I guess I owe my non-Polish readers a short explanation. The punched nazi in the photo is Mariusz Kamiński, a far-right politician who lately made the news for these reasons:
- In late 2000s, Kamiński became chairman of the government-controlled agency called CBA (“Central Anti-Corruption Bureau”) under Law and Justice (PiS) administration. He attempted to bribe another coalition member in order to blackmail him. The other politician commited a mysterious suicide.
- With the return of PiS to power, Kamiński became head of the Interior Minister in 2019. Under his guidance and for money diverted from a newly-created “Justice Fund” (funded from fines, etc.), the agency bought the notorious spyware Pegasus and used it to hack phones of liberal opposition leaders as well as of former and potential co-workers of the ruling party in an attempt to manipulate the elections.
- During the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarussian border, when the government was doing their worst to sell the idea for a border wall and pushbacks to their voters, Kamiński held a press conference to present to surprised journalists a video of animal sex abuse supposedly found on one of the phones stolen from detained refugees. This was later proven to be a cheap fake in order to whip up islamophobia and racism in the Polish population.
- After PiS lost power in the parliamentary elections last year, Kamiński was charged and sentenced for abuse of power, but served only two weeks out of his two-year sentence. The Law and Justice turned their case into a nationwide show, trying to pretend that he and his accomplice, Maciej Wąsik, both MPs now, had been “political prisoners” who “had been tortured/force-fed” and had held a “hunger strike”. This has been generally laughed at by their fellow inmates; actually, both reportedly received special treatment in prison, with Kamiński being held in an individual cell on the “women’s” row to protect him from possible revenge from the inmates on this former head of police and prison system (PiS had made sure general conditions in prisons get harsher).
- President Andrzej Duda used his presidential powers to cancel Kamiński’s and Wąsik’s sentences and both got out. Yet, as convicted criminals, they lost their status as MPs and cannot cast votes or speak in the parliament.
- Earlier this week, a group of politicians from Law and Justice (including their authoritarian chairman Jarosław Kaczyński and Antoni Macierewicz, another party member responsible for producing conspiracy theories that got the party in power in 2015) concocted mini-riots, as both convicted ex-MPs tried to forcibly re-enter the parliament. During one such disturbance, Kamiński was hit in the mug by Macierewicz, who later denied punching his mate (probably tried to hit someone else in the crowd).
- Commentators in Poland generally see the whole shitshow as grotesque, especially as the formerly ruling party use the language of WW2 resistance or reference Stalinism. “A politician in prison is not a political prisoner”, a popular saying goes.
According to Polish Wikipedia, in 1990s, Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik founded a far-right group “Republican League” whose programme consisted of breaking up post-state-socialist rallies while “promoting free market capitalism, removing political correctness, propagating Polish national culture and traditional values based on catholicism”. Kamiński also stands behind the manufacturing of the myth of “Forsaken Soldiers” (a.k.a. “doomed”, “damned” or “cursed soldiers”), anti-communist partisans who refused to decomission in 1945. The myth has been used to motivate far-right anti-socialist sentiments in the Polish nation after 2000, and has served as a mainstream-accepted uniting symbol for numerous neofascist groups.
I hope it’s clearer now.
Tuszem! 