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 "protecting minorities" excuse, for meddling in Poland's internal affairs, did not begin with Stalin. Far from it.
ReplyDeleteAround 1918, there was a big international push for the newly-resurrected Polish state, via the so-called Minorities Treaty, to grant the Jews unprecedented special separate-nation rights. These demands included a quota of Jewish-designated seats in the Polish parliament, government-funded separatist-oriented Yiddish schools, a Jewish-only court system (secularized kahals) parallel to and independent of the Polish court system, etc. The media then (and history books today) raised a big stink when Poland refused to bow to these onerous demands.
No such separatist rights were presented, let alone demanded, by the Jews of London, Paris, or New York. This fact was brought up by separatist-opposing Polish Jews.
And--surprise--all this time, no such separatist rights were even imagined, let alone become the object of international fuss, regarding the Polish minority in Germany.
"The "protecting minorities" excuse, for meddling in Poland's internal affairs, did not begin with Stalin."
Delete???
I never said it did.
I never thought that you did. I just wanted to intensify the fact that "Poland is just terrible to minorities" is an age-old bunch of rubbish that has, for a very long time, been used as a pretext for harming Poland.
ReplyDeleteAnd, to the extent that I can, I will not stand for it.
Amazon allows Holocaust revisionism. https://www.amazon.com/After-Reich-Brutal-History-Occupation/product-reviews/0465003389/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_srvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&sortBy=recent#R397MGOYHFV8UX One opinion declares that there were no extermination camps.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jan for all your brave and sterling work in this impossible arena. And Jerzy well at least if they are going to say there were no extermination camps, they can't blame us Poles/Polonians for them.
DeleteOr can they?
Come to think of they probably can. I was in a discussion some weeks ago with a gentleman who told me that the Polish army was not barred from the Victory Parade after WW2, and that my father (and all the others) were "misremembering".
However he hedged his bets by also saying it was our own fault anyway.
The Polish pilots were invited but they refused to participate by solidarity with other Poles. The most humilated by the Britons Polish officer was Sosabowski (Market Garden).
DeleteThe revisionist doesn't say that the camps were Polish, he believes they didn't exist at all, were invented after the war.
Hello Jerzy, yes, i know that the Polish pilots were invited - the Battle of Britain was so iconic, still is. But, yes, they stayed away as their Polish comrades in arms were excluded.
DeleteAnd, yes, that is my point. At least revisionists who claim there were no camps can't blame Poland for them - surely?!
If I may, I would like to add to Sue’s comment.
ReplyDeleteWhen the British had their London Victory Celebration victory parade at the end of World War 2 in June 1946, they refused to allow the Poles to participate for fear of offending Stalin. The British said that they would only allow 25 Polish pilots to participate but not any Polish Army or Navy units. Of course, the Polish pilots refused. (Some of the non-fighting countries in the parade were Brazil, Mexico, Persia, and Luxembourg.) The British RAF pilots were incensed that their Polish comrades couldn’t participate and released the following statement that derisively paraphrased Churchill’s praise of the RAF in the Battle of Britain: “Never have so many been betrayed by so few for so little.” I would also point out that more than 200,000 members of the Polish Armed Forces in the West had fought under British command.
And don’t get me started on the instrumental role that Poles the played in shortening World War 2 and saving countless lives by giving Enigma to the British. In July 1939, five weeks before Hitler attacked Poland, the Poles secretly met with French and British military intelligence, showed them their procedures for code breaking, and gave them functioning replicas of Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the Allies an unprecedented advantage in achieving victory in World War 2. Although the British facilities at Bletchley Park became the center for Allied efforts to keep up with the changes in Enigma and had about 10,000 workers, the Poles were not allowed to work there. Alan Turing, the British mathematician who led the cryptanalysis effort, could not have cracked Enigma’s code without the help of the Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Henry Żygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. Based on their knowledge, Turing was able to build a large computer that was a replica of the Polish bombe and was able to work out the vast number of permutations in the Enigma settings.
A good American warns - Bohunks are dangerous "Political observers have already begun to detect this risk in the election of governments or political parties inspired by populist-nationalist rhetoric in countries like Poland and Hungary." https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/09/23/pope-francis-warns-against-rise-extremism-calls-solidarity
ReplyDeleteGreat Britain decided to brexit, nationalists are influential in Germany and France, Italy and Austria.