After a visit to Poland, best-selling author and Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen took to Twitter to point out the stunning differences between Warsaw and Portland, Oregon, using two photos to emphasize how the once safe U.S. city has transformed into a place increasingly known for murder, drugs and homeless camps.
Deneen was a guest in Poland last weekend, where he was invited to speak at the conference “Poland: A Great Project.” Apparently, his time in the European country made an impression on him.
“A beautiful Saturday morning in Warsaw. Many young families walking with their children down the street. No stench of weed. Clean. Orderly. Cities don’t have to be wretched cesspools of human filth. (Warsaw/Portland, a month apart,)” he wrote.
Deneen, a professor of political philosophy who has lectured at Princeton and Georgetown universities in the past, is known for his book “Why Liberalism Failed,” which became a bestseller across the world in 2018 and was recommended by former U.S. President Barack Obama, among others, for its incisive study on the crisis facing modern liberalism.
Although the professor could be accused of cherry-picking with the two photos, relevant data illustrates stark differences between Poland and other Western countries. Poland, in contrast to the United States and Western Europe, features one of the lowest robbery and murder rates in the Western world. In most Polish cities, citizens can walk freely at night, and there are no multicultural “no-go zones” prevalent across Western Europe. In such areas, sexual assault, murder, and even attacks against women for simply wearing the wrong type of clothing are remarkably common.
Violent crime is even more pervasive in the U.S., which means that safe countries like Hungary and Poland can often serve as a culture shock for American visitors. Polish citizens in major cities have little to fear from car jackings, interethnic gang warfare, or drug-infested homeless camps, such as the ones routinely featured in news segments such as this one:
Although Portland is safer than other U.S. cities like Chicago or Newark, crime has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2021, Portland broke its previous record for murders, although Portland was not the only one, with murders rising across U.S. last year, resulting in records being broken in other cities including Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Lexington, Kentucky.
So far in 2022, Portland is already on track to surpass last year’s murder record.
The growing homelessness crisis in Portland is greatly tied to the city’s drug crisis, which has been encouraged by its political class. Portland is now described as an “open-air drug market” ever since it became the first city in the nation to decriminalize hard drugs. The move has been credited with pushing drug overdoses an incredible 41 percent higher in 2021.
The stark difference between major Polish cities like Warsaw and American cities prompted some American Twitter users to respond to the professor’s post, discussing their own desire to leave the U.S.
Although a refugee exodus from liberal Western countries into nations like Hungary or Poland is unlikely anytime in the near future, the Hungarian government has expressed openness to the idea of persecuted Christians and conservatives one day settling in Central and Eastern Europe.
“Naturally, we will take in the real refugees,” Orbán said at his annual state of the union address in 2017. “The panicked German, Dutch, French, and Italian politicians and journalists, Christians forced to leave their countries will find here the Europe they lost at home.”
He again repeated similar comments in 2020, saying, “During our lifetime, a great many Christians will come to Hungary from Western Europe. Hungarians believe Christian values lead to peace and happiness, and that is why our Constitution states that protection of Christianity is an obligation for the Hungarian state.”
Hungary, which has an even lower crime rate than Poland in some categories such as robberies, has long claimed the secret to its low crime rate to be its rejection of unchecked mass immigration, an emphasis on law and order, and the promotion of conservative values within society.
