Peadar de Burca. There is Nothing

The citizens are non-contingent. Rules and laws and the tenets of morality and decency are deemed disposable to the population. Witness the lower house of the Polish parliament powering ahead with a legislative project fuelled by the non-elected, non-accountable fundamentalist organization Ordo Iuris. This draft law will put Poland on a fast-track to replace the Istanbul Convention, with a treaty banning abortion and gay marriage.

No-one is safe and nothing is redeemed. Poland looks to its past and deems itself unaccountable. The Poles and Poland, the government asserts, had nothing to do with any part of the Holocaust. Ethnic Poles, and some structures of the pre-war Polish state cannot be implicated in any wrongdoing. Intellectual inquiry? Shut your mouth and die.

Blameless Poland is an aberration, a defect of focus behind which gangsterism and oligarchy increasingly hides in plain sight.

This is not a country. This is the premise for the novel “The Lord of the Flies.”

The government’s heartlessness runs deep, but it is a symptom of a people whose conscience, pity, and hopes disappeared decades ago. That’s if they ever existed at all. We are constantly reminded how Poland’s economic growth defied the 2008 crash, how its vibrant entrepreneurial landscape made it the envy of Europe. What does this even mean? In concrete terms, when you compare it to a country like

Ireland, it means nothing. When the Irish were consumed by avarice from 1995 to 2006, we at least matched it by a commitment to morality. Refugees were admitted. Women’s rights were upgraded. Minorities were embraced. The war in the North was ended.

Ireland, despite not having one quarter of its territory, is actual.

In 2016, with European governments scrambling for responses to the refugee crisis in Greece and Italy, then PiS Prime Minister Beata Szydło said Poland could not do more to help, having already done its part by welcoming 1 million job seeking Ukrainians.

And who cares? Who cares that your commitment to decency and helping the weak is non-existent. Either within or beyond Poland, who gave a damn?

No one.

Because Poland does not exist.

All is void. The space that lies between Germany and the Ukraine and Sweden is only distinguished now by its indifference towards those countries. Covid and death and lockdown is the circular motion of expression at the rim of the sinkhole. There is no plan to end the pandemic. The pain of the sick is constant and sharp, but there is no evidence that anyone in charge hopes for a better world for anyone. The Church lumbers over the countryside, Saturn devouring its children, a Lovecraftian nightmare come to life, Cthulhu, the whisperer in the dark. Women are untermensch, a species to be milked and ultimately destroyed. But tell the truth, even after reading this and coming face-to-face with the stark reality, is there catharsis? Have you experienced a deeper knowledge about yourself?

There has been no reason for me to write this. This column has meant nothing.

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