Why is the Polish holocaust law so controversial?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I see nothing in your post that makes the extermination of the Jews as materially different. Other minorities were rounded up and sent to extermination camps and then to the gas chambers. I’d say that was exactly the same way. Do you think the UN are wrong to consider all minorities exterminated by the Nazis as victims of the Holocaust?
The scale was different, the precise motivation was different but the ultimate desire for a pure German race was the same in all cases. The outcome for those other minority groups herded into the gas chambers alongside the Jews was just as bleak. Had there been 6 million Romany in Nazi Europe there’d have been another 6 million deaths.

I find the singling out of the Jewish deaths as something separate and different to other minorities as disturbing. I’m not sure if that is what you think, I hope not.

Anti-semites will seek to slur and diminish the suffering of the Jews anyway they can. I confess I’ve never knowingly experienced a Jewish person trying to monopolise the holocaust and I’m surprised that I’ve caught a whiff of it on these boards but I’m hoping there’s a nuance in the language here that I’m not getting.

22

because they want to forget some of the complicity the poles themselves like the home guard/kkk type of groups that helped the ss round them up had… and most of the polish conceration camp staff was voluntary things like that

Leon Uris wrote a book that while fictional much of the background was historically accurate and he said it was way worse than what he portrayed … QB VII (or something like that )

23

There is no reason for a state to need to pass laws to protect its reputation. It is not an oppressed minority that may need protection from an oppressive majority. And the law as written “just happens” to include additional language that actually makes reporting factual statements illegal. Therein you find the real reason for the law.

And any state that outlaws the truth is being dictatorial. It’s not even a freedom of speech issue, really. Freedom of speech usually includes the freedom to lie. But this is beyond that. It is a prohibition on discussing the actual historical issue.

The Polish people did participate in the Holocaust. It’s a comforting tale that all the antisemitism came from Germany and Hitler, but it’s just not true. It’s not that some individuals participated. It is that a significant portion of Poland participated.

I’m fine with saying “You can’t glorify the Holocaust.” Those laws do limit freedom of speech a bit, but I can understand them. There really are some acts so evil that you could say they should not be promoted. But this is basically the opposite. By not allowing discussion of Poland’s own participation in the Holocaust, they are actually helping out the Deniers. They’re creating the idea that some factual parts of the Holocaust can’t be discussed at all.

I am worried any time a State thinks it needs to pass laws to protect its reputation. Down that road dictatorships lie. But having it connected with the Holocaust is especially troubling.

24

“The court finds for (the bad guy) and offers him compensation, one half penny, the smallest coin in the realm.”

25

This law is a shameful move that will no doubt have a chilling effect on both scholarship and speech. Indeed, it was designed to do so. The Polish Law and Justice Party has taken a leaf from Putin’s book. It’s quite a disturbing trend in that part of Europe. But on a positive note, the Polish branch of the PEN Club put out a very strong and decisive letter opposing the law and stating in no uncertain terms exactly what is behind it. That gives me some hope for Poland. We can only dream of an organized group of intellectuals in Russia doing anything approaching that in the current climate.

26

Now multiply that hurt by if you are one of the other 6 million that were slaughtered (or their families) but never get mentioned.

27

Sorry for the double post, multi-quote isn’t working for me right now.

I think you’ve said this perfectly. The law does not preclude saying that individual Poles or even groups of Poles were complicit. The law merely says that you can’t say that Poland, as Poland, participated in the construction/running of the camps.

My country has passed a law that criminalizes Holocaust denial. I see no problem with criminalizing insisting that a non-complicit country was complicit. Both are restrictions on free speech. Both seek to prevent the perpetuation of harmful historical fallacies.

28

I am not Polish, I am not a lawyer, I do not speak or read Polish and I am certainly not a Polish lawyer. That being said.

My understanding is that you can say that member of / groups within the Polish nation (nation being the populace of a state) were complicit and participated but it is illegal to implicate the state (the abstract political identity) of Poland in the Holocaust.

29

I agree with you 100%. It is wrong that the complete focus of the atrocities is on the Jews and no mention is made of the other groups who were targeted.

You’re wrong here. Retards, cripples, fags, gypsies and niggers were easy targets that many people thought were, at best, useless, or, at worst, a plague.

The Jews differed materially in that there had never been extermination campaigns against any of those groups whereas the Jews had faced it many, many times throughout European history and the hatred of them was culturally inbred. I mean, after all, the beanie wearing fuckers killed Christ. But that isn’t materially different, it’s more abstract.

So materially it is different - in that there were material advantages to whacking the Juden. It allowed for the confiscation of their assets and, it was well known at least in Elizabethan England, and I suspect earlier and elsewhere as well, that if you want money you fuck the Jews - because the Jews have money.

The Jews were targeted because they were both a historically easy, acceptable, target AND they could be profitably stolen from.

That makes it materially different.

How much of a contribution to the Nazi war movement do you suppose the mentally ill made?

*Yes, I know that many of those terms are North Americanisms but I’m unaware of the terms used in Europe at the time.

30

Let me be clear, I don’t think that the focus is only on the Jews, that hasn’t been my experience. My concern was that the loose language used could be interpreted that way and I invite the poster to clarify if they want to.

What difference does wealth or previous persecution make to the moral depravity of marching a specific human being into a gas chamber? I’m trying to imagine the poor Gypsy, stripped naked, shaven and emaciated being pushed into the ovens and thinking to themselves “well, could be worse, at least I’m not a Jew”
When I say “materially different” I refer of course to the outcome. In all cases the groups in question were targeted for murder because they were considered undesirable, dangerous, exploitable, expendable or any combination of these. The Nazi mentality had many different flavours of justification.

You might want to read what you’ve written here. Am I supposed to agree that the murder of a rich Jew was somehow worse than than the murder of a poor disabled person? That the dead Jewish banker who has his millions taken has suffered more or counts for more than the penniless Downs Syndrome child?

When I consider the 11 million killed by the organised extermination of various groups I don’t see any dividing line between the 6 million Jews and the 5 million others. Either you think that they all mattered equally (I really hope you do) or…well, I can’t wrap my head around what an alternative thought process would be.

31

Neither did Donald Trump.

You’re both wrong.

*"The eminent Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, offers a concise outline of the distinguishing characteristics of the Holocaust in his book, To Mend the World:

The "Final Solution" was designed to exterminate every single Jewish man, woman and child. The only Jews who would have conceivably survived had Hitler been victorious were those who somehow escaped discovery by the Nazis.
Jewish birth (actually mere evidence of "Jewish blood") was sufficient to warrant the punishment of death. Fackenheim notes that this feature distinguished Jews from Poles and Russians who were killed because there were too many of them, and from "Aryans" who were not singled out unless they chose to single themselves out. With the possible exception of Gypsies, he adds, Jews were the only people killed for the "crime" of existing."*
32

That’s utterly despicable. The lowest of low shots. You should be ashamed of yourself but I guess it is easier for you to throw mud and appeal to authority than it is to string together a coherent thought of your own or make a reasoned stand against the details of my posts.

A life is a life is a life.

Nothing of what I’ve said seeks to diminish the suffering of the jewish people. What I do seek to do is raise the suffering of those other minorities to the same importance. Something that apparently you, and others in this thread, are resistant to and I can’t for the life of me understand why.

Can’t you bring yourself to admit that the extermination of the 5 million others was every bit as vile as that of the 6 million jews? Will you not agree that they all deserve equal recognition?

Hundreds of thousands of Romanies killed for being Romanies, 6 million jews killed for being jews. Is this death-camp top-trumps?

33

Curious what your reasoning is for capitalizing Romanies but not Jews.

34

He didn’t seem to have a problem with doing so in previous posts, so I think you can put the tinfoil hat away…

35

The suffering in terms of scale, the grand plan, efficient systemic slaughter and the use of the word “extermination” without hyperbole, makes the Holocaust a Jewish tragedy, not the idea that Jewish suffering is in general is more important. It’s like how Black Lives Matter does not diminish the other victims of police brutality, it’s the numbers and other factors that warrant looking at it in a wider context.

36

There’s no doubt the Nazis had a special hard-on for the Jews - it wasn’t explicitly called “The Final Solution to The Jewish Question” for shits and giggles. I don’t think recognizing that diminishes the sufferings of others in any way.

Totally ignoring the other victims (as when just saying “The Nazis killed 6 million people”) is not cool, but I wouldn’t fight people who want to reserve the actual word Holocaust for just the Jewish victims - even modern scholarship is divided on that usage. Personally, I think it’s convenient to have one word for the whole shebang, so I use Holocaust as a synonym for Nazi genocide overall, and prefer Shoah if I’m talking about the Jewish exterminations specifically.

And that Polish law is fucked up, but then so areother recent lawscoming out of there.

37

Well I think I’ll bow out MrDibbles’s sensible take on things. I’ve nothing more to add .

38

Obviously the person that wrote this didn’t hear about Serbs.

“Yad Vashem estimates over 500,000 murdered, 250,000 expelled and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism”

What is specific about persecution of Serbs in comparison to Jews is that it was done mostly in specific regions, but not everywhere. When Yugoslavia was occupied in 1941, it was split in a bunch of occupation zones, German, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian. Modern day Serbia was mostly under direct German occupation, but it didn’t have any significant systematic exterminations of Serbs.

On the other hand, modern day Croatia and Bosnia were under a newly created puppet state called “Independent state of Croatia” or NDH, with the leader Ante Pavelic. NDH was also under control of Germany and also Italy, but it had a police and army of its own and most importantly, dozens of concentration camps built mainly not for Jews, but for Serbs, among them Jasenovac was the largest one, even larger than far more “famous” ones like Dachau and Buchenwald, but there were even camps designed specifically for kids, like Jastrebarsko and pits where hundreds of Serb women and children were thrown in, at Prebilovci for example ( Prebilovci massacre - Wikipedia )

The official government policy of NDH was to exterminate 1/3 of Serbs, to deport 1/3 (to the German occupied Serbia) and to catholicize (away from orthodox christianity) the remaining 1/3, the children camp Jastrebarsko was for example made for that reason, it was run by catholic nuns and it served as a “learning” camp to teach young children that they are actually Croats. There are even photos of these children wearing NDH military uniforms (called Ustasha uniforms, ustasha is a Croat word for insurgent and NDH leader Ante Pavelic was the leader of Ustasha movement)

So…yeah, Jews were definitely not the only ones that were systematically targeted, maybe in the largest number, but not the only ones.

39

Is it your point that others are doing it so the problem is larger than we thought, or that others are doing it so it is no big deal?

40

You are just coming off of a 30-day suspension, and here you choose to use the most inflammatory language possible in a situation that had no cause for it. Your posting privileges were on hold over the last day while your status was discussed in the moderator loop.

I would strongly caution you going forward to avoid situations where your wording requires scrutiny to infer your intent.