Brian Porter-Szűcs

Poland in the Modern World

I’ve moved to substack!

This blog is now available at https://porterszucs.substack.com.

Brian Porter-Szucs
November 13 ,2023
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Cultural and social history are a bit like geology. Things change, but so slowly that it isn’t always obvious what happened until long afterwards. While political history operates on a much faster timeline, even here we often see events that churn the soil even while the bedrock moves at a glacial pace. Just consider the

Brian Porter-Szucs
April 06 ,2021
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The Politics of COVID in Poland

Something very strange is happening to the coronavirus in Poland right now. If we look at the number of new confirmed cases, we see a success story. In mid November it seemed that the country was only days from a return to a full lockdown, which the government had announced would automatically happen if the

Brian Porter-Szucs
December 04 ,2020
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The End Game

The picture above says more than anything I could write here. That’s Barbara Nowacka, an opposition member of the Polish sejm, displaying her parliamentary ID to a policeman during a Women’s Strike protest yesterday. And that’s pepper spray in that bottle. A police spokesperson later said that the officer used force because he perceived Nowacka

Brian Porter-Szucs
November 29 ,2020
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The Women’s Strike

I was fortunate enough to be in Poland in October of 2016, when the radical-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) first attempted to roll back the already restrictive abortion laws in that country. I say “fortunate,” because I had a front-row seat to the largest display of public resistance against PiS authoritarianism. On the day