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Roman Stanisław Dmowski (born 9 August 1864) is Polish politician and leader of the Polish National Committee

Life[]

Roman Dmowski was born in Kamionek near Warsaw into a poor noble family with patriotic traditions. From an early age, he agitated for Poland's independence and the end of Russification, for which he faced repression from the tsarist authorities. In 1890, he met Jan Ludwik Popławski and Zygmunt Balicki, with whom he founded the National League on April 1, 1893. The outbreak of the 1905 revolution divided Polish nationalist circles because of the pro-Russian attitude of the National League, which saw Jews and Germans as a greater threat to Poland than Russia.

When the Great War broke out in 1914, Dmowski began forming the Pro-Russian Polish National Committee, which for some time was recognized as the legal government of Poland by the French Republic.

However, with the Entente's increasing losses on both fronts, it divided the National Democrats into disparate factions, with supporters of Dmowski's Polish National Committee favoring the Entente, while parts of the MKP and ChZJN had limited support for Germany. In 1925, after the British Revolution, the National Committee moved its headquarters to Moscow, where the National Democrats established good relations with the Russian political right, though Dmowski has hopes he could gain aid from Savinkov and the SZRS. Despite the government's best attempts, Dmowski's texts, such as Thoughts of a Modern Pole, are widely read and distributed by the underground Press.

Views[]

Dmowski's views had a great influence on the rest of the National Democrats, where the younger faction considered him a mentor. In his works, Dmowski called for a national revolution, the recovery of Polish lands stolen by the Germans, the overthrow of the German king, the creation of a "Catholic State of the Polish Nation" and the displacement of all Jews. Dmowski, being a nationalist, was a great opponent of national minorities in Poland, he looked most critically at the Jews who, according to him, were the basis of an anti-Catholic conspiracy involving Syndicalists, Germans, socialists, liberals, Freemasons and Protestants

His views can be easily described as ultra-nationalistic, national-Catholic, anti-Semitic and pro-Russian

Roman Dmowski, as a politician and diplomat, repeatedly criticized German domination over Poland and attempts at Germanization in Poznań and Silesia. As a result, Dmowski became known as a fierce Germanophobe. For this reason, during the Great War, he supported the forces of the Entente against Germany, who, in his opinion, constituted a greater threat to Poland than Russia. Therefore, Dmowski's works are banned in the Kingdom of Poland due to their criticism of Germany and its role in Poland

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