The case of the extradition by Poland to Russia of “Spanish journalist” Pablo González – in fact, the Russian spy Pavel Rubtsov – as part of a larger prisoner swap orchestrated by the Americans vividly demonstrates how the insistent, sometimes even obsessional accusations of right-wing opponents’ supposed links to the Kremlin or hidden support for and by Russia illustrates the well-known psychological phenomenon of projection on the part of left-wing activists.
Sometimes, of course, it can also be a deliberate strategy to avoid honest debate and destroy any opposition on the right. However, it seems to me that there are a lot of well-meaning useful idiots among our accusers, which is why I will first give a definition of “projection” in psychology given on Wikipedia:
“A defense mechanism in which the ego defends itself against disowned and highly negative parts of the self by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others, breeding misunderstanding and causing untold interpersonal damage. Projection incorporates blame shifting and can manifest as shame dumping. (…) Projection tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of personal or political crisis.”
How I discovered that I was myself a Russian agent of influence
I recently found out that I, myself, am apparently a Russian agent of influence, although in a somewhat anonymous way, because the author of the accusations did not cite my name, which is little known anyway.
I am referring to articles by Anna Mierzyńska, an activist from the milieu of Tomasz Piątek and Klementyna Suchanow (known in Poland for frequently leveling accusations of Russian connections at the Right). Mierzyńska is yet another activist who poses as an investigative journalist for the Oko Press left-wing website, and who has even authored a book on fake news. As a source of fake news, she must indeed have some expertise in that domain.
In April this year, Mierzyńska, published a short series of articles alleging Russian financial support to the Visegrád Post website, with which I had the distinct pleasure of working for several years. The Visegrád Post is the modest venture of one man, French-Hungarian journalist Ferenc Almássy. Ms. Mierzyńska reproaches him, among other things, for having participated in a panel at the Economic Forum in Karpacz, Poland, which a Belarusian spy allegedly attended at the same time. Jumping to wild conclusions in the manner of her aforementioned milieu, Ms. Mierzyńska reproached Poland’s Wacław Felczak Institute for Polish-Hungarian Cooperation and the Polish conservative weekly Do Rzeczy for maintaining ties to Mr. Almassy’s modest venture. She failed to ascertain meaningful details of the “partnership” and likely gathered her evidence from the “Partners” tab on the Visegrád Post website.
Well, this “partnership” consisted solely of translation and publication on the Visegrád Post site, at my own personal initiative and without any remuneration, of a small number of Do Rzeczy articles as well as texts from the Felczak Institute’s Kurier.plus website. The Visegrád Post is an English, German, and French-language website that aimed to present the perspectives of the V4 countries (in fact, mainly Poland and Hungary) through a right-wing, conservative lens, so republishing articles from those two Polish conservative websites was something very natural.
Of course, any real investigative journalist would have sought, asked, and checked these details. Ms. Mierzyńska never contacted me, however, even though I signed a large number of these “partner” texts published on the Visegrád Post site.
Of course, Ms. Mierzyńska did not miss the opportunity to remind Oko Press readers that Do Rzeczy is friendly with the Ordo Iuris Institute, which – as every self-respecting Polish leftist well knows – is an “ultra-conservative”, “Christian fundamentalist” think-tank that appears almost everywhere the so-called “long arm” of Moscow operates. It is at least how this otherwise well-known and respected pro-life, pro-family, pro-sovereignty legal think-tank is described by left-wing journalists and activists. One need only review the comments under posts on the social media profiles of Ordo Iuris and its lawyers: there abound various lies and accusations of ties to Russia from representatives of the “smiling,” “tolerant,” and “educated” Poland.
It’s a pity that this “investigative journalist” from Oko Press didn’t notice that the liaison between the aforementioned media (i.e. me) had been working in the communications department of the Ordo Iuris Institute since early March. That would have tied a nice bow on Ms. Mierzyńska’s wonderfully creative allegations.
Connecting the dots à la Piątek
Meanwhile, on the occasion of the extradition of Pablo González to Russia, a certain Bart Staszewski – and LGBT activist who became famous when he created fake news about “LGBT-free zones” in Poland – couldn’t resist posting on X a photo showing González-Rubtsov standing with a camera and microphone during an interview with a representative of Ordo Iuris at the organization’s headquarters in Warsaw. Staszewski has admitted his mistake, he wrote in his post, since he also inadvertently gave interviews to González, but what about Ordo Iuris?! Well, what mistake should Ordo Iuris admit to? Is the Ordo Iuris Institute expected to vet every journalist who requests an interview? Using what criteria? Besides, it was not Ordo Iuris but Bart Staszewski and Anna Mierzyńska, among others, who defended the Russian spy when he got arrested for his spying activities under the previous Law and Justice government.
What would happen then if we also started connecting dots the way they do? Attorney Bartosz Lewandowski, a lawyer who also works with the Ordo Iuris Institute, wrote on X: “Mr. Tomasz Piątek cooperated with Gazeta Wyborcza, taking money for articles in that newspaper; Gazeta Wyborcza stood up for the Russian spy Pablo González, whom Russia officially asked for; Pablo González wrote, as a Spanish journalist, pieces supporting the Women’s Strike, whose representative is Klementyna Suchanow, who in turn appears on Tomasz Piątek’s programs. Everything coalesces and becomes clear.”
It reads like an article by Piątek (whose articles about the Ordo Iuris Institute the Gazeta Wyborcza daily had to remove from its website as part of a settlement the newspaper begged for) or Suchanow. The latter, since the Ordo Iuris Institute sued her for her earlier statements not supported by the facts, has been very careful not to say outright anymore that Ordo Iuris takes money from the Kremlin. It’s a different story for her readers, who do not always distinguish between insinuations and direct accusations.
Not only Pablo González, but Staszewski or Suchanow at Ordo Iuris conferences
Nota bene, Klementyna Suchanow also appeared once at a press conference organized by the Ordo Iuris Institute. Yes, the same Klementyna Suchanow who visited Moscow at the invitation of Kremlin feminist organizations in 2019. There, she allegedly met, among others, with an activist whom the United States later accused of spying for Russia. Was the Ordo Iuris Institute supposed to check all of Suchanow’s connections, as in the case of Rubtsov?
Bart Staszewski also attended at least one conference organized by the Ordo Iuris Institute in Warsaw (in 2016), which he filmed with his phone at the time. He later defended Rubtsov after his arrest in 2022. Thus, should Staszewski have also been screened before he was allowed into that conference? After all, even now, we can’t be sure whether his defense of the Russian spy was the work of a paid agent or a useful idiot of the Kremlin….
The Russian agent also found a defender in disinformation expert Anna Mierzyńska who stood up for him very strongly in March of this year in an article published by Oko Press. Then in April, she asserted links between the Czech Voice of Europe, Hungary’s Visegrád Post and Poland’s Felczak Institute as well as Do Rzeczy alongside the latter’s English-language website Sovereignty.pl (which I had the pleasure of editing for several months), all allegedly having ties to Russia through their network of “partnerships,” in Mierzyńska’s eyes. She failed to notice that the Visegrád Post (the centerpiece of this whole puzzle) had ceased operations in December.
In general, if one looks back at the dates of individual publications, it is clear that there have been several such dead periods in the history of this website in recent years. This happened because this project of my friend, Ferenc, cost him a lot of work and money, and he failed to find permanent sources of funding for it.
While George Soros’s money sustains, directly or indirectly, media outlets such as Gazeta Wyborcza or Oko Press, a small right-wing website has little chance of sponsorship. And by the way, if the Visegrád Post had indeed been a Russian-sponsored media, one should only rejoice, as it would mean that the Kremlin is completely broke.
The Kremlin-connection accusers and the Russian agent were shooting at the same goal
It is also worth noting that the people accusing conservative circles of ties to the Kremlin not only defended the Russian spy Pavel Rubtsov, but spread and continued to spread propaganda strangely similar to that circulated by this agent himself at the Kremlin’s behest: about the alleged torture of migrants by Polish services on the border with Belarus, about violations of women’s and gay rights in Poland, about the failure of the previous right-wing governments to respect the principles of democracy and the rule of law, etc., etc.
One example of González-Rubtsov’s propaganda activities on behalf of the Kremlin exists in the form of an article published on March 21, 2021, on the Spanish website Público. In it, the reader learns how the Catholic Church in Poland wants to control women’s bodies and how the evil Law and Justice (PiS) party is helping it. The article quotes Bart Staszewski, who says, “We are all in the same hell created by PiS, so we have to support each other. Among LGBT people, there are also women whom we must support, this is also our struggle.”
Rubtsov also cites Klementyna Suchanow who claims that nothing in Poland works anymore and that Warsaw is ruled by incompetent religious fundamentalists. Finally, the “ultra-conservative organization Ordo Iuris” is quoted, but the author clearly sides with Staszewski and Suchanow after the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s decision banning eugenic abortion, and asserts that the judges of the Constitutional Tribunal are nominees of the Law and Justice party and political functionaries.
The Russian agent ends his piece with the conclusion: “The ultraconservative drift in Poland continues because, despite mass protests, the government passed the law and the Constitutional Court upheld it. The protests will not stop, but what has happened leaves a certain sense of powerlessness that will force many Polish women to go abroad if they want to be able to decide freely about their bodies.”
As it turns out, even if González-Rubtsov once happened to do an interview with a representative of Ordo Iuris, he still expressed opinions about Ordo Iuris similar to those of Staszewski, Suchanow, Mierzyńska, and company. At the same time, Rubtsov’s partner, Polish journalist Magdalena Chodownik, who lived with the Russian spy at the time of his arrest in 2022, is a long-time correspondent of Western liberal mainstream media such as France 24 and Euronews.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.”
The convergence of the narrative of the Russian agent and Polish (as well as European) left-liberal activists is a good example of the words of American historian Will Durant, who penned a quote American director Mel Gibson used as the motto for his film Apocalypto, which depicts a declining Mayan civilization shortly before its conquest by Spanish invaders: “A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.”
It is undoubtedly in the direct interest of Russia’s imperial policy to weaken further Western
civilization, to which mass immigration, mass abortion and the propagation of gender ideology, along with so-called “wokeism,” contribute. For, absent this deep decay and decadence of
Western societies, and the weakening of the Old Continent’s nation-states, the West will keep
being an obstacle to Russian imperialism in Central and Eastern Europe.
Incidentally, this narrative enjoys support in Western countries not only among Russian agents. Islamists too have formed a tacit alliance with the liberal left in Western Europe. It is an alliance that Frenchman Éric Zemmour has called, in the context of France, a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Western liberals and an expansive Islam. Thus, the above-mentioned Polish activists and their likes in other European countries are, at best, useful idiots not only of Putin’s Russia, but also of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that does not hide its plans to conquer Europe through the use of violence, and then the entire world, for Islam. It is interesting that conservatives are constantly accused by those people of weakening Europe and spreading a narrative in line with that of Putin’s Russia. Whether this is just a phenomenon of projection or a conscious act on the part of left-wing activists, is difficult to ascertain.
It’s time for those who have long accused the right of Russian ties to reveal their own
secrets!
Perhaps, then, the Polish activists and journalists spreading theses that are so similar to those which their Spanish-Russian colleague promoted as part of his work as a Kremlin spy, and whom they so passionately defended, should answer the difficult questions that are now arising about who they really work for and what their motivations really are? They should now tell the public whether they, too, are paid agents of the Kremlin or just innocent useful idiots.
