Mackiewicz devoted much space to reflecting on the simplification and deformation of reality by language. He claimed words, stereotypical notions and wrongly used terms and expressions can completely distort the image and sense of historical events. One example is the positive meaning of the term ‘revolution’ – the pan-European sympathy for this concept allowed the Bolsheviks to integrate their upheaval into the European traditions of freedom, democracy and social progress. Meanwhile, for Mackiewicz, the Bolshevik revolution was not a struggle for social justice and national freedom, but the apocalyptic annihilation of liberal civilisation in 19th-century Russia. To indicate the difference between Russia and the USSR, he posed the question: between Tsarist Russia of the early 20th century and Soviet Russia, where was there more room for truth and individual freedom?
The idea of the country
The central theme of Józef Mackiewicz’s philosophy is nationalism. He believed that nationalism was the source of the greatest misfortune in Eastern Europe – both in Poland and in neighbouring countries, and above all in relations between all the states of the region and the USSR. He believed that a mistake of the Second Polish Republic was creating conflicts between Poles and people of different nationalities living in the eastern areas of the country and that the direct causes of this mistake were both the assimilationist concepts of National Democracy and the ‘superpower’ ambitions of the state administration, as a result of which national minorities were treated as second-class citizens. The only possible reaction to nationalist ideology was the concept of ‘the idea of the country’, which – alongside anti-communism – was the most important component of the writer’s worldview.
In Gazeta Codzienna, edited by Mackiewicz, the ‘country’ concept was justified more or less in the following way: the ‘country’ is the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Its unique problem is that Vilnius was once the capital of various nations. Therefore, history has determined that this land cannot be owned by any of them. The society of these lands is an amalgam of Lithuanian, Polish and Belarusian, mixed with Jews, Tatars, Karaites and Old Believers. The ‘countrymen’ were supporters of a diverse, multilingual and multicultural whole of this area, and not of dividing it into parts according to ethnic criteria. They did not agree with the concept of domination of one culture over the others.
In 1930s Vilnius, however, the ‘countrymen’ were not understood and sometimes even ridiculed. Some considered them traitors. Nevertheless, the ‘countrymen’ believed that the national idea would become a bridge of harmony for all the nations living in this area: Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Jews. The meaning of ‘the idea of the country’ was thus aimed against all nationalism and based on the belief that the nations inhabiting the area would enjoy completely equal rights, just like the inhabitants of Belgium or Switzerland. ‘The country’, however, is not a federation and not a confederation, but a geographical area recognisable only because people of different nationalities and different cultures call it their common homeland.
In ‘the idea of the country’, of which the works of Józef Mackiewicz are an excellent example, most Poles in Vilnius saw only a camouflaged consent to the annihilation of the Republic of Poland in September 1939. It was also disapproved of by Lithuanians, who suspected it of being yet another attempt by Poles to usurp the ownership of Vilnius.
Anti-Nationalism
Mackiewicz wrote that ‘his sense of nationalism has atrophied’, and he expressed this sometimes paradoxically, saying and writing: ‘I personally feel at the moment that I belong to Eastern Europe, and only secondarily to a particular nation’. Anti-Semitism or philo-Semitism, anti-Germanism or philo-Germanism, anti-Russianism or philo-Russianism, etc. were for Mackiewicz ‘matters as foreign as any phobia or philism in relation to any nation’.