All Governments Have the Obligation to Defend Their People from Illegal Immigration
The Polish government has an obligation to defend its people from illegal immigration, just as all governments across the world do. People shouldn’t be collectively punished and their suffering become the subject of schadenfreude for others simply because one might dislike the policies that their government carries out in their name.
Poland has come under intense criticism from friends and foes alike for its heavy-handed approach in responding to the Eastern European Migrant Crisis. The Central & Eastern European (CEE) leader forcibly prevents violent migrants from invading its border in ways that critics claim violate international law. Warsaw has also ridiculously alleged that Moscow is pulling Minsk’s strings to wage so-called “hybrid warfare” against the EU via “Weapons of Mass Migration” (WMM). Furthermore, Poland participated in the US-led West’s wars that destroyed Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, which is the origin of the several Migrant Crises that have caused the EU so much trouble in recent years. It’s also leading the Western effort to sanction Belarus and carry out regime change against its leadership.
What all of this means is that the Polish government isn’t as “innocent” as it presents itself as, but that also doesn’t mean that its people should be collectively punished by WMM because of it. To be clear, WMM can be employed independently by human traffickers, whose actions are then exploited by self-interested political forces for strategic ends against others. In this context, Poland also isn’t “innocent” since it’s taking advantage of this illegal immigrant invasion of its eastern border to provoke a much larger East-West crisis between Russia and the US/EU for the purpose of undermining the incipient progress that’s been made towards their rapprochement since last summer’s Biden-Putin Summit. Poland believes that this is occurring at the expense of its interests, hence its motive in sabotaging it.
Whether or not it succeeds in this respect is an altogether different matter, but it’s crucial that observers recognize that Poland isn’t “innocent” in this crisis. Even so, they must also acknowledge that its government has an obligation to defend its people from illegal immigration, just as all governments across the world do. People shouldn’t be collectively punished and their suffering become the subject of schadenfreude for others simply because one might dislike the policies that their government carries out in their name. That line of thinking is dangerous because it risks morally justifying Western aggression against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and others on the pretext that those governments believe that it’s acceptable to collective punish those populations for political reasons.
The reality of the world is such that only an almost statistically insignificant percentage of the population in any given country actually participates in the direct formulation of state policy. These elites’ decisions in turn disproportionately influence their own societies and others’. It’s understandable that those in the second-mentioned category who are sometimes victimized by these said decisions would be resentful and want revenge, but it’s extremely difficult for those in their societies to actually hold foreign elites to account. For this reason, many live vicariously by sadistically deriving pleasure from the collective punishment of that hostile government’s society, including through means such as WMM that they themselves would be opposed to if their own society was being victimized by them.
In fact, many of those in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) proudly defended Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary during the 2015 Migrant Crisis. They stood up for those governments’ defense of their innocent people from that illegal immigrant invasion despite them all being aligned with NATO (Serbia is an official NATO partner for those readers who might not be aware despite its officially neutral foreign-military policy). None of those countries, however, are as anti-Russian and militarily provocative towards Moscow as Poland is, which might explain the double standards of many in the AMC who experience schadenfreude when thinking about the threat that this latest illegal immigrant invasion poses to the Polish people. In other words, they’re hypocritically virtue signaling opposition to NATO in this case.
It can’t be emphasized enough that there are credible grounds to criticize the Polish government’s forceful response to this crisis which some claim might be in violation of international law, but that should be done without taking joy in the potential suffering of the Polish people who stand to be victimized by the violent illegal immigrants that are trying to storm their country’s border and rampage all across it on the way to their desired German destination. Real refugees claim asylum in the first safe country that they enter, whether it’s Belarus or whatever other one they went to prior to traveling to that former Soviet Republic from which they’re trying to invade Poland. Only economic migrants continue traveling onward to their preferred country, while invaders do so violently.
The Polish government can be faulted for its tactical approach towards defending the border despite the unlikelihood that the UN will ever impose costs upon that country for its alleged violations of international law. It can also be rightly criticized for politically exploiting these WMM in order to provoke a larger East-West crisis that it hopes will selfishly secure its interests by sabotaging the incipient rapprochement between Russia and the US/EU. Nevertheless, no one should ever take joy in the collective punishment of innocent people who live in a society represented by a government that others might dislike for whatever reason. That’s precisely the neoconservative and fascist approach that many in the AMC used to rightly criticize whenever they saw Westerners expressing it against others.
