Politics & Power Quote by Aleksander Kwasniewski

Kwasniewski is doing something that politicians rarely do without a crisis forcing their hand: he’s trying to make national memory feel like a civic duty rather than a partisan weapon. The key word is “attitude.” He’s not promising to rewrite history or litigate every grievance; he’s arguing that how a country holds its past is itself a test of maturity. The “dark pages” phrasing signals a controlled admission of wrongdoing - sober, non-sensational, meant to sound statesmanlike instead of accusatory.

The second sentence sharpens into a warning shot at a familiar post-communist temptation: the urge to cleanse the national story for the sake of pride. By calling denial “bad service,” he reframes forgetting as disloyalty. That’s the rhetorical judo here: the people “impelling” renunciation often present themselves as patriots defending the nation’s honor, yet Kwasniewski flips the charge, casting them as saboteurs of the very nation they claim to protect. It’s a move designed to pry moral seriousness away from extremists and put it back in the center.

Context matters. As a Polish politician shaped by the transition from communist rule into democratic Europe, Kwasniewski is speaking into debates about wartime complicity, antisemitism, political repression, and the instrumentalization of history for electoral ends. The subtext is integration: a nation that can face its shadows can credibly demand respect abroad and cohesion at home. Memory, for him, isn’t nostalgia; it’s infrastructure.