Tuesday, January 26, 2016

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Review by Polish-American Journalist Filip Mazurczak

Source
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is funding by US taxpayer dollars. For that reason, among many others, all American taxpayers have an interest, and a voice, in the museum. The USHMM webpage provides the following numbers:

"Base Operating Budget: $90.8 in FY 2015 ($52.4 million federal revised appropriation; $38.4 million unrestricted private donations and investment income)"

According to many, the USHMM disseminates Christophobic material. Indeed, Jewish leaders have protested this Christophobic material. See, for example, "Anti-Christian Film Draws Ire of Jewish Leaders" linked here.

A quote from this article

"Every 14 minutes, about 32 times a day, 363 days a year, in the shadow of the Washington monument, a woman slowly intones her version of history: 'Christianity emerged from Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew,' she begins. 'The early Christian Church condemned Jews as agents of the devil, and blamed them for killing Jesus. This accusation was not renounced until the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council.'

She continues, 'Christian crusaders slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews…. The Protestant Reformation brought no end to the anti-Jewish tradition of Christianity.'
After quoting Martin Luther that Jewish homes should be burned, she gets to the present century: 'Enter Hitler, Austrian-born and baptized a Catholic.' Her voice goes deep as she imitates Hitler: 'In defending myself against the Jews I am acting for the Lord. The difference between the Church and me is that I am finishing the job.'

Finally, she warns, 'This is where prejudice can lead,' clearly meaning that Christian prejudice against Jews led to their murder under Nazism.

Every 14 minutes, a clutch of sober visitors listen to this explanation of the Holocaust, but this woman is not just another individual with a cause, wearing a hand-stenciled placard, a common sight on the Washington mall.

She is the voice-over for a film underwritten with federal money produced by the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has been prominently featured in the museum's permanent exhibit for several years."

This US taxpayer funded Christophobia and distortion of Holocaust history is not happening in a vacuum. Christians are the people in the world today most likely to be persecuted for their faith. See here. Mongering hatred against Christians, demonizing Christians and Christianity, are not victimless crimes. 

Further, citing Christianity as the Nazis' guiding philosophy is factually wrong. See here.

In brief:

Nazis did not cite Christianity as their guiding philosophy.

Nazis did cite other philosophies as guiding their actions, including nationalism, scientism, atheism, Social Darwinism, and neo-Paganism.

Nazis targeted, persecuted, tortured and murdered Christians.


Filip Mazurczak is a correspondent for the National Catholic Register and the assistant editor of the journal The European Conservative. He has degrees in history and Hispanic studies from Creighton University, international relations from the George Washington University and public relations from the Jagiellonian University. He has lived and worked both in Poland and the United States.

Filip contributed his review, below, of his visit to the USHMM. I include Filip's comments in full, though I don't agree with everything he says, or the way he says it. I'm grateful that he brings the USHMM's Christophobic material to our attention.

I wrote to the USHMM and asked if they cared to respond. They did not respond to my message.
USHMM Review
by Filip Mazurczak

For at least the next six months, I will be living in Washington, DC. I decided to pay a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and share my thoughts. Because the museum’s website boasts that 38 million people have visited it since its dedication in 1993, few institutions in the world shape how the world understands the destruction of European Jewry so much. People longing for an accurate presentation of Polish history will be happy to learn that the museum honors Żegota, details Nazi atrocities against non-Jewish Poles and sells books about Polish rescuers of Jews. Nonetheless, visitors are misled into incorrectly thinking that the Home Army was “nationalist” and “often anti-Semitic.” Most troubling is the museum’s anti-Christian tone, which inaccurately links medieval Christian anti-Judaism with the Final Solution.

The first thing we see upon entering the museum is the bookstore. In it, we can find many books on Polish Righteous Among the Nations (including a picture book on Irena Sendler, the classic memoir The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy by Tadeusz Pankiewicz and a book by Krystyna Chiger, a Jewish child rescued by Polish sewer inspector Leopold Socha), books on Polish martyrdom (such as Allen Paul’s book on Katyn and Miron Białoszewski’s account of the Warsaw Uprising) and balanced books on Polish-Jewish affairs (including Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist, the best book on World War II and one of the best books I have read). On the other hand, Jan T. Gross’s ugly polemic Golden Harvests (one of the most biased books I’ve ever read) was on sale, and the disgusting comic book Maus (which presents Poles as anthropomorphic swine and concentration camp guards at Auschwitz, which they were not) and the anti-Polish, historically inaccurate, poorly written novels Mila 18 and Exodus by Leon Uris were showcased.

I had read about the conflict related to the foundation of the Holocaust museum: should non-Jewish victims be included as well? Ultimately, the decision to honor the martyrdom of other groups was made. Thus I was pleased to see that the museum made it clear that Roma were also locked in ghettoes along with Jews by the Nazis, and that the Nazis also wanted their extermination. An exhibit detailing Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles is included. With regards to the September campaign, it is explicitly said that the Poles fought “bravely,” but received no military assistance from France and England, whose declaration of war against Nazi Germany was just a declaration.

It was refreshing to see the museum commemorate the suffering of non-Jews like ethnic Poles and acknowledge the West’s failings. These failings are also acknowledged when the display explains that the Roosevelt White House refused to increase immigration quotas to allow Jewish refugees to escape to the United States, and that the American Department of War failed to bomb the crematoria of Auschwitz. Although I knew about Roosevelt’s callous attitude towards the Holocaust, I didn’t think that the museum would acknowledge these inconvenient facts. I also was pleased that the museum mentioned other genocides (such as Darfur and the abuses of Pol Pot, although it didn’t have the courage to mention the Armenian Genocide). Some promote a ridiculous, chauvinistic doctrine that the Holocaust was “unique.” Genocide is a tragedy, regardless of what group it affects. I’m glad that the museum avoided this balderdash.

Another pleasant surprise was that in the section on rescue, in addition to much information about the bold Danes who endured a mild occupation and were allowed to maintain their parliament and king and at one point didn’t even incur punishments for aiding Jews, there was a display on Żegota. It features photos of Żegota’s founders, and next to it is a copy of the flyer distributed across Poland by the Nazis stating that Poles aiding Jews would be threatened with the death penalty. Thus visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Museum learn that despite such drastic punishments, there were Poles who aided Jews (however, the display says that Żegota helped secure false papers and hiding spots for 4,000 Jews; the actual number was ten times that – did someone forget a zero?).

Shortly after the tribute to Żegota, however, is the most anti-Polish part of the museum. It mentions that “[i]n Poland, the nationalist Home Army was often hostile to Jews.” Next to this display, there is information about Jews serving in the resistance in Yugoslavia, Slovakia and France. In reality, between several hundred and a couple thousand Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising, and probably more Jews fought in the ranks of the Home Army than any other anti-Nazi resistance across Europe.

The Home Army wasn’t “nationalist”; it was anti-Nazi and anti-communist and loyal to Poland’s government-in-exile. Its members’ ideologies ranged on a wide scale, including both nationalists and socialists. Recently, Joshua Zimmerman of Yeshiva University published an excellent book disproving the stereotype that the Home Army was anti-Semitic. Zimmerman writes that the Polish underground’s attitude towards the Jews varied. While in northeast Poland it issued a pronouncement to fight “Jewish bandits,” in Hanaczów it saved the town’s entire Jewish population from Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. The Home Army had a department devoted to aiding Jews led by Henryk Woliński, and the Home Army’s new newspaper, the Information Bulletin, was edited by a Righteous Gentile, scoutmaster Aleksander Kamiński, and featured frequent condemnation of German atrocities, but also of Polish anti-Semites and blackmailers of Jews.

While I consider Timothy Snyder to be an overrated and unoriginal historian, he is correct when he writes in his Black Earth that the Home Army only occasionally killed Jews and that the far-right National Armed Forces did so much more frequently. Snyder writes that the accounts of anti-Semitic Home Army partisans in many Holocaust survivors’ accounts were often National Armed Forces partisans, and survivors confused the two. I would encourage individuals of good will to write a petition to the museum asking to change the historically incorrect statement insulting the Home Army.

What I found most troubling about the museum was its blatant anti-Christian tone. At the beginning of the exhibit, there is a fifteen-minute documentary film titled “Anti-Semitism” that is on loop. The film immediately starts with Christian anti-Judaism, despite the fact that Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman persecutions of Jews predated Christianity.

The film details Christian prejudices against Jews in the Middle Ages, mentioning that they were expelled from many European countries, accused of blood libel and segregated from Christians in ghettoes. Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is presented. Only later does the film discuss secular strands of modern anti-Semitism: the Dreyfus Affair, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi anti-Semitism. However, this is implicitly linked to Christianity. After discussing the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, the film concludes with a statement that the Holocaust made Christian churches reexamine their teachings on Judaism. Thus the viewer can logically infer that the Final Solution was the product of Christianity.

Was there a strong Christian tradition of anti-Judaism? One would have to be intellectually dishonest to deny that. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Catholic Church decreed that Jews be separated from Christians and wear articles of clothing to distinguish them from Christians. However, the film does not present false information; it presents true information selectively.

For instance, there is no mention that in addition to a strong Christian tradition of anti-Judaism, there was also a Christian tradition of tolerance. It is true that medieval Christians accused Jews of kidnapping Christian children and using their blood to make matzos. What the documentary fails to mention, however, is that multiple medieval popes had issued bulls defending Jews against such charges. Pope St. Gregory the Great was one of the most philo-Semitic rulers of all time, and Renaissance popes employed Jewish court doctors. While Pope Alexander VI may have been corrupt and promiscuous, he invited Jews expelled by the Spanish Inquisition to settle in Rome.

And the documentary makes a big omission. It says that during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Jews were kicked out of England, Spain, Portugal and Germany, “most of whom migrated eastward.” It doesn’t explain where “eastward” was. It completely fails to mention the fact that at the time, Jewish civilization flourished in Polin. While Christian rulers like Isabella I and Edward I kicked Jews out of Spain and England, Christian rulers like Boleslaus the Pious and Casimir the Great made Poland Paradisus Judaeorum.

The film exclusively focuses on Christian anti-Semitism, making no mention of Islamic anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon today, while anti-Semitism flourishes in the Muslim world. Hitler himself said: “It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Islam would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” Meanwhile, a dear friend of Hitler was then-mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, who supported Hitler’s “solution” to the “Jewish question.”

The film’s implicit linking of Christian anti-Judaism to the Holocaust is incorrect. None other than Zygmunt Bauman – a secular, Marxist Polish-Jewish sociologist and philosopher – has argued that it was the Enlightenment and its obsession with rationalism that gave birth to eugenics and pseudo-scientific racism, culminating in the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (the late archbishop of Paris and a Jewish convert) arrived at similar conclusions. The film makes no mention of the fact that Hitler hated Christianity, and that atheistic anti-Semitism existed in Stalin’s USSR.

In sum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a mixed bag. It honors Żegota and presents the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles under Nazism, although it shows the Home Army’s record on the Jews in a tendentious way. The worst is the documentary on anti-Semitism. At the risk of sounding cynical, I must admit that I had to keep myself from snickering as I watched its lopsided account of history.

Photo credit: Filip Mazurczak
Photo credit: Filip Mazurczak
Photo credit: Filip Mazurczak
Photo credit: Filip Mazurczak


21 comments:

  1. This is an excellent piece of journalism (not to say that I agree with everything that Filip Mazarczuk writes).

    The anti-Christian and anti-Polish aspects, of the Holocaust, as presented in American media and educational circles, are much deeper than the controversial film in the USHMM. I have seen countless examples of both, as described in my hundreds of reviews of Holocaust-related books and films.

    It is good to see that there are some prominent Jews--albeit a few--who openly oppose the anti-Christian biases.

    Finally, the negative aspects of past Jewish-Christian relations were not as one-sided as usually portrayed. For instance, during the Persian siege of Jerusalem in 614 A.D., Jews massacred tens of thousands of Christians. To read about this, please click on my name in this specific posting.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello Mr Peczkis,
      Jewish-Christian conflicts from the past are an obstacle in Polish-Jewish relations. I don't blame modern Jews for that, and I don't want to be blamed for Spanish Inquisition, crusades, "Armleder" massacres or Rindfleisch movement.

      Delete
    2. But that is just the problem! Poles and Christians ARE being regularly blamed for long-ago events--in Holocaust materials in general and at the USHMM in particular.

      Delete
    3. I just received an email from the author of this book. I have not read the book. Jan you do many Amazon reviews. Maybe you can read the book and give it a good review, if it is deserving.

      http://www.amazon.com/Boys-Club-George-Kocan/dp/1424109310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454172124&sr=1-1&keywords=george+kocan

      Delete
    4. I checked the description of the item. This book belongs to the same-old Catholic-priests-are-malevolent line of anti-Christian left-wing garbage. I would not dignify it with a review.

      Delete
    5. You haven't even read the book. You don't have the knowledge to categorize it.

      Delete
    6. The Amazon description alone is unambiguous--unless, of course, Amazon is making things up about the book. It speaks of a "conspiracy of priests".

      Anyway, that is my opinion, which you had asked of me.

      Delete
    7. "Anyway, that is my opinion, which you had asked of me. "

      No, I did not, which is clear from my initial post in this thread.

      Delete
  2. Hello,
    I liked Mr Mazurczak's review. Not bad. For an American.

    I want to add that Jews were also killed by communist bands. Those bands often posed as units of Home Army. I guess that Mr Snyder didn't wrote about that fact in his book. Link below.

    https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom_w_Ludmi%C5%82%C3%B3wce

    I appreciate that Mr Mazurczak tries to defend the Home Army, but blaming everything on National Armed Forces is not right.

    As for that town Hanaczów. It's no longer on maps.
    In occupied Poland saving Jews was heroic. For there were consequences.

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    Replies
    1. Indeed, Lukasz.

      It was quite common for the Communist GL-AL bands to murder fugitive Jews, and then to put the blame on the NSZ and the AK, and Jewish memoirs have repeated this blame.

      For a detailed archival study of this fact, please click on my name in this specific posting.

      Delete
  3. I have mixed feelings about this US Holocaust Memorial. On the one hand its good to hear that there is material about the suffering of the Polish people under Nazi German occupation.

    Indeed....the Polish people were the ONLY people who the Nazi Germans punished with a DEATH PENALTY for helping or saving Jews. That's because initially the Poles were helping Jews right and left (even though Poles were slaves of the Nazi Germans) to the astonishment of the Nazi Germans...so the Germans tried to put an end to that by mandating a Death penalty to not only Poles who saved Jews...but ALSO to their Polish families. NEVERTHELESS....Poles continued to save Jews. Which barely gets any recognition in the mainstream media. Thousands of Poles saved Jews. Sadly Anti-Polish critics, sit in their comfortable living rooms today in SAFE America, WHO HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED A BRUTAL WAR AND OCCUPATION and say....yeah but those Poles SHOULD have saved MORE Jews! What arrogance these Anti-Polish critics have! Its like Poles were suppose to have Godlike powers or something like that. All these critics of Poles....if they were in the same positions as Poles in WWII...they would have NEVER LIFTED a finger to help a Jew or Pole being persecuted because they would be too afraid. What hypocrites these Anti-Polish critics are.

    But I am glad this reading material that is sympathetic to Poland and tells the TRUTH about Poland...is in the Holocaust Museum. NO DOUBT that material would not be there.... if it was FOR NOT the Polish people who pushed to have that material in the Museum.

    I am also glad that there is material at the Holocaust Museum on the secret Polish organizations like Zegota that saved Jews. So Good for the Polish people who got that material in there.

    But I am disturbed by the Anti-Polish Material like "Maus" where Poles are portrayed as being "Pigs" in cartoons. Frankly....Polish Americans/Poles should HIGHLIGHT that this kind of propaganda about Polish people...SHOULD be the type of Nazi propaganda that the spirit of the Holocaust Museum should be AGAINST!

    And I think in the future....we Polish Americans should bring to the Holocaust Museum....our experiences of how we have seen the Image of Polish people in the "American" media be put through a HOLOCAUST. There is no doubt that the image of Polish people has been put through a Holocaust by TV networks like NBC-TV.

    The Nazi Anti-Polish hate jokes that NBC-TV, CBS-TV & ABC-TV have pushed since the 1960's....should be documented and put in the Holocaust Museum for the world to know...and especially for Americans to know. The Nazi Germans felt the Polish people had "subhuman intelligence" so they mocked Polish people with their Nazi subhuman intelligence hate jokes about Poles. They are in two of Hitler's speeches shortly after the invasion of Poland. Ironically and hypocritically...the "American" TV networks...who claimed to be "Anti-Nazi".....IMPORTED these Nazi Anti-Polish jokes into America after WWII (mostly 1960's) and MADE SURE to NEVER tell the American people the Nazi German origins of these Nazi Anti-Polish hate jokes.

    The spirit of the Holocaust museum is that we human beings learn from the prejudices of the past....to NOT REPEAT them....whether it s in the drastic form of killing other people...or simply using mocking or ridiculing language to other groups of people to make them feel uncomfortable.

    Many Polish Americans feel the "American" TV networks....especially the anti-Polish element at NBC-TV...have NOT LEARNED from the Holocaust and hatreds of WWII that came out of Nazi Germany....like the Nazi Stereotype of Polish people having "subhuman intelligence"

    ReplyDelete
  4. All excellent points, "700 KFF". Most if not all the points you raise have been elaborated on this BlogSpot.

    As for MAUS, I am opposed to censorship, and would not have it banned had I the power to do so. Instead, the answer to objectionable speech is more speech.

    Therefore, I have developed a "counter-MAUS" cartoon idea that I would like see drawn-up by a cartoonist, and then mandated for the classroom, by law, whenever MAUS is presented therein.

    In this proposed "counter-MAUS" cartoon, which I call MUNGO (the German word for mongoose), we have the following characters: snakes (Germans), mongooses (Poles), rodents (Jews), and bears (Soviets).

    To see the plot outline of my proposed "counter-MAUS" cartoon, MUNGO, please click on my name in this specific posting.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is an excellent review of the USHMM by Filip Mazurczak(not that I agree with everything that he says)

    For one thing, Christian philo-Semitism didn't "begin" in the 1960's, it began much earlier. For more on Christian philo-semitism in early and medieval Christian history see the excellent books Ephrem, A "Jewish" Sage by Elena Narinskaya(for early Christian history) and The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion and the Medieval Orgins of Tolerance by Edmund J. Mazza(for medieval Christianity). It should also be noted that most of the early church fathers weren't anti-Semitic even though some of them made anti-Semitic remarks(we have to understand these statements in their contexts). See this excllent translation of an ancient Christian commentary on Isaiah.
    https://www.amazon.com/Commentary-Isaiah-Ancient-Christian-Texts/dp/083082913X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1543779787&sr=1-1&keywords=9780830829132

    ReplyDelete
  6. Here's an article from the USHMM website. It's an deeply flawed article that promotes what has been called the lachrymose view of Jewish history and of Christian-Jewish relations: https://www.ushmm.org/research/the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies/programs-ethics-religion-the-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries

    Ugh!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Also, here's an excellent book on the real historical truth about the history of Christian-Jewish relations in Spain by Norman Roth. Norman Roth is an leading Jewish American historian of Jewish history and of Spainish Jews and of Spain: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0363.htm

    ReplyDelete
  8. Here's another (mostly) good book that serves as an much needed corrective to the lachrymose view of Christian-Jewish relations and Jewish history. I plan to get this book in the future too: https://www.abebooks.com/9780415866811/Medieval-Jewish-Civilization-Encyclopedia-Routledge-0415866812/plp

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  9. Here's another excellent book that serves as an much-needed corrective to much "scholarship" on the Parting of the Ways between Judaism and Christianity. This is another excellent book I plan to get as well. I deeply recommend this book to you Dr. Goska and also to Jan as well.

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  10. Correction: Here's another excellent book that serves as an much-needed corrective to much "scholarship" on the Parting of the Ways between Judaism and Christianity. This is another excellent book I plan to get as well. I deeply recommend this book to you Dr. Goska and also to Jan as well.
    https://www.amazon.com/Ignatius-Antioch-Parting-Ways-Jewish-Christian/dp/0801047579/ref=pd_ybh_a_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=AN8D5GHJ38D483JN9Q91

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. I have added this book to my Amazon wish list.

      Delete
  11. Speaking of Jewish converts to Christianity, here's an Indian Jewish convert to Eastern Orthodoxy that you guys haven't heard of:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_Irene_Clerides

    It's amazingly fascinating of how Jewish believers in Jesus are not remembered in the PC atmosphere! I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

    ReplyDelete
  12. This excellent article reminds me of this great article by Michael J. Kruger which is of some relevance here:

    https://www.michaeljkruger.com/seven-lessons-for-evangelical-scholars-in-the-secular-academy/

    Thought this might catch your interest Ms. Goska and also Jan's interest as well.

    ReplyDelete

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