I HAVE NEVER CLAIMED that all Poles were innocent of crimes committed against Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland, so that's a lie. It would be as stupid to claim that as to claim there were no Germans who were anti-Nazi and who helped Jews hide or escape from murder by the Nazis. There is no country that was occupied by the Nazis that didn't have collaborators, there is no group, including Jews and Poles, which didn't have people who collaborated with them. Maus doesn't handle that topic well, at all. *
What I criticized Art Spiegelman for doing was to characterize 35 million people as "pigs" in Maus, something which, apparently is a "lesson" taught when incompetent, ignorant and, perhaps, bigoted teachers teach the book as if it is what it is not, accurate history. It's especially fraught a decision on his part as the Nazis often referred to the Poles AND JEWS as "pigs." While I know enough about pigs to know it's a rather stupid insult, they being capable of being rather pleasant animals, that's not how it's meant when People call other People "pigs." To use such a crude and Nazi-like depiction of an entire group of People in a book that has rather insanely gotten the Grade A stamp of virtue is a symptom of deep problems with our whole notion of such virtue.
I totally reject that kind of group-guilt, the characterization of groups of people, small or large, by the kinds of stereotypes and prejudicial characterizations that such books (and movies, TV shows and plays) inevitably use.
Only the People who are guilty of crimes and sins are guilty of them, People who didn't commit crimes and sins aren't guilty of the crimes and sins that other People commit. Many Poles risked and gave their lives to save Jews during the Nazi occupation, as I've pointed out here before, in the list of the Virtuous Among The Nations at Yad Vashem, the largest group, by country, are Poles, some of whom sacrificed their lives and even the lives of their entire family who were murdered by the Nazis because they hid Jews.
Stereotyping of biological groupings of People is the very basis of Nazi thinking as it is any other human application of the pseudo-scientific theory of natural selection. The modern form of that began almost immediately upon the publication of On the Origin of Species, which was enthusiastically taken up by the mainstream of racism - keeping in mind that whenever the word "race" is used it is extremely important to understand how the person using it understood that dangerously slippery term.
In Germany that use which turned into Nazism just under seventy years later began in a big way in the 1860s with the publications of Ernst Haeckel, the first and foremost promoter of the theory of natural selection in the German language with the complete and enthusiastic support of Charles Darwin who was entirely familiar with his work and which he endorsed fully, both in letters to Haeckel and in his second major scientific work The Descent of Man. Which is why I pointed out that to understand the application of that theory in Nazism you had to first admit the fact that that is what it was based on. And, from the start, people such as Haeckel, as Darwin's closest English disciple, Thomas Huxley and Darwin himself started talking about ethnic, racial and other groupings in terms of their purported inequality and not only extermination through natural attrition but by human murder. I've documented that in their own words, over and over again here, search for their names in my archives, I always give citations and when available to primary sources, links.
The stereotyping of humans on the basis of anything from somewhat valid to totally unscientific classification** as if different groupings of human beings were different species was the basis of the Nazis mass murder, the reason that they could mark a group as intimately biologically tied in with the German population as the neighboring Poles and Jews for extermination. Biologically it is as irrational as Darwin's characterizations of worthy Scots as he characterized their closest biological cousins, the Irish in terms of their imagined biological depravity.
The literature of Darwinism is full to the top of racist, ethnic, class and gender bigotry presented as science. One of the landmarks in the current resurgence of legal and political racism in the United States was The Bell Curve, which is certainly a part of the same literature. Natural selection is such a strong superstition within science that it allowed the obvious, blatant antisemitism of Kevin MacDonald and some of his credentialed, employed, even honored colleagues to go unremarked for decades before his work became known to the wider public through his testimony on behalf of the neo-Nazi racist David Irving, whose work, also, was accepted within academia, though that was due mostly to incompetence by a number of his well regarded, well-credentialed colleagues who never checked his citations and sources.
The incompetence of the teaching of Maus as history is a problem, I don't blame Poles for protesting against that at all. It is a question of the book doing exactly what anyone picking it up and reading it has a right to expect it not to do, classifying an entire group of millions of People based on a selective presentation of the sins of some People. It was exactly the same tactic that is always used by those who want to denigrate and attack and use other groups of People. And a lot of teachers, ignorant, not careful with fact, stupid enough to mistake a comic novel for a history book, perhaps desperate to get TV and movie and internet addled brats to pay attention and so going with something as facile as an anthropomorphic comic presentation of stereotyping promote the prejudices of the comic artist.
I have pointed out that that use of group characterization is, ironically, typical of Nazi thinking. I stand by that entirely. It is an irony that a book held up to be a weapon against Nazi thinking should promote that kind of thinking. It is even more of an irony that teachers who believe they are virtuously and dutifully teaching against that kind of bigoted thinking are, in fact, teaching it.
* Here's an example at, God help us, an alleged online resource, goddamned comment driven BS, intended for, apparently, teachers and students dealing with the topic of collaborators within death camps to get a better grade on the test.
MAUS
7. What is a Kapo, and how does Vladek build up a relationship with his Kapo? How does Vladek benefit from this??
Answered by jill d #170087 9 years ago 3/13/2013 1:42 PM
Vladek's Kapo
A "kapo" is a Polish supervisor at a concentration camp. Soon after Vladek arrives at Auschwitz, Vladek's kapo asks the Jews in the barracks if anyone there can speak English. Vladek volunteers, and the kapo takes him on as a tutor. He keeps Vladek safe in the quarantine block for as long as he can, and he provides him with extra food and clothing. Ultimately, Vladek must start working, and the kapo helps Vladek find work as a tinsmith, since skilled laborers get better treatment.
Source(s)
Answered by BOB G #501290 6 years ago 2/11/2016 9:32 AM
"Kapos" weren´t Polish supervisors in german concentration camps. They were simply supervisors made up of prisoners from the camp so in the case of Auschwitz many if not most of the "Kapos" would be jewish. It´s this type of historical inacuracies.. many times deliberate lies that frustrate me. Read something else than just Maus and learn about the truth.
There are worse examples given in some papers but I haven't had time to check to see if I find their citations to check them.
** I'd better point out that it's the classification that is, only sometimes, valid, NOT THE RANKING OF THEM IN TERMS OF VALUE.
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