Posted on 02/25/2018 6:27:41 PM PST by nickcarraway
Increasingly, ordinary Poles, caricatured as staunchly Catholic, simple-minded and chauvinistic, are positioned as the quintessential Holocaust perpetrator. That's far more comfortable than blaming 'elite' German Nazis
To many observers, not least those who are neither Polish nor Jewish, the highly critical press coverage of Poland's new Holocaust law which seeks to criminalize declaring the complicity of the Polish nation in the murder of Jews in WWII, appears both simple and clear.
Poles contributed enthusiastically to the genocide of six million Jews. Poles did so because they are staunchly Catholic, simple-minded and chauvinistic. Right-thinking observers must perpetually goad Poles to drop their defenses, acknowledge their guilt, and make amends.
Polish-Jewish relations are thus reduced to a calculation performed with black and white beads on one rod of an abacus. The black beads represent the bad, anti-Semitic Poles. The white beads represent the exceptional, prejudice-free Poles. A "true" historical retelling is only achieved when the black beads far outnumber the white beads. The token righteous white bead – Jan Karski – is the main concession to any semblance of balance. Karski was the Polish Home Army officer who brought the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust to Roosevelt.
The abacus approach dominates public discussion. But it is intellectually and ethically bankrupt, not just because it distorts beyond recognition a thousand years of Polish-Jewish interaction and the unique horror of 1939-1945. The abacus prevents historical clarity and ethical responsibility. And this debate matters very much in the era of Trump.
In my book "Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype", I explored how people talk about the Holocaust, its victims and its executors. Many, though not all, of those I interviewed talked about Poles quite differently from how they talked about Germans.
Visceral vocabulary and animal references were prominent. This trend can be found in Fania
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
You also need to mention the Bulgarians and the Danes who saved their Jews.
My opinion about the people who acquiesed with the Germans is that we can't be too judgemental - we could have easily done the same in their place -- read "hanns and Rudolf" - it talks about Rudolf who was theAuschwitz camp director who came up with the idea of gas chambers. The account is chilling - he was not a monster, he just took one little step towards evil, then another, then another - each time the step was justified by what had happened before
It is the slippery slope to hell. horrifying in the pscyhologic analysis -- these were NOT monsters, not demons, but human beings like us -- we need to constantly be on our guard not to slip even a little bit, or if we do, to correct ourselves immediately.
There are some good things in his books although his Irish novel was awful. He was a pop writer, what more can be said? I don’t know why Israel cares so much about Poland at this point. The future is where it’s at.
Prove that this was done on a mass scale, any more than a few individuals. All the documents that I have seen including by Jan T Gross, talk of, in terms of facts, isolated incidents.
What has that got to do with it? The Germans, Poles, Russians, etc are all Indo-Europeans that intermarried with each other for centuries. Even the hungarians are majorly Slavs genetically (with significant German and Romanian admixture)
That killing of 42 innocentJews is indefensible - it was plain wrong.
But you shouldn't either club it with whathappened under Nutzi oppression nor use this one incident to label all Poles
What Gadrael points out is real enough -- and to say that there was no threat of discovery is wrong. The Germans could always find out - perhaps the Jews got caught and it was found they walked past your land and you didn't do anything?
I would not have liked to live in those times.
Which pogroms are you talking about?
And the ones who could have turned them in would alsohave been in fear of their and their families’ lives if the germans found out they had NOT stopped and handed over a jew (it would have been collaboration by the pole).
He influenced me at least and I'm sure a lot of other people in believing the stereotype of Poles -- when I moved here I found it wasn't true.
I liked him as well. He tells the story of the founding of Israel with great drama. I don’t think most people walk away from his books thinking of Poland as an evil country. Uris shames a lot of countries in not helping the Jews.
As I recall, there is a Polish character named Wanda who helps Dov in delivering underground messages.
Absolutely. I try to take that all into account. It is hard to imagine the fear of people who are just trying to get through it all in one piece and not run afoul of either side...
Trying to be invisible.
I really wish that Israel would get out of this criticism of the law and say "Ok, you as a NATION didn't do it -- we know there were bad eggs and good eggs but you as a NATION are not to be blamed for Germany's crimes. There was a 1000 years of mostly peaceful history between the peoples. Let's forget and be friends today" - it would help a lot. Poland should reciprocate as well.
The programs from the 1700s through the late 1800’s. I am sure that millions of those in the famine areas were probably Jews as well.
Ah, ok, you’re talking about the Tsarist pogroms.
Da.
I know exactly what you mean. I did take issue with the premise of the article "...How Poles Are More Vilified as 'Bestial' Brute Jew Killers Than German Nazis Themselves..."
I just think that is wrong.
Nice post about “How Poles Are More Vilified as Bestial Brutal Jew Killers Than German Nazis Themselves”.
The Latvian and Lithuanian SS/Police were just as murderous as the Germans were. The same for some of the Moslem SS Divisions, and some Hungarian SS.
Re many others saved Jews. Yes.
Your next sentence is a good one but a slippery slope in modern history. “Because to take the leap from hating a group of people and even boycotting them down to slaughtering the men, women and children - THAT IS A LEAP FROM HUMAN TO DEMON”. ..”Not many could do that”.
That “leap” was made by “too many” as my relatives found out the hard way.
Nazism and Communist “dehumanize” its pawns, cannonfodder (W.E. B. Du Bois term for Communist Party USA members in the 1930’s), and those little people who desire to have power over others (esp. those in the Gestapo).
The Khmer Rouge took only teenagers for their army and trained them to “hate” their parents, the educated, the religious, etc.
Read the books and articles by former Khmer Rouge shanghaied teenagers who had to kill their own parents. Often the parents told the child to kill them so that they could live.
The mental anguish that haunts those KR survivors is a psychological phenomenon that will take many more decades to understand.
Remember, ISIS did the same thing to young Iraqi boys they kidnapped. The films are available on YouTube.
Palestinian children are taught to hate the Jews, not just the Israelis, and the knife if their classroom weapon of learning. You close and personal but in a psychopathic mode of making their victims into “demons”, not realizing that they are the demons.
Haters are too crazy to realize that they are the evil ones, not their victims. If you’ve ever met a real Nazi, Communist,Islamic fanatic, Black racist extremist or Black Bloc Anarchist/Marxist(I’ve met some of them) then you know whereof I speak. Just look into their eyes. All you see his “HATE”. All rationality, compassion, and humanity “had left the building” a lone time ago, and that is what makes them so dangerous to you and me.
The blessing during WW2 was that “SOME” people refused to make the leap from “human to demon”. Some died for refusing to do that, God Bless Their Souls. Others took great risks to stay human, and a lot of my friends from the Holocaust were saved because of it.
Unfortunately, the “Demons” of the Fascists and the “Demons” of Communism outnumbered the good people and that is why these two systems alone murdered in the most horrible ways imaginable over 100,000,000 people between 1917 and today.
ISIS was a “JV”, as Obama claimed, only because it failed thanks to America, President Trump, and our Pesh Merga/Christian allies in Iraq and Syria, plus some brave Iraqi soldiers as well.
Otherwise, if it had succeeded, I would have become a member of the TRIOKA OF GENOCIDE (Fascism/Nazis, Communism, and Islamic Extremism).
However, Africa has been suffering the same genocide since the 1960’s in Rwanda, So. Sudan, the Marxist Eritrea, Nigeria/other Boko Harum areas, the Congos, and Idi Amin’s Uganda, among other countries there.
Unfortunately the fact that the “good people” (i.e. the victims of these genocides) didn’t have weapons or decent
weapons to fight back seems to have been lost on our Democrat/Liberal/Progressive-Marxist anti-gun organizations here at home.
Just imagine how many innocent black lives would have been saved in the Old South of the US between 1865 and the late 1960’s if they had weapons with which to defend themselves.
Yes, some Americans made the “Leap” from “human to Demon”, which is a stain on our history and our decent people.
Our goal today is to prevent anymore making that “Leap”, including the mentally ill. It starts with teaching the young how to be a decent human being, not a leftist or racial extremist psychopath.
“Demons” have no one single color or religion or ideology. They live a life of “Hate”. It becomes the reason for their existence, whether it is a Dylan Roof, Louis Farrakhan, Luis Gutierrez, Maxine Waters, or Richard Spencer.
We need a moral exorcism of hatred, be it racial, religious, ethnic or ideological class warfare.
IT sure isn’t going to come from the Democrats, the most politically and morally and mentally corrupt political organization in modern American history. They and their plans make the Klan look like amateurs in sheets, while they are professionals in suits/ties and dresses.
We know who are “Demons” are, esp. those in Congress, those wrecking our schools, and those desecrating our religious institutions and the media.
It is time for honorable conservatives, independents and those few surviving decent liberals to “Cast out the demons” who are tearing America apart.
Our task is monumental, almost biblical in size, but if Moses and a handful of former slaves can do it, then we can too because we are Americans, and good Americans have always fought against the demons of the world.
Postscript: In about 2-1/2 hours, 3:00 AM, March 20, 2003, my son and members of his Army unit joined Kuwaiti engineers to destroy Iraqi sand berms, tank trap pits, etc. to start the drive that liberated Iraq from a real-life demon, Saddam Hussein and his murderous butchers sons.
Evil can be defeated. You just have to have the guts, determination, and moral imperatives to do it.
We did it on March 20, 2003, and in Kuwait in 1991. We can do it again because today we have more demons to fight.
We should no longer just take names. We should kick ass till the demons are defeated be they in Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, ISIS, Boko Harum or the Democrat Party.
>With regards the "leap" - I meant it as a sudden change to evil as opposed to a slow descent - even those KR teenagers had to be trained for years to hate.
Haters are too crazy to realize that they are the evil ones, not their victims. If you’ve ever met a real Nazi, Communist,Islamic fanatic, Black racist extremist or Black Bloc Anarchist/Marxist(I’ve met some of them) then you know whereof I speak. - thankfully I haven't had the "pleasure" of meeting such.
ISIS was a “JV”, as Obama claimed, only because it failed thanks to America, President Trump, and our Pesh Merga/Christian allies in Iraq and Syria, plus some brave Iraqi soldiers as well. diverging from the topic, but the Izlamik state lost due to Russia mainly and the Kurds in Iraq. But that's a different topic
> Our goal today is to prevent anymore making that “Leap”, including the mentally ill. It starts with teaching the young how to be a decent human being, not a leftist or racial extremist psychopath. - I couldn't agree with you more.
About the 1991 war I disagree with you, but again, that's a different topic from the one at hand.
The rationale for the gas chambers was simple: The units that were killing Jews by shooting them were exhibiting all kinds of mental issues as a result.
The Kielce pogrom, in my opinion, is more of a stain on the Polish people than you allow. If it had been a single person, it could be written off as something that does not indicate a wider social ill. But a whole town engaged in a pogrom and so soon after the whole world knew what happened to the Jews. I don’t condemn the whole Polish nation for it, nor change anything I’ve said to mitigate the undeserved “Polish Death Camp” label, but Kielce spoke about something deeper and wider in terms of Polish anti-Semitism still being an active force.
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