🚪 THE ENTRANCE: Anatomy of a Convenient Purchase
You walk through the revolving doors. You grab a shopping cart. A pleasant, soothing melody of common and safe beliefs drifts from the store speakers. Do you really think you came here as an autonomous seeker of objective historical truth? Stop lying to yourself.
If we accept the simplest, most intuitive definition of culture—as a way of life based on specific values—a horrific mutation occurs right here. The modern supermarket of ideas is a space where the criteria of pure convenience, utility, and psychological comfort have completely devoured and colonized the world of values.
Let’s be clear: modern man stopped looking for the truth a long time ago. He looks solely for a myth that will validate his own prejudices.
Truth, as a fundamental value, is a luxury item—and a brutally expensive one. It demands immense effort, strict rigor, slaving over source materials, and—worst of all—the painful questioning of one’s own narcissism. That is why the mass consumer opts for a purely utilitarian product: a pre-packaged, pre-formatted myth. It is cheap, easily digestible, and requires zero thought. When the ancient Roman governor asked his dramatic question, “What is truth?”, he was looking for a foundation. Today’s customer, standing in front of a shelf stocked with historical oversimplifications, hears a different answer echoing from the speakers: “Truth is whatever happens to land conveniently in your shopping cart.”
Why do we do this? Surely it isn’t out of some primitive sense of evolutionary superiority over the people who had the misfortune of living centuries before us. That would be too cheap.
We buy these myths as ammunition.
This isn’t an innocent, educational sightseeing trip into the past—this is an armory. We pull distorted historical narratives, ancient feuds, and doctored biographies off the shelves for one reason only: to secure live ammunition against the people living right here and now. We use the dead as human shields and political clubs to bash our contemporary ideological opponents in daily, tribal turf wars. Scholarship, which ought to guard historical integrity, becomes a hostage in the process—its fragments ripped out of context, shrink-wrapped, and sold as cheap talking points for debates.
So, let’s take a walk down the aisles of this discount store. Let’s see which “facts” you grab most eagerly just to keep your ideological magazine fully loaded.
🛒 SHELF 1: The Children of Głogów, or How to Turn Political Hostages into Infants
📦 What Was Actually in the Original Ingredients? (Gallus Anonymus)
The oldest source, written closest to the event itself—The Chronicle of Gallus Anonymus—makes no mention of any tiny, defenseless children in the modern sense of the word. Gallus consistently uses precise, austere Latin, employing the terms obsides for hostages and filius for sons. In the reality of the early Middle Ages, the threshold of adulthood looked entirely different than it does today; the best example is Bolesław Wrymouth himself, who was knighted and became a full man at around fifteen years old. Henry V, as a capable and ruthless commander, didn’t take young toddlers hostage—their crying might affect morale at most, but it gave him no tactical leverage over the defenders’ decisions. Instead, the imperial camp received mature young men capable of bearing arms and fighting, drawn from the more prominent noble families, along with the son of the castle count (comes) himself. Losing a firstborn, coming-of-age heir was an absolute political, economic, and biological catastrophe for a medieval magnate family. This was pure, brutal geopolitical calculation designed to paralyze the fighting hands of the defenders, not a sadistic raid on a daycare.
📦 Stage 1: The Kadłubek Preservative (A Medieval Morality Tale)
How did this political raw material transform into a purely emotional commodity? The first major modification to the product’s ingredients was introduced a century later by Master Wincenty Kadłubek. The Bishop of Kraków didn’t write his chronicle to dryly report facts; his goal was to craft ethical treatises in which the eternal freedom of the fatherland stood above all else. It was Kadłubek who first abandoned Gallus’s “son” and introduced the literary term “child” into the description of the siege, hidden under the Latin word parvulus. He did this deliberately, knowing that the death of an innocent, defenseless being in the name of a higher value hits the reader ten times harder and perfectly seals the moralizing purpose of his work. Kadłubek provided a solid foundation for the identity myth, upon which subsequent centuries began building entire floors of national commentary.
📦 Stage 2: Partition Heartburn (The 19th Century and Manufacturing the Villain)
The real production assembly line, however, kicked into high gear in the 19th century, at a time when Poland was wiped off the map and its people faced brutal Germanization under Prussian rule. Writers, poets, and historians needed tales to comfort hearts, but above all, a massive emotional club to bash their contemporary enemy. Feliks Koneczny authoritatively fabricated a detail, decreeing that the hostages could not have been older than fourteen. Antoni Gorecki penned a melodramatic poem in which little children, pierced by arrows, beg for rescue from the battlefield. The medieval episode was shamelessly rewritten as a publicist hit piece on the Prussian—the enemy had to be a monster slaughtering Polish children, because that legitimized and fueled contemporary resistance against the occupying power.
📦 Stage 3: PRL Legitimacy, or Taming the “Recovered Territories”
After World War II, the product returned to the shelves with a brand-new propaganda label, this time as part of a massive campaign to tame the so-called “Recovered Territories.” The communist authorities needed hard proof that the newly annexed lands were our ancient, Piast borderlands, which we had always defended against the Germanic onslaught. In 1953, Karol Bunsch—carrying the fresh trauma of wartime atrocities and fighting in the Home Army (AK)—published the novel Psie Pole (The Hound’s Field). It is on its pages that the legendary, fictional Przedsław and his son are born, the latter uttering the famous, almost cinematic cry that death hurts less at a father’s hand. The mechanism of historical marketing worked flawlessly: in 1975, this literary distortion went straight into fourth-grade textbooks as the official narrative of our past. Four years later, precisely on the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, a monumental statue was erected in Głogów, depicting terrified, bound toddlers on a battering ram. The complex, medieval political episode was officially fused with 20th-century martyrology and the atrocities of the Warsaw Uprising.
📦 Stage 4: The Deluxe Edition (The 21st Century)
The deluxe edition of this myth is being manufactured right before our eyes in the 21st century, because today’s market requires a constant ramping up of stimuli just to get a reaction out of a desensitized consumer. In an anniversary comic book published in 2009, the creators went a step further, throwing not just the sons but also the daughters of the Głogów citizens into the ranks of the little hostages—something medieval chronicles never even whispered about. All of this to maximize the enemy’s cruelty to the absolute limit and squeeze every last tear out of the reader.
Shelf Summary: The modern cultural consumer who gets emotional over the fate of children slaughtered by Germans in 1109 is not engaging with science, but with a political product. You buy this myth because it feeds your need for moral comfort and provides a ready-made stone to hurl at today’s opponent—forgetting that the cart you are pushing has been loaded with merchandise manufactured in the identity-marketing department.
🛒 SHELF 2: The Myth of the Bloody Inquisition, or the Anatomy of a Historical Flip
📦 A Black Market Product Becomes the Competitor’s Bestseller
At the very top of your ideological shopping cart lies the conviction that the Hammer of Witches (the wretched Malleus Maleficarum) was the official Vatican manual of terror used by the Church to legitimize mass genocide.
The facts? This book was the private, utterly fanatical public writing of one Heinrich Kramer—a man whom official Church institutions (headed by the University of Cologne and local inquisitors) explicitly condemned and rejected as a heretical psychopath, dismissing his theological drivel as absolute nonsense. Rome gave Kramer a red light. Yet the book became a hit, all thanks to the printing revolution.
And here comes the first flip: who grabbed this allegedly “Catholic manual of terror” most eagerly? The newly emerging Protestant countries. Having cut themselves off from Roman structures and rejected Catholic canon law, the new communities—built on the foundation of sola scriptura—found themselves without established institutional and legal frameworks when hit by local, rural witch hysteria. Consequently, secular Protestant judges unhesitatingly reached for the damnable treatise written by a fanatic whom the Catholics had rejected, simply because it offered an instant solution to their problem.
📦 The True Heart of Darkness
Another myth from the same shelf: stakes burned in the name of the pope, and Europe was awash with blood because the Catholic Inquisition set the continent on fire.
Let’s check the label: more than half of all witch executions in Europe took place in the fragmented, Protestant German territories, as well as in Protestant Scotland and Switzerland. The main executioner was not a monk with a crucifix at all. It was a sober, local, secular judge, a Protestant mayor, and a panicked village mob. Witch-hunting was not the product of religious dogma, but of a paralyzing, collective fear of famine, war, and pestilence. Local secular authorities organized these trials on an assembly line to satisfy the mob’s thirst for blood, find a scapegoat, and, while they were at it, shamelessly seize the assets of the condemned women.
📦 The Inquisition as… an Advocate and an Emergency Brake
If you think that landing before the papal Inquisition meant a guaranteed and horrific death sentence, you have bought the worst kind of pseudo-historical garbage.
The Roman and Spanish Inquisitions operated on the basis of an exceptionally rigorous Roman procedural law. The finest legal minds of the era worked there. When a local village mob dragged a woman before the inquisitor, screaming that she made the cows dry up and that she flew on a broomstick, the ecclesiastical judge treated it as backward pagan superstition, mere fraud, or mental illness (which was called melancholy at the time). Inquisitors explicitly banned convictions for witchcraft without hard, physical evidence.
The result? Where the Inquisition held a real legal monopoly—namely in Spain and Italy—stakes practically never burned, and death sentences over the course of centuries amounted to barely a few dozen. Paradoxically, it was the ecclesiastical legal apparatus that acted as the rational institution, civilizing the wild secular judicial system and saving thousands of people from lynch mobs.
📦 The Genius of Marketing, or How the Enlightenment Cleared the Record
Since the facts are so clear-cut, why is it that today, when you hear the phrase “witch hunt,” you envision a Catholic inquisitor rather than a Protestant mayor? Here we arrive at an absolute masterpiece of political propaganda.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Enlightenment writers (headed by Voltaire) needed a massive club to fight the Catholic Church. What did they do? They took old wartime propaganda mass-produced by Protestant English and Dutch authors during their historic conflicts with Catholic Spain (known in history as the Black Legend). Enlightenment publicists rewrote these lampoons, jacked up the casualty numbers into the millions, and dumped all that barbarism into one giant Catholic bag.
Consequently, Protestant nations and later secular revolutionaries managed to wash the blood off their hands with spectacular success. Thousands of stakes in Germany or Switzerland were conveniently forgotten, and all the mud was slung onto Rome’s account.
📦 The Pop-Culture Coffin Nail (Monty Python)
Ultimately, this entire black PR machine was cemented by modern pop culture. When Monty Python dropped the legendary line in their sketch, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”, they created the ultimate meme. The irony is that, in historical reality, everyone expected them—inquisitorial courts operated with such a massive bureaucratic engine that the accused received official notices thirty days in advance. But the mass consumer doesn’t care about boring legal documents; they prefer a catchy gag that permanently shut down any discussion about actual facts.
Shelf Summary: The modern “consumer” shouting about “witches and the bloodthirsty Church” is not pursuing any historical truth. They are realizing the exact image designed by 18th-century deists and early Protestant propagandists in their brilliant marketing department, solely to hide the skeletons in their own closets. You threw this myth into your cart because it was more convenient. The weapon is handy, but you have just fallen for a product born out of a historical lie.
🧺 THE PROMO BIN: “Checkout Multi-Buys”
We are slowly approaching the checkout zone, but before you lay your purchases onto the conveyor belt, you have to pass those massive wire bins flooded with promotional items. In the world of culture, these are the ideological equivalents of cheap candy bars, chewing gum, and batteries lined up right at the counter. They cost zero intellectual effort, possess no complex list of ingredients, but you grab them on impulse just to have something quick to hurl at an opponent in the comments section on Facebook or X. Let’s rummage through this promotional merchandise and see what you are most eager to toss into your cart right before paying.
📦 The Empire of Greater Lechia
This is a regional product driven by pure Slavic ethno-national compensation. You buy a sweet, alternative fairy tale about a powerful, ancient Slavic empire that supposedly ruled all of Europe long before Mieszko I (the first historical ruler of Poland), and which was insidiously erased from textbooks by a conspiracy of the clergy and German historians. This product’s recipe is pure, pseudoscientific fiction, mixing 19th-century forgeries like the Chronicle of Prokosz with a complete disregard for archaeological or linguistic facts. You buy this myth because it cures regional complexes and allows for pride in an imaginary power, without having to face the difficult and far humbler truth about the actual origins of the state.
📦 The Crusades as Unprovoked Colonialism
This merchandise enjoys endless popularity with anyone who needs a universal club to bash religion. You buy a ready-made image of bloodthirsty white knights who, in the 11th century, out of pure boredom and greed, invaded a peaceful, tolerant Middle East under the banner of religious fanaticism. In reality, this is a textbook example of historical illiteracy. The Crusades were not the onset of unprovoked aggression, but a new, massive, and dramatically escalating phase in a creeping defense against Islamic jihad that had already been going on for over three hundred years. It was a response to the systematic conquest of Christian lands, which had previously only been resisted on a smaller, local scale.
📦 A Flat Earth in the Middle Ages
A bottom-shelf classic that we reach for impulsively just to prove how smart, enlightened, and progressive we are today. You toss into your cart the conviction that before Columbus and Galileo, everyone lived in such deep ignorance that they considered the Earth a flat pancake, and the Church threatened the stake for claiming otherwise. Meanwhile, the ingredients of this product are nothing but a 19th-century literary hoax. Every educated person and university student from the 13th century onward learned astronomy from the textbook De sphaera mundi, knowing perfectly well they lived on a sphere, and the scientific debates of that era concerned the mechanics of the heavens and the planet’s circumference, not its shape.
📦 Absolute Filth and a Lack of Hygiene
A seasonal product that perfectly fits the myth of linear human progress. You throw into your cart a vision of ancestors living in permanent squalor, who never washed in their entire lives because organized religion considered caring for the body a sin. Yet, when you actually read the sources, you are in for a shock, because public baths operated legally and en masse in medieval cities, etiquette demanded washing hands before every meal, and medical manuals explicitly ordered cleanliness. Paradoxically, the true hygienic regression and the mass closure of bathhouses were brought about only by the Renaissance and the early modern era, triggered by a paralyzing fear of a massive, new epidemic of syphilis.
💳 THE CHECKOUT / THE BILL
You finally approach the conveyor belt. You lay out all those goods. With stoic calm, the cashier scans the barcodes of the pre-packaged myths you want to use to prop up and weaponize your beliefs. And it is right here that the full scale of what the modern supermarket of culture has become comes into view. After all, you didn’t come here to critically examine your worldview; you came to pick up an order of ready-made, pre-formatted clichés that will validate what you believed to be the only absolute truth from the very beginning. You buy specific historical distortions not out of love for the past, but out of love for your own narcissism, looking solely for easy building blocks to defend your unassailable positions.
And right here, just before authorizing the payment, comes the time for the final tally. An incredibly apt thought is attributed to St. Augustine: that to examine the truth, it is required above all that the mind be free of prejudice. Meanwhile, in this supermarket of culture, you pay in a completely different currency. By choosing a convenient myth, what you are actually buying is peace of mind and high morale for today’s culture war. The price you thoughtlessly leave at the register isn’t money—it is your own intellectual and critical independence.
The belt moves. Do you pack these beautifully wrapped illusions into your bag to sleep soundly with a blissful sense of being right, or do you leave this fucking cart behind and finally start thinking for yourself?
– How much do I owe?
– Forty zlotys and four groszy. Thank you for shopping with us, and we hope to see you again soon.