Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Poland is Bad No Matter What It Does: Washington Post

 


Poland is bad no matter what it does. 

Poland has gained admiration around the world for its help to Ukrainian refugees. 

Camp Anti-Poland is uncomfortable with this, and so criticism must follow. 

Mateusz Mazzini in the Wa Po says that Polish patriotism will interfere with the education of Ukrainian children stuck in Poland while their country is at war. 

Mazzini touches on important and complex matters, and that's good. 

The problem is, his only point, and the Washington Post, his publisher's only point, is to bash Poland, not to spark an intelligent and compassionate discussion on a difficult topic. 

I'd love to see such a discussion. It won't emerge from Western mainstream media, which, for its own reasons, as explored in my book Bieganski, is largely anti-Polish. 

Mazzini is writing about refugee schoolchildren; the Washington Post is publishing on refugee schoolchildren, but neither care about refugee schoolchildren. They just want to use refugee schoolchildren to bash Poland. And that is wicked. 

Excerpts from the article

Now, with a massive influx of Ukrainian students in Polish schools, this historical revisionism has suddenly become awkward. One of the key sources of Ukrainian national identity was a serf rebellion against Polish nobility who had reduced Ukrainian peasants to near-slavery and forced educated Ukrainians to learn and speak Polish in the areas of Ukraine it controlled. That is hard to reconcile with the stories of Polish virtue and victimhood that the current Polish government prefers.

On the other hand, during World War II, Ukrainian nationalists tried to exterminate ethnic Poles in the Wołyń area, killing some 50,000 Polish inhabitants. Poles retaliated, although on a much smaller scale, murdering a few thousand Ukrainians. The Wołyń massacre was a delicate and difficult topic for decades in Polish-Ukrainian relations, also because the Soviet domination over both countries blocked any meaningful debate about it. Now it could become a major point of contention, as PiS-reformed curriculums, again, emphasize Polish heroism and the tragedy of Polish victims, leaving little room to even discuss the Ukrainian perspective.

The more fundamental problem is that the official Polish version of history is based around excluding rather than including non-Poles. It’s possible to push such a history in a country that just has one major national group within its borders. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, Poland has two nations rather than one for the first time since World War II.

6 comments:

  1. Mateusz Mazzini works for "Gazeta Wyborcza", so he is against the government of Poland. A serious publisher would have warned its readers about his bias, so WaPo does not look serious. The majority of Ukrainian children will leave Poland, either traveling to rich countries or returing to Ukraine, so there is no problem of integrating them. Ukrainian culture is nationalistic itself, the fathers die for Ukraine, not for BLM, LGBT, uncontrolled judiciary.

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  2. https://dorzeczy.pl/historia/287020/gdzie-pedzisz-kozacze.html Krzysztof Maslon describes historical problems between Poland and Ukraine, which may be important in historical teaching. Ukrainian history was tragic, several victories included massacres of Poles and Jews. Several Polish-Ukrainian cooperations failed.So teacher sof history and Polish literature have to be careful. "With Fire and Sword" is in some way anti-Ukrainian. I do not know if Polish children read it.

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  3. https://twitter.com/EJ_Burrows/status/1516520217438044166/photo/1 Real Russia, far from Moscow and Petersburg. The people are grateful to Putin. Their children fight and die in Ukraine.

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  4. WaPo Part Two https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/13/poland-refugees-wall-belarus/ Belarus is de facto Russia. Russia fights a terrible genocidal war. Poland is the bad guy. Poland has more than two million Ukrianian refugess, half of them children. How many Ukrainian refugees has District Columbia accepted ?

    ReplyDelete
  5. 91-year-old Holocaust survivor dies in Mariupol https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/5495941/jewish/91-year-old-Holocaust-Survivor-Perishes-in-Mariupol-Basement.htm#utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tw_en

    ReplyDelete
  6. One of the amazing statements from the article above is:

    "forced educated Ukrainians to learn and speak Polish in the areas of Ukraine it controlled."

    This is nonsense. Educated Ukrainians thought of the Ukrainian language as "peasant talk", and voluntarily learned Polish.

    ReplyDelete

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