Bogdan Klich is Poland’s chargé d’affairs to the United States.
History cannot be molded at will. It can be observed, analyzed and evaluated from a multitude of perspectives. But the events themselves cannot be changed, nor the lessons discarded, simply because they have become politically inconvenient.
After World War II, the international community confronted the catastrophic consequences of allowing aggressive nationalism and claims of national superiority to go unchecked. Out of that experience emerged not only determination to prevent another world war, but a fundamental principle of the postwar international order: Borders cannot legitimately be changed through force simply because a more powerful state claims that history, ethnicity, language or a perceived transgression justifies its actions.
Today, these lessons are becoming more relevant, not less. Yet some of the arguments that made the early 20th century so destructive are again entering the mainstream. Now is precisely the time to remember why they are dangerous.
In his recent conversation with former British lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tucker Carlson justified Nazi Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, which began World War II in Europe, by arguing that Adolf Hitler was reclaiming territory that had previously belonged to Germany and had been wrongfully transferred to Poland in the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles.
Such an argument not only omits the essential historical context, such as previous partitions of Poland and over a century of Prussian occupation of Polish territories. It also whitewashes Hitler’s well-documented objective of destroying the Polish state and exterminating its population.
Hitler’s demands to annex the free city of Gdańsk and build a German-controlled transit strip across the Polish Corridor, which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, cannot be severed from his broader plans for aggression. It is well-established that Hitler was already preparing to attack Poland, while the August 1939 nonaggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union secretly laid the groundwork for its partition.
The Sept. 1, 1939, invasion was not an improvised response to failed negotiations, but a planned war of conquest that led to occupation, persecution, displacement and mass murder.
It is inconceivable that the memory of Holocaust and World War II victims — including hundreds of thousands of American soldiers — would be deprecated and the actions of the initiator of the deadliest war in human history openly defended.
There are striking parallels between arguments historically employed to legitimize territorial expansion and those Vladimir Putin has used to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine. Carlson’s legitimization of Hitler’s attack on Poland under the pretext that western Poland was once “German territory with Germans” in it not only misinterprets the history but revives logic that condones war and aggression in the name of territorial and national reunification. Such rhetoric can then be used to encourage new waves of violence.
In today’s multilateral reality, ideas of reunification can endanger national, ethnic and religious minorities. The clearest example is the persecution of Europe’s Jewish population by Hitler’s Third Reich. The effects of Hitler’s antisemitic ideology stand as unequivocal evidence of how dangerous ideas of national reintegration can become.
A world in which antisemitism and discrimination against minority groups are warranted through the misinterpretation of history should be unacceptable.
The propagation of reunification can also threaten alliances that have preserved peace for decades. Western societies increasingly encounter another seductive argument: Why should they risk their own prosperity and security for people portrayed simply as distant foreigners? But alliances are not merely acts of charity toward strangers. They exist because countries learned that hostility becomes more likely when aggressors believe their victims will stand alone. Collective security rests on the understanding that defending an ally today can prevent a far larger and more costly conflict tomorrow.
Democratic societies must therefore be especially vigilant when dangerous historical narratives arise from within. The threat is not merely that authoritarian governments will produce propaganda. It is that democratic societies may gradually adopt the assumptions on which that propaganda depends.
World War II may seem like a closed chapter, but it is imperative that its lessons are not forgotten. The philosopher George Santayana warned: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” History must be remembered for what it was, not distorted to spread propaganda. No matter how hard anyone may try, history cannot be changed.
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