The menace of Jewish anti-Polonism during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’: antisemitic conspiratorial thinking on the Christian far right in Poland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Polynczuk-Alenius’s article contributes to a better understanding of the racist moment in Poland that began in the aftermath of the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. It does so by zooming in on Christian far-right discourse and reconstructing a cognitive map of the social world manufactured therein. To this end, it analyses the blog of the former Catholic priest Jacek Międlar, now a far-right activist and one of the leaders of the anti-refugee movement. In doing so, the article relies on two compatible bodies of research that have rarely been used together. Theoretically, the article approaches Christian far-right discourse as an articulation of the paranoid style and concentrates on its conspiratorial aspect. Analytically, it uses the fourfold model of authoritarian communication developed by the Frankfurt School to dissect systematically the conspiratorial tale expounded on Międlar’s blog. Accordingly, the empirical analysis of 116 blog posts treats the following themes: 1) the discontent diagnosed by Międlar (anti-Polonism, epitomized by the suppression of nationalist and Christian values in favour of European universalism); 2) the alleged operators of anti-Polonism (the Jewish-orchestrated conspiracy bent on dominating the world and its puppets); 3) the movement that will rise up against this cabal (namely, the Polish Catholic nationalists armed with conservative values); and 4) the leader of the struggle (Międlar himself as a Christ-like martyr figure). The article concludes that the anti-Muslim discourse, premised on an appeal to racist sentiments, served as a gateway into the conspiratorial, deeply antisemitic world-view of the Christian far-right milieu. In Poland, as elsewhere, such a world-view, stored and transmitted through the fringe far-right discourse, usually seems to gain traction in wider society during times of crisis.