Today’s commemorations marking the seventy-seventh anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising will follow a well-worn script. Dignitaries from the major parties will pay their tributes. The remaining living Home Army (AK) veterans will be paraded around by scouts. There will be historical reenactments. Come the “W” hour at 5 pm, when the uprising began, crowds filled with far-right soccer hooligans will flood onto Parade Square to chant and set off flares. These rituals, repeated each year, have become so ingrained in public life as to seem almost natural — though this spectacle only dates back about a decade and a half.

The present cult of the uprising is closely bound up with the 2000s rise of the Law and Justice Party (PiS). It especially owes to late president Lech Kaczyński, a leading figure in the hard-right party; as mayor of the capital in the buildup to the sixtieth anniversary in 2004, he was the central force behind the construction of the Warsaw Uprising Museum. Together with his twin brother, Jarosław, he invoked the insurgents as paragons of the patriotism they claimed to be restoring in Poland.

After Lech’s death in 2005, the living Kaczyński — PiS chairman and Poland’s de facto leader — maintained this stance. He insists that anyone who views the decision to stage an insurrection in Warsaw in August 1944 as a misadventure “serves a narrative pushed by the enemies of Polish independence.” Everywhere it can, PiS appropriates the symbolism of the Polish Underground for its own political projects. We saw this last year during the Women’s Strike defending reproductive rights: when Jarosław Kaczyński mobilized his supporters against the protestors, he wore a pin of the Home Army emblem, a P with an anchor at the bottom.