The 'cursed soldiers', or post-war anti-communist resistance fighters, have become key figures in Polish memory politics after the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawidliwość, PiS) came to power in 2015. The exhumation of the remains of 'cursed soldiers' from numerous unmarked mass graves all over the country is an important element in their remembrance. Being carried out by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN), these unburials make an exemplar of necropolitics (Mbembe), in this case understood as the state's management of these human remains. Making use of a left-wing memory repertoire linked to Human Rights, in Poland tropes related to forensic science are instrumentalized in the process of sacralization and militarization of the 'cursed soldiers' remembrance.
Understanding these exhumations as part of a messianic tradition, which until today dominates Polish culture (Janion), and is fueled by PiS historical politics (polityka historyczna), we will relate the conclusions of our fieldwork on the exhumation of the 'cursed soldiers' remains to PiS' biopolitics. Notably, the recently tightened abortion law, which rules that the abortion of fetuses with fatal or serious abnormalies represents an unconstitutional form of eugenics, connects to the exhumed remains in an uncanny manner. Commenting on the change of the abortion law, Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki argued that "[t]hose who do not live cannot exercise their right to freedom of choice."
Taking his words into account and drawing on Michel Foucault's idea of biopolitics as well as Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics, this paper brings into sharp focus the question of the state's power over life and death, while strictly policing the boundaries of the national community and it's memberships. We argue that the messianic memory paradigm is profoundly gendered and more concerned with voiceless past and future members than the living members of the Polish national community. As such, PiS' memory politics involves the future as much as the past, and, symbolically, makes the present seem irrelevant.
