Nationalism, populism and popular culture in Poland: The case of memory politics of cursed soldiers

In our paper, we look at how the right wing in Poland uses popular culture to remodel Polish collective memory and mobilise support. We focus on the memory politics towards the post-1944 anti-communist armed underground in Poland. We show how the right wing transformed the underground into an emotionally and symbolically charged invented tradition of the cursed soldiers. We explain the functions and meanings of the symbol of the cursed soldiers in the ideology of Polish populist nationalism. We argue that, on the one hand, it symbolises the Polish ‘common’ people allegedly betrayed by the liberal elites after 1989, fitting in with the populist rhetoric of the right wing. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the cursed soldiers represent national boundaries marking the difference between "us" the true Poles, and “Others”, various national degenerates and ethnic others (cursed soldiers as the Polish nation), and we also demonstrate that the cursed soldiers represent in the right-wing imagination the fate of the Polish nation and signify Polish martyrological nationalism (the Polish nation as the cursed soldiers). We refer to the concept of cultural hegemony developed within cultural studies and political anthropology. We argue that the Law and Justice Party (PiS) transformed the cursed soldiers into a key memorial symbol in its hegemonic project of remodelling Polish collective memory in line with its ideological project of redefining Polish national identity. We show that the process cultural popularisation of the cursed soldiers were crucial in building and consolidating of the nationalist-populist hegemony. We understand hegemony more broadly than classical approaches - not only as the imposition of dominant meanings, but also the production of a dominant collective emotional field. By the process of popularisation we mean the use of various pop-cultural tools to promote the right-wing memory politics. In our paper, we show how PiS supports both directly and indirectly various pop-cultural forms of commemoration of the cursed soldiers. We focus primarily on rap music, which has become one of the main pop-cultural vehicles for Polish nationalist content in the Polish public space. Paradoxically, music identified with the black ghetto has become an expression of a racist and authoritarian Polish nationalism. We analyse how PiS indirectly uses rap music, which is surrounded by an aura of rebellion and defiance against the establishment, to promote an official state memory politics which is 'sold' as contestatory to attract young audiences. At the same time, we demonstrate that the nationalist rap cannot be fully subsumed within the ideology of the PiS, constituting to some extent an autonomous cultural phenomenon. In summary, in our paper we would like to show how PiS uses popular culture to construct symbolic boundaries between 'us' common Poles versus the elite by valuing the 'plebeian' tastes of rap supporters and how, by means of popular culture, it simultaneously constructs national boundaries focused on the difference between us true patriots (white, Catholic, conservative, etc.) and the rest.