By Christopher Harper
Poland has become what I’d like the United States to be—a country that restricts illegal aliens, stands up to Russia, and respects life.
In 2015, when millions of migrants and asylum seekers surged over Europe’s borders, the immigration crisis nearly tore apart the European Union. Many members offered asylum to the refugees; others, like Poland and Hungary, wanted no part of it.
Six years later, the current standoff at the border between Poland and Belarus echoes that crisis. Still, European officials insist that member states are united when it comes to defending Europe’s borders.
The crisis, like the one at the U.S. border, is a manufactured one. In the case of Poland, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, has created the crisis in response to sanctions imposed by Poland and the rest of the EU over a stolen election and repression of domestic dissent.
The crisis began in late August, when growing groups of migrants, mainly from the Middle East, began massing at the borders of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, shepherded there by Belarus. That movement has become much larger, with at least 4,000 men, women, and children trapped in the cold between Belarus and its neighbors.
Not only is Poland standing up to Belarus but also Russia, which is backing Lukashenko. President Vladimir V. Putin has blamed the West for stoking the migration crisis and agreed to deploy nuclear-capable bombers to patrol the border zone.
Last week, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called Lukashenko’s tactics a “cynical power play” and said that blackmail must not be allowed to succeed. In Washington, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, met President Brandon and emerged to say that what was transpiring on the Belarus border was “a hybrid attack, not a migration crisis.”
The support for Poland is especially striking while the European Union is locked in a significant confrontation about the supremacy of European law over Polish law and about restrictions on the independence of the judiciary. In that confrontation, Brussels is withholding from Warsaw billions of dollars in funds intended to help economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Poland and the EU have been battling for months over the supremacy of the court system. Poland wants its courts to have the final say; the EU wants its opinions to govern its members, including Poland.
A critical judicial disagreement involves Poland’s law that restricts abortions only in the cases of rape, incest, or a significant health issue for the mother.
Whatever the case, Poland has pulled the rest of Europe kicking and screaming into a confrontation with Russia. Poland should get more support from the Brandon administration, which once called it a threat to democracy because of its “right-wing” views.
It so happens that I agree with most of those “threats” to democracy.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 