Top Priority For Polish American
Political Action
Ideas drive politics. The word politics comes from the Classical Greek word “polis”, which means city state. Therefore, politics refers to the affairs of the polis, or to public life, as opposed to private life.
Some may wish to avoid partisan political engagement, that is membership and action on behalf of a political party. But those who eschew making known their preferences on public questions, and especially on the existential issues of foreign policy, do so at their peril. After all a misguided foreign policy can put our country and our kin country, Poland, in peril and have lethal consequences. In short, foreign policy can get you killed, and that precisely is why citizens of our democratic republic must register their points-of-view on what America’s role in the world should be.
What key idea propels the political engagement of Polish Americans? The answer is the advocacy of freedom assured by individual rights that are enforced by a limited republican representative government as the best form of political organization not only for our kin country Poland, which is still ruled by transformed communists, but for all East Central and Eastern Europe, or the Intermarium, the territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas that approximates the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth, or Res Publica. The partitions of the Res Publica at the end of the eighteenth century set off a competition between Germany and Russia for domination of the Intermarium.
Both of these competitors reject the Polish idea of freedom and prefer the political organization of the Intermarium based on authoritarian principles. The two neighbors collaborated with each other to partition Poland and to keep Poland down throughout the 19th century, only to go to war against each other for control of the Intermarium in 1914. Again, in 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union first collaborated to conquer and then partition Poland, only to go to war against each other in 1941. This competition continues in our times, and today the focus is Ukraine. The way to end this lurid cycle is to organize the Intermarium based on freedom in an updated and militarily powerful version of the Polish-Lithuanain-Ruthenian Commonwealth for our times.
If the political organization of the Intermarium is to be based on freedom, then the Russian Federation, tacitly, but strongly, supported by Germany, can not prevail in the present armed struggle now under way in Ukraine. Without a truly sovereign Ukraine there will not be a sovereign Poland and the entire Intermarium will again become the terrain for a renewed struggle for mastery over this area by Germany and Russia.
That is why the top priority for Polish Americans is to urge our elected and appointed American leaders to station with alacrity a large number of United States armed forces personnel on Polish soil and to agree to send military assistance to Ukraine to stop the Kremlin’s imperialistic project.
By John Czop