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The Polish Home Army and the Politics of Memory

Politics of memory makes use as well as abuse of history. As any kind of politics, politics of memory are not guided by truth—they are guided by utility in a broad sense of the term. Truth and utility may coincide, and yet they are not close friends at all. Politics are, as the political scientists say, an open-ended game, and so they are politics of memory. They do not deprive people of the freedom of thinking any more than politics sensu stricto deprive them of freedom of behaviour. Some politics of memory are necessary for uniting people as fellow citizens. The point is that these particular ones the author is referring to in this article were bad politics; they divided, not united. The present article outlines the history of how the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) and particularly the Warsaw Rising of 1944 have been treated and mistreated in the legitimising myths of the regime imposed on Poland in 1945, in the political system the Poles freely elected in 1989, and in the propaganda of the so-called Fourth Republic of Poland in 2005—7. The author intends to show how this controversial wartime event has been entangled in the politics of memory and why its exploitation for political purposes has turned it into a black-and-white picture that has stifled more balanced and less passionate opinions on its meaning and significance.