In September, 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia both attacked Poland.

Poles who know their history understand why it is criminal to demonize Nazism while giving Communism a free pass.

I love the headline: "to protect minorities."

Leftists have long used "divide and conquer," have used grievances of splinter groups to justify their own existence and to erode societies before taking them over.

I note this pattern in the posts of leftist Facebook friends, who mourn black people shot by police, but not white people shot by black police -- Justine Ruszczyk, anyone? -- or black people shot by black police.

Who insist that to demonize Christianity or Israel is their duty, but to shield Islam from any analysis is somehow sacred. Who insist that biological males should use the same restrooms as little girls, and who insist that any objection to this proves that America is racist fascist sexist and must be destroyed.

Splinter groups exist only to be exploited by the left as levers to topple societies so that the workers paradise can be ushered in.

And, yes, interwar Poland was a really tough place to be a minority in Poland. A hard time to be Ukrainian, Lemko, Jewish, or indeed German. People were killed for that -- for being German in Poland.

But the solution to Poland's mistreatment of minorities was very much not Stalin, invasion, genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, Siberia.

The Anne Applebaum Piece in the Atlantic about the Law and Justice Party and Poland as a Sign of Bad Things to Come

My book, Bieganski the Brute Polak Stereotype, and this blog, are both dedicated to Western stereotypes of Eastern European Christian peasant-descent people. 

That being the case, I refrain from offering much commentary on Law and Justice. Current Polish politics is not my area of expertise. I can't comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of Anne Applebaum's doomsaying piece in the Atlantic, entitled "A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well." I can only offer scattered, subjective observations. 

I found the opening paragraphs hard to get through Applebaum shows off how hip she is, how rich, how connected, how deep, how caring. She owns a house that has a name. She has friends who are members of the elite. Good for you, Anne Applebaum. We knew that about you already. 

Applebaum writes, "the journalists, writers, and thinkers, including some of my party guests, who believe anti-Polish forces seek to blame Poland for Auschwitz."

This is an idiotic sentence, and there is no excuse for it. My book has been out for years. I have written to Applebaum herself and her husband about it. I received perfunctory replies. She has no idea what she is talking about here. 

I keep reading. Applebaum talks about what jerks her friends have turned out to be. This is just more showing off, and it is uncharitable. 

One of her friends is a crazy anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is a bad thing. I really don't care that Anne Applebaum has a friend who is a crazy anti-Semite. I'm asking myself, why I am devoting time to reading this article? 

She mentions Radio Maryja. I reject Radio Maryja but not its listeners. I have met people, in Poland, who listen to that radio station, who are really nice people. 

I reject Trump. But I don't reject everyone who voted for Trump. 

If Anne Applebaum wrote a complex piece explaining that ballet -- how to reject bad ideas without rejecting people who embrace bad ideas -- I'd like to read that piece. 

Applebaum mentions that she and her husband have been the focus of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Well, that's something we have in common. I receive hate mail from people who identify me as secretly Jewish, and a Polish American who was once friendly to me denounced me in a right-wing Polish publication as an anti-Polish conspirator. 

Applebaum writes, "Negative international press coverage of Poland has grown much too widespread for a single person, even a single Jewish person, to coordinate all by herself."

Anne, if you had read my book, you would understand this phenomenon better than you do. 

Reading on. Applebaum mentions a pre-WW II Romanian writer, and she mentions the Dreyfus Affair. 

I think she may be missing the point. 

I understand her focus on anti-Semitism, but the elephant in the room that she's only touched on so far, is the mass, unvetted, migration of military age Muslim males into Europe, the question of assimilation and cultural change, and a rise in crime, including sexual assaults on women, and Europe's covering up of that news, and blaming the victims. See the British grooming gangs scandal. See the shameful treatment of coordinated sex attacks, in public, as happened on New Year's Eve, a few years ago. 

If you're not talking about that, you're not talking about anything. 

Will she mention a West that seems suicidal, as per Douglas Murray's new book title? 

We'll see. 

She's talking about Lenin's Russia, and Zimbabwe. Not helpful. 

Applebaum writes, "As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state 'invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.'"

Anne, please talk to me about the political profiles of professors on American college campuses. Talk to me about real statistics about what percent of professors on elite college campuses are Republicans, or devout Christians, or come from a poor, white, rural background.

And talk to me about the student body. What percent of the student body at any elite American university is from a poor, white, rural, Christian background? You can refer to Espenshade and Radford's research on this matter.

Then get back to me about people being promoted because of ideology rather than quality.   My point: "liberals" in power in the US have systematically disenfranchised people whose religious identity, skin color, and political beliefs they disdain.   Anne praises "meritocracy and competition." I'm with her there. 

Law and Justice says it is cleaning up a mess left by communism. Anne writes, 

"But this argument, which felt so important a quarter century ago, seems thin and superficial now. Since at least 2005, Poland has been led solely by presidents and prime ministers whose political biographies began in the anti-Communist Solidarity movement. And there is no powerful ex-Communist business monopoly in Poland either—at least not at the national level, where plenty of people have made money without special political connections. Poignantly, the most prominent former Communist in Polish politics right now is Stanisław Piotrowicz, a Law and Justice member of parliament who is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a great enemy of judicial independence."

This is the first paragraph of her piece that impresses me, and that I feel tells me something about Poland that I don't already know and could benefit from knowing. 

She's saying that one of Law and Justice's raisons d'etre, "We are cleaning up after communism, " is suspect. 

I'm reading onward. Anne mentions ... a person place or thing ... with which I have had personal experience. Anne likes this ___, and proclaims ___ as a voice of reason in a nation gone mad. 

My experience differs. Seven years ago I traveled to Poland. Someone with more influence than I gave me the personal phone number of ___. I contacted ___. I gave a brief introduction of my work. 

___ sent me hate mail that blistered and burned. This ___ hated me, someone ___ had never met, and denounced me as an obvious Nazi. Yes, I have been denounced as both a Jew and a Nazi because of my work on Polish-Jewish relations. 

I tell this anecdote for this reason. Anne insists that ___ is part of the best of Poland. I had a first hand encounter with ___ and ___ was every bit as hateful and nutso as Anne describes Law and Justice as being. 

Both sides have nuts. Both sets of nuts are obnoxious. 

I know this is terrible, but I have to stop reading now. I have to work for a living, and my time is limited. 

Yes, I tend to see more sense in the anti-Law and Justice position than in the pro-Law and Justice position. 

But I need a different article than the one Anne Applebaum wrote. 

I am resolutely anti-Trump, but I have little patience with much anti-Trump rhetoric. 

If someone rich and famous began an article about how rich and famous they are, and then went on to attack Trump, I'd be impatient. If that article then swerved into discussions of Zimbabwe, Lenin, and the Dreyfus Affair, I'd stop reading. 

One thing that is repeatedly left out of anti-Trump rhetoric, including in Obama's masterful speech given at a university last week after he won an award. (The speech is amazing and you should watch it, here.) 

The left gave birth to Trump. The left got Trump elected. Trump is a swing of the pendulum. 

Hitler's rise was a swing of a different pendulum. 

One thing I repeat in Bieganski and discussions of it. Ultimately, there is no they. There is only us.

A Warning from Europe. The Worst is Yet to Come. Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic about How Bad Poland Is Now.

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic about how bad things are in Poland now. Here. 

Germans ARE All Nazis, When it Becomes Politically Useful to See Germans As Nazis. Chemnitz, Open Borders, and the New York Times

© John MacDougall, AFP | Demonstrators hold flags of Germany during an anti-migrant protest in Chemnitz, eastern Germany, on September 1, 2018

In writing Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype, and in maintaining this blog for the past seven years, I have often had to type through a maelstrom of emotions. Today is one of those days. 

In my book, and on this blog, I demonstrated how Western cultures, including Israel, have worked hard, since WW II, to cleanse German ethnicity of the taint of Nazism. The taint of Nazism must go somewhere, so it is foisted on to Bieganski, the Brute, Eastern European, Catholic peasant. 

This twisted process is carried out in speeches, in op-eds, in book reviews, in books, in films, TV shows, and in casual, every day comments, all documented on this blog and in the book. 

It just has not been helpful for the West to equate Germans with Nazism's crimes. 

Well, guess what. Today the New York Times published "Germany’s Nazi Past Is Still Present. It is often held up as a model liberal democracy that has fully reckoned with its horrendous crimes. It hasn’t," an op ed by a Yale philosophy professor named Jason Stanley. Stanley's argument can be reduced to, "Scratch a German, Find a Nazi." 

In "Bieganski" I document article after article from prestigious publications that works to exculpate German ethnic identity from association with Nazism. Clearly, when Germans are grouped with Polish Catholic peasants, one group must be guilty and one group must be pure, and the guilty group is the Polish Catholic peasants. 

Now, the grouping is different. 

What has changed? 

Recent weeks have seen protest in Chemnitz, Germany, against the stabbing to death of a German man by Muslim migrants. Chemnitz citizens protested against open borders policies. 

That's why Germans must now all be Nazis. Because it serves the master narrative to make all Germans Nazis, in relation to mass Muslim migration to Europe. 

Get the formula? 

1939-1945 German Nazis / Polish Catholics = Polish Catholics are the real Nazis. 

2018 German citizens / mass Muslim migration, the result of open borders policies = Germans are Nazis. 

The manipulation of hatreds here, the distortion of history, the exploitation of the term "Nazi" to gain political points,  make me sick. 

I attempted to post the following on the NYT website: 

Jason Stanley's piece is shocking and shameless and it deeply disturbs me that the NYT choose to place its seal of approval on it. 

"Some myths are politically useful" Stanley writes. His piece is a demonstration of that truth. 

Germans, Stanley insists, through innuendo and anecdote, are constitutionally different from the rest of us. Scratch a German, discover a Nazi. 

This is racism and stereotyping. Germans are not different from the rest of us. Genocides have occurred in far flung nations, with genes and histories very different from Germany. Scratch a Cambodian, a Hutu, a Turk, and find a genocidal monster? The NYT would never publish such a piece. 

Stanley insists that citizens marched in Chemnitz because they are Nazis. This is nonsense. Citizens marched in Chemnitz because one of their fellows was stabbed to death by migrants, and migrants have contributed greatly to an increase in crime and social decay in Germany and other European nations practicing foolhardy, nearly open borders policies. 

Acknowledging the menace created by these policies would not serve Stanley's racism. So he doesn't acknowledge that menace. 


Shameful, twisted, bigoted, and false. 

Baltic Countries Ask Walmart to Stop Selling Communist Themed Items

In September, 1939, Poland was attacked by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Both powers rounded up citizens, shot them, put them in cattle cars, moved them to concentration camps, and mass murdered them. Both powers used ethnicity, religion, and social class to target their victims. 

Some of us often ask, "Why, in the West today, is the swastika anathema, but the red star, and images of Stalin, Che and Mao are not just okay, they are often considered cool?" 

Why is "You Nazi!" is a life-destroying insult, but "You communist" is not? 

Why is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez considered cute and inspirational and not delusional and dangerous?

The suggestion is that the crimes of communism are papered over, because academia and media tend to be leftist, and the left is less willing to discuss its own excesses. I don't know if that's true. 

I think of Grover Furr, who teaches at NJ's Montclair State University. One can view him whitewashing Stalin here.

In any case, Lithuanians and other Balts have asked Walmart to stop selling Soviet-themed shirts. You can read that article here.

Above are some memes floating around the web.

And here is an article by Timothy Snyder asking Hitler v Stalin: Who was Worse? 

Polish Bieganskis, German Nazis, and Media Manipulation of Civil Unrest in Chemnitz

One of the arguments of "Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype" is that, for a number of complicated reasons, guilt for Nazism's crimes, which properly belongs to Nazism, is laid at the foot of Bieganski, a stereotypical Eastern European, Catholic, peasant.

The book argues that that shift in guilt is carried out through verbal legerdemain. 

We are currently observing something of the opposite. 

Now any German can be labeled a Nazi. This development is rather dramatic. 

There has been civil unrest in Chemnitz, Germany, for the past week.

The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets explain the unrest thus: Right-wing neo-Nazis are randomly chasing and beating up "people of color."

I smelled manipulation, and tried to find out more facts via alternative media sources.

Alternative media sources are saying that a German man attempted to protect a German woman from sexual assault by migrants. The migrants pulled out knives and stabbed the German man to death.

I can't confirm this version of events, and there is at least one other version of events. In this second version, the dead man was attempting to withdraw money from an ATM when he was stabbed to death by migrants.

In any case, the video linked below is interesting. At the 3.30 minute mark, you see some protesters conversing with someone chastising them for demonstrating.

One man says, "I can't walk downtown with my wife and children, because the migrants attempt to sexually harass them."

The pro-migrant woman has no answer for that.

Mainstream media is labeling this man and others like him a "Nazi." 

It's interesting to see whom the PTB label a "Nazi," depending on whose ox is gored. 

PS: a couple of my German friends have informed me that West Germans feel contempt for East Germans. Chemnitz is in East Germany. 

Otto, who has sometimes contributed to this blog, said that back during the days of East Germany, some of his relatives from East Germany visited his family in the US. They were out in public, speaking German, and some West Germans approached and began to converse with them in a friendly way. Then they looked at their shoes. East Germans had shabby shoes. The West Germans stopped being friendly and backed off. 

Another PS: Chemnitz used to be Karl Marx Stadt, and it is still home to a giant bust of Karl Marx. It is rather bizarre to see mass rallies of allegedly "Nazi" Germans gathered under a giant bust of Karl Marx. Oh, the layers of manipulation involved in such an image. If only Orwell were alive.