The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Anything that is not directly related to the game or its community.

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby Elf » Fri Feb 02, 2018 11:51 pm

Feeling a bit irritated about Poland's new laws. Three years in jail for uttering the words "Polish death camps" or mentioning that some Poles took part in the Holocaust (so did others like Norwegians too ..). What kind of crap is that?

One can legitimately think a lot about what's the right terminology and so on - but are they these kind of freedom values "Europe" stands for, nowadays? Fits well with the post-Franco Spanish police attacking people who just wanted to go and vote with savage beatings... :x

According to Anti-Deformation League's map of antisemitism in the world, 45% of the Poles suffer from antisemitic ideas. In comparison, so do 56% of Iranians.

Apart from that, ehh... are these Poles insinuating that those areas aren't integral parts of Poland? That Poland stopped existing as a nation, just because it was occupied? :roll: To my knowledge, no one blames the Holocaust on Poland as a nation. On the other hand, there were antisemites who stood up to assist the Nazis in what they did (almost) wherever the Axis Power's conquered. In the city of Odessa for example, Ukrainians killed a lot of Jews days after Romania had occupied it. Although the Greater-Romanian fascists probably did not like Ukrainians either, just as the Germans did not like Poles. The same happened in Poland in Jedwabne, and in other areas. Antisemitism is a much bigger problem than just Hitler, it had been a long time before national socialism was invented, and if one is against it, one should be consistent, not just react whenever it's coming from Nazis or Islamists or whatever group one happens to dislike a lot.

But it may also be worth a reflection on how this appears to be a major problem in Catholic and Orthodox countries, more so than in Protestant ones, because unfortunately there is some kind of tradition of that kind. I know this very well, after spending ten years as a Catholic (though I'm lapsed now). I have experienced Catholics speaking of such attitudes from, above all, (thankfully) older relatives. I've met Poles on the internet who've spoke of "prophesies", apparently coming from Virgin Mary, that Assad will lead the believers against "Satan's synagogue" (Israel) and such nonsense. Maybe I'm a bit influenced by my smallish German-Jewish heritage, which is noticeable in my last name irl... :) In 1900, the Prussians had to send soldiers to the town of Kontiz (Chojnice) to protect Jews after the Polish Catholics where rioting due ideas about Jews ritual-murdering Christian babies and drinking their blood. That's the same kind of myths spread when the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 1300s. I have to say that it feels a little hard to blame the Prussians, who built telegraphs and railways and airships and submarines, if the thought struck them that some contemporary Poles were mostly a bunch of peasants still living in the Middle Ages, hunting imagined Jewish vampires... :roll: Many Jews fought proudly for Germany during WWI, and Germany was about as much on the road to democracy as Sweden at that time .... all that was kinda destroyed after Versailles and then Hitler and that.. and it doesn't get better when various kooks and extremists kidnap old Prussian or German symbols from that time, because they can not use Nazi ones...

Anyway. Back to our time. Germany has been atoning for its crimes for more than 70 years. While there appears to be great problems in Poland, even recognising the problem - results in the Polish government feeling insulted as soon as anyone suggests that Poles can be antisemites. I do not blame individual Poles for the fact that 45% of Poles carry anti-Semitic ideas according to ADL's investigation, or for what Poles have done historically. But it feels really ugly when Poland is restricting freedom of speech to protect itself against accusations against antisemitism instead of tackling their own problems with antisemitism...

And by the way... they want more compensation now? Maybe the descendants of ethnically cleansed former Prussia, 10 million people, most who were evidently not Nazis or had any part in Nazi policies - should be demanding that from Poland? It's Poland that should come up with a real appology and acknowledge that it was a horrific crime similar to other instances of ethnic cleansing, and offer some to move back if they want to. But they will definitely not do that. Because it would violate their national pride... It was around 10 milion people and at least half a million died on the way. Had what's happened to the Rohingya in Burma right now reached such numbers, the world's leader's would be unanimously asking the United States to intervene ...

Emperor Wilhelm apologised to the Jewish people and said that he was ashamed to be German after the Night of Broken Glass. Not that it helped so much in practice, but that kind of Christian humility seems to be too much even for nations that's crowned Jesus as its King (yeah, really).

Ruhe in Frieden, Preussen... :cry:

Image

By the way, I wonder if this means that this movie is to be banned now? :roll:

I get that Poland is angry because the EU wants to have a say about their constitution, and I'm not a fan of the unelected bureaucrats in the EU - who apparently support the kinds of things that we saw taking place in Catalonia - doing that. The EU evidently doesn't like liberal democracy. But neither does Poland. And given the amount of contribution they receive from other EU member states, they have kinda forfeited their right to complain, imho...
Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people laughing
User avatar
Elf
 
Posts: 220
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2017 8:01 am
Location: Kali Yuga

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby SlavaD » Sun Feb 04, 2018 9:13 pm

Well, that's a nice post littered with quite a bit of subtle and not so subtle anti-Polish sentiment. This is not a surprise, there has been a massive outpouring of such sentiment especially from Israel, and it has unfortunately caused a backlash of anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland that very much activated the 45% you cited from the Anti-Defamation League's study. Both sides are, at this point, talking past each other.

The law does not criminalize the phrase "Polish death camps" or mentioning that some Poles committed crimes against Jews - it specifically criminalizes accusing the Polish state and Polish nation as a whole of war crimes or complicity in what are known to be crimes of Germany. Certainly accidentally uttering the inaccurate phrase "Polish death camps" would not land you in jail - but stating deliberately and inaccurately, like a certain prominent Israeli politician did, that "Polish death camps" existed and implying they were created and run by Poles and not by Germans, would. This seems to me to be a perfectly acceptable law criminalizing blatant inaccuracy, and is very much in line with laws throughout Europe that make Holocaust denial a crime. If freedom of speech is what you're truly concerned about, equivalent outrage should be given to those laws.

The crucial thing here is that Poland is not worried about the historical truth of some Poles collaborating, or some Poles participating in massacres of Jews. Certainly many even reported on them and this resulted in thousands heading to their doom. These cases have been studied and acknowledged by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, and numerous apologies have been issued by Polish Presidents in dedication ceremonies for monuments commemorating the victims in places such as Jedwabne or in Kielce for the post-war pogrom there. Polish society's overall hesitancy to accept these crimes is, I believe, better explained by the tendency to project those crimes on the entirety of the Polish nation rather than those who committed the crimes. The line that the law, and I think many Poles, want to draw is between the actions of a small portion of the population of WW2 and the Polish nation as a whole. The discussions surrounding this law let me rest my case on this matter - the impression I am getting is that everyone is outraged over Polish co-guilt over the Holocaust that it is unwilling to acknowledge. Yet what is there to acknowledge that has not already been acknowledged? The Polish nation was not complicit in the Holocaust - some Poles were. There is a massive difference in these statements.

This gets back at the broader problem that clearly underlies the thinking behind your post. German crimes are viewed as a historical aberration and not a result of centuries of embedded antisemitism - people are frequently only too happy to emphasize the Nazis as the perpetrators rather than Germans. Of course, this was just a temporary lapse into barbarism by the otherwise civilized Germans. Yet when the discussion moves elsewhere, like Poland, crimes against Jews are the product of centuries of antisemitism and Polish barbarism etc etc. - never mind that when Jews were being burned and expelled throughout Europe, they were accepted in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth because of its immensely progressive religious laws. Even in the interwar period, which had grown to become quite antisemitic, Poland remained the primary destination for Jews fleeing death and destruction in the Soviet Union, with tens of thousands being accepted every year. Much of the wartime hatred and crimes by Poles during the occupation are a result of tensions during this period, in combination with the latent aversion embedded in most European Catholics.

The key to resolving disputes such as these is not talking past each other, and certainly not to accuse each other of trying to revise history. I think Poles have every right to be anxious of being accused as complicit in what are Nazi German crimes. As always the incumbent government is much like an elephant in a china shop, so their solution is neither elegant nor optimal. That does not making it illegitimate.

As for compensation for Prussian lands - you don't get to start a World War, completely flatten an entire country, go to extreme lengths to eliminate its culture, intellectual elite, national monuments and symbols, kill 6 million of its people and plan for the remainder to either also be eliminated or be kept as non-literate slaves, and then demand compensation because you lost land. Germans ought to be eternally grateful to the more moderate politicians of FDR's administration and Churchill's Ministry and the circumstances of the Cold War that they even have a united country today, and that they were not cosigned to living in agricultural statelets.
SlavaD
 
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:02 am

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby soysauce » Mon Feb 05, 2018 4:50 am

SlavaD wrote:Well, that's a nice post littered with quite a bit of subtle and not so subtle anti-Polish sentiment. This is not a surprise, there has been a massive outpouring of such sentiment especially from Israel, and it has unfortunately caused a backlash of anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland that very much activated the 45% you cited from the Anti-Defamation League's study. Both sides are, at this point, talking past each other.

The law does not criminalize the phrase "Polish death camps" or mentioning that some Poles committed crimes against Jews - it specifically criminalizes accusing the Polish state and Polish nation as a whole of war crimes or complicity in what are known to be crimes of Germany. Certainly accidentally uttering the inaccurate phrase "Polish death camps" would not land you in jail - but stating deliberately and inaccurately, like a certain prominent Israeli politician did, that "Polish death camps" existed and implying they were created and run by Poles and not by Germans, would. This seems to me to be a perfectly acceptable law criminalizing blatant inaccuracy, and is very much in line with laws throughout Europe that make Holocaust denial a crime. If freedom of speech is what you're truly concerned about, equivalent outrage should be given to those laws.

The crucial thing here is that Poland is not worried about the historical truth of some Poles collaborating, or some Poles participating in massacres of Jews. Certainly many even reported on them and this resulted in thousands heading to their doom. These cases have been studied and acknowledged by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, and numerous apologies have been issued by Polish Presidents in dedication ceremonies for monuments commemorating the victims in places such as Jedwabne or in Kielce for the post-war pogrom there. Polish society's overall hesitancy to accept these crimes is, I believe, better explained by the tendency to project those crimes on the entirety of the Polish nation rather than those who committed the crimes. The line that the law, and I think many Poles, want to draw is between the actions of a small portion of the population of WW2 and the Polish nation as a whole. The discussions surrounding this law let me rest my case on this matter - the impression I am getting is that everyone is outraged over Polish co-guilt over the Holocaust that it is unwilling to acknowledge. Yet what is there to acknowledge that has not already been acknowledged? The Polish nation was not complicit in the Holocaust - some Poles were. There is a massive difference in these statements.

This gets back at the broader problem that clearly underlies the thinking behind your post. German crimes are viewed as a historical aberration and not a result of centuries of embedded antisemitism - people are frequently only too happy to emphasize the Nazis as the perpetrators rather than Germans. Of course, this was just a temporary lapse into barbarism by the otherwise civilized Germans. Yet when the discussion moves elsewhere, like Poland, crimes against Jews are the product of centuries of antisemitism and Polish barbarism etc etc. - never mind that when Jews were being burned and expelled throughout Europe, they were accepted in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth because of its immensely progressive religious laws. Even in the interwar period, which had grown to become quite antisemitic, Poland remained the primary destination for Jews fleeing death and destruction in the Soviet Union, with tens of thousands being accepted every year. Much of the wartime hatred and crimes by Poles during the occupation are a result of tensions during this period, in combination with the latent aversion embedded in most European Catholics.

The key to resolving disputes such as these is not talking past each other, and certainly not to accuse each other of trying to revise history. I think Poles have every right to be anxious of being accused as complicit in what are Nazi German crimes. As always the incumbent government is much like an elephant in a china shop, so their solution is neither elegant nor optimal. That does not making it illegitimate.

As for compensation for Prussian lands - you don't get to start a World War, completely flatten an entire country, go to extreme lengths to eliminate its culture, intellectual elite, national monuments and symbols, kill 6 million of its people and plan for the remainder to either also be eliminated or be kept as non-literate slaves, and then demand compensation because you lost land. Germans ought to be eternally grateful to the more moderate politicians of FDR's administration and Churchill's Ministry and the circumstances of the Cold War that they even have a united country today, and that they were not cosigned to living in agricultural statelets.

Very well said,


All this talk of the superior Germans Vs the inferior Poles, and fantasies of a Prussian revival. Its nonsense, facts twisted to fit an agenda.

It was this kind of vile nationalist sentiment that led to the Holocaust in the first place. Modern day nationalists would do well to remember that.
User avatar
soysauce
 
Posts: 1100
Joined: Thu May 16, 2013 6:02 pm
Location: tir na n-og

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby Elf » Mon Feb 05, 2018 12:58 pm

SlavaD wrote:Well, that's a nice post littered with quite a bit of subtle and not so subtle anti-Polish sentiment. This is not a surprise, there has been a massive outpouring of such sentiment especially from Israel, and it has unfortunately caused a backlash of anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland that very much activated the 45% you cited from the Anti-Defamation League's study. Both sides are, at this point, talking past each other.
Nah. I love polish people and they love me. I've dated polish women. I do think that the EU is weird and seems to hate liberal democracy, but I'd honestly would have more respect for the Polish government if it wasn't taking millions in EU subsidies and then complaining about the EU wanting a say in its policies... :roll: I'm sure the hard-working people of Poland can do well on their own, maybe even better than Sweden in the long run, honestly...

SlavaD wrote:The law does not criminalize the phrase "Polish death camps" or mentioning that some Poles committed crimes against Jews - it specifically criminalizes accusing the Polish state and Polish nation as a whole of war crimes or complicity in what are known to be crimes of Germany. Certainly accidentally uttering the inaccurate phrase "Polish death camps" would not land you in jail - but stating deliberately and inaccurately, like a certain prominent Israeli politician did, that "Polish death camps" existed and implying they were created and run by Poles and not by Germans, would. This seems to me to be a perfectly acceptable law criminalizing blatant inaccuracy, and is very much in line with laws throughout Europe that make Holocaust denial a crime. If freedom of speech is what you're truly concerned about, equivalent outrage should be given to those laws.

The crucial thing here is that Poland is not worried about the historical truth of some Poles collaborating, or some Poles participating in massacres of Jews. Certainly many even reported on them and this resulted in thousands heading to their doom. These cases have been studied and acknowledged by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, and numerous apologies have been issued by Polish Presidents in dedication ceremonies for monuments commemorating the victims in places such as Jedwabne or in Kielce for the post-war pogrom there. Polish society's overall hesitancy to accept these crimes is, I believe, better explained by the tendency to project those crimes on the entirety of the Polish nation rather than those who committed the crimes. The line that the law, and I think many Poles, want to draw is between the actions of a small portion of the population of WW2 and the Polish nation as a whole. The discussions surrounding this law let me rest my case on this matter - the impression I am getting is that everyone is outraged over Polish co-guilt over the Holocaust that it is unwilling to acknowledge. Yet what is there to acknowledge that has not already been acknowledged? The Polish nation was not complicit in the Holocaust - some Poles were. There is a massive difference in these statements.
I dearly hope you're right, because it seems like a reaction to stuff like the movie Ida, rather than anything else. Honestly, has anyone claimed that those camps were run by Poland? It's not a freedom of speech issue for me either. Germany and others have laws against criminalising the holocaust because they want to recognition historical crimes, and to prevent any resurgence of Nazism and Fascism. This Polish law seems to be more about protecting Polish national honour. I don't mind people having a sense of national honour, but making laws to prevent it being offended by controversial views on sensitive historical topics is something that rather makes me think of what's going on in Turkey, honestly.

SlavaD wrote:This gets back at the broader problem that clearly underlies the thinking behind your post. German crimes are viewed as a historical aberration and not a result of centuries of embedded antisemitism - people are frequently only too happy to emphasize the Nazis as the perpetrators rather than Germans. Of course, this was just a temporary lapse into barbarism by the otherwise civilized Germans. Yet when the discussion moves elsewhere, like Poland, crimes against Jews are the product of centuries of antisemitism and Polish barbarism etc etc. - never mind that when Jews were being burned and expelled throughout Europe, they were accepted in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth because of its immensely progressive religious laws. Even in the interwar period, which had grown to become quite antisemitic, Poland remained the primary destination for Jews fleeing death and destruction in the Soviet Union, with tens of thousands being accepted every year. Much of the wartime hatred and crimes by Poles during the occupation are a result of tensions during this period, in combination with the latent aversion embedded in most European Catholics.

The key to resolving disputes such as these is not talking past each other, and certainly not to accuse each other of trying to revise history. I think Poles have every right to be anxious of being accused as complicit in what are Nazi German crimes. As always the incumbent government is much like an elephant in a china shop, so their solution is neither elegant nor optimal. That does not making it illegitimate.
Actually I agree - antisemitism is not in any way a specifically "Polish" problem. After 10 years in the Catholic church I'm also fully aware of the antisemitic traditions its been contaminated by in the past - and I think this kind of legislation shows of some kind of weird priorities in that regard. Ideas about blood-drinking Jews were spread in France as well around the time of the Black death, and there even used to be child saints who've supposedly fallen to Jewish ritual slaughter. In that regard, some more progress-oriented nations in Europe like Prussia or the UK, had moved past that at some point.

SlavaD wrote:As for compensation for Prussian lands - you don't get to start a World War, completely flatten an entire country, go to extreme lengths to eliminate its culture, intellectual elite, national monuments and symbols, kill 6 million of its people and plan for the remainder to either also be eliminated or be kept as non-literate slaves, and then demand compensation because you lost land. Germans ought to be eternally grateful to the more moderate politicians of FDR's administration and Churchill's Ministry and the circumstances of the Cold War that they even have a united country today, and that they were not cosigned to living in agricultural statelets.
I don't necessarily think that there should be any compensation to ex-Prussians, although some kind of apology and recognition of it as a crime against humanity wouldn't hurt - and maybe inviting some of those who's ancestors had done the Polish nation nothing wrong to come back. Two wrongs doesn't make one right. Now tell me, honestly, do you think that the Polish government would feel that something in those lines would be affront to Polish national pride?

soysauce wrote:All this talk of the superior Germans Vs the inferior Poles, and fantasies of a Prussian revival. Its nonsense, facts twisted to fit an agenda.
Did you even read my post?

"Prussian revival" is about as viable as "Byzantine revival". Recognising the crime against humanity that was committed with the ethnic cleansing of over ten millions, and Prussia as a (in its context) spreader of science and enlightenment values that was at peace around 80% of its existence, is not a "revival".

soysauce wrote:It was this kind of vile nationalist sentiment that led to the Holocaust in the first place. Modern day nationalists would do well to remember that.
The holocaust wouldn't have gotten anywhere without local collaborators. Wherever the nazis came, some people stood ready for a pogrom, that includes Norway btw. Unfortunately, not all countries atoned for those times as Germany has. Poland was kicking out Jews even after WWII, back in the 60's, many of those and their descendent are appreciated artists and politicians in my country and in other places as well, I'm sure. Of course it's not contemporary Polish people's fault, but I fear their leaders seem to be thinking that phrases like "polish death camps" is a bigger issue. If you're afraid of aggressive nationalism, you should be mailing the Polish government... :roll:
Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people laughing
User avatar
Elf
 
Posts: 220
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2017 8:01 am
Location: Kali Yuga

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby TPPDJT » Mon Feb 05, 2018 1:50 pm

SlavaD wrote:Germans ought to be eternally grateful to the more moderate politicians of FDR's administration and Churchill's Ministry and the circumstances of the Cold War that they even have a united country today, and that they were not cosigned to living in agricultural statelets.


Roosevelt and Churchill supported the Morgenthau Plan, but it was Anthony Eden in the UK and Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson in the US that got it scrapped.

Germany is Our Problem by Henry Morgenthau is an exemplary book on the subject and I would recommend it to you and anyone else would be interested in the rationale behind the plan and its potential implications if it were to have been put into effect.
"Whoever excommunicates me, excommunicates God." - Girolamo Savonarola

"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." - Desiderius Erasmus
User avatar
TPPDJT
 
Posts: 253
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2016 3:59 am
Location: Campus Martius

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby SlavaD » Mon Feb 05, 2018 2:06 pm

Well, certainly your love of Polish people is not best expressed by an attempt to justify over a century of German colonialism, imperialism, and cultural genocide by saying that the Prussians had every right to think of Poles as uncivilized peasants because there was some random riot against Jews somewhere. ;)

Unfortunately there are people, prominent people, who use the phrase "Polish death camps" implying that the Nazi German camps in Poland were Polish-run. Just look on Yair Lapid's twitter, whose first reaction was to say that "There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that." This is not some random fringe Israeli politician, but one of the main opposition leaders in the country! Even Yad Vashem, for all the care it goes through to avoid the phrase explicitly, mentions the "complicity of the Polish nation" quite frequently. If you don't know much about the Holocaust or the history of Europe at the time, its easy to walk away with the impression that Poles are just as guilty for what occurred. In both cases, I think most historians would agree that this is a misrepresentation of history at best, and a deliberate attempt to shift the blame of the Holocaust at worst. And just as a side note, the so-called "progressive" countries you name (UK, Prussia, etc.) were hardly immune to antisemitism even in its most backward and virulent forms (blood drinkers, child killers, etc).

As for the "Prussians," I don't think any apology is warranted. Their expulsion was part of a European-wide rearrangement of national borders and peoples. I don't know if you care to believe the Polish Academy of Sciences or not, but it seems their assessment is that at least half of those 10 million that you cite voluntarily left with retreating German forces. It certainly was not an elegant solution, but it ensured once and for all that Germans could not claim entire slices of Europe for themselves because of German minorities. It was also endorsed by all the major Allied powers as the best policy forward. Poles were also subject to large-scale expulsions from the Eastern territories which were taken over by the USSR. No Polish government will ever issue an apology, not just because one isn't warranted, but also because the lands have been considered part of the very limited compensation that Poland received for the death and destruction caused by Germany during WW2. I do think the claims of reparations are bizarre, but it is more likely that they are just a stick to poke the Germans and make them uncomfortable every time the Polish government thinks they are being too aggressive in the EU. Notice that for now talk of them has completely died.

As for EU funding, last I checked its not an arrangement of "take our money and do exactly as we say." I do think that the high amount of cohesion funds Poland receives can probably be explained by an underlying German willingness to redress the wrongs of WW2. Anyhow, I think a lot of these disputes could be solved if Western Europeans dropped that attitude - that Central European EU members ought to be "grateful" for something. Perhaps negotiating as the equal members of a common union that they are all supposed to be may be worth considering as a tactic. :)
SlavaD
 
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:02 am

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby soysauce » Mon Feb 05, 2018 4:50 pm

The holocaust wouldn't have gotten anywhere without local collaborators. Wherever the nazis came, some people stood ready for a pogrom, that includes Norway btw. Unfortunately, not all countries atoned for those times as Germany has. Poland was kicking out Jews even after WWII, back in the 60's, many of those and their descendent are appreciated artists and politicians in my country and in other places as well, I'm sure. Of course it's not contemporary Polish people's fault, but I fear their leaders seem to be thinking that phrases like "polish death camps" is a bigger issue. If you're afraid of aggressive nationalism, you should be mailing the Polish government... :roll:

I think that's transferring an unacceptable amount of the blame away from Germany to the Polish people, in fact it seems a somewhat bizarre claim to be making. Of course there were collaborators, however claiming the Polish were complicit in the crimes is just nonsense. Germany was making a concerted effort during the war to wipe out the Polish people and Polish culture during the war, to an extent they even succeeded. While perhaps not treated as harshly as the Jews, the Polish people were very much the victims of German aggression.
User avatar
soysauce
 
Posts: 1100
Joined: Thu May 16, 2013 6:02 pm
Location: tir na n-og

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby LukasV » Mon Feb 05, 2018 7:02 pm

soysauce wrote:
The holocaust wouldn't have gotten anywhere without local collaborators. Wherever the nazis came, some people stood ready for a pogrom, that includes Norway btw. Unfortunately, not all countries atoned for those times as Germany has. Poland was kicking out Jews even after WWII, back in the 60's, many of those and their descendent are appreciated artists and politicians in my country and in other places as well, I'm sure. Of course it's not contemporary Polish people's fault, but I fear their leaders seem to be thinking that phrases like "polish death camps" is a bigger issue. If you're afraid of aggressive nationalism, you should be mailing the Polish government... :roll:

I think that's transferring an unacceptable amount of the blame away from Germany to the Polish people, in fact it seems a somewhat bizarre claim to be making. Of course there were collaborators, however claiming the Polish were complicit in the crimes is just nonsense. Germany was making a concerted effort during the war to wipe out the Polish people and Polish culture during the war, to an extent they even succeeded. While perhaps not treated as harshly as the Jews, the Polish people were very much the victims of German aggression.


This. While I don't like limiting free speech and I don't think that fining people for uttering a phrase is a correct course of action, I find it absolutely reprehensible to use the phrase "Polish Death Camps" as some way to make it seem that Poland, as a nation or culture, was complicit in the creation and maintenance of these camps, as if we just LET the Germans walk in and put them up. There is simply no way that Poland as a nation had any hand in this, especially not alike the Nazi collaborators of Vichy France, whose connection and cooperation with the Nazis was well documented. But I mean, they're fucking French, so I don't expect much. But considering that Germany divided up our nation into three "governorships" under their direct jurisdiction, they did an exceptional job in eliminating any subversive activities by sending Poles to those same death camps that you people are sooooo convinced that we collaborated in building and maintaining. I should know, I had family who were shot on their doorstep, or sent to a camp, or also sent to Siberia thanks to the Russians, who decided to do that whole death camp business a lot later. But no one gave a shit about what the Russians really did during and after the war.

The majority of Poles don't agree with the direction that the current government is taking the nation, as it's being fiscally irresponsible and very totalitarian in nature, puppeted by a relic of the bygone Socialist era which NO ONE wants back in Poland. However, on the subject of foreign entanglements, such as this or the refugee "quotas", I personally cannot complain with the general stance of things.
Get All That You Deserve In This World

Free Speech Fundamentalist
Classical Liberal/Libertarian
A Necessary Evil
Haterz Gon' Hate

"You believe you have dominion
So you force your lame opinions on me
And my eggshell mind"
User avatar
LukasV
 
Posts: 597
Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2011 2:47 pm
Location: Poland

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby Hrafn » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:06 am

soysauce wrote:
The holocaust wouldn't have gotten anywhere without local collaborators. Wherever the nazis came, some people stood ready for a pogrom, that includes Norway btw. Unfortunately, not all countries atoned for those times as Germany has. Poland was kicking out Jews even after WWII, back in the 60's, many of those and their descendent are appreciated artists and politicians in my country and in other places as well, I'm sure. Of course it's not contemporary Polish people's fault, but I fear their leaders seem to be thinking that phrases like "polish death camps" is a bigger issue. If you're afraid of aggressive nationalism, you should be mailing the Polish government... :roll:

I think that's transferring an unacceptable amount of the blame away from Germany to the Polish people, in fact it seems a somewhat bizarre claim to be making. Of course there were collaborators, however claiming the Polish were complicit in the crimes is just nonsense. Germany was making a concerted effort during the war to wipe out the Polish people and Polish culture during the war, to an extent they even succeeded. While perhaps not treated as harshly as the Jews, the Polish people were very much the victims of German aggression.

So what? Doesn't change the fact that there was rabid Polish antisemitism.

Why do even engage in this ridiculous blame-game? What is done is done. Neither today's Poles nor today's Germans have anything to do with the holocaust. None of them should be obliged to grovel on their knees asking for forgiveness or to pay reparations.
User avatar
Hrafn
 
Posts: 905
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 6:36 pm
Location: Where the sun does not set

Re: The Behaviour of the Eastern European Countries in the EU

Postby Hrafn » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:10 am

Elf wrote:Nah. I love polish people and they love me. I've dated polish women. I do think that the EU is weird and seems to hate liberal democracy, but I'd honestly would have more respect for the Polish government if it wasn't taking millions in EU subsidies and then complaining about the EU wanting a say in its policies... :roll: I'm sure the hard-working people of Poland can do well on their own, maybe even better than Sweden in the long run, honestly...

My thoughts exactly. Kudos to Poles working for a Polexit, but complaining about having to follow the directives of a union they choose to be in and which they are getting a ton of charity money from is pathetic.
User avatar
Hrafn
 
Posts: 905
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 6:36 pm
Location: Where the sun does not set

PreviousNext

Return to Off-topic

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests