4/5/2006- Mateusz Piskorski is a shadowy figure who has been known to Searchlight readers for several years, having made his name as a translator and publisher of hardcore nazi material such as the brochure, National Socialism, penned by British nazi satanist loony David Myatt. Since the autumn of 2005, 28-year-old right-wing extremist activist Piskorski has been an MP for a populist party politically close to the Polish government. Searchlight's Polish sister magazine, Nigdy wiecej/Never Again, has monitored Piskorski's activities since the mid-1990s and Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's main daily paper recently published a lengthy article on him, written by a member of the Nigdy Wiecej/Never Again team. The article yet again exposed Piskorski's militant nazi background and documented how, not so long ago, he was the busy publisher of several nazi skinzines. The material in these rags was deeply racist offensive. For example, a 1999 article about the conviction of a skinhead for beating up an African American working as a basketball player in Poland and titled "Judeo-justice" said "Many of you [...] must have heard of the punishment of one of the most accomplished members of our movement, Pawel from Stargard. When it occurred, the attack on the n-word Eggelston was widely reported even in the national media [...] The court that handed down this verdict was clearly not guided by the interests of Poland, nor that of the white race. Pawel is in jail, and the provocateur Eggelston still besmirches Polish earth rather than hopping around someplace in Mozambique from one palm tree to another in search of coconuts, is constantly wandering the streets of Stargard."
In his main publication, Odala, Piskorski sang the praises of the so-called Aryan Race and of Adolf Hitler. He also supported the struggle against ideologies "foreign to our race, like Christianity, Liberalism, and Marxism", describing Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as the most successful nations of all time, and publishing interviews with notorious Holocaust deniers.
Over the years, Piskorski and his friends, Marcin Martynowski and Igor Gorewicz, have moved increasingly in the direction of fascist neo-paganism and racist pan-Slavism. Another article in Odala proclaimed: "Considering the decay and multi-raciality of the West, only a united Slavdom - the northern empire of the rising sun - is the hope for the White Race and anyone in the West who does not support the Slavs betrays the White Race and himself". In 2001, Piskorski's pagan association, Niklot, lost a court case it brought against Marcin Kornak, the editor of Nigdy Wiecej/Never Again magazine, for calling the group "chauvinistic and antisemitic". The lawsuit flopped, the judge noting that such a description was, in fact, quite accurate. Piskorski and his playmates first tried to enter the political mainstream in 2000 by allying themselves with the local PSL Peasant Party (PSL) but this attempt failed after it came under media scrutiny. Two years later Piskorski's mob enlisted in the populist Samoobrona (Self-Defence) party but, in 2004, he was forced to withdraw from running for a European Parliament seat after his fascist background was again mentioned by the press. Nevertheless, he resurfaced last year as a successful candidate for the Polish national parliament and as one of Samoobrona leader, Andrzej Lepper's, chief advisers.
Since his election to parliament, Piskorski has managed to participate in a Brussels conference of Reseau Voltaire, a conspiracy-obsessed group that believes the 9/11 attacks were the work of Mossad and CIA. He has also visited and supported Transnistria, a mafia-ruled breakaway republic on the territory of Moldova, which is a magnet for the Russian fascists and extremists with whom Piskorski is linked via Alexander Dugin's Euroasian Movement. His Transnistrian trip, also exposed by Nigdy Wiecej/Never Again, led the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to slap tougher restrictions on the use of diplomatic passports by MPs. Embarrassed, Lepper, who is now chasing increased political respectability - with his eyes set firmly on the deputy prime minister's job - even threatened Piskorski's expulsion from the party and forced him to admit his "mistake". Despite this, Piskorski remains a leading light in Samoobrona's foreign policy group. Furthermore, his links with the extreme right-wing are far from a mere thing of the past as illustrated by a recent formal question he put in parliament to the minister of internal affairs, calling for repression of "so-called anti-fascist groups".
A commentator of the European Tribune, writing in the wake of the Gazeta Wyborcza exposé, noted aptly: "The fact that this disgusting nutcase can be an MP and senior figure in a party which is in a de facto parliamentary coalition with the government is just depressing". © Searchlight http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/