By contrast, in Poland, which had witnessed its own tentative opening in the March student movement, a nationalist-authoritarian faction exploited all that was intolerant and ignorant in Polish tradition, employing xenophobia and anti-intellectual rhetoric. Polish Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar, the leader of the nationalist faction, combined communist rhetoric with a language proper to fascist movements in order to mobilize the masses against the “cosmopolitan-liberal intelligentsia.”