Scarcely a day goes by when history is not being used as propaganda justifying contemporary politics and, in particular, the idea that certain races, creeds, nations and faiths are being uniquely singled out for 'victimisation'.
In Poland the controversy over its the role of anti-semitism in it's history will go on but it has recently been brought into focus as a result of the controversy over David Cameron's alliance in the European Parliament with the Polish PiS Party through the European Conservatives and Reform group.
It is claimed that Michal Kaminski, elected president of the ECR is anti-semitic and that PiS is 'respectable fascist'. The evidence for this is that Kaminski was a member of the neo-fascist National Rebirth of Poland as a teenage in the dying days of Communism.
However, as Timothy Garton Ash writes,
More serious is what Kaminski has said and done as an adult. In the 1990s, he was a dynamic and ambitious young activist in a rightwing, nationalist, xenophobic party, the Christian National Union. In 1999, he visited Britain to present what is described as a gorget embossed with an image of the Virgin Mary to General Augusto Pinochet. "This was the most important meeting of my whole life. Gen Pinochet was clearly moved and extremely happy with our visit," Kaminski told the BBC's Polish service. In a short video clip from July 2000, he describes homosexuals as pedaly, a slang term roughly translatable as "queers" or "poofters".
As for the anti-semitism,
In 2001, he became involved in one of Poland's greatest post-1989 historical controversies, about the murder in July 1941 of almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish village of Jedwabne – a murder committed by Polish villagers. As the local MP, he denounced the post-communist president Aleksander Kwasniewski for his readiness to apologise in Poland's name for this crime.
An interview with Kaminski appeared in a nasty rightwing weekly, Our Poland. In it, while acknowledging "the tragedy of the Holocaust", he is reported as saying the murder was committed by a handful of outcasts ("no decent person would be involved in burning Jews"), and that he will apologise if someone "from the Jewish side" apologises for what "the Jews" did during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941.
The problem with accusing Kaminksi of anti-semitism is that many Poles believe that though the Holocaust was a 'tragedy' without necessarily being anti-semitic. They usually just want to assuage any sense of guilt by claiming that Poles were also the victims of Nazism.
Where the myth of Zydokomuna is not still held there is the view that the kind of collaboration with the Nazi's that occured at Jewdwabne was the exception and that Poland had the highest number in Europe of Righteous Amongst Nations so honoured by Israel for saving Jews.
What Kaminksi was doing in his Nasza Polska interview was playing on the feeling of victimisation of Poles to gain popularity. The idea was to convince Poles that Jews had supported Communism and that this was as much a genocidal attack on Poles as the Nazis carried out on Jews.
Yet the peculiarity of anti-semitism without Jews that undoubtedly still exists in Poland is matched only by the curious way that the issue of Michal Kaminski's alleged anti-semitism has been politicised by the liberal left.
After all, though it demonstrates a moral failing it does not have any immediate consequences in Poland for the miniscule community of surviving Jews who have not been subjected to discrimination or been attacked.
It is, of course, important that Poland come to terms with the anti-semitic past ( as documented formidably by Gross with regards the rest of that nation in his later work Fear in 2005) because, as Kaminski's populist rants, show the self pity and tendency to scapegoat 'enemies within' has hindered Poland's ability to develop politically.
As any political discussion on TVN reveals the political class in Poland prefer to shout over one another loudly in pseudo-debates over non-issues instead of trying to discuss sensibly and calmly the future of their nation.
Yet the Polish liberal left and it's allies in New Labour like Denis MacShane are hardly in a position to take the moral highground when considering the slavishly 'Westernising' policies that Poland has supported in recent years.
For the Polish populist right from Lepper's Self Defence to Giertych's League of Polish Families and PiS have only been able to score electoral success because of the scale of the poverty created by neoliberal 'shock therapy'.
The anger and bitterness that caused led many Catholic workers to turn to the populist right for rationalisation of what had gone wrong. The Polish populists have to exploit that to get votes whilst pursuing the same neoliberal policies.
Hence the recourse to 'identity politics' by Kaczynski and Kaminski. As Catholic peasants and workers have became more powerless after the hopes generated by Solidarity it's all there is left. A theme developed by David Ost in The Defeat of Solidarity.
For the deal stitched up by Solidarity leaders like Michnik, Geremek and Mazowiecki at the Magdalenka Talks in 1990 followed by the Balcerowicz Plan, which allowed large numbers of industries to collapse, impoverished millions.
Outside the prosperous cities many in rural areas and the small towns now espouse conspiracy theories, involving the one that Michnik and Geremek's Jewish ancestry ensured they were in league with Jewish capital.
Kaminski knows that PiS has to win over this broad constituency of the disaffected who regard the EU as an attempt to destroy the Polish nation through stealth and impose decadent Western attitudes.Playing on fear is an effective way to get votes.
With regards the Jedwabne controversy, Kaminski is only repeating a common view in Poland that the incidence of one massacre in which Poles collaborated with the Nazis is being used to destroy Poland's pride in its national history.
All with the aim of delegitimising criticism of the EU, a motive that is far from absent in the liberal left's attempt to portray PiS as 'Francoist', a charge levelled by those like Denis MacShane and Michnik. Michnik even hysterically claimed that Kaczynski's government was intent on a coup.
Moreover as Poland has become a key client state and subservient ally of the USA and its Middle Eastern ambitions, it cannot affford to be seen as anti-semitic when anti-semitism is a core part of the propaganda justifying Israel's policies and delegitimising criticism in it's treatment of the Palestinians.
For Israel is central to the 'neoconservative foreign policy of those like Michnik and MacShane. No less than it is to Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle who has been attacked for defending Kaminski and accounts for the confusion over the nature of the Tories alliance with PiS.
In Poland the controversy over its the role of anti-semitism in it's history will go on but it has recently been brought into focus as a result of the controversy over David Cameron's alliance in the European Parliament with the Polish PiS Party through the European Conservatives and Reform group.
It is claimed that Michal Kaminski, elected president of the ECR is anti-semitic and that PiS is 'respectable fascist'. The evidence for this is that Kaminski was a member of the neo-fascist National Rebirth of Poland as a teenage in the dying days of Communism.
However, as Timothy Garton Ash writes,
More serious is what Kaminski has said and done as an adult. In the 1990s, he was a dynamic and ambitious young activist in a rightwing, nationalist, xenophobic party, the Christian National Union. In 1999, he visited Britain to present what is described as a gorget embossed with an image of the Virgin Mary to General Augusto Pinochet. "This was the most important meeting of my whole life. Gen Pinochet was clearly moved and extremely happy with our visit," Kaminski told the BBC's Polish service. In a short video clip from July 2000, he describes homosexuals as pedaly, a slang term roughly translatable as "queers" or "poofters".
As for the anti-semitism,
In 2001, he became involved in one of Poland's greatest post-1989 historical controversies, about the murder in July 1941 of almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish village of Jedwabne – a murder committed by Polish villagers. As the local MP, he denounced the post-communist president Aleksander Kwasniewski for his readiness to apologise in Poland's name for this crime.
An interview with Kaminski appeared in a nasty rightwing weekly, Our Poland. In it, while acknowledging "the tragedy of the Holocaust", he is reported as saying the murder was committed by a handful of outcasts ("no decent person would be involved in burning Jews"), and that he will apologise if someone "from the Jewish side" apologises for what "the Jews" did during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941.
The problem with accusing Kaminksi of anti-semitism is that many Poles believe that though the Holocaust was a 'tragedy' without necessarily being anti-semitic. They usually just want to assuage any sense of guilt by claiming that Poles were also the victims of Nazism.
Where the myth of Zydokomuna is not still held there is the view that the kind of collaboration with the Nazi's that occured at Jewdwabne was the exception and that Poland had the highest number in Europe of Righteous Amongst Nations so honoured by Israel for saving Jews.
What Kaminksi was doing in his Nasza Polska interview was playing on the feeling of victimisation of Poles to gain popularity. The idea was to convince Poles that Jews had supported Communism and that this was as much a genocidal attack on Poles as the Nazis carried out on Jews.
Yet the peculiarity of anti-semitism without Jews that undoubtedly still exists in Poland is matched only by the curious way that the issue of Michal Kaminski's alleged anti-semitism has been politicised by the liberal left.
After all, though it demonstrates a moral failing it does not have any immediate consequences in Poland for the miniscule community of surviving Jews who have not been subjected to discrimination or been attacked.
It is, of course, important that Poland come to terms with the anti-semitic past ( as documented formidably by Gross with regards the rest of that nation in his later work Fear in 2005) because, as Kaminski's populist rants, show the self pity and tendency to scapegoat 'enemies within' has hindered Poland's ability to develop politically.
As any political discussion on TVN reveals the political class in Poland prefer to shout over one another loudly in pseudo-debates over non-issues instead of trying to discuss sensibly and calmly the future of their nation.
Yet the Polish liberal left and it's allies in New Labour like Denis MacShane are hardly in a position to take the moral highground when considering the slavishly 'Westernising' policies that Poland has supported in recent years.
For the Polish populist right from Lepper's Self Defence to Giertych's League of Polish Families and PiS have only been able to score electoral success because of the scale of the poverty created by neoliberal 'shock therapy'.
The anger and bitterness that caused led many Catholic workers to turn to the populist right for rationalisation of what had gone wrong. The Polish populists have to exploit that to get votes whilst pursuing the same neoliberal policies.
Hence the recourse to 'identity politics' by Kaczynski and Kaminski. As Catholic peasants and workers have became more powerless after the hopes generated by Solidarity it's all there is left. A theme developed by David Ost in The Defeat of Solidarity.
For the deal stitched up by Solidarity leaders like Michnik, Geremek and Mazowiecki at the Magdalenka Talks in 1990 followed by the Balcerowicz Plan, which allowed large numbers of industries to collapse, impoverished millions.
Outside the prosperous cities many in rural areas and the small towns now espouse conspiracy theories, involving the one that Michnik and Geremek's Jewish ancestry ensured they were in league with Jewish capital.
Kaminski knows that PiS has to win over this broad constituency of the disaffected who regard the EU as an attempt to destroy the Polish nation through stealth and impose decadent Western attitudes.Playing on fear is an effective way to get votes.
With regards the Jedwabne controversy, Kaminski is only repeating a common view in Poland that the incidence of one massacre in which Poles collaborated with the Nazis is being used to destroy Poland's pride in its national history.
All with the aim of delegitimising criticism of the EU, a motive that is far from absent in the liberal left's attempt to portray PiS as 'Francoist', a charge levelled by those like Denis MacShane and Michnik. Michnik even hysterically claimed that Kaczynski's government was intent on a coup.
Moreover as Poland has become a key client state and subservient ally of the USA and its Middle Eastern ambitions, it cannot affford to be seen as anti-semitic when anti-semitism is a core part of the propaganda justifying Israel's policies and delegitimising criticism in it's treatment of the Palestinians.
For Israel is central to the 'neoconservative foreign policy of those like Michnik and MacShane. No less than it is to Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle who has been attacked for defending Kaminski and accounts for the confusion over the nature of the Tories alliance with PiS.
.
After all, Pollard, who writes for the Times, is a staunch Zionist who regularly conflates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and seems to think that the current Pope Benedict is a closet Nazi sympathiser whilst Kaminski is a forthright friend of Israel and thus not.
For in reality when it comes down to it the ECR alliance between Cameron's Tories and the PiS nothing to do with the forces of nasty nationalism. It is an expedient one dictatated by the need to serve the neoconservative market fundamentalist agenda better than the Atlanticist liberal left can.
There are virtually no political voices in Poland calling for copying the German or French economic models. Even Kwasniewski who led Poland into war with Iraq in 2003 without a vote in the Sejm is a member of the Atlantic Council.
On foreign policy there is no real dissent. Only sterile debates on the past which is used for crudely political purposes at the level of domestic politics and that deflects attention from a reasoned consideration of them.
Denis MacShane, who first publicised Kaminski's shady past in a member of the Henry Jackson Society which also includes key backers for David Cameron like the neoconservatives Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and Alan Mendoza.
As the Conservative Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan writes of his 'friend' Kaminski-"We each have two little girls of similar ages. We're both conservatives: Eurosceptics, free-marketeers and Atlanticists".The only difference to MacShane is the 'Euroscepticism'.
Kaminski like MacShane is a spin doctor who masterminded the PiS election victory in 2005. He has few convictions other than procuring power no less than New Labour in Britain which makes 'the right noises' about Muslims just as he does on Jews.
That the Euro-Atlantic liberal left ( as represented 'intellectually' by the likes of MacShane and Michnik ) likes to pretend that PiS and right wing populists have real 'nationalist' or 'fascist' convictions is just stale politicking.
For in reality when it comes down to it the ECR alliance between Cameron's Tories and the PiS nothing to do with the forces of nasty nationalism. It is an expedient one dictatated by the need to serve the neoconservative market fundamentalist agenda better than the Atlanticist liberal left can.
There are virtually no political voices in Poland calling for copying the German or French economic models. Even Kwasniewski who led Poland into war with Iraq in 2003 without a vote in the Sejm is a member of the Atlantic Council.
On foreign policy there is no real dissent. Only sterile debates on the past which is used for crudely political purposes at the level of domestic politics and that deflects attention from a reasoned consideration of them.
Denis MacShane, who first publicised Kaminski's shady past in a member of the Henry Jackson Society which also includes key backers for David Cameron like the neoconservatives Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and Alan Mendoza.
As the Conservative Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan writes of his 'friend' Kaminski-"We each have two little girls of similar ages. We're both conservatives: Eurosceptics, free-marketeers and Atlanticists".The only difference to MacShane is the 'Euroscepticism'.
Kaminski like MacShane is a spin doctor who masterminded the PiS election victory in 2005. He has few convictions other than procuring power no less than New Labour in Britain which makes 'the right noises' about Muslims just as he does on Jews.
That the Euro-Atlantic liberal left ( as represented 'intellectually' by the likes of MacShane and Michnik ) likes to pretend that PiS and right wing populists have real 'nationalist' or 'fascist' convictions is just stale politicking.
.
The economic and geostrategic orthodoxies remain cross political as the lack of dissent in Poland and Britain with regards its relationship with the USA in recent years clearly shows.Britain and Poland's foreign policy is virtually identical.
Indeed for all Kaminski's vulgarity and the anti-semitism without Jews that does exist in Poland-largely due to guilt at the greedy peasants who opportunistically stole Jewish property-it hardly compares to the Islamophobia without Muslims.
The defence in 'freedom of speech' terms given by Michnik and Geremek in 2006 to Oriana Fallaci's rant about the demographic threat of Muslims in The Strength of Reason. a book where she describes Muslims as "rats", is of far more contemporary relevance
Moreover in combatting "Islamofascism" the Polish governments have allowed CIA rendition on Polish soil and acquiesced in the neoconservative war on terror without hardly a demur about the use of torture and human rights abuses.
All of which makes the anti-semitism controversy with regards Kaminski somewhat of a sideshow.
True, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Racism and Antisemitism, based at Tel Aviv University, reports, that PiS contains radical nationalists and ex-members of antisemitic organisations and retains a tactical alliance with Radio Maryja, "the mass-audience nationalist Catholic radio station and a key force on the far right", which gives airtime to antisemitic ranters.
Yet apart from acting to salve those who have guilty consciences over the 'Unwelcoming of Jewish Survivors' from Nazi occupied Poland, the looting of Jewish property and the resentment at having it brought back up anti-semitism has no real traction as a political force with significance.
Unlike 1968, when General Moczar used anti-Zionism as a pretext to expel 'Zionist' elements and enemies within from the universities and win popular support for the Polish Communist state, Poland is now a free democracy in which anti-semitic voices appeal to silly people for the same reason conspiracy theories do in the West-it comforts them and prevents them having to make an effort to understand how the world really works.
Indeed for all Kaminski's vulgarity and the anti-semitism without Jews that does exist in Poland-largely due to guilt at the greedy peasants who opportunistically stole Jewish property-it hardly compares to the Islamophobia without Muslims.
The defence in 'freedom of speech' terms given by Michnik and Geremek in 2006 to Oriana Fallaci's rant about the demographic threat of Muslims in The Strength of Reason. a book where she describes Muslims as "rats", is of far more contemporary relevance
Moreover in combatting "Islamofascism" the Polish governments have allowed CIA rendition on Polish soil and acquiesced in the neoconservative war on terror without hardly a demur about the use of torture and human rights abuses.
All of which makes the anti-semitism controversy with regards Kaminski somewhat of a sideshow.
True, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Racism and Antisemitism, based at Tel Aviv University, reports, that PiS contains radical nationalists and ex-members of antisemitic organisations and retains a tactical alliance with Radio Maryja, "the mass-audience nationalist Catholic radio station and a key force on the far right", which gives airtime to antisemitic ranters.
Yet apart from acting to salve those who have guilty consciences over the 'Unwelcoming of Jewish Survivors' from Nazi occupied Poland, the looting of Jewish property and the resentment at having it brought back up anti-semitism has no real traction as a political force with significance.
Unlike 1968, when General Moczar used anti-Zionism as a pretext to expel 'Zionist' elements and enemies within from the universities and win popular support for the Polish Communist state, Poland is now a free democracy in which anti-semitic voices appeal to silly people for the same reason conspiracy theories do in the West-it comforts them and prevents them having to make an effort to understand how the world really works.
Antipolonism is much more prevalent in Poland than antisemitism, however paradoxically it sounds - internal and external, constant attempts to "frame" Poles as perpetrators during IIWW is a great example. "Zydokomuna", on the other hand, isn't a myth but a verifiable historical fact - an apparatus of red terror was managed on polish soil mostly by Jews who were disproportionately numerous. There's a natural contradiction in being Polish and bolshevik. You can't pronounce that about Jews.
ReplyDeleteLink in polish:
http://niniwa2.cba.pl/zydzi_w_kierownictwie_ub.htm