Masha Gessen, the Polish Government, the Polish-Jewish Museum and the New Yorker

The insufferable Masha Gessen has an article in the insufferable New Yorker about the Polish government and the Jewish museum. 

I can't take Gessen. I just can't. She appears frequently on WNYC, the New York area NPR affiliate, and she nauseates me. She talks down. Exclusively. Down. Because she is superior and you are inferior. Everyone in the world is less intelligent, less aware. less hip than she. And they are probably Christian peasants. 

Can I cite her ever saying anything about Christian peasants? No, I can't. 

I also get the impression that Gessen thinks that there are about five worthy people in the world, they are all her personal friends, and they all live on a coast, and are wearing all black. 

How does it feel to go through life like that? 

The New Yorker was the go-to publication when I was writing Bieganski. 

Grab your copy of Bieganski and check out every time I cite the New Yorker. Then get back to me. 

What, you don't have a copy of Bieganski? 

Here's one passage in Bieganski that quotes the New Yorker. There are many such passages. 

Aptly summing up Borat's distinguishing characteristics, David Edelstein wrote in the New Yorker that Borat is typified by his “minuscule IQ, cultural backwardness, rampant libido, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.” Edelstein continued:

To understand what Baron Cohen's Borat is up to in part, it helps to consider the most notorious scenes in Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, in which the director trains his camera on Polish peasants who lived near the Nazis' most lethal concentration camps while they were in full swing. Under Lanzmann's probing, these old men and women — some of them residing on property seized from the Jews — murmur that yes, it was a terrible thing, the exterminations. Just terrible. But of course, the Jews did bring it on themselves, didn't they? I don't know whether Baron Cohen saw Shoah, but Lanzmann's gotcha journalism on untutored anti-Semites paved the way for what amounts to a (riotous) libel on Eastern Europe.
(Edelstein)

Here we see the logic, the ethic, and the anodyne of Bieganski. Eastern European peasants deserve to be mocked as people who bathe in toilet bowls. They are responsible for the Holocaust. It is their very qualities, so different from those of the modern academic, movie star, or journalist and his audience, their qualities associated with peasantry, that cause them to be monsters. Modern people are exculpated from the crime of anti-Semitism.

Anyway, if you want to read Gessen in the New Yorker writing about Polaks, go here

Here is a key excerpt: ""It meant that Poles should stop apologizing for their sins, foremost among them their coöperation with the Nazis in exterminating European Jewry."