Dennis Miller: Lech Walesa Spends His Time "Screwing in Light Bulbs"

I am listening to the Dennis Miller radio show. I am a big fan of Dennis Miller. He is brilliant. No one can summon a metaphor like Miller can. He turns speech into an Olympic event.

Miller read the text for an advertisement. Apparently former Polish President Lech Walesa will be making an appearance in America soon. The text listed all of Walesa's achievements. Walesa, Miller said defeated communism, won the Nobel Prize, was elected Poland's president ... something like that. I don't remember the exact text.

After listing Walesa's many achievements, Miller closed this way, "And now Walesa devotes his time to screwing in light bulbs."

Miller's allusion is to two forms familiar to Americans: the Polak joke, and the light bulb joke. These jokes communicate how crude Polaks are. How many Polaks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Ten: one to hold the light bulb and nine to rotate his ladder.

Here is an excerpt from the talk I recently gave in Wisconsin:

Bieganski is not just pervasive. He is inescapable. He is required. If you mention Polish identity in any number of venues: a college classroom, a party, a political speech, a film, a discussion of poetry – if it is a lower strata venue, you make a Polak joke. If it is a higher strata venue, you invoke Bieganski. In American culture any mention of Polish identity is followed by Bieganski. It is obligatory.

Dennis Miller, a talented man I great admire, just demonstrated this axiom from my talk.

My facebook friend's friends did the same.

If you mention Polish identity in America, you must then make a joke. If that doesn't fly, you bring up Poles' responsibility for hate and atrocity. There are examples of this pattern in the book. 

BTW, Dennis Miller is a right-wing Catholic. I don't agree with those who argue that the Bieganski stereotype is limited to left-wingers and Jews. It is found across ethnicities and political positions. It is standard. It is a formulaic speech pattern.

It is up to Polonia to change this. Start with the three part blog post on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision.

Facebook: Krakow. Crack Whore. Funny? Prejudiced? Or does the Polak just need to relax?

Krakow, Poland. A city I love as if it were a living thing. Source.

Believe it or not,
this is one of the less disturbing images that turn up when you do a Google image search of  "crack whore." I don't advise that you repeat this search. The images are grotesque and offensive.  

A facebook friend is a cantor or hazzan. He is visiting Poland. I've been enjoying his trip vicariously. He posted photos of tombstones in Warsaw's Jewish cemetery and I "shared" them to my facebook page. I was educated and delighted. 

Last night, he posted a one-word update: "Krakow." 

The very first comment was a joke. Emeril, a TV chef, says "Krakow" when he cooks. The next comment was enthusiastic. The poster posted a one sentence comment about how she appreciates Krakow. 

The next comment was a joke. Back to the Emeril comment. The next comment was a joke. The poster posted this url: http://icant.co.uk/talks/img/krakow.jpg

The next comment was a joke. "Krakow" is the sound Batman makes when he punches someone. (In English, comic book authors often use the word "kapow" to indicate the sound the impact of a punch makes. 

The next comment was a joke. A reference to crack whores. 

And that's it. Those were all the comments. One person saying something enthusiastic. The rest, jokes. 

I posted the following: 

"Krakow is a cultural center in Poland. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was the capital of Poland for hundreds of years. There are sites in Krakow directly connected to Kosciuszko, Pilsudski, Mickiewicz, Wyspianski, Wojtyla. Wawel castle is in Krakow. It is especially beloved of Polish Americans because when Polish Americans visit Poland they often visit Krakow. The KF hosts summer schools there.

Krakow is also a site of horrendous suffering. The Nazis worked very hard to destroy Krakow, while still enjoying what they left of it. There is a museum in Krakow that talks about this occupation. I'll include a link.

After the Nazis, the Stalinists did their part, locating Nowa Huta near Krakow. The steel mill fumes damaged the city's ancient stones.

Evoking "crack whores" or batman's "kapow" -- and nothing else -- with Krakow suggests an underlying disrespect and denigration.

We all enjoy freedom of speech, and if this is what people choose to do, that's legal and acceptable. It is also legal and acceptable for me to point it out."

Two of the facebook folks who posted "jokes" about Krakow responded. They both said that I should "relax."

Do Germans Deserve Free Speech? Can They Handle Free Speech? Twitter Censorship

Norman Rockwell

As an American, I enjoy, and strongly support, freedom of speech. I love this counterintuitive quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in the style of Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Previously on this blog, I talked about NPR's firing, and demonization, of commentator Juan Williams, after Williams admitted that he gets nervous when he sees passengers in Muslim garb on airplanes. In that blog entry, I argued that even those criticized benefit from the freedom of speech that makes criticism possible. That blog entry is here.

I was shocked when I first learned that many countries in Western Europe don't enjoy freedom of speech. That gave me a bad feeling. Was Germany still so prone to Nazism that it couldn't allow what I guessed was a small minority to express their Nazism?

I find it really weird and sad that England, where human rights took so many historic, celebrated giant steps, like the thirteenth-century Magna Carta, bars Michael Savage from entry – on the basis of Savage's criticism of Islam.

From Wikipedia

Of the banning of Michael Savage from entry into England, "the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wrote: 'America still has a constitutional protection of free speech, and I have been amazed... to see how few people in England are willing to stick up for that elementary principle... a country once famous for free speech is now hysterically and expensively sensitive to anything that could be taken as a slight.' In The Guardian, Catherine Bennett wrote: 'The ban on Savage is so far from being a comprehensible act, so staggeringly capricious and stupid, as to defy evaluation.' While Sam Leith wrote: 'Barring this shock-jock from Britain risks turning a rabid blabbermouth into a beacon for free speech.'"

Oh, England. How sad for you that you have come to this.

And how about Germany, and Germans? Are they ready for free speech? Can they handle it? If not now, when?

The fear of those who institute bans on free speech seems to be that if bad ideas are allowed to be discussed openly, they will be so attractive that they will overpower good ideas.

Is that right? Isn't Nazism such a very bad idea that if it competes in the free marketplace of ideas, it will lose?

Or not? And, if not, why not?

Also, doesn't banning open discussion of some ideas make them immediately more attractive to some? Doesn't banning open discussion of some ideas protect those ideas from serious scrutiny? If you can't talk about an idea, you can't talk about how bad it is.

By the way, when I was in a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, recently, I attempted to access this blog. Initially, I could not. I received a message saying, "Access Denied. This page uses the word 'Sieg Heil.'" Those words do appear on the blog, but not in a laudatory way. I do not recommend that people greet each other using the words "Sieg Heil." The hotel computer's blocking of this blog demonstrates the clumsiness of internet censorship.

I did, though, find a way to get around that firewall. I posted the update from Madison from that very hotel computer that at first wanted to deny me access to my own blog.

A recent controversy over Twitter was covered in the New York Times. Below, excerpts from the Times article.

October 18, 2012
Twitter Blocks Germans' Access to Neo-Nazi Group
By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN — Twitter waded into potentially perilous territory on Thursday when it blocked users in Germany from access to the account of a neo-Nazi group that is banned by the government here.

The move was the first time that Twitter acted on a policy known as "country-withheld content," announced in January, in which it will block an account at the request of a government. But the company cracked open the gates to a complex new era in which it will increasingly have to referee legal challenges to the deluge of posts that has made the site so popular.

The company said the goal was to balance freedom of expression with compliance with local laws. "Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently," Alexander Macgillivray, the company's chief lawyer, wrote on Twitter.

A German spokesman for the company confirmed in an e-mail that it was the first time the policy had been used, although Twitter does not as a matter of policy announce government requests to block an account. In a "transparency report" issued earlier this year, the company said it had received six such requests but had not, for reasons it did not specify, acted upon them.

Uwe Schünemann, the interior minister for the state of Lower Saxony, where the neo-Nazi group is based, applauded the decision to block the Twitter feed, calling it in a statement "an important step."

Twitter neither shut down the group's account nor deleted the group's posts. It blocked them for users only in Germany, who see a message that reads "Blocked" and "This account has been withheld in Germany," along with a link to more information about the policy.

The decision to block the German feed was a relatively easy one, given that the group is banned and that the use of Nazi symbols and slogans can be criminally prosecuted. The more difficult question is how broadly and under what rules the policy will be applied by a company with users around the world.

Twitter employees are not combing through the hundreds of millions of messages posted each day searching for offensive material, but are responding only to government requests, beholden to free-expression laws in the countries in which it operates. That makes the company potentially subject to manipulation by authoritarian governments, rights advocates say.

"Where it really will be dangerous is in repressive regimes where Twitter is a very important means of communication between political dissenters, and where laws are interpreted by people who would interpret them in a politically biased fashion," said Svetlana Mintcheva, the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York. "What, for instance, if the president of Belarus decides to suppress the tweets of a theater company which is critical of him?"

Authoritarian governments may wish to stifle the voices of dissidents just as ardently as German officials hope to silence the extreme right. In some countries, religious leaders may seek to prohibit messages they deem to be blasphemous…

Full text of the article is here.

Bieganski at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

On Thursday, October 18, 2012, I had the honor of presenting a talk about “Bieganski” at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I was a guest of the Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. There was a lively and heartfelt discussion after the talk. I enjoyed this trip tremendously, and this post will include a bit about Polish-Jewish relations, and a bit of the personal, as well.

I flew not long after surgery. I was a bit worried – would I measure up?

So far, everything has gone off without a hitch. I thank the many good people who sent prayers my way. I have felt no fatigue, neither while traveling nor while delivering the talk.

Prof. James P. Leary was key in inviting me to Madison. Prof. Leary is an Irish-American scholar who is a great friend to Polonia. After he became aware of my work several years ago, Prof. Leary contacted me and has been a stalwart supporter and warmhearted friend ever since. Unfortunately he is currently in Iceland, so we were unable to meet.

I was met at the airport by Prof. Herbert S. Lewis, a scholar I greatly admire. Prof. Lewis is the author of “The Passion of Franz Boas.” I first contacted Prof. Lewis several years ago to ask him a question about Franz Boas, a scholar mentioned in “Bieganski.” We stopped for a delicious lunch of humus and couscous, and we talked about roots and identity. Prof. Lewis, like me, is from New Jersey, and he has some ancestry from Poland, and also England.

I mentioned that I tear up when I mention the Polish national anthem. Herb said the Hatikvah moves him to tears. I said it moves me to tears, as well, and of course we mentioned that it comes from a tune used by Bedrich Smetana, from my mother’s birthplace of Czechoslovakia.

The Jewish Studies Center’s very charming Kesha Weber shepherded me from the hotel to the speaking venue. I was introduced by Rachel Brenner, who was born in Poland. She is the author of “Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust.”

I’ve spoken enough about Polish-Jewish relations to know that I needed to tell the audience that I was not going to say what they might have expected me to say.

The speaker on Polish-Jewish relations faces two challenges:

1.) Most people have never heard of Polish-Jewish relations, don’t care about the topic, and don’t realize that it has any significance to them whatsoever.

2.) Those who have heard about Polish-Jewish relations are, all too often, rabid partisans of one side or another.

I see my job as doing two things:

1.) I must address those in the audience who may not realize that the Polish-Jewish interface has universal significance. Not just because Auschwitz is in Poland. But because it is part of our job here as humans to figure out how to get along with each other, including those we define as “other.” The Polish-Jewish interface offers lessons on that, and this story is all too often distorted and abused, rather than used in the best way it could be.

2.) I must let those in the audience who are familiar with Polish-Jewish relations know that I am not going to say the predictable things that they may want me to say.

What predictable things do people expect?

One side will want me to say that Jews have suffered more than any other people on earth, and that Poles are the world’s worst anti-Semites.

I don’t say that.

The other side will want me to say that Poles are the most gloriously heroic people on earth, that they have suffered more than anyone, and that Polish anti-Semitism is no big deal. Oh, and: Kosciuszko! Pilsudski! Chopin!

I don’t say that.

If you’ve read, and understood, the book, and if you read this blog, you know exactly what I said. And you know that parts of it are hard to hear. Hard for Poles to hear. Hard for Jews to hear. Hard for anyone to hear.

I very much liked the reaction I received from the audience. From reading facial expressions, I had a sense that they hadn’t heard all this before, but they were following me, with open, intelligent minds, and with interest.

I asked how many people identified as Jewish, and how many identified as Polish. About a third of the audience raised their hands to the first question, and about a third to the second, leaving about a third identifying as neither.

That was very heartening to me. I was saying the same, hard things to Polonians, to Jews, and to members of neither group, and all were ready to listen, understand, care, and engage.

Given that reaction, I can’t help but think that the time is ripe and the opportunity is there for us – all of us who care about this – to seize this moment and CHANGE things. To name the Bieganski stereotype for what it is, understand it, and get past it. I can only hope that Polonia will consider doing this.

The question and answer period was lively and rewarding to me. People asked key questions.

A young lady with a slight Polish accent reported shock at what young Americans learn about Poland – that the Poles were more or less a minor version of the Nazis, that they never fought or suffered, that they murdered Jews just as the Nazis did.

A man wearing a yarmulke said that when he goes to baseball games in Chicago Polish fans throw popcorn at him and the police do nothing to intervene.

Mrs. Lewis chided me for making a sarcastic comment about my reaction to Germans. In my answer to her, I said that a post on this blog, Otto Gross’ “Ripples of Sin,” helped to change, not so much my mind, but my heart, about Germans.

Mrs. Lewis also mentioned that, just as we should not stereotype by ethnicity, we should not stereotype by socioeconomic class. I agreed strongly and mentioned the Ulma family, peasants, who sacrificed their lives and the lives of their children for saving Jews.

Two people asked similar questions Their gist: if more people encounter decent, white-collar Poles in real life, will that weaken the stereotype?

I said that when I was younger, like many people, I invested in the notion of human progress – that, as time goes on, people get better and better, and nasty things like stereotypes are defeated. Now that I’m older, I see that that is not the case. There is genocidal anti-Semitism loose in the world again today. One need only listen to the statements by the leader of Iran. Too, one of my informants told me clearly that the Poles she knows in real life are white collar professionals, but when she hears the world “Pole” she thinks of a working class person in rumpled clothing, dirt under the fingernails, no education.

After the lecture, I enjoyed Ethiopian food at Buraka with John Cash, an old friend from my days at IUB. John and I had not seen each other in seven years, and yet eating a meal with him felt completely natural. I thought about my essay “Never Be An Immigrant,” and reuniting with old friends in Poland in 2011 whom I had not seen in over twenty years. Those reunions, too, felt … natural. I guess the heart does not possess a stop watch.

The photo, above, is of an unexpected, surprising delight on this trip. I had a layover in Detroit. The photo is of a tunnel in the Detroit airport. The tunnel is lined with a curved screen on which amorphous, floating shapes in blues, pinks, purples, and occasional flashes of yellow flicker and dance. New Age music accompanies the visual display. It takes about five minutes to walk through this tunnel.

I applaud the airport for including this brief foray into a trance, dreamlike state for its travelers. I liked the tunnel so much I went back and walked through it a couple of more times, and I felt de-stressed and revived each time.

Human decisions and human will make up the human world. Polonia can decide to play its cards differently regarding the Bieganski stereotype. The audience in Madison showed the readiness of many Poles, Jews, and others for civil dialogue and a rejection of the Bieganski stereotype and a confrontational, enemy-approach. Those who would like to take action on this matter might want to read the three-part blog post on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision.

Polaks and Papists in America by Richard Journey

All Photos Courtesy Richard Journey 

Polaks and Papists in America
Richard Journey

God was displeased with his favorites, the WASPS, or White Anglo Saxon Protestants. As punishment he sent poor Eastern and Southern Europeans to the shining city on the hill. As an upside these aliens were to do the dirty work in the mines, the steel mills, the factories and foundries.

My parents, as children, came to America in the early 1900s from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poland did not exist as a nation during that time. In the late eighteenth century, it had been carved up by three major powers: Russia, Austria, and Prussia.

My father had a few years of Polish grade school in a Pennsylvania mining company town. As an adolescent he worked in the mines, unable to get further schooling or the vocational training that he wanted. He described how he and his father had to walk through the woods, avoiding the stone throwing by the Wasps, White Anglo Saxon Protestants. My father saw burning crosses, intimidation for the foreigners, for the Catholics.

His family eventually moved to Ohio, with his father and the other males working in factories. The family bought a lot in the country. There they were able to keep a cow, chickens, and have a garden in an area shared by other immigrants. Life had gotten better through their work in factories and foundries. Most of them moved to different parts of the country.

For years I thought that the immigration officials changed the family name. But I later found out that my father changed the name around 1942. We could be Polish without sounding too Polish. When we were young my parents did speak a secret language, Polish, not to let us know what they were saying. When very young I spoke with my Polish-speaking grandmother, and we seemed to understand each other. Now I regret that my parents did not speak Polish with us. I heard little Polish anywhere after those early years.

As a boy I thought that the Yalta agreement in which President FDR and Churchill gave Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe to Russian control showed the devaluing of the Slavic peoples. Stalinist Russia continued the same Nazi killing and enslavement of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. All contacts with our relatives in Poland were cut off with the iron curtain. I had heard that the Stalinist deportations had moved our relatives to Siberia. Recently my sister found relatives who had survived in the mountains of southern Poland.

In the US prejudice was shown in different ways including the countless Polish jokes. At least mobs were not burning down convents as they had years earlier. Our Protestant town did not have Asians or blacks or Hispanics. So the more recent immigrant groups like the Polish were at the bottom of the pecking order.

With our continuing integration into American life there remained more obviously the problem of a Catholic identification. I was Catholic, and prejudice against Catholics continued through the years, in attacks by Paul Blanshard in his 1953 book American Freedom and Catholic Power, by the POAU, Protestants and other Americans United for separation of church and state. Later even the Catholic presidential candidate JFK had to face an Inquisition, a board of Protestant ministers to find out if he could be trusted as a Catholic with the presidency. It was never clear what Protestants feared from Catholics. Did they think that the pope would send foreign Roman legions to conquer America? But Protestants have been fiercely oppositional to differences, to the Other. Protestants fiercely drove out the Mormons from state to state.

There seemed to be little reason for such a great fear of Catholics. I criticize Catholics for blending too well with the dominant culture, and not furnishing a critique of the problems in the culture. However there were the fathers Berrigan demonstrating against American wars, currently the Nuns on the Bus pushing for social justice, and the old Catholic worker movement with Dorothy Day, to mention a prophetic few. Today the church makes its own problems of abuse, authoritarianism, male supremacy, derogation of women, all helping form a cafeteria Catholicism, or leaving the church.

When I walked on the Rue Maitre Albert in Paris I realized that this referred to Albert the great, a Catholic in the 13th century's thriving intellectual life of the University of Paris. Greek and Roman philosophy and literature along with Arab and Jewish thought were, at that time, all coming into the great mix of Paris for the first time. Abelard mixed it up in his dialectical method. Aquinas tried for the great synthesis. My studies of Greek and Roman classics, along with classical and medieval philosophy were coming back to me on this street of the Latin Quarter.

Most Catholics adjusted, grew more professional, but were not adventuresome in the intellectual life. There were grounds to believe that Catholics were somewhat different. For instance, my studies in Husserl's phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre's philosophy helped in pursuing an alternative vision of psychology, a human science psychology. Most of this was not American in style, but continental European.

I don't know why being a Catholic was so important for me. Perhaps part of it was the prevailing hostility to Catholicism helping perpetuate a fortress mentality. The nuns walking through our Protestant downtown with medieval veils fluttering in the breeze were a testimony to the faith for me. Years later I felt pride in a Polish pope and the Solidarity movement working to bring down a communist dictatorship in Poland. Happy for that, I was yet disappointed that he unraveled some of the reforms of Vatican Council II. Sadly he suppressed another liberation movement, the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America.

These are my memories of times past; memories that crowded back when I visited the Polish Museum and Library on the Ile Saint Louis in Paris. There, we talked with a young beautiful Polish guide who has to return to the city of Krakow to continue her university training. Krakow is beautiful, but it is not Paris. We tried to console her. Her being in Paris made it plainer to me that Poland has entered the wider community of Europe. Gone are the days of the Bloodlands or borderlands when Nazis and Communists systematically oppressed and killed Polish and other Eastern European peoples.

The Polish Library, founded in 1838, is one of the biggest institutions in the whole world devoted to Polish culture. In it are the œuvres, remnants, and remembrances of notable Poles. Chopin's piano, for instance; the manuscripts and correspondence of famous Polish novelist, Adam Mickiewicz, a symbol of Polish national and cultural unity and the works of Boleslaw Biegas, a Polish sculptor, painter, and dramatist. It also has records of Polish migration.

In the Polish Museum, I was captivated by the works of Andrew Kreütz-Majewski, operatic and theatrical scenery designer, and professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. This man, born in the mid-1930s, had thrived in the most difficult circumstances of World War II and Communist Poland. I had never heard of him before and, curious, I googled his name and found this, a fitting description as unsettling and haunting as the effects of Majewski's works on me:

"Much like his painted works, his designs convey a strong sense of solitude and impermanence, an existential fear of death, and a sense of external threat that the artist projects by creating harsh theatrical, visual imagery that seems to issue from a singular sensitivity.

"Wartime experiences, images from childhood and youth contained in enduring fears and dreams, an oppressive claustrophobic obsession, all processed creatively, are reflected in enclosed spaces: walls, parks, walls without doors or windows, planes suspended overhead," wrote Agnieszka Koecher-Hensel.

All this conveys a sense of seclusion. Yet this is no safe asylum that protects one from the world outside. Rather, it is imprisonment without possibility of escape even though enclosures in Majewski's sets are always penetrated by a ray of light or possess an outlet'" (Source).

I believe I know, in my own way, how Majewski might have felt. Would knowing help me finally let go of it? Self-conscious about my past vulnerability to prejudice as alien Polak and papist, I realize that other groups face and have faced prejudice. Sadly, we will always have replacements for Polaks and papists. No problems there.

Richard Journey

Film Shines Light on Neo-Nazi Music Scene

Source

Film Shines Light on Neo-Nazi Music Scene 
From The Local: Germany's News in English 

Excerpt:

For much of this year, the German media has been awash with news of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a neo-Nazi terrorist group thought to have murdered at least ten people over a decade. The NSU's existence only became public when two of their members committed suicide after police cornered them following a botched bank robbery.

Many media outlets treated the revelation as surprising new evidence of an armed far-right underground network, but one undercover journalist has been investigating the scene for years, filming footage from neo-Nazi concerts that showed a flourishing music scene and a growing readiness for violence.

Along with Ohlendorf, Thomas Kuban (an alias) made the footage into a documentary, which, other than being screened at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, is yet to receive widespread attention. The title of the film, “Blood Must Flow,” is taken from a track repeatedly played at concerts.

Kuban spent six years dressing as what he called a “typical fascist pig” and wangling invites to secret concerts, where he secretly caught images of braying crowds and hundreds of arms raised in the Sieg Heil salute. He risked his life every time, Ohlendorf told The Local.

Seeing hall after hall of self-declared “Aryan warriors” chanting along with lyrics like “we shit on the freedom of this Jewish republic,” – Kuban and Ohlendorf hoped to help open Germany's eyes to homegrown extremism and the role music plays in recruiting young people to the far-right.

In fact, the film shows a thriving neo-Nazi music industry. Over 100 records are released each year from around 30 specialist record labels and there are countless online shops where merchandise is sold along with the music…

Full text is here.

Thanks to John Cash for sending this in. 

Polish Spy on To Tell the Truth

A Polish Spy appeared on the TV game show "To Tell the Truth" in 1963. You can watch the entire episode here. 

Many Polonians will especially appreciate what Tom Poston says at four minutes forty seconds into the video. 

Thank you to Chris Jaworski for sending this in. "Looking Down a Mineshaft," Chris' post about his Polish-American father, can be read here.

Chris is a hardcore marathoner, recently running one hundred hours straight through the mountains of Vermont. One of Chris' articles about his impressive running career can be found here.