.
Over spicy patatas bravas, the American asked what newspapers I read. When I told him he shook his head in mock pity.
‘Lies,’ he said, dipping a croqueta into the tomato salsa. ‘The people have had enough of mainstream media’s lies.’
‘The people?’ I said, incredulous. I thought for a moment that he was taking the mickey.
‘Your whole alphabet soup – New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian and the BBC – are history, elbowed out by infinite YouTube channels, infinite Twitter feeds. The people will no longer be silenced.’
I disagreed with him of course, arguing that ‘the people’ needed objective reportage and journalistic integrity now more than ever. How else could voters see through the fake facts and bogus promises?
‘Journalistic integrity is dead,’ replied the hack-cum-controller Mateusz, putting down his glass to interrupt me. ‘There is no such thing any more.’
‘We on the right are totally open about this,’ said the American in cool confidence. ‘We don’t hide our personal bias. We’re transparent and honest with our audience.’
‘Here in Poland we fight for Polish ownership,’ added network boss Janek, refilling our glasses.
‘Meaning no dissenting views?’ I asked flatly, thinking of the government’s disinformation campaigns and state television’s salacious, thinly sourced attacks on opponents. A few months later Gdańsk’s liberal mayor Paweł Adamowicz – so often defamed as a thief and a homophile – would be murdered, live on air.
‘Our country and our family come first, not the interests of globalists,’ Janek continued. ‘We’ll drive a stake through the heart of the Brussels vampire.’ His eyes seemed too far apart.
‘We’re fighting on the battlefield of ideas,’ said the American while nibbling on cider-cooked chorizo. ‘Politics is propaganda and information is a weapon.’
I sat back but couldn’t make myself comfortable. I had wanted to meet Janek, to throw myself into his virtual lion’s den. To be frank I also hoped to change him, or at least to remind him of the importance of pluralism and a free press. But as hate speech seeped into public discourse, he seemed content to toe a party line, shaping an expedient narrative to sustain the elite (and to empower a new one), while purporting to reflect the will of ‘the people’.
‘I suppose this new book of yours, about Europe’s last thirty years, won’t be a comedy?’ ventured Janek.
‘It isn’t easy to raise a chuckle, given what I’ve just heard.’
‘I’d be happy to check over the manuscript for inaccuracies,’ cockily offered the American with no trace of irony.
Thirty years ago Poland had been a place reborn, free to shape its future. Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of Solidarność, had called for liberty, fraternity and normality. He wanted a revolution for a constitution, not for a paradise. But since 2015, the Law and Justice party has undermined the bodies that protect that constitution, turning parliament’s lower house into a rubber stamp, forcing almost half of Supreme Court judges to retire.
‘Achieve power by democratic means then kill democracy. You know you’re not the first to hit on that idea?’ I reminded my smart and stylish crusaders, likening their support for PiS to the betrayal of Poland by the Nazi’s willing helpers.
‘That’s something you don’t understand,’ snapped the American. His hand shot out, unexpectedly strong, seizing my wrist. ‘Do you think the old communists were just magicked away after the fall of the Wall? Poland’s lurch to democracy was a sordid, stitched-up business deal.’ His whole body stiffened, his movements became sharp and spiteful. He was volatile and belligerent. He hissed, ‘At last we are rid of those apparatchiks and Solidarity has-beens, and their corrupt, nepotistic judiciary.’
On our table appeared a trio of fried oysters encased in crunchy batter and served on a bed of wilted spinach. The network boss offered one to me as the American explained that ‘meaning and purpose’ had brought him to Poland. His Jewish grandfather had been a Polish poet who’d fallen foul of the post-war leadership, he said. He’d emigrated to the States but – in the McCarthy years – could find work only as a motor mechanic. His poems, which somehow managed to juxtapose Polish folk tradition with interstate highways and car parts, had attracted little attention, even after he was crushed to death under a falling Oldsmobile V8 engine. The loud-mouthed prepster had grown up idolising the grandfather he’d never known, blaming the untimely death on both big government and the Warsaw Pact. In his late twenties, after spells at Princeton, in a Washington lobbying firm and at a Trump campaign office, he’d come to Poland in search of his roots, possessed by a dream of tribal loyalty.
‘Poland is made up of Polish people. That may seem obvious to you but I’d never lived in a homogeneous country,’ he said, calming himself by machine-gunning facts at me: 7 per cent of the people in the US aren’t citizens, Mexican illegals account for 13 per cent of all crimes, Latinos commit nearly 12 per cent of all murders. He left me no time to reply or verify his claims but rushed on, ‘As soon as I arrived here I wanted to be a part of this exclusive club, to help to make its history.’
Of course his alt-right insider knowledge made him of value to the PiS, and the leadership ensured that he did feel both useful and at home. Ministers began to consult him on the media and Breitbart. He brought access to analytics and specialised polling data to help them to target voters. He took every opportunity to big himself up, his arrogance tempered by nervy self-consciousness. ‘As Donald once said to me, if you’ll forgive the namedrop…’ In no more than a couple of blog posts he found himself invited to the right parties, bought a Gucci dinner jacket and spoke about the historical parallels between Polish and American politics.
Poland had long been divided between kosmopolici and patrioci, he told me. ‘Cosmopolitans and patriots are like coast liberals and ordinary Americans.’
Kosmopolici were an elite who derived their power from outside Poland, from ‘imperial’ Moscow, Berlin or Brussels, explained network boss Janek. They ‘suppressed’ ordinary ‘patriotic’ Poles.
‘Since the eighteenth century it’s been an historical struggle, that’s now been overturned here and in America.’
Of course he didn’t see himself as kosmopolici, despite his elitist education and designer dinner jacket. He was a patriot and a nationalist. The party even helped him to find a pliant publisher willing to print his grandfather’s poems.