In conversation with Dr. Lucyna Kulińska about the refugee crisis and threats posed by ISIS in Europe, along with issues of terrorism, the future of the globalized world and the Polish-Ukrainian relations.
We are receiving a lot of signals suggesting that Ukrainian nationalists are cooperating with the so-called ‘militant’ arm of the Islamic State. Currently, some of them are even being transferred from Syria to Ukraine. Does Europe have anything to fear from the border with Ukraine?
Nine thousand Ukrainian passports were sent to ISIS. Of course you cannot do this directly, so you organise an armed assault on a government building and the documents disappear. Most likely with these documents ISIS will be able to get from Ukraine to Polish territory, as was the case when ISIS moved to Europe together with Syrian refugees. We must also expect that our border with Ukraine will be penetrated by terrorists of the Islamic State, using people fleeing from areas directly threatened by war. So far, we allow tens of thousands of Ukrainians entry onto our territory. However, we haven’t conducted the appropriate verification as to who these people were.
The shocking news for me is that Poland and other countries feel they must support Ukraine’s aspirations to enter the EU. Someone who says such things is clearly acting suicidal. Each facilitated border crossing, without proper screening, poses a threat that can come back to haunt us when we hold any mass public events. Such as the forthcoming World Youth Day. It’s not from the west or south side that IS terrorists come to us. This will most likely be from our eastern border. If then a group of people from Ukraine attend who under the slogan of these World Youth Days (and we know that such groups are treated a little differently), then no one can guarantee that within such a group, all holding Ukrainian passports, the border envoys of terrorist group cannot sneak in. Our military aid which goes to Ukraine may be intercepted by Banderovite organizations, as well as neo-Nazis. They are now in Ukrainian government and they have the most to say.
In Poland, for example, in Lodz and other cities, paramilitary training classes for Ukrainians are now formed, organized in this way the whole class. This reminds me of what happened before the war, when Poland gave military training to Ukrainian nationalists. These young people entering the OUN structures then murdered Poles. They were trained and prepared for this with Polish money. Now, Ukrainians are full of praise for their OUN youth and how it is beautifully trained. Poles have very much applied themselves to it. We gave them money, thinking they will wage war with Russia. No, they took us a few provinces. Not only that, today, nationalists are resenting our national territory. We can therefore expect that those whom we are currently training will delimit the new frontier for us as far as Cracow.
Ukrainian nationalists are subsidized by our allies, the United States. In turn, the second supporter is located in Germany. You might have noticed that Poland has been excluded from the talks that have fought on Ukraine. Ukrainians want to talk only with Germany and those who distribute residency cards. If, for example, we wouldn’t want to implement certain German demands, the Ukrainians will always work as a fifth column. Just as before the war. Today we’re back on the same track.
Countries such Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which oppose the refugees quotas, are now denigrated as far denigration was only Russia. What does this ‘dislike’ for refugees result from?
If you look at how the Second World War passed in countries such as France, Belgium, Sweden and Poland, we will see quite a difference. Monstrous losses and trauma experienced meant that the instinct of self-preservation, the memory of that trauma, is still very much alive in our minds. So we know that it could end badly. It is alleged that we are protecting ourselves and resisting. No, we just know what it smells of. Our fear of such phenomena is much greater because we have these terrible experiences. We are faced with a challenge which Europe hadn’t faced since World War II. There haven’t been such challenges yet.
Let’s see how it began in Hungary. There is one factor that brought about change, which was that big companies took over the supervision of drinking water in Budapest. It turned out that Hungarians have to pay to some French concern even for water from their own river. Once people realize this fact, they are being very briefly grabbed by the throat, they realized that they do not want this, that this did not benefit them. In eastern European countries, where the survival instinct is not dead, because there was always somebody who wanted something from them, somebody who conquered, invaded and exploited. It breaks the idea that we do not want to be slaves forever. Our resistance against refugees boosts our rating abroad. You have to see what ordinary Germans say. Austrian and French newspapers, German newspapers attack us. But what do ordinary people think? It turns out that they look at us, even Germans, some even keep their fingers crossed for us. If we do not succumb to the pressure of refugees, it could be that those people who do not want to live in Western Europe and lead their businesses there, will be able to move them into Poland. We may win our card not by the fact that we are great, but by the fact that we were poor and we didn’t catch so many foreigners.
How would you comment on the EU’s controversial idea to combat the migration crisis in which Brussels wants to create a European Corps of Border Guards? Special troops would be sent to guard the borders of each country which cannot cope with its own control and even without its consent.
Is Merkel’s arbitrary decision not a sort of fascism? At the moment, people in Cologne and Hamburg have confiscated houses, their second homes if they possess such. They are being commandeered and, in the process, ownership law is being breached as well. At the beginning, the law of Schengen was broken because it obliges European countries to defend their territory. They didn’t send any ships that could send back refugees on the other side. If you ask the average Dane, Frenchman or German (but autochthon) what he thought we would hear what he thought of it. However none of these people are being asked about what they think. Democracy is a process where people have impact on what affects them directly. Today, people in Western Europe have been presented with a fait accompli. They had nothing to say. Now, when their private property is taken, they still do not have anything to say. Haunted their penalties, if they even try to protest on the Internet. They are being reported to the prosecutor’s office. As warned by our border service alerts, in the spring we will be at real risk from breaches of the eastern border. I do not suggest that Mrs. Merkel has gone mad, someone probably used the willingness of Germany to full domination over Europe. Allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees to enter Europe is the digging of her grave and the grave of Western civilization. For a simple reason. How will a country perform that wants to grow and wants to innovate? It can only realize this goal by the way of some inventions through the work of scientists and universities, research etc. For this you need large sums of money. Where will these sums come from if we spend them on supporting masses of people, while advancing robotics eliminate the working process? Especially in terms of basic work – in factories, for example. Today, even a large production plant can function well with only a few people doing the work – the rest is done by machine. What we are dealing with is a deliberate and large-scale process of trying to confuse and con people.
Konrad Stachnio is an independent Poland based journalist, he hosted a number of radio and TV programs for the Polish edition of Prison Planet, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.