Protesters gathered in Warsaw for a rally on Saturday.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

WARSAW, Poland — A march organized by a group seeking authoritarian rule in Poland drew tens of thousands to the streets of Warsaw on Saturday in what organizers and critics say has become Europe’s largest nationalist celebration.

Saturday’s march, which coincides with Poland’s Independence Day, drew tens of thousands of Poles and members from far-right groups across Europe, from the Italian Fascist group Forza Nuova to Hungary’s Jobbik. The event started as a small demonstration by fringe radicals in the late 2000s by a group called the National Radical Camp, or ONR in Polish, which takes its name from nationalist factions active before World War II.

The ONR continues to co-organize the march now that it has achieved official status. The group says that it seeks to preserve Poland’s “ethnic homogeneity” and Catholic faith under a military political order. This year’s slogan for the march was “We Want God,” invoking a Polish religious song discussed extensively in President Donald Trump’s July speech, in which he called Poland an example for those with “the will to defend our civilization.”

Krzsztof Bosak, a former member of Parliament from the National Movement, a small political party once formally affiliated with the ONR, said Trump’s speech was “exactly what should be said.” Bosak — who calls himself a monarchist — said that previous march slogans included “Poland for the Poles” and “Poland, stronghold of Europe,” but this was the first time in eight years that they’d chosen a slogan to make clear they were marching for Christian nationalism.

Critics call the ONR and other groups that organized Saturday’s march fascist, but organizers reject that label. Robert Bakiewicz, one of the organizers, said he preferred the label “authoritarian.”

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

“We just think it’s not efficient when everybody’s vote has equal power,” he said in an interview with BuzzFeed News this week. Despite the group’s radical ideology, it has since grown into one of the largest independence day events, joined in previous years by MPs of the ruling Law and Justice Party and welcomed with a letter read on behalf of President Andrzej Duda.

Saturday’s march was preceded with a mass that the priest opened with special greetings that included to members of the ONR, “football fans from all over Poland,” and an MP who belongs to the National Movement, Robert Winnicki. Though the Catholic bishops issued a statement earlier this year condemning nationalism, the march has been extensively covered by influential outlets linked to the church. These include Poland’s largest weekly, Gość Niedzielny, and the broadcasting network owned by a powerful priest, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk.

Organizers kicked off the march with chants that included, “Smash, smash, smash liberalism; our way is nationalism” and a performance by nationalist rappers. A number of foreign speakers took the platform to praise Polish nationalism, including Roberto Fiori, the Italian fascist leader who spent several years in Britain to avoid arrest in Italy.

“The virus is spreading in all Central Europe,” Fiore told BuzzFeed News, saying that he was hopeful about the advance of nationalist movements in countries including Hungary, Austria, and Belorussia. “I think that Poland now is undergoing a national revolutionary process. and we are trying to follow that process.”

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Marchers lit red flares as dusk fell around 3 pm and they began their procession. Some carried the neo-nazi Celtic cross symbol, and a handful had white nationalist slogans like “White Europe of fraternal nations” and "Europe will be white or deserted," Gazeta reported.

Poland has one of the most right-wing ruling parties in Europe, which has clashed with the European Union over its refusal to honor an international agreement to resettle refugees and attacks on democratic institutions. On the day before the march, lawmakers with the ruling Law and Justice Party announced a deal to advance a judicial overhaul that has prompted EU leaders to threaten sanctions for undermining the rule of law.

Before the Law and Justice Party took power in 2015, the Nov. 11 march routinely ended in violent clashes between police and anti-fascist protesters. But the government has now given its tacit blessing to the march. The police presence was light on Saturday, despite the possibility of a clash with an anti-fascist march happening a few blocks away.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

The National Radical Camp and allied factions consider the Law and Justice Party too soft on some issues, wanting the government to confront neighboring Ukraine over grievances dating back to World War II and to take steps to sever ties with the EU. They are most closely tied to the National Movement party, which holds no seats in parliament.

But National Movement board member and former MP Krzsztof Bosak said the party has helped move the debate in their direction, a process he said was accelerated by the European financial crisis and the refugee crisis.

A new delegation of white nationalist groups condemned by organizers announced they would join as a “black bloc,” borrowing the tactic of covering their faces from anti-fascist activists. These factions were connected to a Friday event organized by a publication called Szturm, which was to feature American alt-right personality Richard Spencer before he canceled under pressure from the Polish government. The groups, which included supporters of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, a militia with deep neo-nazi ties.

“We are the voice of those who, in spite of anything and everything, want to destroy the system and build a new home for our people on its ruins,” said black bloc organizers in a statement before the march.

ONR spokesperson Tomasz Kalinowski told BuzzFeed News these groups “have a bit different views on some issues” and “think the independence march is too soft.” But, he said, “we don’t exclude anybody from our march.”

Rafal Pankowski, a sociologist of the far right and co-founder of the anti-fascist association Never Again, told BuzzFeed News that many marchers may not be fully aware of the organizers’ ideology. But the growth of the event shows how far to the right the spectrum has moved in Poland.

“It is about shifting the boundaries and shifting the norms,” Pankowski said. “I think there is an element of triumphalism [among the marchers] in the last two years. Maybe not, ‘We have won,’ but ‘We are winning.’

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Marcin Krasnowolski contributed reporting.

Daniel Mihailescu / AFP / Getty Images

Anti-corruption campaigners in Romania say Facebook suddenly blocked dozens of their personal accounts, which they suspect was the result of a coordinated effort by opponents to suppress support for protests against the ruling party.

A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in a statement that "a number of pages were temporarily blocked due to an error in our automated systems." She did not respond to questions about whether that could have been triggered by a coordinated campaign to flag content critical of the ruling.

Romania's ruling center-left Social Democratic Party (PSD) has faced protests throughout the year in opposition to proposals to alter the country's legal system that critics say are designed to weaken anti-corruption measures. This follows a wave of prosecutions against officials, including the country's former prime minister, several members of Parliament, and many other officials. The PSD's leader, Liviu Dragnea, is also facing allegations that he formed a "criminal group" to illegally access funds from the European Union.

Activists have taken to the streets throughout the year, including last Sunday, in a movement largely sustained by a number of Facebook groups. But as the latest protest approached, reports began to surface that activists, journalists, and others posting about the demonstration were discovering their accounts were frozen or restricted.

Florin Badita, an administrator of a Facebook page with more than 73,000 members and a name that translates to Corruption Kills, told BuzzFeed News that he was unable to post for 48 hours because Facebook's system was flagging his post as spam. He shared with BuzzFeed News a list of 90 people compiled through the Facebook group who reported having their accounts restricted after posting about the weekend's protest or posting comments critical of the government and corruption.

One of the most high-profile accounts that was blocked was that of the 101-year-old philosopher Mihai Sora, who later posted that Facebook abruptly blocked his account until he submitted to an ID check. His account had apparently been flagged for a violation of Facebook's real name policy.

Dragos Stanca of the Romanian marketing firm ThinkDigital also collected dozens of reports of account disruptions in response to a call he posted on Facebook. Though there could theoretically be purely technical reasons for these accounts to be blocked, the fact that there seemed to be a clear pattern targeting anti-corruption supporters suggested a systematic effort by government supporters to report their accounts to Facebook.

"There are a few hypotheses that can be easily put on the table: one, it was a massive action of reporting the posts and tripping somehow the Facebook algorithm," Stanca said. "My educated guess is massive reporting done by real accounts that tricked a little bit the robots from Facebook."

Romania has a long history of orchestrated troll campaigns, said Oana Popescu, director of the policy think tank Global Focus and a foreign policy adviser to the then-leader of the PSD during the 2008 campaign. "You’d have hundreds of hired people, and literally every party had them. You would pay some students ... to post on forums and news websites."

BuzzFeed News could not reach a PSD spokesperson for comment about the account suspensions by phone or email on Tuesday evening. The government is under increasing pressure to abandon its changes to the judiciary, including a call from the US State Department on Monday urging the Parliament to "to reject proposals that weaken the rule of law and endanger the fight against corruption."

The PSD shot back in a statement that the US's position "does not appear to be the result of a balanced, objective and comprehensive analysis of the facts, but rather echoing opinions circulated in the Romanian public space." Dragnea has said the allegations against him are a plot orchestrated by billionaire activist George Soros.

"It all starts from George Soros, this malefic character, to whom I say: I will not surrender,” Dragnea said in July.

Like in many other places in the world, said ThinkDigital's Stanca, the fight in Romania is "a war between the bubbles: the bubble of the people that sustain the protest, or [the bubble that is] trusting the propaganda saying the protest is baked by George Soros."

He continued, if there was an orchestrated effort to suppress the protest movement, it will backfire. With another protest scheduled for Dec. 1, Romania's national day, he said, "The effect was exactly the opposite — now everybody’s talking about the fact that they tried to censor opinions."

PARIS — The man the alt-right claims as its spiritual father is a 74-year-old who lives with four cats in a Paris apartment around the corner from a Creole restaurant, a West African clothing store, and a Peruvian supermarket.

His name is Alain de Benoist, and he has published more than 100 books in his nearly 60-year writing career that encompass topics from anthropology to paganism. As the leader of a movement begun in the 1960s known as the “New Right,” he won one of France’s most prestigious intellectual prizes, was a columnist for several of its leading newspapers, and helped build the canon of fascist and radical writers familiar to political players ranging from Richard Spencer to Steve Bannon.

His core arguments are at the heart of many nationalist movements around the world, echoed even by those who do not know his name. His work helped give an aura of respectability to the notion that European “identity” needs to be defended against erasure by immigration, global trade, multinational institutions, and left-wing multiculturalism.

Today, de Benoist generally avoids social media and remains very much a man of the printed page. His Paris apartment is a refuge from the country home where he keeps a personal library of more than 200,000 volumes, a collection so vast he says it has become a burden. His study houses an art collection that includes a modernist portrait of de Benoist with his face encased in what appears to be a mask of metal. A poster for a talk he once gave in Turkey hangs on the bathroom wall, opposite a poster featuring different breeds of cats.

“Maybe people consider me their spiritual father, but I don’t consider them my spiritual sons.”

He now sees himself as more left than right and says he would have voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US election. (His first choice in the French election was the leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.) He rejects any link between his New Right and the alt-right that supported Donald Trump.

“Maybe people consider me their spiritual father, but I don’t consider them my spiritual sons,” he said.

De Benoist’s views have changed a lot over his career, and he has written so extensively and in such dense prose that it can be hard to figure out what he believes today. (For English speakers, his challenge is complicated further by how little of his work has been translated.) He’s denounced racism but opposes integration. He rejects demands that immigrants assimilate or “remigrate” but laments “sometimes-brutal” changes they bring to European communities. He says identities change over time but wants them to be "strong." He disavows the alt-right but collaborates with some of the most prominent people associated with the movement.

Over the course of an afternoon, he grew frustrated with questions about how his ideas link to today’s politics, saying, “You treat the New Right as a political subject, but for us it is an intellectual subject.”

It wasn’t the far right that brought de Benoist’s writings to the United States. A left-wing journal called Telos, which was drawn to de Benoist’s critique of US foreign policy, first published his work in 1990s. Telos translated his Manifesto for a European Renaissance in 1999, in which he laid out a philosophy that has become known as “ethnopluralism” — arguing that all ethnic groups have a common interest in defending their “right to difference” and opposing all forces that threaten to erase boundaries between “strong identities.”

Whatever his intentions, this argument caught the eye of a new generation of white nationalists, in whose hands ethnopluralism became a kind of upside-down multiculturalism. They were not white supremacists, they claimed, but they believed that everyone was better off in a world where ethnicities were separate but — at least theoretically — equal.

De Benoist came of age following the war over independence for Algeria, which sparked a debate about whether Muslims could ever really be French, and whether France had made itself vulnerable by inviting them in.

After 130 years of French rule, Algeria had increasingly become part of the French republic, and Muslims increasingly a part of France. Algeria’s split from France in 1962 sparked tensions about whether French values could transcend differences of race, ethnicity, and religion. And the hundreds of thousands of Algerian residents — both ethnic Europeans and Muslims — who moved to France in its aftermath fueled a bitter debate over who could truly be French.

The New Right began as a cadre of young men once aligned with Nazis and fascists who believed these questions were life-and-death for the future of Europe. But they broke from the far right in the late ’60s, reinventing themselves as intellectuals, drawing on both the right and the left as they worked their way into mainstream debate.

It’s no accident that ideas de Benoist first formulated in France in the mid-20th century are now upending the politics of the 21st. And it is perhaps inevitable that the people laying claim to de Benoist’s legacy are dragging him back into the kind of far-right world he tried to escape.

Alain de Benoist in his office in Paris.

Pierre Terdjman for BuzzFeed News

De Benoist was born in the Loire Valley west of Paris in 1943, when France was under Nazi occupation. His parents moved him to Paris as a child, where he attended elite prep schools before entering the Sorbonne, one of France’s most prestigious universities.

He began his writing career at just 17, publishing a couple articles with an editor, Henry Coston, who’d been in prison for collaborating with the Nazis. Coston had been a leader of the Association of Anti-Jewish Journalists during the German occupation and published works like the pro-concentration camp pamphlet I Hate You. De Benoist said he was not aware of Coston’s anti-Semitism — he met him because he was friends with Coston’s daughter — and thought of Coston as someone who “mainly wrote about economics and banks.”

De Benoist calls his brief work with Coston a “footnote” in his history; the Algerian War was the conflict that defined his early career.

He entered politics in the early ‘60s as a leader of a group called the Federation of Nationalist Students. That group lent support to something called the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which united former soldiers, fascists, and champions of the French empire in a desperate campaign to block Algerian independence. As independence became increasingly inevitable, the OAS unleashed a terrorist group that killed almost 2,000 people and nearly assassinated the president of France.

De Benoist became close with an OAS member named Dominique Venner, who in 1963 helped launch a magazine with De Benoist as part of the team. Europe-Action became a key voice on the right trying to define what it now meant to be French.

Before the war, France had gone further than nearly any other European country in making colonial residents full citizens, according to historian Todd Shepard. Algeria elected 55 Muslims to the Parliament, including a vice president of the National Assembly. The leader of the Senate — and the first in line of succession to the president — was a black man from Guiana. France had also taken special steps to erase differences between European and local communities in Algeria, including affirmative action for Muslims in government jobs and a campaign to help Muslims “modernize” by casting off the veil.

But France’s rule was brutal, using torture, assassination, and collective punishment to crush calls for independence — tactics that made France a global symbol of the evils of colonialism. Even many in France embraced the cause of Algerian independence because they’d come to believe keeping the territory betrayed France’s egalitarian values.

Author Dominique Venner in France in August 1993.

Marc Gantier / Getty Images

The right took a different lesson, Shepard said in an interview. For people like Venner, the war proved that it was foolish to include “Arabs” in a European country, and that France was too weak to defend itself from the countries now rising in the ashes of France’s former empire. And with nearly 1 million people moving to France from Algeria in the war’s aftermath, they believed the question of identity would determine if France — or Europe — could endure.

“France and Europe must accomplish their nationalist revolution in order to survive,” Venner wrote from prison in a manifesto that cited Lenin, Hitler, and Mao as models. Force alone was not enough to accomplish this, he argued. The right must also win the battle of ideas, formulating a “new doctrine” to be “a rudder for thought and action.”

In this moment of crisis, Venner and de Benoist’s Europe-Action called for the West to unite as “the community of white people.”

Instead of the kind of nationalism that had led Europeans to fight against one another, de Benoist argued that they should unite around race.

“Race constitutes the only real unit which encompasses individual variations,” de Benoist wrote under a pseudonym in 1966. “The objective study of history shows that only the European race (white race, caucasoid) has continued to progress since it appeared on the rising path of the evolution of the living, contrary to races stagnant in their development, hence in virtual recession.”

And so he endorsed the kind of racial science that the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust. “Replace natural selection,” he recommended, “with a careful communitarian eugenics policy aiming to reduce the flawed elements and the flaws themselves.”

De Benoist now disavows this essay and other work from these years, saying he “said a lot of stupid things before” growing disappointed “not only with the radical right, but also with politics.”

“For me, my intellectual life started in 1967, in 1968,” de Benoist said. “This is where I completely changed.”

In reality, the journal he started around that time published continued to write about “biological realism” for many years after. But during this period, he joined with former Europe-Action and Federation of Nationalist Students colleagues to form the New Right, which would gradually stop emphasizing a racial hierarchy and instead focus on “identity” and “human diversity” as social goods that must be carefully preserved from homogenization.

De Benoist went on to develop a philosophy that draws on — and challenges — both the right and the left. But his work’s key preoccupations would echo Venner’s revolutionary manifesto for the rest of his career: the beliefs that politics can be reshaped through the spread of ideas, that Europe needs to return to its cultural roots, and that identities must be forcefully defended from erasure.

He also dined once a year with Venner, de Benoist said, until his death in 2013. Venner died still trying to shock Europe into a nationalist revival. He shot himself in Notre Dame Cathedral, a gesture he said was intended to awaken “French and European memory of our identity” before France falls “into the hands of the Islamists.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen leads the annual demonstration of the political party he founded, the National Front.

Yves Forestier / Getty Images

Like the alt-right, de Benoist’s New Right wanted to craft a new right-wing ideology to break into a debate they believed was controlled by the left.

In some ways, de Benoist was very much in step with his French generation in rebelling against authority. In May 1968, left-wing student protests at Paris’s universities sparked a political uprising that transformed France. Clashes between students and police in the streets of Paris were followed by a nationwide general strike, which brought the country’s economy to a halt for two weeks and ultimately forced President Charles de Gaulle into retirement.

De Benoist was in Paris for most of May and “shared the enthusiasm of ’68,” he said, adding, “I didn’t share the reaction of the rightist people who said ‘this is horrible and anarchist.’” He even dropped out of university in 1965, he said, believing getting his degree would be “some kind of collaboration with the system.”

He admired the tactics of the left, and it inspired him and other former far-right activists to undertake a long-term battle of ideas waged through a new think tank.

They called this project “metapolitics,” borrowing a term from the communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. They called themselves as the Group for Research and Study of European Civilization, or GRECE.

They were kind of a group of right-wing hippies. They organized solstice parties and sold spiritualist trinkets in their magazines. They declared themselves pagan because “the European peoples must draw from the origins of their spiritual identity.” The group, which was nearly all men, also embraced an ethic of free love in which “wife swapping” was common, former members said.

Whenever white nationalists today claim not to be racists — just people who believe that everyone is better off living with their own kind — they are invoking this framework.

At one point, de Benoist even came to the defense of an author who celebrated pedophilia, writing, “Can one not have the right to prefer to stroke the hips of high school girls[?] … It seems to me, according to my scale of personal values, that it is more ‘scandalous’ to watch TV shows, to play the lottery, than to have a passion for fresh buttocks, nascent emotions and burgeoning breasts.”

De Benoist’s biggest enemy became liberal capitalism, which he saw as an all-consuming force bent on assimilating the whole world into a universal market.

But de Benoist’s writings from this period often stood the logic of the left on its head: Egalitarianism was the true racism because it sought to erase difference from the world. Democracy was the true totalitarianism because it insisted undemocratic systems were illegitimate. Individualism was robbing people of their identities because it weakened community bonds.

GRECE advanced its ideas through seminars, conferences, and an annual “summer school” that covered topics from the Italian fascist writer Julius Evola to neo-fascist alliances with postcolonial movements. The group had as many as 2,000 members by the late ’70s who organized local clubs around France, according to historian Anne-Marie Duranton-Cabrol. Outside of Paris, they were strongest in Mediterranean towns where the pieds noirs, the ethnic-French community who’d lived in Algeria for generations and militantly opposed independence, had settled.

The group’s journals, Nouvelle École and Éléments, did not initially sound that different from Europe-Action, and a lot of the same writers — including Dominique Venner — were early contributors. But by the mid-’70s, de Benoist had developed a new rhetoric of identity that challenged the left on its own terms.

De Benoist in France in January 1995.

Louis Monier / Getty Images

Polish nationalists say anti-Semitism has been used to shame Poland, but historians and Jewish leaders say they’re trying to censor the truth about the Holocaust.

Poland infuriated Israel ahead of last weekend's Holocaust Remembrance Day when its Parliament took up a bill to make it a crime to blame Poland for the Holocaust.

The legislation would punish people with up to three years in prison for statements that “publicly and against the facts ascribe responsibility or co-responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the Third German Reich to the Polish nation or the Polish state.”

But it doesn't stop there. The bill's full text says it would broadly make it a crime to accuse the Polish state of "other crimes against peace and humanity, or war crimes," or to "grossly [diminish] the responsibility of actual perpetrators" of such crimes.

After passing Poland's lower house last week, the Polish Senate approve the bill on Thursday. It still has to be signed by the president to become law.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

“We will under no circumstances accept any attempt to rewrite history,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in remarks to his cabinet on Sunday. Netanyahu also called Poland's prime minister to protest the legislation.

Many historians and Jewish groups inside Poland denounced the bill as well. "We consider the adopted law a tool intended to facilitate the ideological manipulation and imposition of the history policy of the Polish state," said a statement from the Polish Center for Holocaust Research. "The new legislation would constitute an unprecedented (and unknown in a democratic system) intrusion into the debate about the Polish history."

Tsafrir Abayov / AFP / Getty Images

The bill, which passed the lower chamber of Poland's Parliament, seeks to forbid calling Auschwitz and other Nazi facilities "Polish death camps."

Many Poles are infuriated when Nazi concentration camps are referred to as "Polish," because they were built and run by Germany in occupied Polish territory. Around 150,000 ethnic Poles are estimated to have been imprisoned in Auschwitz, along with more than 1 million Jews and tens of thousands of members of other groups.

Poland is generally estimated to have lost 6 million people during World War II; about half of the dead were Jews, the rest Poles and members of ethnic minority groups. Thousands of Poles have been recognized by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel for helping rescue Jews during the war.

Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

Many Polish nationalists believe previous liberal governments went too far in confronting anti-Semitism in Poland's past. This bill is part of rolling back what they call a "pedagogy of shame" designed to make Poles feel bad about their history.

"We reject the policy of the pedagogy of shame," said Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the ruling Law and Justice Party, last November. "We are moving towards Poland, which will be able to say is an independent and proud country."

Alik Keplicz / AP

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

According to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, this was one of dozens of pogroms that broke out as Nazi troops advanced across Poland.

The incident became well-known in Poland thanks to a book by American historian Jan Tomasz Gross, in which he described the event unfolding as "half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half." An investigation by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance concluded that only a fraction of the town's Polish population participated. It also called into question his conclusion that the total number of Jews killed that day actually totaled 1,600.

A survey conducted after the book's publication found half of Poles surveyed were familiar with the incident, and 40% approved of the president's 2001 remarks. But historical debate over Gross's account has more recently transformed into allegations that Poles were never involved in the massacre at all.

In 2016, the education minister from the Law and Justice Party told an interviewer the claim that Poles were involved in the pogrom was just "opinion," and she also would not say Poles were responsible for a 1946 pogrom that occurred in the town of Kielce after the war's end.

AP Photo

Paul Thompson / Getty Images

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

Polish President Andrzej Duda announced Tuesday that he would sign legislation making it a crime to suggest Poland had any responsibility for the Holocaust or any other crimes against humanity.

"One must protect the good name of Poland and Poles," Duda said while announcing his approval of the legislation, which carries penalties of fines and three years in prison. "We have the right to historical truth and we have the right to be judged in a real way, according to the facts."

The bill is largely aimed at making it a crime to refer to Auschwitz and other Nazi camps established by German forces in Poland as "Polish death camps." The Polish government has repeatedly lodged official protests when foreign officials have referred to the camps that way, as when President Barack Obama did so in 2012.

Poland lost an estimated 6 million people during World War II, during which it was simultaneously invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Half this number is estimated to have been Jews, while the rest were Poles and members of other ethnic groups. Thousands of Poles have been recognized by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel for helping rescue Jews during the war, despite there having been a death penalty for anyone found helping a Jew while the country was under Nazi occupation.

But Poland also had its own anti-Semitic movements before the war — including government officials exploring ways to deport Jewish people from the country — and several anti-Jewish riots broke out as the Nazis conquered Polish territory.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Polish prime minister to protest when the bill cleared its first legislative hurdle in late January, and denounced the legislation as an "attempt to rewrite history." The US also lodged an official protest against the bill, saying it "could undermine free speech and academic discourse" and could have "repercussions" for "Poland’s strategic interests and relationships — including with the United States and Israel." US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday said in a statement that the law, when in effect, would "adversely [affect] freedom of speech and academic inquiry."

Historians and Jewish groups have also said they were concerned the law could be used against Holocaust survivors telling their own stories. President Duda acknowledged this concern on Tuesday, saying he would refer the law to the Constitutional Tribunal after he signed it into law to make sure it would not "close the mouths of those who survived."

The Israeli Embassy in Warsaw issued a statement on Friday reporting a "wave of anti-Semitic statements" in Poland since the legislation sparked an international uproar, remarks that have been "overflowing the internet channels in Poland, but they have become present on the main stream media too," including on the government-backed channel.

Nationalist groups that take their names from anti-Semitic organizations active before World War II had planned a protest in front of the Israeli Embassy on Monday, but local officials blocked their access to the street in front of the building.

KRAKOW, Poland — Tadek spent his teens scouring record stores for albums by the Wu-Tang Clan and other hip-hop artists in Poland’s medieval center, Krakow.

Tadek, whose full name is Tadeusz Polkowski, discovered rap in the ’90s when it was still a new import to Poland; communism kept the country closed to Western pop culture until 1989. He started recording his own tracks at 16 under his nickname and became nationally known in his twenties as part of a wannabe gangsta rap–style group that recorded songs with names like “The Hard Life of a Street Rapper.”

So there was an outcry from the mainstream press when Tadek was invited to perform at the presidential palace in 2017 to mark the National Day for the Polish Language, a day historically used to honor Poland’s greatest writers.

The performance looked awkward for everyone involved. Tadek had traded the hoodie he often wore in his videos for a pair of chinos and a mustard V-neck sweater, both of which looked several sizes too large for his willowy frame. He kept his eyes tightly shut, as if trying to block out the rows of dignitaries in suits stiffly watching on.

But Tadek was given this platform precisely because he was no longer the man who’d tossed around phrases like “fuck the police” in his youth. That day he performed a song addressed to his wife — but it turned out to have a surprise message.

“We are getting stronger, the family is getting bigger, without man and woman — the final extinction. Our sons are so great that I want another child,” he rapped, before apologizing at the song’s end, “You have one rival, forgive me — it's Poland!”

“Everyone who wants to control Poland ... wants us to be weaker, wants us to be not proud of ourselves.”

Rappers like Tadek reflect just how deeply the past divides Poland today. He’s reinvented himself in recent years as part of a booming nationalist rap scene. His songs pay homage to the Poles who fought the Nazis in World War II and the communist government that followed, while taking jabs at the mainstream media, liberal politicians, and the European Union. His videos sometimes rack up millions of views on YouTube, and he plans to put out three new albums this year, now supported with a fellowship from the Ministry of Culture.

His trajectory reflects just how much nationalism has transformed Poland in recent years. The 2015 elections were won by an aggressive far-right faction, the Law and Justice Party, known as PiS for short. The PiS government has undermined the courts, refused to accept the refugees required under EU rules, and opened a culture war by claiming Poles have long been fed lies about their history.

Earlier this week, the president enacted a law that makes it illegal to say Poland shared any responsibility for the Holocaust. In World War II, the country lost 6 million people, half of whom were Jews. Lawmakers want Poland to be recognized as a victim of the Nazi invasion, but critics say the law would silence discussion of the way some Poles contributed to the Jews’ deaths.

One of the biggest tests of democracy in Europe is now playing out in Poland — and a drive to rewrite history is at its heart.

“Everyone who wants to control Poland ... wants us to be weaker, wants us to be not proud of ourselves,” Tadek said in an interview with BuzzFeed News last month at his apartment overlooking the industrial valley that keeps Krakow smothered in a blanket of smog. “Pride gives people power to do something for your country.”

Tadek at home with his two sons.

Anna Liminowicz for BuzzFeed News

The night that Tadek’s parents brought him home from the hospital in 1982, he slept through riots outside their front door in which pro-democracy activists clashed with communist paramilitaries.

Shortly before Tadek was born, his father, a poet named Jan Polkowski, was imprisoned for seven months for his role in the pro-democracy Solidarity movement. After communism fell, Polkowski went on to serve in Poland’s newly democratic government and then a right-wing party that ultimately became part of PiS.

Tadek grew up surrounded by the memories of ancestors who’d fought for Poland. His parents hung a portrait of an ancestor who fought in a failed 1863 uprising against imperial rule by Russia. Tadek was told stories about his great-grandfather, who fought the Soviet Union after Poland became independent in 1918. He heard about his grandfather, one of thousands of Polish soldiers who fought the Nazis only to be sent to Soviet gulags by the Red Army as it established a communist puppet government at the end of the war.

So, Polkowski told BuzzFeed News, he was dismayed when Tadek grew into a rebellious adolescent drawn to “the way of expression that was used by black people in slums.” The music “did not talk about the reality he lived in,” he complained, and it seemed like a foreign subculture that “cuts you off from your roots.”

“It was also a rejection of my past,” Polkowski said.

Within a few years Tadek had started a group called Firma, rapping about weed and vodka and girls.

He saw Tadek as emblematic of a generation of young Poles raised under the liberal governments that ran Poland in the ’90s and brought it into the EU in 2004. He said Poland’s liberals only wanted to speak about the dark side of the country’s past and believed that “Polish identity should be dissolved into an EU identity.”

While his father wanted him to learn about Poland’s history, Tadek dedicated himself to mastering the audio equipment he’d inherited from an uncle. He recorded songs to cassette using samples from his PlayStation, recordings for children, and classical composers like Brahms and Beethoven. He was still in high school when he began performing live shows.

“I was fucking scared,” he said when recalling his first performance. “Everyone told me that I was really white in the face onstage.”

Within a few years Tadek had started a group called Firma, rapping about weed and vodka and girls. By the mid-2000s, they were playing around 50 concerts a year.

But everything changed for Tadek as he approached his thirties, when he decided to go on a self-improvement kick — to fight “not to be an idiot,” he said. His father had a library of more than 10,000 volumes, so he asked for some recommendations. And his father gave him books about Polish history.

Recounting this moment in his living room, which is decorated with the emblem of the uprising of Polish rebels that expelled Nazi troops from Warsaw at the end of World War II, Tadek grew angry about how much he hadn’t known about Polish history.

“Jewish people use the Holocaust for a lot of business.”

He discovered a past full of heroes who fought for the country’s independence — and decided their memory should be a resource for Poland today, not something to be ashamed of.

“What’s wrong? Why don’t we use it?” he said. Poland could have followed the model of the Jews, he said, who “built a lot of success on tragical history from years of war.”

“Jewish people use the Holocaust for a lot of business,” he said, like how “when you say something wrong about some Jewish people, it’s [called] anti-Semitism.”

For Tadek and many others, an example of the distortion of Polish history concerns the 1941 massacre of Jews in a village called Jedwabne. That July, a group of Poles herded the town’s Jewish residents into a barn and set it on fire as Nazi soldiers looked on.

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Jedwabne was one of dozens of pogroms that broke out as the Nazis marched east across Poland, but a 2001 book by American historian Jan Tomasz Gross about the incident forced the first widespread discussion about how some Poles contributed to the death of Jews. A monument was built in Jedwabne, and two presidents apologized at commemorations a decade apart. But a government examination of the incident concluded in 2003 that Gross overstated the number who died and how many Poles participated. Many nationalists have since dismissed the book as a hit job designed to make Poland look bad.

Tadek claimed that Gross said, “Poles were the biggest killers of Jewish people during the war … that Polish people only wanted Jewish blood during the war.” In reality, Tadek said, thousands of Poles risked a death sentence by helping Jews escape the Nazis.

World War II wasn’t just a Jewish tragedy, he said. Around 2 million of the 6 million people believed to have been killed in Poland were ethnic Poles, and both Hitler and Stalin sought to destroy the Polish state. The Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944 was the largest underground revolt against German forces in any country during the war — there were plenty of stories of heroism, too.

“We were fighting during the Second World War,” Tadek said. “We were the biggest losers.”

Tadek came to believe that powerful interests were trying to keep the truth of the past from Polish citizens.

He pointed to members of the old Communist Party who’d become part of the center-left party that led Poland into the EU, who he believed were trying to keep the party’s crimes buried. Other former communists have become powerful in the media, like Jerzy Urban, who was the press secretary for Poland’s last communist leader and now edits a weekly paper. Many foreign companies are now big players in the Polish economy, including German firms that profited during the Nazi era, such as Allianz insurance.

“If you want someone to be your slave, you don’t want him to be intelligent, smart,” he said. “How the fuck did it happen — people don’t know about the biggest World War II heroes?”

Anna Liminowicz for BuzzFeed News

It’s not just the memory of World War II and communism that divides the Poles.

In 2010, President Lech Kaczyński and several other top officials died when a plane crashed in the Russian city of Smolensk as they were traveling to the site where the Soviet army massacred Polish officers at the end of WWII. Competing accounts of what happened that day are so far apart that they exist in entirely separate universes.

The official investigation by aviation experts and the government of liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk established that it was an accident caused by a rushed landing attempt in bad weather. But the leader of PiS — the dead president’s identical twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński — was convinced it had been an assassination by Russia and that Tusk was covering it up.

PiS hammered on the claim, organizing monthly vigils calling for the “truth” about Smolensk, while a new network of right-wing media outlets spread the conspiracy allegations. They claimed Tusk was a pawn of a hostile power, and charged him with treason when he later left Poland to become president of the European Council. By 2015 nearly a quarter of Poles believed there was a cover-up of Smolensk.

That’s the year PiS won a majority in Parliament promising to restore Poland’s pride and to keep out Muslim refugees. And it solidified its power with what opponents say is sustained assault on the media and the historical record.

If you think that the previous government covered up a Russian assassination of Poland’s president, then it’s not a stretch to believe that authorities will lie about anything. And there was a new network of right-wing news sites and social media accounts to convince the public they had long been duped.

“We were fighting during the Second World War. ... We were the biggest losers.”

For PiS members, the Smolensk cover-up was part of a much wider conspiracy by pro-European governments to lie about Poland’s history so the country would be ripe for foreign exploitation. They claimed liberals wanted Poles to be ashamed of their past so they would not fight back.

PiS’s Andrzej Duda, who is now Poland’s president, said his liberal predecessor’s apology for the Jedwabne pogrom “destroys historical memory.” A former PiS parliamentary candidate organized a nationwide hunger strike when the education ministry rolled out a more flexible curriculum in 2012 that required fewer hours of history.

Tadek’s first historically themed album came out at the height of this furor. He called it An Inconvenient Truth, because, he said in the title song, it carries a message for “those scumbags that destroy this country from the inside.”

“There is no consent to rob young Poles of knowledge of their ancestors,” he said in lyrics addressed to then–prime minister Tusk in a song about the curriculum overhaul. “Maybe he forgot that he is the prime minister? ... Do they love their country or Brussels more?”

The album’s biggest single was about the so-called Cursed Soldiers, Polish units who fought the Nazis and hid in the forests when the Soviets occupied Poland in 1945; they fought until the Red Army finally wiped them all out. It immediately racked up thousands of views on YouTube, and today it has been watched more than 4 million times in various versions. That number is more than one-tenth of Poland’s entire population.

One track told the story of Danuta Siedzikówna, who joined the Polish resistance as a nurse and supported the Cursed Soldiers with medical supplies until she was arrested and executed by communist forces. Another told the story of Witold Pilecki, a soldier during World War II who spent two years organizing a secret resistance inside the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He escaped in 1943 and fought with Polish forces during the 1944 uprising in Warsaw, before being arrested and executed in 1948 as a Western spy by the communist regime.

“Why did they not teach me about you in school?” Tadek lamented. “Today, the media and political elites — as if they are Polish — are constantly striving to deceive history.”

Tadek Polkowski in his the apartment where he grew up in Krakow, Poland.

Anna Liminowicz for BuzzFeed News

This led to the busiest time of Tadek’s career, when he was playing around 100 concerts a year. He also began working with a Krakow museum dedicated to Poland’s homegrown World War II resistance, and the city’s symphony orchestra organized a concert of classical arrangements of his music. Then came government honors.

Promotional copies of Tadek’s An Inconvenient Truth were distributed by Magna Polonia, a publication that is now a Breitbart-esque online portal run by a group called the National Radical Camp. Known by its Polish initials ONR, it takes its name from a right-wing group that sought an ethnically pure Poland in the 1930s.

ONR members have been convicted under Poland’s anti-fascism law for making Hitler salutes. But in 2010, a procession the ONR co-organized in Warsaw to mark Poland’s Independence Day became the focal point for the growing nationalist fervor and drew thousands.

“You have one rival, forgive me — it's Poland!”

A Polish far-right activist holds a Confederate flag and a Celtic Cross flag in 2015.

Wojtek Radwanski / AFP / Getty Images

A multinational neo-Nazi music festival called a "Night of Identity" is being planned in Poland to coincide with Hitler's birthday in April, the news outlet Gazeta Wyborcza reported this week, with participation of bands from countries including the United States and Germany.

The report comes as Poland is under fire from historians and Jewish organizations for a new law that criminalizes saying Poland has responsibility for the Holocaust. Lawmakers want Poland, which lost 6 million people during World War II, to be remembered as solely a victim of the Nazi troops that occupied the country. But some Poles were complicit in the deaths of some of the 3 million Jews who were among the dead.

Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the April concert is being organized by a group called Club 28, which has ties to the international neo-Nazi organization Blood & Honor. The event is to include international white power bands including the US's H8 Machine and Germany's Heiliger Krieg. In December, a flyer for a "Night of Identity" concert was posted on a Facebook page for H8 Machine, but only listed the location as "somewhere in Europe."

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Poland has become an increasingly important hub for nationalist parties and neo-fascist organizations in recent years. In November, an official march celebrating Poland's Independence Day included contingents from foreign organizations like Italian neo-fascist group Forza Nuova.

BuzzFeed News also attended a conference the day before November's march organized by Polish white nationalist publication Szturm that included the creator of the Russian white nationalist clothing brand White Rex, Denis Nikitin. American alt-right leader Richard Spencer was also due to speak at the conference, but pulled out at the last minute saying he feared the Polish government would bar him from entering the country.

At the same time that Poland is under fire for its new law about the Holocaust, a news report about neo-Nazi activity inside the country has caused a national scandal.

Last month, Poland's independent TVN broadcaster released a documentary with footage from a similar celebration of Hitler's birthday last year that included a swastika-shaped birthday cake, a flaming swastika, and participants chanting "Seig Heil." TVN also reported that an aide to an MP from Poland's most nationalist faction, the National Movement, was involved with Pride and Modernity.

(On its website, Pride and Modernity has denied that it was involved as an organization in the 2017 event.)

The TVN report brought widespread condemnation from across Poland's political spectrum, and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called for the group to be banned.

"These two totalitarianisms, Nazism and communism were the greatest tragedies in the history of mankind," Morawiecki said during televised remarks on Jan. 23. "In Poland there cannot be the slightest tolerance for Nazi, fascist, or communist symbols. Their presentation is against the law and against all our values."

Five people were arrested after the TVN documentary aired for violating a Polish law against promoting fascism. That law is narrowly interpreted; groups that describe themselves as "authoritarian" and "racial separatists" organize a march of tens of thousands every year in Warsaw to celebrate Poland's Independence Day, and some participants in last year's march carried banners of the Celtic Cross, which was also used as a Nazi symbol.

Prosecutors do sometimes bring charges for using symbols directly associated with Nazi Germany. Some members of the group that organize the Independence Day march, the National Radical Camp, were convicted of using Hitler salutes in 2008. Authorities tried unsuccessfully to get the group banned when Poland's government was lead by left-leaning lawmakers, but the lawmakers of the nationalist party that now governs Poland have generally backed the march since taking power in 2015.

Jaroslaw Sellin

Czarek Sokolowski / AP

A minister in the Polish government has backed the idea of building a "Polocaust" museum dedicated to the non-Jews who died in Poland during World War II.

Deputy Minister of Culture Jarosław Sellin said "this terrible fate" deserved to be shown to the world.

"I believe that the story of the fate of Poles during the Second World War ... deserves such a story," he said during a Tuesday appearance on Poland's Radio One.

Sellin was being interviewed to promote a plan to expand an existing museum in Poland – dedicated to Poles who saved Jews during World War II – to have a branch in Manhattan, "because this is the city where the most Jews in the world live." The goal, he said, is for "this story to be close to this community."

But Sellin was also asked to respond to the "Polocaust" museum proposed yesterday by an influential columnist and political consultant, Marek Kochan, as a way to respond to the outpouring of public criticism of a law enacted last week that criminalizes blaming Poland for the Holocaust.

"The State of Israel has succeeded in imposing a narrative reducing the victims of the war to the victims of the Holocaust. And yet no death resulting from criminal intentions is better or worse than another," Kochan wrote in the Rzeczpospolita newspaper.

Kochan, who has advised politicians including the chairman of Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party, wrote: "Every state has the right to its own historical policy, Israel has it, Poland has it. The Polocaust is not the Holocaust. It is something different, but also threatening the existence of an entire nation. Polish victims also have the right to be commemorated."

The main gate entering Auschwitz death camp.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

Six million people were killed in Poland during World War II – about half are estimated to have been Jews and the rest ethnic Poles and members of other groups.

Many Poles feel that their plight during the war — in which both Hitler and Stalin wanted to destroy the Polish state — has been ignored. They also feel that calling camps like Auschwitz "Polish death camps", which were built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, unfairly implicates Poland in the death of Jews, which led to the new Holocaust law being passed.

More than 6,000 Poles risked a death sentence to save Jews, and they are honored at a memorial in Israel as well.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Thomas Kienzle / AFP / Getty Images

Critics of Poland's new Holocaust law say it could silence discussion of the multiple incidents during the war when Poles committed riots against Jews or otherwise collaborated with Nazi genocide. The new law has been condemned by the Israeli and US governments, Jewish groups, and historians.

The diplomatic fallout continued over the weekend when the country's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested there were also "Jewish perpetrators" during the conflict, and there has been a surge of anti-Semitic incidents in Poland.

Kochan acknowledged naming his proposed museum after the "Polocaust" would be controversial, but he used an entry on Urban Dictionary to claim the term had been in use since at least 2012.

He also said the proposed museum should recognize the deaths of Jews and suggested inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the opening. "As the last debate has shown, in Israel there is a deficit of knowledge about the Second World War," he wrote.

LINK: This Is Why Israel And Poland Are Fighting About The Holocaust

Poland's most powerful politician, ruling Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, smiles during a vote in parliament

Czarek Sokolowski / AP

Poland’s parliament could soon vote to restrict kosher slaughter, potentially pushing its already strained relationship with Israel to the breaking point.

It is part of a broad package designed to protect animal welfare that’s been pending since November. But it could come up for a vote as soon as next week, opposition lawmakers and meat industry advocates tell BuzzFeed News. This could do permanent damage to Poland’s international reputation, said Rafał Trzaskowski, an MP from the opposition Platforma Obywatelska party and a candidate for Warsaw mayor.

Unless lawmakers can de-escalate the situation, Trzaskowski said, “This can really destroy our relation not only with Israel, but also the United States.”

Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, declined to be interviewed for this story. But a Polish Jewish leader in Warsaw who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic relationships told BuzzFeed News that, if the legislation passes, “It’s game over for Poland’s relationship with Israel. They will recall their ambassador. It’s the nail in the coffin.”

Poland has faced international condemnation since it made it a crime last month to suggest Poland had any responsibility for the Holocaust. The bill was largely aimed at ending use of the phrase “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz and other concentration camps run by Nazis in occupied Poland. Six million people died in Poland during World War II, three million of them Jews.

Poland, which has long been one of Israel’s closest allies, seemed stunned that many Jewish groups, foreign leaders, and historians interpreted the law as a way to prevent discussion of the ways some ethnic Poles participated in the genocide of Jews. The fact that the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) is now considering taking up the kosher slaughter ban is a sign of just how poorly its leadership is misreading the international situation, critics say.

“I think they really don’t know what to do,” said Trzaskowski.

PiS’s powerful chairman, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, seemed personally surprised by the fallout from the Holocaust bill, Trzaskowski said, adding that Kaczynski is not an anti-Semite and did not understand that the legislation could be seen as anti-Semitic. (The PiS press office did not respond to request for comment for this story.)

There has been a surge of anti-Semitic incidents in Poland since the bill passed. On Thursday, a PiS senator was suspended from the party after he shared Nazi propaganda footage of Jews being beaten in the Warsaw Ghetto on his Facebook page and a “Jewish Dictionary” that defined an anti-Semite as “a person that has the audacity to defend his rights from the arrogance and rapacity of Jews.”

Some Jews in Poland are talking about leaving the country, while many Poles feel under siege from abroad and sometimes blame foreign Jews for the outcry. The fury in Poland reached a fever pitch on Wednesday, after a Jewish foundation based in Boston posted a video of people saying “Polish Holocaust” as a protest against the law and calling for the US to break off diplomatic relations. (It was later deleted.)

But many opponents of the kosher slaughter ban say that if it advances, it won’t be primarily due to lawmakers’ malice towards Jews. Instead, it will mostly be because of Kaczynski’s myopia and inability to understand how Poland’s actions will be interpreted abroad.

Kaczynski is a famous animal lover who once called the suffering of animals raised for fur “one of the worst sufferings that exist in the world,” and the kosher rules are part of a broad animal rights package he has long championed. The bill would also shut down the country’s $350 million fur industry, which risks alienating the PiS base in rural areas.

The law would forbid kosher and halal slaughter for export. Many animal rights groups consider these methods cruel because the animals are commonly lifted or suspended alive before having their throats slit. The law includes a provision allowing ritual slaughter for domestic consumption, a carveout designed to address religious liberty concerns that led to an earlier version of the bill being struck down by the constitutional court. But kosher meat industry advocates say it could still forbid all ritual slaughter in practice, because another provision forbids suspending animals before killing them.

This proposal is generally in keeping with EU regulations, which require animals to be stunned to prevent suffering except in cases of religious slaughter. The practice of slaughter without stunning is also condemned by the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe.

“The scientists and veterinarians are against killing animals without stunning them, calling such actions barbarian,” said Cezary Wyszynski of the Polish branch of the animal welfare organization Viva.

But this legislation would likely have been especially controversial in Poland even before passage of the Holocaust history law, because kosher and halal exports have become big business for Poland. Meat exporters in Warsaw told BuzzFeed News that the Polish cattle industry mostly raises cows for dairy, which means the bulls are not of the quality required to compete in the European market. Israel, which used to import most of its beef frozen from South America, became an ideal market for the cattle, as it is close enough for meat to be shipped fresh from Polish slaughterhouses.

The exporters, who asked to remain anonymous fearing retaliation against their business, also say kosher slaughter is not inhumane, and that religious prejudice may be a reason that some lawmakers believe the practice is cruel.

Kosher and halal exports now account for a large portion of Poland’s substantial meat export business, according to the Polish Alliance of Farmers' Trade Unions and Farmers' Organizations, and it would be a disaster for farmers if it were enacted. Polish beef exports were worth about $1 billion between January and August 2017. The group’s president, Sławomir Izdebski, told BuzzFeed News that he would announce Friday a coalition of agricultural organizations to stop the bill, and would call for street protests if Kaczynski and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki won’t promise to shelve it.

“We always fight till the end,” Izdebski says. But, he said, Kaczynski is an “animal welfare fanatic.” A major reason they have a shot to defeat the bill is because of the international outcry about the Holocaust law, but even so, he believes Kaczynski will push forward.

“As far as i know, a lot of MPs and PiS members oppose this bill, but it seems that Kaczynski is really determined to put it through,” Izdebski said.

No PiS politicians would speak to BuzzFeed News for this story. Rafal Trzaskowski, the opposition MP, also thought PiS lawmakers opposed to the bill felt they couldn’t speak out.

“There are quite a few of Law and Justice members who are terrified,” Trzaskowski said. “They are dismayed by the Holocaust history bill, they are from rural areas [that rely on agriculture], but no one speaks out against the chairman, especially on an issue on which he feels so strongly. They just don’t dare.”

Trzaskowski, who supports the animal cruelty bill with an exception for ritual slaughter for local consumption, is hopeful that Kaczynski could still be persuaded to at least delay the vote. And there were signs in recent days that the government may be looking to ease tensions.

On Wednesday, the speaker of the senate said during a TV interview that he believed the Holocaust history bill would not be enforced until the Constitutional Court finishes reviewing its constitutionality, though there is nothing in Polish legal procedure that would prevent its enforcement before the Court rules.

But if Polish and Israeli diplomats are trying to find ways to preserve their historically close relationship, they are trapped by public opinion that seems to support escalating tensions. Support for PiS leaders has increased since the law was signed, and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki added fresh fuel to the fire last weekend when he said that there were “Jewish perpetrators” during the Holocaust during a speech in Munich.

Kaczynski seemed to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was gaining ground in the face of the criticism.

“Today the devil suggests a very bad solution, a very bad disease of the soul, the disease of the mind. This disease is anti-Semitism,” he said earlier this month. “We have to reject it, definitely reject it.”

But the kosher slaughter ban would be giving into that temptation, said one of the kosher meat exporters.

“If you touch the kosher, it’s like you kill the Jew,” he said.

MILAN — Laura Boldrini didn’t worry much about the death threats until she received a bullet in the mail.

Boldrini, who is the speaker of the Italian Parliament and the country’s highest-ranking woman politician, gets a level of harassment that even her critics say is extreme — and even by Italian standards. Many of them are sexist and threatening comments on Facebook, but they’ve been so relentless since she took office in 2013 that she began posting the names of her harassers on her own page. “Death to Boldrini” has been scrawled on city walls across Italy, and she is closely guarded by a heavy security detail.

Boldrini lives in Rome but is now campaigning ahead of the elections on March 4 for a parliamentary seat in Milan, where she stays in a nondescript house on a graffiti-lined street; its exact location is a carefully guarded secret. This election has been one of the most tumultuous in recent history: A group of immigrants was shot at by a white nationalist, there have been attacks on fascist parties and left-wing groups, and anti-fascist protesters have clashed with police in violent demonstrations.

The threats against Boldrini have gone on for so long they rarely make news. There was the time that a mayor of an anti-immigrant party responded to an alleged rape by an immigrant by suggesting rapists should visit Boldrini in order to “put a smile on her face.” Earlier this year, members of the party’s youth wing burned her in effigy.

What worries her most, Boldrini told BuzzFeed News in a wide-ranging interview last week, is the impact the threats have on her 24-year-old daughter.

“Her mother is threatened with decapitation [or being] put in a group of people raping her. Can you imagine what does it mean for a daughter?” Boldrini asked. But, she said, it has made her unafraid to challenge even her most aggressive political opponents.

“I don’t feel uncomfortable because if I consider what I’ve done in my life, how many scary situations I had to pass through, how could I be scared?”

“I don’t feel uncomfortable because if I consider what I’ve done in my life, how many scary situations I had to pass through, how could I be scared?”

Boldrini has put herself at the center of two issues that are tearing Italy apart. One, immigration, has dominated this election campaign. Boldrini is a former high-ranking official of the United Nations refugee agency, and has been an outspoken advocate for immigrant rights, even as overtly racist factions are poised to win a place in the next government by exploiting a backlash against the nearly half a million people who’ve come to Italy since 2015.

But Boldrini was already a favorite target of right-wing politicians and internet trolls. From the outset, she has defined herself as a politician who wants to revolutionize women’s rights in a country that ranks 82 out of 144 countries on a gender equality index by the World Economic Forum, and where nearly half of women do not work.

At a time when a new conversation around gender inequality and sexual harassment is transforming the politics of countries around the world, Italy’s political culture is headed in the opposite direction.

This election has seen 81-year-old former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — disgraced by a sex scandal involving an underage prostitute and a criminal conviction for tax fraud — return as a political force. One of Boldrini’s opponents in the race for her district in Milan is Berlusconi’s divorce lawyer.

Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party is polling well enough that it may well lead the next government. But Italian politics has become a race to the bottom thanks to two anti-establishment parties that are growing fast using social media to capture the backlash against immigration. The leader of one of these, Matteo Salvini of the Lega Party, hauled an inflatable sex doll on stage in July 2016, and addressed her as Boldrini’s doppelgänger.

For Boldrini, hatred toward migrants and women are linked. The factions that are campaigning against immigration by claiming new arrivals from Africa or the Middle East rape Italian women are also the ones threatening women in politics with rape. The men likely to govern Italy are “chasing votes over women’s bodies,” while sidelining their women opponents with unchecked sexual abuse, she said.

“The ones that hate migrants and the ones that hate women in positions of power — it’s the same cultural framework,” Boldrini said.

She’s derided by critics as shrill and unlikeable, and applauded by supporters as principled and uncompromising. But there’s wide agreement that she is on the receiving end of the worst of Italy’s political culture. Her most noxious opponents stand a good chance of being in government, while she will be likely be demoted to a rank-and-file member of Parliament from a minor opposition party.

“Sometimes I feel that I’m not understood, because the country is not maybe yet ready,” she said. “I’m confronting ... I don’t hide myself. I want to challenge you. ... The more you attack me, the more you threaten me, the more I have to go ahead.”

Laura Boldrini in Parliament on Dec. 13, 2016.

Andreas Solaro / AFP / Getty Images

In February 2013, Boldrini was working as a spokesperson for the UNHCR, when she visited a medical center in Greece where locals would line up alongside asylum seekers to get free treatment. She heard a group of African men shouting at another man, who was covered in blood. He should get used to being beaten, she remembered them saying, as a black man now in Europe.

Shocked by what she had seen, Boldrini went to her room and wrote a piece for her blog with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, attacking her own government for its failure to integrate new immigrants.

She found herself wondering if her life’s work had been pointless.

“It was the first time that I realized ... people affected by racism can reach the point where they think they deserve this,” Boldrini said. “My life dedicated to human rights — it’s a failure. What have we done if this is the result?”

That’s when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the leader of an upstart left-wing party called Left, Ecology, Freedom (SEL), who was looking for people from outside of politics to join his list for the upcoming elections.

“I was not ready. ... I never thought I could have done this,” she said. But then she thought, “it was the time you have to give something back to your country.” She’d spent decades working for international institutions in crisis spots around the world, and this was a chance to return home and represent “those values that were not the most welcome by everybody in the Parliament.”

“The ones that hate migrants and the ones that hate women in positions of power — it’s the same cultural framework.”

In the 2013 election, her party barely won the share of the vote required to get into Parliament, but it was courted to support an attempt to form a coalition government led by the center-left Democratic Party. The Democrats gave the post of speaker to SEL to help secure their votes, and they agreed that Boldrini was a good choice because her UN experience bolstered the coalition’s good-government bonafides. (This was a time when refugees were still coming to Italy in small numbers and immigration was not the divisive issue it became after large numbers began heading to Europe in 2015.)

But all this was decided by party leaders in secret. Boldrini only learned that she would become one of Italy’s most senior leaders minutes before it was publicly announced, on the morning of her second day as an MP. Her party leader told her that she would have to give an inaugural address — a speech to all members of Parliament carried live on national television — within two hours.

“I didn’t want the job,” she said, but everything was already in motion. For the first time, “I understood what it means when you’re not given the chance to say no.”

She hid in a bathroom long enough to call her daughter, who was living overseas, and then wrote her speech, which she drafted by hand because she’d forgotten to bring her iPad to work that day.

In her address she pledged to make Parliament a place for those who need the most help, including prisoners and people with disabilities. She called on Parliament to take on the issue of domestic violence “on day one,” and concluded with remarks about the thousands of migrants who drown at sea trying to reach Italy’s shores.

“All my issues were in there, and it was my identity card,” she said.

She represented the greatest hopes of the left, which was on the brink of taking power for the first time after Berlusconi’s last term as prime minister. Boldrini said a demonstration of tens of thousands had gathered on the streets of Rome at the same time her appointment was announced, and the crowd roared its approval.

“People were just crazy, saying, ‘If she can be the speaker than the change is possible,’’” Boldrini said.

But ultimately, she said, the left hoped for far more than lawmakers could ever deliver.

“In order to implement the change, other pieces had to be composed in the puzzle,” she said. “I was one piece ... but all the other pieces didn’t come.”

Laura Boldrini

Ottavia Fabbri for BuzzFeed News

The right-wing press declared her an enemy almost immediately — one newspaper declared that she’d spent her “entire life spent spitting on Italy” — but the reaction didn’t immediately seem out of the ordinary. And even though most of the right-wing MPs sat on their hands when she called for action on violence against women during her inaugural speech, the new Parliament’s first act was to unanimously ratify an international treaty requiring states to tackle domestic violence.

The first sign of Parliament’s entrenched macho culture came from something that shouldn’t have been an issue at all: The speaker is called “the president” in Italian, and her colleagues kept addressing her as “Mr. President” because “president” is a masculine noun in Italian grammar — il presidente. She wanted them to use language appropriate to her gender, which seemed like a no-brainer to her, but they continued to use the masculine form (even though women had twice held the post before her).

One reason for this, Boldrini said, was that, although Italian grammar has feminine forms for some lower-prestige jobs — like “contadina,” farmer, and “operaia,” factory worker — jobs higher up the social ladder — lawyer, engineer, or minister — always appear as masculine.

“Language is not only a semantic issue, it is a concept, a cultural issue ... When you are opposed to saying la ministra or la presidente it means that culturally you are not admitting that women can reach top positions,” she said. “Everything must remain masculine.”

So she sent out a letter asking her colleagues to call officeholders by their appropriate genders.

“In Italy there is a real difficulty in accepting the authoritativeness of women.”

Right-wing critics and politicians seized on this as a sign that she was an unhinged culture warrior, a frivolous elitist who had spent so much time hobnobbing overseas that she felt she could lecture Italians on how to speak their own language.

One newspaper went as far as saying that Boldrini was actually insulting the dignity of women, while a female former speaker of the house said it was a waste of money to have Parliament’s stationery reprinted with the president’s correct gender.

When she called for an end to the Miss Italia beauty pageant, or said she was tired of advertising that showed women as sex objects or housewives, Boldrini said even the mainstream press and women voters wrote to her to say she should stop attacking “our culture.”

“I was attacked by the media — even the mainstream — because that was ‘our culture, linked to our tradition, she’s a [subversive], these are our roots.’” Boldrini said. “Women writing, ‘I’m very happy to serve my husband.’ Give me a break! I had to make a video saying I didn’t want to offend anybody ... but why don’t we portray them in court, or in a surgery room, or — I don’t know — in Parliament?”

Lorella Zanardo, a women’s rights activist and writer who produced a documentary about the image of women in Italian media, said Boldrini challenged the most fundamental notions about a woman’s public role. Those ideas were heavily shaped by Berlusconi’s TV stations in the 1980s, which depicted women as either weak or as scantily dressed sexy props.

“President Boldrini embodies so many things that are disliked in this country,” Zanardo said, running down a list of traits that defy convention: She had her own career, and then won high office without working inside a party machine or with the patronage of a “godfather” figure. There is a stereotype that strong women are ugly, but she is attractive and was in a relationship with a man 11 years her junior. She is also perceived as having risen above her station, having traveled the world and learned other languages.

It is “too much for Italy,” Zanardo said. “In Italy there is a real difficulty in accepting the authoritativeness of women.” And even many women soured on her because “she is a difficult model to follow as she reminds us of our failings.”

Many Italians — including many women — defend Berlusconi’s brand of paternalism and say Italy shouldn’t be measured by the same standards as other Western countries.

Guia Soncini, a controversial columnist for Gioia, a widely read women’s magazine, said that “one of the big failings of what I call Cosmopolitan feminism — the glossy mags, Facebook groups [that claim] we all are great, all capable, all smart — we are not. Not all women aim for a Nobel Prize … Some wanted an easy career out of their beauty, Berlusconi was a kind of welfare.”

“It is true that Italy is different, but I don’t think of it as a disadvantage,” Soncini said. “What doesn’t convince me about the #metoo movement [is that] it’s as if they’re saying to us you cannot watch out for yourself ... I know lots of women who would be very offended if they were told you need public outrage.”

But Boldrini said that while Berlusconi has cultivated the objectification of women through his broadcasting empire, his Forza Italia party is not her main political adversary. She even had warm words of praise for several of the 39 women elected with Berlusconi’s party.

Boldrini said the factions that were encouraging the online harassment and threats were two newer parties that were growing quickly thanks to a backlash against immigration and their internet savvy.

The rise in immigration had presented an opportunity to a regional party originally known as the Lega Nord — the Northern League — to turn itself into a national force. The party was formed in 1991 to win independence for Italy’s wealthier northern regions, but reinvented itself as a far-right anti-immigrant party with national appeal. Renamed simply Lega, it is now polling close to 15%. None of the 18 Lega MPs elected in 2013 were women.

But a new level of fury has been directed at Boldrini from the Five Stars Movement, a populist party unlike almost any other in Europe. It was cofounded by the comedian Beppe Grillo and a tech entrepreneur, with a platform that champions environmentalism while also opposing immigration. It is defined by its anti-establishment style more than any ideology — and has frequently reversed itself on major issues — constantly seeking direct input from members through the internet to appear in touch with changing voter attitudes. After repeatedly clashing in Parliament, the Five Stars Movement turned on Boldrini too, frequently adopting the same violent and sexist language as her other opponents.

Protesters in Warsaw on Feb. 5.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

A group influential in passing a new law in Poland that makes it a crime to attribute any blame to the country for the Holocaust said Friday that it had filed the first lawsuit seeking to enforce the legislation.

The case was filed by the Polish League Against Defamation (RDI) against the Argentine newspaper Pagina12 over a story published in December — more than two months before the law came into effect — about a incident in the town of Jedwabne in 1941 in which a group of Poles burned more than 300 Jews in a barn with the tacit approval of occupying Nazi soldiers. The RDI wants the paper to apologize for illustrating the story with a photograph taken after the war of a group of Polish fighters executed for opposing Poland’s new Communist government.

"Connecting these two things: information about killing the Jews in Jedwabne during the German occupation and depicting killed soldiers of the independence underground is a manipulation, an action against the Polish nation and damages the reputation of Polish soldiers," the RDI said on its website. "This is intentional abuse to consolidate in the readers Polish anti-Semitism."

Pagina12 did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The Holocaust law, which was passed last month, includes provisions for fines as well as up to three years in prison for anyone who attributes “responsibility or co-responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the Third German Reich to the Polish nation or the Polish state," where many of the Nazi death camps were located. The law gives NGOs such as the RDI the ability to bring suit for violations of the law in addition to prosecutors.

There’s been some back-and-forth about when the law is to come into effect, and RDI’s suit appears designed to force it into effect. Lawmakers had proposed March 1 — the day before the suit was filed — but amid an international outcry Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said this week that the law would not be immediately enforced until the Constitutional Court reviews its legality. However, as soon as those remarks were reported in an Israeli newspaper, a spokesperson for Ziobro’s own ministry put out a statement suggesting the law would come into force on March 1.

The timing of the suit — coming just after Polish lawmakers met lawmakers in Israel in an attempt to put the key allies back on track — appears to be an attempt to scuttle efforts to downplay the law in order to quiet international furor.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accused Poland in January of “an attempt to rewrite history," and historians worry the law will silence discussions of the way some Poles contributed to atrocities during the war. But the international outcry has mystified many in Poland, where the law is perceived as an effort to have Poland recognized as a victim of World War II, during which it was invaded by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Six million people died in Poland during the war, three million of them Jews.

The ruling Law and Justice Party saw a bump in the polls after the law’s passage, and a desire to capture support at home helps explain why attempts to calm the crisis have been undermined at every turn. The most infamous incident came when Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki undermined himself by suggesting there were “Jewish perpetrators” of the Holocaust while he was trying to dispel concerns that the law would prevent anyone from talking about Polish citizens who contributed to atrocities.

Lawmakers had claimed to be surprised by the international outcry, but the outlet Gazeta Wyborcza reported this week that US diplomats had warned the foreign ministry against the law before the vote. However, there was an unusual delay in passing that message on to lawmakers.

And while the MPs were in Israel discussing ways to cooperate on historical research, a committee of the Polish Senate debated a resolution that implied the Soviet Union was to blame for a mass outpouring of anti-Semitism that caused thousands of Polish Jews to flee the country in 1968. This week a large group of historians protested a decision by the Polish government’s historical agency, the Institute of National Remembrance, to reassign a leading scholar of the Holocaust.

The group that brought the new lawsuit was founded by Maciej Świrski, who is close to the ruling party and now runs the Polish National Foundation, a quasi-public organization funded by state-owned corporations to promote Poland’s reputation abroad. In February, the Polish media reported that Morawiecki, the prime minister, wanted Świrski removed because of concerns he was mismanaging the Foundation’s annual budget of around $75 million.

Świrski was a key player in getting the Holocaust law passed. The Polish League Against Defamation collected tens of thousands of signatures in support of the legislation while he was the group’s leader, and disclosures from the Polish justice ministry suggest he was the only person formally consulted before the law was presented to parliament.

As Morawiecki and other lawmakers were trying to downplay the law’s significance in the days after its passage, the Polish National Foundation went on the offensive. It recorded a video defending the law, which was promoted with ads that appeared in right-wing outlets like Breitbart.

Świrski declined an interview request with BuzzFeed News, and several sources said they would not criticize him on the record because he is a powerful figure in his own right. But his running of the foundation has been controversial at home. In September, the foundation signed a $45,000 per month contract with a Washington PR firm called the White House Writers Group (WHWG), according to disclosures filed with the US government.

The contract has been questioned in the Polish media as part of a pattern of questionable spending on lobbying the public. The principal on the account, according to forms disclosing WHWG’s work for a Polish government entity to the US government, is Senior Director Anna Chodakiewicz Wellisz, who once published an article with Taki’s Magazine, which has been an important platform for many alt-right figures, including its former editor, Richard Spencer.

“I have no connections to alt-right circles, and I know nothing about them beyond what I read, including in publications such as yours,” Wellisz said in an email to BuzzFeed News. She also said there was no effort to target right-wing media to defend Polish policy in the US, “Our intent is to reach across the spectrum of opinion.”

But it’s not clear how the Polish National Foundation is using its Washington PR firm even as the US State Department has also condemned the Holocaust law. Wellisz said the firm was not involved in the video defending the law, and that the only ad buy it coordinated were ads on CNBC and Fox in December, when the organization aired a spot with priests, a rabbi, and an imam wishing Americans “happy holidays” on behalf of the Polish people.

"Auswitz for Poland guide!!" scrawled on the wall of Diego Audero's apartment.

Supplied

The home of an Italian tour guide and Holocaust historian was vandalized in the city of Krakow, Poland, on Friday, according to Polish media reports, as tensions rise in Poland following the adoption of a new law restricting speech about the Holocaust.

The guide, Diego Audero, told Polsat Media that he found a Star of David and the slogan "Poland for the Poles" written in Polish on the door of his apartment, and "Auswitz [sic] for Poland guide!!" scrawled in English on the wall. A police investigation is underway.

Audero told BuzzFeed News: "People make you feel [like you're] not part of the community because you are not Polish. And for me it's painful because I am totally integrated here. I am not [used] to meeting with Italians but only with Polish [people]. I love Krakow and Poland too much to go away.

"I just would like to avoid politization of the situation. It's just sad that Auschwitz is a divisive matter, it shouldn't be."

Audero's door defaced with "Poland for Poles."

Supplied

Earlier, Audero told Polsat: "I have lived in Poland for 11 years, but I have been meeting with increasing reluctance for a year now.

"I often hear that I should not take the floor on certain matters, because I am not a Pole and I should generally return to where I came from. And I have no intention of returning to Italy. I love Poland, here is my home, Polish culture is my culture. My friends and relatives also live here."

The current fight in Poland over the history of the Holocaust centers largely around how death camps such as Auschwitz are remembered. In February, Poland enacted a law aimed at making it a crime to call them "Polish death camps" — because they were run by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territory, and many Poles feel the phrase blames them for the deaths in a war that claimed the lives of 6 million Polish citizens.

But the law is so broadly written that historians, Jewish groups, and the Israeli and US governments worry it could punish anyone who discusses the multiple anti-Semitic acts committed by some Polish citizens during the war.

The law is popular in Poland but has sparked such an intense backlash that it threatens key diplomatic relationships, especially with Poland's longtime close ally, Israel. There has also been a surge of anti-Semitic incidents amid the outcry, including a senator who posted historic footage of a Jew being beaten in the Warsaw Ghetto on Facebook, along with a “Jewish Dictionary” that defined an anti-Semite as “a person that has the audacity to defend his rights from the arrogance and rapacity of Jews.”

A yellow badge bearing the word "Jew" issued to Jenny Hanf in 1942 is displayed at the exhibition "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away" in November 2017 in Madrid.

Afp Contributor / AFP / Getty Images

Senior government officials had promised the law would not be immediately enforced following its effective date, March 1, in the hopes of cooling the uproar. But on Friday an organization filed the first lawsuit seeking to enforce the law, potentially further inflaming tensions.

A spokesperson for the Auschwitz Museum, Bartosz Bartyzel, said in a statement to the Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita, "We were very concerned about the scandalous and shocking event that took place in the apartment of one of the educators showing around the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site. ... He is a licensed educator who has special substantive preparation and qualifications."

LINK: The First People Have Just Been Accused Of Violating Poland's New Holocaust Law

Screenshot of Alternative for Sweden leader Gustav Kasselstrand in a 2014 video.

youtube.com

A new party that formally launched in Stockholm on Monday hopes to capture the anti-immigrant vote in Sweden, potentially sparking a civil war on the far right that could derail support for its largest nationalist party.

Sweden’s elections in September will likely attract close attention from immigration opponents around the world. The number of immigrants Sweden accepted during the refugee crisis — 240,000 new arrivals to a country of just around 10 million between 2014 and 2015 — and Sweden’s progressive reputation has made it a favorite subject for right-wing media in the United States. That fervor broke into the mainstream media with the frenzy last spring began by President Donald Trump’s apparent allusion to a terrorist incident “last night in Sweden” that never occurred.

Inside Sweden, the immigration backlash created an opening for the Sweden Democrats (SD), a party that originally began out of skinhead and neo-Nazi circles in the 1990s. But it has purged many members who were caught flirting with neo-Nazism or white nationalism in a deliberate effort to break into the mainstream. Polls last year put the Sweden Democrats in second place, though it has now slipped into third with 16% of Swedes supporting it in recent polls as the center-right Moderate Party has also begun campaigning against immigration.

The new party’s name, Alternative for Sweden, echoes the German party Alternative für Deutschland. Last October, the AfD became the first far-right faction to enter Germany’s parliament since World War II. The leaders of Alternative for Sweden come from a faction ousted from the Sweden Democrats in 2015 after being accused of anti-Semitic comments and relationships with white nationalists. And the party’s launch is a sign that factions the Sweden Democrats are now shunning are organizing to stay players in nationalist politics.

"After eight years in parliament it is clear that SD is paralyzed — SD politicians are well-fed, comfortable and tired," said the new party’s leader, Gustav Kasselstrand during the launch event, which was attended by around 200 people and major Swedish news outlets at a dive bar in Stockholm. “I have paid a price for my convictions — I have been maligned and treated badly but I will never stop fighting..... Together we are an alternative for Sweden."

Kasselstrand told BuzzFeed News that the accusations against him and his allies were trumped up to prevent them from becoming rivals to the Sweden’s top leaders. But, he said in an interview before the party’s official launch, he believes the Sweden Democrats had grown too soft on immigration in the hopes of being acceptable to other right-wing parties in a governing coalition.

He specifically faulted the party for not pushing for a policy of deporting immigrants who entered the country illegally. He also called for an end to allowing foreigners to seek asylum in Sweden.

“They less focused on really speaking out on Sweden’s problems,” Kasselstrand said. “They don’t want to speak anymore about the repatriation of illegal immigrants.”

A spokesperson for the Sweden Democrats did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kasselstrand was one of many kicked out in the SD’s 2015 purge, which also led the party to shut down its youth wing. Party leaders alleged Kasselstrand and other youth wing leaders had relationships with the white nationalist Nordic Youth, who had espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and “expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.”

Kasselstrand said these charges were made up, but he and others of the ousted members appeared in a 2014 video that showed solidarity with the Identitarian movement, an effort to rebrand white nationalism that began in France but has now found support across Europe and the United States such as Richard Spencer.

Titled “Salute to the European Youth,” the black-and-white video appeared directly modeled on a “Declaration of War From the Youth of France,” and declared that “our insane experiment with multiculturalism and mass immigration is tearing apart our previously united nations.”

Among those in attendance at the kickoff Monday night was Ingrid Carlqvist, the leader of a new effort called the Free Sweden Association to bridge diverse far-right factions that is also a sign of new organizing efforts of the radical fringe.

Carlqvist is a former journalist who used to write for the Gatestone Institute, a US-based anti-immigration group. She now promotes a conspiracy theory that Jews were behind bringing Muslims to Sweden and collaborates with the white nationalist website RedIce. Her partners in this group reportedly include Magnus Söderberg, the former leader of the Nordic Resistance Movement, which is running this year as a Nazi political party, and Robin Holmgren, who fought in Ukraine with the Azov Battalion, a nationalist faction with neo-Nazi links.

Carlqvist’s collaboration alone is a “game changer in the Swedish far right,” said Daniel Poohl, the CEO of the Swedish anti-racist organization Expo, bringing together far-right factions that have resisted cooperation in the past and have not been able to find homes within the Sweden Democrats or the small neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement.

Poohl seems less concerned about the new Alternative for Sweden effort, writing last month that it will have an uphill climb against the Sweden Democrats. But Katerina Janouch, a popular right-wing writer with a large following in Sweden who attended the kickoff Monday, told BuzzFeed News she thought Alternative for Sweden could tap into the anger the Sweden Democrats no longer speak to.

“The Sweden Democrats are getting to be like the mainstream politicians. They are not radical enough,” Janouch said. “People are really fed up, so disappointed and angry, bitter and afraid .... So [Alternative for Sweden] stands a good chance if they handle their position with care.”

Polish President Andrzej Duda and President Donald Trump at a joint press conference in Warsaw last year.

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

The US quietly rolled out diplomatic sanctions against Poland last month in response to the country's new Holocaust law, the Polish outlet Onet Wiadomości reported Tuesday.

Onet reported that it had obtained a memo, dated Feb. 20, that said Poland's leaders would not be allowed to meet with President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence until the law was repealed.

State Department officials also reportedly warned that the US might withhold funding for joint military projects in Poland, including the stationing of US forces in the country as part of joint NATO defense efforts.

Poland has faced an intense diplomatic backlash ever since it prepared to enact the new law in February, which makes it a crime to attribute any blame to the Polish nation for the Holocaust.

A source based in Warsaw with knowledge of diplomatic discussions confirmed the Onet report to BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity. The US Embassy in Warsaw and the State Department did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, nor did spokespeople for the prime minister and the ruling party.

A spokesperson for Poland’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment directly on the report, citing a policy against discussing classified material or official correspondence. But, the spokesperson said in a message to BuzzFeed News, “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs received signals that the American administration is concerned about the implementation” of the Holocaust law, though denied the US issued an ultimatum over the law. Since then, the spokesperson said, intense diplomatic talks have continued and “bilateral strategic cooperation is not threatened.”

Polish Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Bartosz Cichocki denied the Onet report, but also said that leaking memos from US officials to the press was a crime. “Using such notes in contacts with the press is not only breaking the law and should lead to the suspension of security clearance for these people by counterintelligence, but is also proof of extreme irresponsibility,” Cichocki said during an appearance on TVN24. “It’s not true, there is no ultimatum like this. I do not understand why someone wants to rock the boat."

Separately, the Polish site WP reported Tuesday that Polish President Andrzej Duda refused to take a phone call from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shortly before he signed the law in February. Citing a source close to Poland's prime minister, WP said Duda did not take the call because he believed Tillerson should be speaking to someone at a lower rank rather than directly to him.

BuzzFeed News could not independently confirm this account, and a request for comment from the Polish president's office was not immediately returned.

Holocaust survivor Malkah Gorka holds a picture from her school days in Poland during a protest against the new law in front of the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Gil Cohen-magen / AFP / Getty Images

The Holocaust law, which received its first vote during Tillerson's visit to Poland on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, is aimed at making it a crime to call facilities like Auschwitz — run by Nazi soldiers in occupied Polish territories — "Polish death camps." Many Poles feel the phrase blames them for the deaths in a war that claimed the lives of 6 million Polish citizens.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the law as "an attempt to rewrite history," and historians and Jewish groups say it is so broadly written that it could punish anyone who discusses the multiple anti-Semitic acts committed by some Polish citizens during the war.

The warnings from the US government came following meetings in Washington, DC, between Polish diplomats and US officials including Molly Montgomery, special adviser on Europe to Vice President Pence, and A. Wess Mitchell, assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

Trump was greeted as a hero when he visited Poland last year, a trip that was seen as an endorsement for the nationalist ruling party that has flouted EU rules and refused to accept the refugees required by international agreements. Trump praised the country during his July speech in Warsaw as an example for those with “the will to defend our civilization.”

Donald Trump stands under the Warsaw Uprising Monument on Krasinski Square, where he delivered his speech last July.

Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty Images

Polish officials have sent mixed signals as the furor has grown abroad over the law at home, in part because the law is very popular domestically. Onet reports that Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki and the chairman of the ruling party, Jarosław Kaczynski, formulated the idea of freezing the law's enforcement in response to the ultimatum from the State Department.

This suspension was announced last week by Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, but he was immediately contradicted by a statement from an official spokesperson for his own agency saying the law would be treated like any other duly enacted legislation.

Onet reported that State Department officials said there would be "dramatic" consequences if the law were enforced against US citizens. The report said that US officials were especially concerned that charges might be brought against the US historian Jan Tomasz Gross, who kicked off the first discussion of Poles' role in World War II atrocities with a book published in 2002 about a 1941 massacre in the town of Jedwabne.

Gross documented that a group of Poles trapped Jews in a barn and burned them alive with the tacit approval of Nazi soldiers. His work demonstrated Poles were sometimes active participants in the Holocaust, not just the victims of Nazis. Two Polish presidents issued apologies for the atrocity, which nationalists — including President Duda — have said damage Poland's "good name."

The group that helped get the law enacted, the Polish League Against Defamation, is attempting to force the Polish Justice Ministry's hand by announcing it would file a lawsuit on Friday to try to get the law enforced, using a provision that allows NGOs to sue over alleged violations. The group, which is close to powerful players inside the ruling party, said it was suing a newspaper in Argentina for using a photograph of partisans killed in 1950 for fighting the Communist regime to illustrate a story about a Polish massacre of Jews in 1941.

Several Polish news outlets reported Tuesday afternoon that the prime minister and president held an urgent meeting with the foreign minister to discuss what reporters have dubbed “a crisis” in US relations. Government spokesman Krzysztof Szczerski denied that this was the focus of the meeting, adding that it had long been scheduled. But these denials were openly mocked by some journalists.

"Some still say that there is no problem, no crisis, no personal restrictions on the part of the US, and the media came up with the matter. Unfortunately they did not," tweeted Marcin Makowski, a reporter with the outlet Do Rzeczy.

LINK: An Auschwitz Guide's Home Was Vandalized With The Star Of David And "Poland For The Poles"

LINK: Poland Expected To Vote On Banning Kosher Slaughter Amid Holocaust Uproar

LINK: How Rap Became The Soundtrack To Polish Nationalism

Andrzej Duda speaks at the ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the protests.

Andrzej Iwanczuk / AFP / Getty Images

Poland's president issued an apology on Thursday for an anti-Semitic government campaign in 1968 that led some 20,000 Jews to leave the country.

"To those who were thrown out, I say, forgive us," President Andrzej Duda said in a speech marking the 50th anniversary of the campaign. "Through my lips Poland is asking forgiveness, asking them to be willing to forget, to be willing to accept that Poland regrets very much that they are not in Poland today."

A wave of protests 50 years ago led Poland's communist government to suggest the demonstrations were the work of a Jewish plot. Many Jews were expelled from Poland, while many others chose to leave voluntarily.

The apology comes amidst the ongoing international protest over a new law that makes it a crime to blame the Polish nation for the Holocaust. The law is aimed at making it a crime to call facilities like Auschwitz — run by Nazi soldiers in occupied Polish territories — "Polish death camps." Many Poles feel the phrase blames them for the deaths in a war that claimed the lives of 6 million Polish citizens.

But it has also been followed by a surge of anti-Semitic incidents, and Jewish groups, historians, and diplomats from Israel and the United States have strenuously objected to the law out of concern it would silence discussion of the multiple instances of Poles committing atrocities during the war. On Tuesday, the Polish news site Onet Wiadomości reported on a leaked memo from the US State Department telling Polish diplomats that President Duda and Poland's prime minister would be barred from meeting with President Donald Trump until the law was repealed.

Duda's apology seemed designed to allay concerns that Poland was trying to erase anti-Semitism in its past, and was well-received even by some of his party's fiercest critics. Such apologies have been politically fraught — Duda personally attacked his predecessor for tarnishing Poland's "good name" in an apology he issued for a 1941 incident in which a group of Poles herded several hundred Jews into a barn and set it on fire.

But Duda made clear it was Poland's communist dictatorship — not its people — that was responsible for the anti-Jewish campaign of 1968.

“The free and independent Poland of today, my generation, is not responsible and does not need to apologize," he said. "I'd like to say please forgive the Republic, Poles, the Poland of that time for having carried out such a shameful act."

Also on Thursday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said "we should have been much better in explaining all this" during an appearance at the German Marshall Fund's forum in Brussels. He said the law was intended to make clear that Poland was a victim of the war, during which there was no functioning state and Polish territory was occupied by the armies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

He also said the law was like laws that make it a crime to deny that the Holocaust took place, which are on the books in several countries, including Israel.

"In 18 countries today, there is a very similar law which is predominantly around Holocaust denial," Morawiecki said.

The Holocaust law is broadly popular in Poland, but on Thursday a coalition of NGOs released a letter apologizing for the new law and said that the statements by leaders who "seek to whitewash Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust" and "arouse anti-Semitic sentiment " are "not being done in our name."

The signers of the declaration include Lech Walesa, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for leading the uprising against the communist government in 1989, but is now a target of the ruling party, who accuse him of secretly colluding with the communist regime.

BUDAPEST — Hungary’s internet flooded with videos purporting to show immigrants wreaking havoc across Europe on the day last month that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was giving the most important speech of his reelection campaign.

The videos were promoted by the Facebook page of one of Hungary’s most important private TV news programs and a network of websites around the time of the speech on March 15. Some were videos distributed by Russia Today’s video service; others were several years old, not filmed in Europe, or carried fabricated subtitles. Similar videos were also posted to YouTube under an account with the name “Tamás Kovács,” which was created the day before and posted only these videos. Some of the videos carried the slogan “Europe 2018 — is this what we want?” and racked up nearly 200,000 views before YouTube shut down the account for “violating community guidelines.”

This did not appear to be a renegade fake news operation but part of a broad propaganda offensive that also involved Hungary’s state media, which featured anti-immigrant programming as the election approached. The country’s state TV even aired a special program featuring Hungarians who were said to have moved to Sweden and were terrified of immigrant neighbors — though one had actually returned to Hungary years earlier.

“Europe and Hungary stand at the epicenter of a struggle of civilizations.”

They all bolstered the message of Orbán’s speech as he called on Hungarians to use their vote on April 8 to take up arms as “Europe and Hungary stand at the epicenter of a struggle of civilizations” in a battle for “European civilization.” Africans threaten to “kick down the door” while the European Union is “not defending Europe,” Orbán told a crowd of thousands. “We not only want to win an election, but our future,” he said. “Those who do not halt immigration at their borders are lost.”

Hungary has long worried neighboring governments, EU officials, and democratic watchdogs, who considered it especially at risk of sliding into authoritarianism despite lying in the heart of the EU, sandwiched between Austria and the Balkans. But now it seems less like a special case and more like an early victim of the challenges facing democracies throughout the West: the onslaught of fake news, manipulated social networks, and mainstream political parties exploiting racism and xenophobia.

These are tools that have been used in Hungary for more than a decade, say political veterans, and Orbán’s critics worry that this weekend’s elections will show just how bad things can get.

Since Orbán and his Fidesz party won an overwhelming majority in 2010, state broadcasters have sounded more like local equivalents of Fox News, and wealthy allies have bought or built friendly media empires that saturate the country’s private media market. Orbán is even said to have his own version of Steve Bannon, a political adviser who drives the agenda for the Fidesz-aligned media and owns one of the key websites that push propaganda like the anti-immigration videos that circulated last month.

Unlike the media-loving Bannon, this adviser's role has been kept so secret that Fidesz officials have long avoided acknowledging any significant relationship with him — the press outside Fidesz’s control nicknamed him Orbán’s “phantom adviser.” An opposition MP once demanded during a parliamentary session that Orbán explain the man’s role, to which the prime minister responded by reading a prepared statement: “I did not find the person in question on the payroll of a single government institution or public company, so I am not competent to answer the question.”

The mysterious man’s name is Árpád Habony, a former art student and competitive sword fighter who became one of Orbán’s most trusted advisers after the latter suffered a crushing electoral defeat in 2002. Over the next 15 years, Habony helped build Orbán’s loyal network of media outlets, forged a partnership with a Republican consultant from the US famous for negative campaigning, and transformed Fidesz into a relentless machine campaigning against immigrants and liberal elites. He’s also become a very wealthy man in the process.

When asked by BuzzFeed News about Harbony’s role, a spokesperson for Orbán and the Hungarian government, Zoltán Kovács, declined to comment, citing a policy against discussing “personnel issues.” Kovács confirmed that Habony and a handful of other specific people run a media network allied with Fidesz, but said it was a way to correct the bias of “the so-called liberal press [that] has always been very influential in the past.”

“Who decides what fake news is? Look at what CNN does on a daily basis, spreading unconfirmed news.”

He said he believed the situation in Hungary was no different than the rest of the world, adding that the very notion of an “independent” press has collapsed.

“There is no independent media in the globe that is behaving without interest — this is not what you see from the past couple years,” Kovács said. And Orbán does face frequent critical stories from outlets owned by a former ally who turned on him in 2014.

Kovács also implied Hungary is no different than the US, borrowing a line from Donald Trump, saying: “Who decides what fake news is? Look at what CNN does on a daily basis, spreading unconfirmed news.”

Despite Habony’s extraordinary power, few outside Fidesz’s circle have ever even seen a picture of the man. But critics say the effects of the system he helped build are everywhere.

“We are not running a democratic election on the 8th of April,” said Bernadett Szél, the candidate for prime minister of Hungary’s Green Party, known as the LMP. In this media environment, she said, “it’s almost impossible to show our values to the public.”

Bernadett Szél

Lester Feder / BuzzFeed News

Habony’s secrecy has made him a favorite subject for news outlets not controlled by the Fidesz network, which take delight in digging up even minor details about his early life.

“We got his high-school diploma,” bragged a headline in the newspaper Magyar Nemzet when it confirmed he’d studied ornamental sculpture at the Secondary School of the Visual Arts. “We’ve never seen Habony so young!” exclaimed another outlet when a reporter spotted Habony in a photograph from the ‘90s as part of a team in a kendo competition, a sport that’s like a Japanese version of fencing.

Habony has earned a reputation as a dandy based on a few photos of him wearing brightly colored plaid jackets and carrying Gucci bags. Senior members of Fidesz go to bizarre lengths to avoid revealing how central he is to the party, but one party leader was caught on tape confessing that Habony advises the party.

Habony has earned a reputation as a dandy based on a few photos of him wearing brightly colored plaid jackets and carrying Gucci bags.

Lajos Kósa, the leader of Fidesz’s bloc in Parliament, can be heard in a tape leaked to independent news site 444 saying that the party doesn’t want to formalize its relationship with Habony because he has a hedonistic lifestyle that could embarrass the party.

“In regards to the media covering us, Habony is still a serious threat,” Kósa can be heard saying. “Árpád has a disadvantage: He’s an exhibitionist. But this won’t make us devalue him. We don’t even give him a penny — we only ask for advice.”

Habony did not respond to an interview request submitted through his company’s headquarters in Budapest. He also did not reply to detailed questions submitted to the director of a firm he owns in London.

Habony seems to have spoken on TV only once, in 2000, when he appeared on a news broadcast as the man responsible for a new display case in Parliament’s rotunda designed to showcase the centuries-old Hungarian crown.

This gave Habony a bit part in a pageant that critics say was an early sign of Orbán’s authoritarian streak.

Orbán was then in his first term as prime minister, having been elected in 1998 on the back of a reputation as a fiery liberal student activist who helped bring down Hungary’s communist regime in 1989. The opposition saw the decision to install the crown in Parliament as an attempt by Orbán to seize the trappings of royalty, and a flirtation with nationalism in a country that had rising problems with abuse of Jewish and Roma minorities.

Orbán was pedaling “fake news” long before it became a feature of politics in the West, said Ron Werber, a political consultant from Israel who advised the Social Democratic Party when Orbán ran for reelection in 2002. He recalled state media selectively edited footage of a large rally that the Social Democrats held in a Fidesz stronghold to make it appear as if no one showed up. He also alleged that teachers who supported the Social Democrats lost their jobs. Kovács’ office dismissed these allegations as “absurd.”

“Fake news was alive and kicking long before the 2016 US presidential elections, and Hungary under Orbán has been one of its most aggressive promoters for two decades now,” Werber said.

“Fake news was alive and kicking long before the 2016 US presidential elections.”

Despite his best efforts, Orbán lost the 2002 election to the Social Democrats in a surprise upset, and Habony reportedly became close to him as he was licking his wounds and plotting a comeback, according to the news outlet Magyar Narancs. Habony, who allegedly never finished college, quickly became close to the Oxford-educated Orbán and was instrumental in building up think tanks to support the party while in opposition.

As the 2010 elections approached, Orbán’s team called in help from abroad, hiring an American consultant whose adversaries in the US had given him nicknames like the “merchant of venom.”

His name was Arthur Finkelstein, a gay, Jewish New Yorker who infuriated opponents by aiding Republicans who exploited hostility toward gays, Jews, and other minorities. Finkelstein, who died last year, helped Ronald Reagan win the White House in 1980 by turning “liberal” into a dirty word, got many Republicans get elected to the Senate, and also was part of the team that first got Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister of Israel.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Budapest, Jan. 3.

Bernadett Szabo / Reuters

Fidesz won the 2010 election with a two-thirds majority after a campaign in which Orbán began to build his cult of personality. This was Hungary’s first Facebook election, and Orbán’s team was way ahead of the competition in understanding the network’s power. They put out high-quality videos intended to make Orbán likable, and brought the producer of a popular series of viral videos satirizing the Social Democratic leader onto the campaign staff.

The producer, Gergely Tomanovics — who turned against Fidesz in 2012 — claimed that Fidesz began using paid trolls around this time, though this could not be independently confirmed. “I think one of Habony’s projects was paid commenters on Index Forum and social media,” Tomanovics told BuzzFeed News, referring to a social network popular in Hungary before Facebook took off in the country. Tomanovics said that in 2009 he met members of a secretive team of around five people whose job was said to be posting on social media for Fidesz.

When asked if Orbán’s team used paid trolls in the past or now, Kovács, the spokesman, said, “All parties are using social media according to the rules of the social media. That’s what I can tell you.”

Orbán used the supermajority he won in 2010 to carry out a sweeping overhaul of Hungary’s political system that gave Fidesz huge advantages. It enacted a new constitution and redrew electoral districts making it harder for opposition parties to win seats, installed new judges, and created a new media regulator with the power to impose stiff fines on coverage deemed “biased.”

But the party was still nervous when elections approached again in 2014. A far-right nationalist party called Jobbik was gaining in the polls, using rhetoric that targeted Jews and Roma.

Orbán had also lost his most important ally in the media, a former roommate named Lajos Simicska whose outlets include a major TV channel, a national newspaper, and radio station, and a leading news website. Simicska threw his weight behind Jobbik declaring that Fidesz “is a stinking criminal gang that must go.”

So Habony and a handful of other close allies began building a media network of their own. And he had the money to do it, having reportedly received a number of interest-free loans from people close to Orbán, which the government denies. Habony was a member of a small group of people whose companies allegedly shared €2.5 billion in publicly funded contracts between 2010 and 2016.

“The biggest fake news producer is the public service media.”

They went into the media business around the time of the refugee crisis, in which hundreds of thousands of people made their way to Europe, and Habony is credited with recognizing that it could offer an opportunity for Fidesz to outflank Jobbik with right-wing voters.

Orbán decided to build a wall to stop those who might want to cross Hungary’s southern border in June 2015 and plastered billboards across the country that carried messages such as “If you come to Hungary you cannot take the jobs of Hungarians.” The new Fidesz-friendly media amplified the message with headlines such as “Immigrants are threatening people, throwing rocks and setting fires.”

Fidesz kept its supermajority in 2014, and their propaganda machine has only gotten stronger in the years since.

Hungary now lives with “continuous propaganda without any kind of ethical standards,” said Ágnes Urbán of the Mérték Media Monitor in Budapest.

The spread of fake news on social media isn’t causing a crisis this year, Urbán said, largely because “the biggest fake news producer is the public service media.”

Márton Gulyás

Hirling Balint for BuzzFeed News

Romain Lafabregue / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook has targeted one of the major white nationalist groups in France by shutting down two of their largest pages this week, according to French news reports.

The pages belong to the pan-European movement known as Generation Identity, which became widely known last summer with a mission branded "Defend Europe," sailing a boat intended to stop NGOs from rescuing migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa. Facebook closed the main page of the group's French chapter, known as Generation Identitaire, and suspended a page under the Defend Europe banner.

But many major pages affiliated with the group remain active. These include one belonging to the group's French parent organization, Les Identitaires, with more than 60,000 followers. The pages of the group's chapters in Germany, Italy, and Austria are still active as well, which have almost 150,000 followers combined.

Generation Identity first announced its Facebook and Instagram page had been closed through its Twitter account on Tuesday, which Facebook confirmed to French media on Thursday. The AFP reported that a Facebook spokesperson explained the decision by saying, "We do not allow hate speech on Facebook, because these speeches create an atmosphere of intimidation and exclusion, and can lead to violence in the real world."

The move came a couple weeks after around 100 Generation Identity members launched an "Alps mission," erecting a plastic fence across a mountain pass in the hopes of stopping immigrants crossing the border from Italy.

Facebook did not immediately respond to questions from BuzzFeed News, nor did France's Generation Identity. The group is protesting the suspension via its Twitter account with a pinned tweet that says: "Today it is us, tomorrow it will be you! We need your support!"

Generation Identity is the largest international organization of the "Identitarian" movement, which grew out of former fascist circles in France in the 1970s as an attempt to rebrand white nationalism. It has since inspired a new generation of racial separatists, including Richard Spencer and the alt-right in the United States.

The action against Generation Identity's French branch comes just as the group's most high-profile international spokesperson, Austria's Martin Sellner, is planning to join a protest against alleged censorship in London set to feature Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart's Raheem Kassam, and other far-right activists.

British authorities appear to have become increasingly concerned about Generation Identity's efforts to expand in the UK, recently barring Sellner and his girlfriend, the American YouTuber Brittany Pettibone, from entering the country.

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