What this "debate" shows, to me, is that Poland still has an anti-semitism problem.
Not that I'm standing from some moral high ground in the good old USA, of course. In fact, the rhetoric seems eerily similar to arguments that US massacres of entire Vietnamese villages were not "really" racist because, well, there was a war on, and troops had received reports from somewhere that there were NLF sympathizers somewhere in the village, so Our Boys had no choice but to wipe out everyone with an Asian face... That such "reasoning" is considered acceptable at all in itself highlights the existence of the social problem under "debate."
I shall leave aside for now the apparent assumption in both Poland and the US that wiping out a village full of communists is justified prima facie...
----Original Message Follows---- From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net> CC: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Polish anti-semitism Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 15:29:14 -0400
I am quite familiar with the issue, which is currently hotly debated in Poland. This is actually what I had in mind when I wrote the original missive. The bottom line appers to be like this: after the Red Army entered Poland in 1939, many Jews were openly pro-Communist which offended the sensibilities of some rabidly nationalistic Polish rightwingers. So after the Nazis invaded the USSR and the Red Army withdrew, the nationlists took a revenge, which took a particularly ugly turn in Jedwabne (but there were other attacks as well). As I understand it, the points being contested in the debate are the scale of the massacre, and whether it was "justified" given the openly pro-communist stance of the Jewish community.
This is consistent with the points I tried to make, namely:
- communist authorities curbed anti-semitism, or perhaps its worst excesses (the perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre who were apprehended after the war were sentenced under the communist government); - ideology and religion were generally more important dividing factors than race in E.Europe (Jews were ususlly defined in those terms, rather than a separate ethnicity).
wojtek
in the aftermnaAt 10:41 AM 6/26/01 -0700, you wrote:
> You read the new Jan T. Gross vol. from Yale Univ. Press, on the village
>in Poland that slaughtered the Jews en masse w/o the Nazis, yet? TNR
>recently had Michnik and Wieseltier debating the issues.
>Michael Pugliese
>
>
>
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