How we think about the world and—perhaps even more importantly—how we narrate it have a massive significance (…) This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge.

This passage from The Tender Narrator, Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize Lecture, gestures toward a truth that is at once elemental and enduring: that the power to command a narrative capable of addressing the heart and animating the imagination may ultimately determine whom audiences choose to follow—and, in political terms, whom voters empower. This remains true even when the narrative in question is warped, selectively distorted, or wholly fictitious. Across large swaths of the contemporary world, populist movements have mastered the craft of storytelling, and this phenomenon of populism has been examined here with acuity by, among others, Sadurski, Khosla and Singh.

The narrative motifs that circulate within these stories are repetitive. They include promises of making the country “great again”; tales of ever-present, threatening enemies; and visions of abundance, contingent only upon the correct electoral choice. Many of these narratives draw deeply on mnemonic myths of an “Arcadia lost”. At times, however, this nostalgic impulse assumes a more troubling form: a redemptive narrative that sanitizes, or altogether effaces, the violent dimensions of history, recasting the nation as an innocent victim or a magnanimous savior—never as a perpetrator of harm inflicted upon others. It is one of several strands of Polish populism—rooted in mythic self-absolution and affective storytelling—that has proven capable of shaping, and at times decisively determining, electoral outcomes.

This phenomenon is intimately entwined with what might be conceptualized as militant memory—a form of recollection that actively defends itself against perceived distortions. Militant memory evidently refers to Karl Loewenstein’s militant democracy, a construct that has become foundational within comparative constitutional scholarship, much of which is attributable to Issacharoff. Originally articulated as a response to the totalitarian threat of German Nazism, militant democracy postulates legal and institutional mechanisms designed to curtail the rights and freedoms of actors pursuing anti-democratic agendas. As Loewenstein metaphorically framed it, the democratic polity is confronted with the perennial question: how can democracy defend itself against its enemies, who abuse democratic settings in order to, like  the Trojan horse, enter the city?

Transposed into the domain of collective memory, the Polish manifestation of militant memory exceeds the mere criminalization of Holocaust denial or incitement to ethnic and religious hatred. The 2018 amendment to Poland’s Act on the Institute of National Remembrance—widely known as the Holocaust Bill—provides a paradigmatic case study in the instrumentalization of mnemonic narratives. Enacted under the auspices of the Law and Justice party, but, importantly, supported across the broad political spectrum, the law sought to “defend” the nation’s reputation by penalizing public statements that falsely attributed responsibility for Nazi crimes to the Polish state or nation. Initially framed as a criminal statute, imposing fines and up to three years imprisonment, it was subsequently attenuated to civil penalties in response to international diplomatic pressure rather than legal critique. Officially, the legislation aimed to rectify offensive mischaracterizations such as the phrase “Polish death camps” used to denote German-operated extermination camps on occupied Polish territory.

Yet, as critics immediately recognized, its broader effect was to constrain historical inquiry into crimes committed by Poles against Jews during World War II, including the Jedwabne Pogrom of 1941. In Jedwabne “ordinary people,” unremarkable inhabitants of this small town, murdered their Jewish neighbors under the instigation of German SS, burning them in a barn—a fact meticulously documented by Jan Tomasz Gross. Consequently, Jedwabne today embodies a mnemonic battleground. Ongoing efforts to propagate antisemitic insinuations and to monopolize the site’s symbolic authority illustrate the dangers inherent in the politicization of collective memory. To date, Polish legal frameworks capable of regulating such abuses remain underenforced, leaving this controversy unresolved and the authority over the past itself fiercely contested.

But Polish militant memory is not monolithic; it arises from several intersecting sources. One of these is grounded in a genuine asymmetry: the crimes described in Snyder’s Bloodlands have never been fully incorporated into Europe’s shared mnemonic DNA. The European Parliament’s prolonged difficulty in adopting a resolution addressing clearly and decisively both Nazi and Stalinist and Communist crimes reflected a deeper reluctance to acknowledge traumas other than the Holocaust—traumas experienced by Central and Eastern Europe, Poland included. This deficit of recognition has produced a legitimate sense of marginalization, a feeling of being relegated to a second class of victims. At the same time, more troubling roots of militant memory in Poland are at play. Nationalist feelings—frequently tinged with antisemitism and xenophobia—continue to exert considerable affective appeal among segments of the Polish electorate. Decades of failed social dialogue and inadequate engagement with the past have created a discursive vacuum, increasingly filled by emotional mobilization rather than rational deliberation. And the controversy surrounding Jedwabne may yet prove a decisive test: the memory of the Jews murdered there remains increasingly displaced by narratives that substitute historical truth with antisemitic distortion.

Cited at the outset of this text, Tokarczuk is a writer of rare moral courage. Her remarks on Polish co-responsibility for the fate of Jews during the Holocaust and for historical crimes against Ukrainians sufficed to unleash a virulent campaign of hatred. She received death threats, was denounced as an “enemy of the Nation,” and branded “a Jew”—a term still functioning in certain circles as a ritualistic insult. These reactions arise from a segment of Polish society that grounds its sense of belonging in insulating the collective from any critical self-reflection. The majority, as so often, withdraws into silence; protest is left to a courageous few.

For nationalist populists, such emotions are not obstacles but resources to be cultivated and intensified. The more difficult question faces the other side of the political spectrum: how to respond to such sentiments? They understand that appeals to historical responsibility, ethical accountability, and a reflective stance toward the “Other” yield scant electoral reward. What is more, in a public sphere distorted by misinformation and narrative simplification, such appeals struggle to gain traction. And yet, the effort cannot be abandoned. Collective memory remains particularly vulnerable to manipulation. Politicians are acutely aware of the fragility of truth and we would do well to be equally vigilant. Any engagement with the past is never merely retrospective; it is inseparable from our present circumstances and profoundly shapes the futures we imagine and construct.