The article, below, appears today in FrontPage Magazine here
Western European vs. Eastern European Responses to
Mass, Unvetted, Muslim Immigration
Compassion vs.
Intolerance? Don't Believe the Propaganda.
Eastern Europeans are responding very differently to the
mass migration of Muslims into Europe than are Western Europeans. Westerners
who encourage mass, unvetted Muslim immigration insist that they are
compassionate, tolerant, and ethical. They insist that Eastern Europeans and
anyone else who resists immigration are bigots, xenophobes, without compassion
and unethical, if not outright Neo-Nazis. Westerners are stereotyping Eastern
Europeans as bigoted thugs whose opinions must be demonized, whose choices must
be overruled, whose borders must be penetrated and whose demographics must be
altered through coercion.
In this article I focus on three signs at the Warsaw anti-immigration
rally of Saturday, September 12, 2015. Full understanding of these protest
signs illuminates how many Poles and other Eastern Europeans view the current immigration.
These protest signs will help to illuminate why many people, not just Eastern
Europeans, oppose this immigration.
On Saturday, September 12, 2015, demonstrators in Poland
marched for and against mass Muslim immigration. The press estimates several
thousand people took part in an anti-immigration demonstration in Warsaw. An
estimated one thousand people marched in favor of immigration.
In August, 2015, Slovakia announced that it would accept
only Christian, not Muslim, migrants. Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban,
has been outspoken in his resistance to mass Muslim immigration. "Those
arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically
different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims … This is an
important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in
Christianity," Orban wrote in a commentary for Allgemeine Zeitung.
Western elites have an easy explanation for Eastern
European resistance to mass Muslim immigration. Eastern Europeans have long
been depicted as primitive, thuggish Neanderthals. Think of Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire or the butt
of any given Polak joke.
On September 12, 2015, The New York Times published an article by Rick Lyman entitled, "Eastern Bloc's Resistance to Refugees
Highlights Europe's Cultural and Political Divisions." Lyman's use of the
anachronistic term "Eastern Bloc" consigns Eastern Europeans to
membership in the long dead Warsaw Pact. The article raised the alarm against
allegedly racist and intransigent Eastern Europeans, ghosts of the bad old days
of the Cold War, who threaten the bright, new European order with their
atavistic bigotry.
The Times acknowledged
that mass Muslim immigration to Europe is a problem. The problem is not,
however, that a staggering number of defiant illegal migrants committed to a
very different culture, acknowledged by security experts to include an unknown
number of potential terrorists, had overwhelmed Europe's ability to respond.
No. the problem was Eastern European backwardness.
"The main impediment" to a successful response
to mass Muslim migration is Eastern European's "rising xenophobia." "Powerful
far right movements, nationalism, and racial and religious prejudice" are
proof of "stubborn cultural and political divides that persist between
East and West." "Sluggish," "corrupt" Eastern Europe betrays
its "pledge of support" to "European values" like "cultural
diversity, protection of minorities, and a rejection of xenophobia," according
to The New York Times. Eastern
Europeans are "wary of accepting racial and religious diversity." In
contrast to tolerant and diverse Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans' "tradition
of accepting culturally different refugees is very weak." Also, Eastern
Europeans are whiners who see themselves as victims. They resent others who may
have "suffered more than" they have.
Lyman's very brief, 1,500 word article struck a nerve. By
Sunday evening it inspired 1,164 reader comments.
Comments that The
New York Times selected as worthy of attention tended to agree with the Times' assessment: backward, bigoted,
bad, old Eastern European Neanderthals were the problem. One of The New York Times highlighted reader
comments condemned Poland as a land of "endemic bigotry and intolerance."
A very different story was to be found among the comments
that readers themselves had voted for. In that section, one found voices contesting
the Times' entire narrative.
One reader, Alexandra Ares, wrote,
"Former CIA Joshua Katz said today that the US should
not agree to a quota for security reasons; that there must be a very thorough
process of vetting; this takes time since many have burned their documents and
bought fake passports; that we shouldn't bump up quotas because of political
pressure. Even so Katz said we should expect that some of the Syrians we admit
into the US might become terrorists in the long run. If our own CIA experts oppose
quotas, why pressure less prepared Eastern Europe to take risks and act against
their national interests and capacity of absorption? … Unlike Western Europe,
the Eastern bloc suffered hundreds of years of Muslim occupation and
persecution of Christians and Jews. In Romania our Independence Day is when we
kicked out the Ottoman Empire."
While writing the book, Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype, I walked a tightrope. My thesis was
that the West tends to stereotype Poles and other Eastern Europeans as racist
thugs. I had to make this point while acknowledging that there are indeed some
real racist thugs in Eastern Europe, as there are anywhere else.
The group hosting the several-thousand-strong,
anti-immigration demonstration in Warsaw was the Oboz Narodowo Radykalny or
National Radical Camp. The ONR is indeed a far-right organization. The
contemporary ONR claims its descent from the pre-war ONR, founded in 1934 and
banned by the Polish government. The original ONR supported anti-Jewish
boycotts. One of the ONR's founders, Jan Mosdorf, was imprisoned by Nazis in
Auschwitz and was murdered for helping Jews. That the leader of an overtly
anti-Semitic group would be murdered by Nazis for helping Jews indicates how
difficult it can be for outsiders fully to understand Polish history and
politics.
I am not a supporter of the ONR. I am a supporter of the
expansive Poland that embraces and celebrates Jews and other minorities. I live
in the US and I cannot assess to what extent the participants in recent
demonstrations were ONR supporters or merely opponents of mass immigration who
had no other outlet for their concerns. I have watched raw footage of the
demonstrations on YouTube posted by the ONR, who, one would expect, would want
to boost their own presence. The vast majority of protestors who
carry any sign are carrying Polish flags, not racist signs or the distinctive green flag of the
ONR that features an upraised arm wielding a sword. I can report that the
content on three of the signs tells me much about the hearts and minds of the
Poles who oppose immigration. These signs are not racist. They must be
understood.
First, it must be pointed out that those Westerners who
support mass, unvetted Muslim immigration to Europe are not models of
compassion, ethics, or tolerance. They have utterly cynical and selfish reasons
for their support of this immigration.
One reason nations want desperate immigrants: workers to
support extensive government welfare programs. On September 8, 2015, the Washington Post's Rick Noack attempted
to explain why some European countries accepted, and others rejected, mass
Muslim migration. In an article entitled "This map helps explain why some
European countries reject refugees, and others love them," Noack employed a demographic
map depicting birth rates. Some European nations are aging and losing
population; some nations are young and their populations are increasing. The
European nations whose populations are aging and shrinking tend to offer
generous cradle-to-grave welfare benefits. Someone needs to work and pay into
this system for the governments to continue to provide benefits. These European
nations want desperate immigrants. Some European nations have steady
birthrates, and, by comparison, don't provide such generous state-mandated
welfare. These European nations don't want unvetted immigration.
Another reason some nations want immigrants: to improve
their reputations. Those who embrace the current immigration believe that doing
so broadcasts and certifies their status as secular saints. In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland writes, "Mama Merkel has consigned the
ugly German to history … If history can offer a more dramatic turnaround in the
perception, and perhaps reality, of a nation, then it's hard to think of it.
Seventy years ago Germany was a byword for tyranny and murderous violence: the
land of racial supremacism and unending cruelty … Hitler, the Nazis and the
apparatus of the Holocaust remain lodged in the global folk memory … But now it
will be remembered too as the place where in 2015 uniformed police greeted a
trainload of exhausted Syrian children with soft toys."
There is a third reason that many Europeans interpret a
Muslim immigration as to their benefit. Europe had been a predominantly
Christian continent. Unvetted Muslim immigration will inevitably vitiate Europe's
Christian character. Many ideological opponents of Christianity, from New
Atheists to Marxist, see that as a good thing. See David Horowitz's 2006 book, Unholy
Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.
Just as it is not true that Western Europeans who embrace
unvetted immigration are saints, it is also not true that Eastern Europeans are
primitive racist thugs and traitors to "European" ideals. A few signs
at Saturday's rallies speak volumes.
One sign reads "Kosciol Walczacy, Nie Kapitulujacy."
That means: "The Fighting Church, not the Surrendering Church." This
sign is deeply resonant to me as a Catholic and as a Polish-American. My deep
understanding of this sign, and my awareness that no Americans or Western
Europeans I know would understand this sign without my explaining it to them,
reveals a great gulf between how many in the West understand Christianity, and
how many Eastern Europeans do.
People in the West have adopted secular, Christophobic interpretations
of Christianity. Christians in the West hang their heads in shame and say, "Oh,
I am so ashamed to be Christian. The Crusades … the Inquisition … so bad."
Western Europeans may look at Muslim immigrants and say,
"These are the poor, sad victims we colonized. Let's prove how
multicultural and compassionate we are by letting them in."
None of these approaches to Christian faith resonate for
me as an American of Polish and Slovak descent.
The Inquisition? Poland's significant role during the
Inquisition was as a tolerant "state without stakes" who invited in
Jews, heretics, and indeed Muslims who had been exiled from other lands.
The Crusades? We were not major players in the Crusades.
In fact, there was a Crusade against us, the Wendish or Slavic Crusade. I
recently mentioned to a Catholic Facebook friend that images of crusading
knights swinging their swords above their heads did not really excite or
inspire me. I associate such images with the Teutonic Knights, whom the Poles
had to fight for their own survival. I am mindful that Sergei Eisenstein
exploited long Slavic memories of being attacked by the Teutonic Knights in his
anti-Nazi propaganda film, Alexander
Nevsky. Germans have long memories, too, and when they invaded Poland, they
dismantled Krakow's Grunwald memorial to our defeat of the Teutonic Knights.
Colonization? We Eastern Europeans were significantly the
colonized, not the colonizers.
A shamefaced, apologetic, hesitant Christianity? This has
not been my experience of Christianity during my many visits to Eastern Europe
from the 1970s to the 2000s. Rather, I have experienced something deeply
beautiful and unforgettably inspirational to me: the fighting church, a church
that stands shoulder to shoulder with people defending their home.
On my first visit to my mother's natal village in
Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, I met a Catholic priest who had been tortured by
the Communists. In Poland, priests were tortured and murdered by the Nazis.
Twenty percent of Polish priests were killed. Polish convents played a key role
in saving Jewish children. Polish priests risked and often lost their lives to
save Jews. Poles remember Stefan Wyszynski, a cardinal, who had been imprisoned
by Communists. Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko was tortured and murdered by
the Communists in 1984. I lived in Poland 1988-89 and participated in
anti-Communist protests. I witnessed unarmed Catholic priests, with nothing but
their courageous presence, protect demonstrators from aggressive riot police.
Poles and other Eastern Europeans have needed a
"fighting church" because they have been embattled for so very long. Poles
have long seen themselves as the Christ of Nations. We suffer and others
benefit. Not so long ago, others acknowledged Eastern Europe's role in bearing
the brunt of unending invasions from the east.
The fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
reads: "It is to the Slav colonization of the Russian plains and to the
long Slav struggle with nomadic invasions from Asia that Western Europe owes
her comparative freedom to develop a certain cultural unity. The role of buffer
state was not voluntary, but the debt is nonetheless great, and the heroic
struggle of the Slav races against repeated invasions, in hard climactic
conditions, should command the respect and admiration of the world."
Eastern European nations, by necessity, had to take on
invaders from the East. While we were fighting, dying, and facing enslavement,
Western Europe benefitted from the bulwark we provided.
Poland was repeatedly attacked from the east, often by
Muslims, including Turks and Tatars. Poles fought significantly in historic
battles against Muslims, including the Battle of Varna, the Battle of Khotyn
and the Battle of Vienna. These battles took place in Bulgaria, Ukraine, and
Austria. Poles did not travel to Muslim lands to attack Muslims. Muslims
traveled into Eastern European for their jihad. Malcolm X famously said of the
African American experience, "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. The rock
landed on us." Eastern Europeans might say, "We didn't land on the
Ummah – the worldwide Muslim population. The Ummah landed on us."
Poles were among many Slavic people enslaved by Muslims. Between
the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Muslims from the Crimea enslaved
perhaps one million persons from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – as many
as 20,000 human beings per year. The last major Muslim slave raid on these Slavic
people occurred in 1769. Poles enslaved by Muslims did hard labor, or served as
sex slaves.
1769 is a long time ago, you say. Poles should get over
it. My friend John Guzlowski is the son of two slaves. His parents were
enslaved by Nazis, not Muslims, but iconography on protest signs makes clear
that Poles see resistance to one totalitarian invader as analogous to
resistance to another. ISIS brags of taking Christians as slaves, while the
world waits in vain for significant Muslim protest of ISIS atrocities.
Poles are not the only Eastern Europeans whose cultures
enshrine unpleasant encounters with Muslims. Serbs once had to give their
seven-year-old sons to Muslims for forced conversion – the practice of
devsirme. The Slovak poem Turcin Ponican by Samo Chalupka records Turks
invading Slovakia. Perhaps my favorite cultural legacy of the constant wars
between jihadis and Slavs is the 1880 Ilya Repin painting, "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to
Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire."
More famous, of course, is Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian leader dedicated to
protecting Christians against Muslims, who gave his name to Bram Stoker's
Dracula.
There is more to the sign reading "Fighting Church."
During the Nazi occupation, the Polish Resistance called themselves "Polska
Walczaca" or "Fighting Poland." Please note the similarity of
vocabulary and construction between the anti-Nazi resistance "Polska
Walczaca" and the anti-immigration sign "Kosciol walczaca." Poles
are understanding their stance against mass, unvetted immigration as comparable
to their stand against the Nazis and past totalitarian and genocidal invaders.
That understanding is echoed in the visual imagery of the
flags many protestors carried: flags with an anchor formed by the letters P and
W. This anchor was a symbol of the World War Two resistance.
These Poles, agree or disagree, see their church as a
church that resists Western orders to capitulate – to surrender – to Islam. And
they are placing their church in the tradition of those who fought the Nazis.
Another image draws in Poland's long history of
resistance: the image of Jan Sobieski and the words "Przyszlismy,
ujrzelismy, a bog zwyciezyl." This quote is attributed to Jan Sobieski. It
is his Christian rewrite of Julius Cesar's famous quote, "Vini, vidi,
vici." Cesar said, "I came; I saw; I conquered." Sobieski, a
true Pole, was mindful of classical history. He was also a devout Christian. He
said, "We came; we saw; God conquered," of his victory against
jihadis at Vienna in 1683.
Poles have lived through much more history than many
luckier peoples. As such, they are often difficult. They are not, though,
especially intolerant, unethical, or lacking in compassion. They merely see the
obvious problems with the current mass, unvetted migration. Few realize that
Poland has hosted its own Muslim population for hundreds of years without major
incident. The mainstream media outlets that are depicting Poles and other
Eastern Europeans as intolerant Neanderthals are doing a grave disservice. The
readers' favorite comments at the New
York Times site suggests that they are fooling fewer and fewer people.
