Page 80 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

While these were the views of many politicians and journalists in Warsaw, the concept that

Volhynia was an uncivilized borderland that needed to be integrated into a civilized Polish

motherland (macierz) further west was not simply imposed from the outside. Instead, Polish-

speaking elites who lived in the province similarly utilized the language of integration to make a case

for their own political importance as civilizational conduits on the ground. In such proclamations, the

physical geography of west and east mattered less than the civilizational connotations that these

people attached to concepts of “the West” and “the East.” This meant that a person could remain in

the same physical location that he or she had inhabited prior to the war—or even arrive in Volhynia

from areas to the geographical east, which were now part of the Soviet Union—and still claim to

serve as a carrier of Western civilization.

Scouting groups in Volhynia, for instance, made the case that they needed to reverse the

worrying processes of Polish denationalization, moral depravity, and civilizational decline in what

they claimed had become a foreign borderland, dominated by Bolsheviks and Jews. In the mid-

1920s, the leaders of scouting troops in Volhynia wrote to the Ministry of the Interior in Warsaw in

order to relay information about the particular ways in which local youth was in danger of being

exposed to Bolshevism, a political force that, they argued, spread pornography and destroyed

patriotism, religiosity, and family values. Volhynian Poles, its author went on, found themselves in

competition with “foreign” groups, including Jewish scouting troops that espoused “anti-Christian

ethics” and were allegedly receiving “great funds,” not only from wealthy local Jews but also from

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their coreligionists in the United States. Portraying Jews as representatives of a doubly foreign
threat to Catholic Poland, in terms of their religious affiliations and their transnational financial

networks, the scouting leaders stated that “Polish youth, both those educated in schools and those not

attending school at all, lives in an atmosphere of state and national indifference, negation of faith in

39 “Memorjał z Wołynia w sprawie Harcerstwa Kresowego” [undated, probably 1926], AAN ZHP 689.

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