On Saturday afternoon, 24-year-old Michal Oksinski drove into Kraków’s Main Market Square and started shooting. Before he was stopped in a heroic action by local police, he had killed at least six people and wounded many more. His victims included Poles, a British national and an Austrian. His parents and sister were found shot dead in the family home. Oksinski died in hospital, succumbing to the wounds he received in a gunfight with police.
As is depressingly common now, the bodies were barely cold before politicians attempted to blame the culprit’s political beliefs – in this case, the ‘far right’ – for what happened. Within hours, interior minister Marcin Kierwiński told a press conference that the gunman held ‘very radical views’ and that ‘everything indicat[ed]’ he was fascinated with far-right ideologies. Kierwiński, a former secretary-general of Polish prime minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform, is by no means a marginal figure. In effect, he has been Tusk’s enforcer against the conservative right. Seizing on his comments, international media like CNN spread the message: ‘Poland stunned as suspect with far-right views kills six’.
On social media, speculation was out of control. Many on the left leapt on Kierwiński’s comments to lay the dead at the feet of the conservative opposition in Poland.
This impulse is almost certainly the result of a relentless campaign of demonisation and institutional warfare that has been waged by Tusk’s government against the conservative right. Tusk never wastes a moment to cast his opponents as traitors – by no means an idle accusation in a deeply patriotic country. At a party congress in April, he claimed that Polish president Karol Nawrocki and opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński were part of a ‘Putinist front’, along with the far-right party, Konfederacja. Tusk also called them a ‘modern Targowica’, after the 18th-century nobles who sold Poland to Russia.
No wonder Tusk’s minister immediately attempted to fit the shooting into the same frame. For Tusk’s government, the conservative right is not a legitimate opposition, but a band of corrupt, traitorous thugs who have been devoted not to conservative values but to ‘undermining the rule of law’. The culmination of this was last week’s judicial coup, where Tusk moved to take over one of the country’s top courts with the help of riot police.
When it came to the Kraków attack, however, Tusk’s coalition overreached. Due to the uproar, Kierwiński was forced to soften his line. In a TV interview on Sunday, he said that far-right ideology was only ‘one of the hypotheses’, and claimed he had not meant to stir emotions. (Tusk, for his part, handled the tragedy with more dignity: his first comments asked people not to politicise the case.)
But it was not just the liberals who jumped on the case to validate their prejudices. Others attempted to fit the shooter into a predetermined narrative favourable to the conspiratorial right. They claimed Oksinski was a Ukrainian, or an ‘LGBT activist’, or that the whole thing was a government plot to ban the Independence Day march on 11 November.
What can we actually say about Oksinski? Does his background point toward a political motive? From what is known, the shooter fits no clear ideological profile. A report in Super Express, drawing on unofficial sources, says the gunman belonged to no organisation and had no links to any party. He appears to be something perhaps more worrying: an expression of a particularly recognisable kind of disaffected nihilism.
Already, his profile indicates a creepy backstory that characterises many other similar mass shooters. He was reportedly seen wearing both a pirate-flag patch (popular with both US Navy SEAL teams and Gen Z protest groups) and a black t-shirt reading ‘I escaped from Morawica’, apparently a joke about a psychiatric hospital. There is the recollection of a former classmate, who says he drew hangings and school shootings and told her he wanted to become a terrorist. The fact that he apparently killed his family first also points in the direction of the non-ideological mass shooter, well known to us from America.
Of all the official comments, perhaps the most astute was from the head of the president’s National Security Bureau, Bartosz Grodecki. Grodecki suggested within a day that the attacker might be a ‘nihilistic extremist’, with no ideological affiliation, whose aim was chaos and fear.
Poland is, unfortunately, seemingly in the grip of an episode of such nihilism, chaos and fear. Only a month ago, there were three separate violent attacks on schools in four days. In all cases, from what is publicly known, the assailants had little ideological motivation and seemed more like nihilistic outcasts who radicalised themselves on the internet. At the time, Tusk himself warned of ‘nihilistic violent extremism’ fed by the internet, noting one attacker had worn a helmet camera to film it. As one commentator put it, there is something uncomfortably familiar about this kind of ‘Gen Z’ nihilism:
‘They have no coherent worldview, apart from the mockery of everything and the dismissal of literally everything. A person can consume far-right or far-left propaganda one day, nihilistic memes the next, and fantasies of mass murder the day after… Violence, alienation, resentment and the desire for recognition reinforce one another.’
Prosecutors are treating Saturday’s attack as terrorism. But if that word conjures up associations of warped and extreme political goals, it doesn’t seem to fit the case here. As others have argued in different contexts, this kind of nihilistic violence doesn’t map well on to more familiar forms of political terror. There is no aim, programme or political idea being advanced. Nihilism, rather than ideology, seems to best fit this kind of horror.
Yet it still seems right to call this terrorism. The choice of location clearly suggests an attempt to sow chaos and fear – to spread, literally, terror. What we are witnessing, perhaps, is the possibility of terror without any clear political motive. A man who drives into a square to kill strangers is trying to terrify the rest of us – whether for political or merely nihilistic ends. What this raises is the uncomfortable possibility of a rot deep inside many Western societies.
It is possible that new facts will emerge, pointing the finger at a more recognisable political motivation. But, until then, we should ask a harder question than the one familiar to us from the culture war. This kind of nihilistic terrorist is not a verdict on left or right, but perhaps on all of us. How does a society produce young people who want only to spread chaos and fear and death?
Jacob Reynolds is policy director for Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative Europe.