A Free World
and a Prison of Nations

After the Battle of Warsaw, the history of Eastern and Western Europe took very different courses. The West has for twenty years enjoyed relative peace, while the East became a bastion of tyranny.

DISINFORMATION

TRUTH

Comrades! The Polish bourgeoisie accuses Polish communists in Soviet Russia of agitating for war with Poland. To enforce the communist system in Poland with the bayonets of the Red Army. Lies! The war between Poland and Russia was caused by the Polish government alone. Polish capitalists and landowners wanted to maintain the rule of the authorities over peasants in Ruthenia and Ukraine; and they also wanted to overthrow the worker’s government in Russia. Meanwhile, the government of Soviet Russia truly desired only peace. I personally went twice on behalf of the Russian government to Poland in the summer and autumn of 1919. I proposed peace to the Polish government on behalf of Comrade Lenin. But the Polish government turned down these propositions.

The Polish government and Józef Piłsudski in particular are to be blamed for the rivers of bloodshed, for the destruction of the country. Now that peace has been entered into, we, the Polish communists, want this peace to last. Because we believe deeply that the Polish working people will deal with their enemies, with the landowners and capitalists by themselves, and on their own terms. (…) Poland will be truly free when the Polish workers start to rule by themselves.

Long live the Polish proletariat! Long live the workers’ Poland!

“We were faced with a new task... We had to take advantage of the military situation in order to prepare for a war of aggression... We formulated it not in an official resolution included in the Central Committee’s protocols... but we agreed amongst each other that we would use bayonets to test if the time was ripe for a proletariat socialist revolution in Poland...

[We decided] that somewhere near Warsaw, where there is not just a centre of the Polish bourgeois government and capitalist republic, but the centre of the entire modern imperialistic system, the circumstances that would allow us to shake this system up and pursue our policy: not only in Poland, but also in Germany and England. In so doing, we would create a brand new section of the proletariat revolution in Germany and England, which would combat worldwide imperialism...”

Vladimir Lenin during a closed session of the 9th Conference of the Russian Communist Party, 22 September 1920.

INFORMATION WAR

The concept of an information war is not an invention of the 21st century. After the end of the Polish-Soviet War (between Poland and Bolshevik Russia), the Soviet propaganda machine cranked into gear, mendaciously blaming Poland for the conflict.

Julian Marchlewski

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