This is a follow up to my comments earlier this week about how even the highest forms of dramatic art, not to mention the simplistic, manipulative, heart-tugging-mind-dulling junk is about the worst possible way to present something that stands in for history.
Listening to the Polka Party as I do my housework, I remember that I'd meant to address one of Simels' comments that made it through the filters. I noted that he hated Poles, which he didn't deny, he said, "ever hear of the Warsaw ghetto". Which, of course, is about the extent of his knowledge of what happened in Poland under Nazi occupation. By that I mean he knows the name and maybe has some notion of what it was, he probably saw a TV movie about it or heard some bit of lore around that as-composed-for-a-movie concerto by Richard Addinsell. What Simps doesn't know about much of anything other than the mid to low-brow part of white American-Brit pop culture is pretty much comprehensive.
The show-biz presentation of what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto is as one-dimensional and false as anything it "does" and, I maintain, dishonors those who died there, were sent to their deaths from there and who resisted and survived it. Show-biz, fiction, etc. might go down easier than reading rigorous history but they always falsify things. Show biz, dramatic, novelistic "histories" are, uniformly, lies.
In that idiocy Simps has many a fellow stultified bigot, I've written about that officially denoted current atheist idea of a genius, Stephen Fry making a similar slam against Poles, in his case it was related to his typical Brit anti-Catholic bigotry. Simps also hates Catholics, probably that feeding his hatred of Poles, too.
I think both cases prove how dangerous getting everything you mistakenly think you know about something from from show-biz is. The history of Poland in the 1930s and 1940s is especially complex* in that they faced first imminent threats from two powerful, genocidal regimes on both sides, Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, both of which were publicly intending to invade it, the Soviets to absorb it into their country, the Nazis not making it any secret that they intended to kill all of the Poles as well as the Jews and Roma and replace them with "Aryans" leaving only those Poles who they deemed sufficently "Aryan" to allow to live. Their plans to maintain a set number of Slavs to be slaves to the Aryans, working them to death, managing their numbers should be considered a living genocide.
That a number of Polish communists, some of whom were Jewish openly favored Soviet invasion and domination certainly didn't help things. It certainly didn't make the lives of Jews who didn't favor Stalin any less dangerous. I can't, for the life of me, considering what their history of being jerks no matter what else they are, understand the vestiges of sentimental affection for commies in 2020. I've mentioned before that even during his life, when someone proposed to Marx that he was a Marxist, he didn't want anything to do with those assholes. They didn't get any better over time. Communism should be tossed on the same trash heap of history that Nazism and fascism belong on.
As in those countries whose resistance under Nazi occupation are the stuff of exaggeration in movies and popular books, the story of Polish resistance to the Nazis is a mixed thing. There were Poles who hid Jews, in not a few cases sacrificing their entire families in the effort to protect them, there were some who hid them without discovery by the Nazis or betrayal. There were Poles who worked with Polish Jews in the resistance - in some cases both were betrayed by those parts of the resistance who were Communist and working with those who favored Soviet annexation of Poland, though there were communists who didn't. There were Poles who out of cowardice or mercenary motives cooperated with the Nazis, denounced Jews, who blackmailed Jews who were concealed by false documents, etc. In every real nightmare you're going to find the full range of human behavior. There's nothing specific to any country or any language group or any other division of humanity that sets them apart. You could say the same thing about France under Nazi occupation or the Netherlands, etc. I don't remember Simps or Fry slamming the French or the Dutch over the history of collaboration with the Nazis in their history.**
But to uniformly blame the Poles for what the Nazis did in their country is especially obscene. especially considering one of the results of the Nazi occupation was the decades of Soviet occupation that followed. It strikes me as obscene in a way that bringing up The Stern Gang and Irgun and their collaboration with, sometimes the Nazis and sometimes Stalin's side as not being at all unfair. Nor is their stated intention to make Israel a totalitarian state. Likud is their successor, Yitzhak Shamir was a member of Irgun. But that's unmentionable.
* The title of this short piece from The Atlantic, "The Truth About Poland's Role In The Holocaust," make me reluctant to link to it - there is nothing that short that can approach being "The Truth" but it's a good, fast introduction to how complex and varied it was.
** I wonder what a list of the number of books and magazine articles going over the French, Dutch, etc. collaboraton as opposed that of Polish collaboration would show. It was certainly not because the Polish Government in Exile and the non-Communist Polish resistance were any less vigorous than that in France or Holland. From the Atlantic article:
In contrast, the Polish Government in Exile based in London sponsored resistance to the German occupation, including some to help Jews in their native land. Jan Karski, who acted as an emissary between the Polish underground and the government in exile, was one of the first to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to Allied leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt in the hope of spurring rescue. On the ground in occupied Poland, the Zegota group (the clandestine Council to Aid Jews) saved several thousand people by supplying false papers and organizing hiding places or escape routes. And courageous individuals such as Gertruda Babilińska risked their lives to save Jews with whom they had personal connections. Babilińska was the nanny for a Polish Jewish family. After the death of the parents, she cared for the family’s young son by posing as his mother. Despite false papers giving him an assumed Christian identity, the child’s circumcision put both “mother” and child at risk of discovery and death at all times. Through Babilińska’s ingenuity and audacity, both survived the war and eventually moved to Israel, in accordance with the wishes of the child’s murdered parents.
If Simps gets to here while looking for stuff to cherry-pick, I'd bet this is more about this subject than he's read in his seven plus decades, I'll bet it's still more than Stephen Fry has.
No comments:
Post a Comment