In America, you get canceled. In Europe, you get erased

In early September, the website of the European Conservative was still online. When I opened it on Sept. 23, all I got was a message: “503 Service Unavailable.” I knew the feeling. On Dec. 20, 2023, my access pass for Poland’s public broadcaster, TVP, stopped working. I was not on staff, but I was under contract as a regular commentator and columnist. I waited almost three years before writing about it.In Poland, Dec. 13 is not an ordinary date. On that day in 1981, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law to crush the Solidarity movement. Telephones went silent, and a general in uniform appeared on television. On Dec. 13, 2023, Donald Tusk’s government was sworn in.This time, the phones stayed on. On Dec. 19, Culture Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz dismissed the management of public media, even though five days earlier, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal had issued an injunction ordering the state to refrain from changing its boards. The ministry declared the injunction legally ineffective. The next day, I was at the headquarters of TVP Info, the public news channel, in central Warsaw. I saw police outside the building. At 11:18 a.m., TVP Info went off the air, and its website, tvp.info, went dark. That evening, presenter Marek Czyz promised viewers, “Instead of propaganda soup, we would like to offer you clean water.”I have not been invited back to a TVP studio since. That I can live with. Losing access to the studio was not the real problem. It is harder to remain a journalist in your mid-40s when your body of work suddenly disappears.The website came back on Jan. 15, 2024. Andrzej Jaszczyszyn, who was overseeing it, said archival material had been reviewed for what he called journalistic reliability, and that content “bordering on propaganda” would not be made public. In practice, the new management was deciding which works of its predecessors would remain in the public archive.Much of the archive did not come back. Nor was it only my work. Material by journalists, commentators, and academics was missing. A week after the relaunch, the media-industry publication Wirtualnemedia reported that historical and cultural pieces, including articles by academics, had vanished as well. Jaszczyszyn declined to comment and referred questions to TVP’s press office.About 400 of the missing articles, analyses, and interviews were mine. Among them were the weekly political column I had written every Saturday evening since 2018 and a report I filed from Armenia during the war with Azerbaijan.Polish governments have changed public media management before. That was not what bothered me. What bothered me was that years of published work could be taken out of public view by the people who inherited it.I do not know whether my articles were deleted or taken offline, but still stored somewhere. For readers, it makes no difference. I have copies of all of them. But I sold TVP the rights to the articles, and no contract anticipated the broadcaster retaining those rights while taking the work out of public view. I could republish them myself and see whether TVP sues me. I suspect they would enjoy that more than I would.Americans know cancel culture from social media: a suspended account, a deleted post. In America, you can lose your account. In Poland, you can lose your past.I did not want to make myself the story, so I kept quiet. I thought it was a Polish story. Then came September.In April, Hungarian voters removed Viktor Orban from power. Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s new government dissolved the foundation that ran Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a conservative educational institution. Since late 2024, MCC had controlled the company publishing the European Conservative and subsequently separated its website from the print magazine. On Sept. 8, Alvino-Mario Fantini, editor-in-chief of the print edition, wrote that the European Conservative was now “in the hands of the Hungarian state,” specifically the Finance Ministry. No new articles have appeared on the website since. By Sept. 23, it returned only a server error.On Aug. 20, the European Conservative website published my essay on how religion is being removed from public life in Poland without a formal ban. I did not expect the headline to describe the fate of the essay itself. Nobody banned it. You simply cannot open it today.I do not know whether this is a political decision, a technical consequence of the takeover, or an ordinary outage. In Warsaw, the new management openly said it was sifting through the archive. In Budapest, there has been no comparable explanation. The obvious objection is that the magazine depended on institutions tied to Orban and lost that support after he lost power. Funding can end. What I want to know is whether the archive will be readable again.OPINION: JD VANCE WARNED US ABOUT EUROPE’S ‘THREAT FROM WITHIN.’ POLAND PROVED HIM RIGHTIn Munich in February 2025, Vice President JD Vance warned that the threat he feared most in Europe was a “threat from within,” including a retreat from free speech.I still carry the TVP pass in my wallet. It has not opened a door since December 2023. This week, the site that published my August essay returned an error. For the second time in three years, work I had published has disappeared from the place where readers used to find it.Milosz Manasterski is a Polish essayist, political commentator, and CEO of Agencja Informacyjna. From 2018 to 2023, he was a regular commentator and columnist for Polish public television (TVP) and Polish Radio. He now contributes to Telewizja Republika, a conservative Polish news channel. A former Middle East correspondent based in the United Arab Emirates, he writes on Central European political economy, historical memory, and culture for the European Conservative and Brussels Signal. He holds the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and the U.N. Economic and Social Council Medal.