[lbo-talk] Question for Woj or anybody else on Poland

Willy Greenfields filthydirtyunwashed at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 31 10:51:18 PST 2007


Chris wrote:


>He also thinks that in a few years there will be
>fascist torch marches all through the eastern half of
>the EU.

If I can mix metaphors, I'd say he's smoking too much of the Rodina Kool Aid.

Woj's answer here is very good. The histories are complicated, and I haven't seen any popular scholarship that tries to disaggregate German Nazis operating in the Baltics from locals who enthusistically supported the Nazi cause from those who opportunistically threw weight behind the Germans to repel the Soviets from nationalist partisans from post-Soviet ethnic Balts giving a petty and truly inappropriate middle finger to resented Russians both in the Baltics and in Russia itself.

Cynical political entrepreneurs - be they mundane Baltic Russophobes, anti-Semitic Baltic fascists, the ADL, Soviet apologists, or expat Slavophiles (insert smiley emoticon; sorry for putting you in such company, by the way) - fixate on one element to the exclusion of all others. Ultimately, I'd say it's all probably too tangled up to tease apart meaningfully.

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