Posted on 04/19/2015 8:42:15 PM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland has summoned the United States' ambassador in Warsaw over an article written by a top U.S. intelligence official on Poland's alleged responsibility for the Holocaust during World War Two, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.
The article by FBI director James Comey, published in the Washington Post earlier this week, prompted an outcry in Poland and drew condemnation in the media and from politicians.
A foreign ministry spokesman said on his Twitter account that the U.S. ambassador would be summoned to the ministry over the article, and that Poland would demand an apology.
Comey said in the article: "In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do."
Poland says the passage wrongly implied it was complicit in the Nazi genocide of European Jews.
Poland's ambassador to the United States said in a statement the remarks were "unacceptable", adding that he had sent a letter to Comey "protesting the falsification of history, especially ... accusing Poles of perpetuating crimes which not only they did not commit, but which they themselves were victims of."
Shortly after Poland's announcement, U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw Stephen Mull told reporters he would attend a meeting at the foreign ministry on Sunday afternoon. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at ca.news.yahoo.com ...
From the death camps to Jedwabne, to Kielce; etc., Poland has a very shameful history of juden hass that it will probably never live down.
Guess he was surprised that all the left-wing cosmopolitanism and working class solidarity he expected was completely absent from the men's behavior.
The "Cossack" revolt was started by the lesser Polish nobility on the eastern Ukraine who made an alliance with the Cossacks against the Polish magnates in the western Ukraine (like Wisnowiecki) who were stealing their land and cattle. The Cossacks were originally mercenaries hired by the Poles to fight the Tatars and help suppress the Ukrainian peasants.
True by 1939 onwards.
However, Hitler had a real soft spot for Pilsudski, even ordering a state funeral (in absentia, of course) when he died in 1936.
Sometimes I think that if Pilsudski had lived, Poland (like Hungary) would have entered the war on the German side: she would have had to make territorial concessions in the west, but would have been promised restoration of Poland's 1754 borders in the east.
Pilsudski hated Russians more than anything, so in the early days Hitler pictured him as a potential ally to fight Russia. I could imagine even then Hitler promising Poland some spoils if they aligned with Germany.
But Pilsudski never trusted Hitler, and while his successors were more anti-semitic, they also hated the Germans just as much.
But the one thing the probably doomed Poland in the end was the fact that there were so many Jews in the country, could Hitler allow a Polish State to exist that protected so many Jews? It begs the question, what if Poland offered to return Danzig and the Corridor to the Reich, would Hitler have stopped, or would he simply have kept moving the goalposts until virtually Poland had to acquiesce into becoming a Nazi Puppet State, like Slovakia?
What doomed Poland was the Munich Agreements (which Poland supported, I believe). Czechoslovakia with the Sudentenland would need to hit Germany at the same time as Poland in order to have a real fighting chance against the Germans. The Poles didn’t realize that after Czechoslovakia they were next on Hitler’s lunch table.
“One person who cleverly took advantage of Poland's hatred for the Jews was Bohdan Khmelnytsky.”
“There was also those Polish Cossacks in the 1200s who cut Jews open, put a cat in the Jew's body and sewed it up again.”
LOL !!! Did you hear about the Jewish gay? He slept with women.
Uh uh.... I don't find the slaughter of my fellow Jews all that funny.
The "death camps" -- as shown above, were Nazi German death camps on German territory (as Poland was erased from the map). Jedwabne was the Poles in Jedwabne's evil, yes -- the killing of the 340 Jews by the people of that town was disgusting evil -- " A group of Jewish men were forced by the Nazis to demolish a statue of Lenin that had been put up earlier by the Soviets (as in Kolno) and then the group was takent o a barn and killed" - as wikipedia says
ditto for the Kielce killing of 42 Jews -- disguting and evil
Note that those were the ONLY TWO instances you could point out of Polish actions and only the former took place under the Nazi Germans. This proves that the FBI guy was wrong to ttalk of Polish collaborationists
The nobility who became Roman Catholic became "Poles", while those who didn't became "Ukrainians"
There is also the fact that at a point the term "Pole" was more for szlachta or nobility as in the Soviet diatribe against "Polish landlords"
However the Cossacks were bandits are the beginning, living in the no-mans land between Poland-Lithuania, Moscowy and the Tatars. They adopted Tatar ways merged with Slavic ways.
Let me read up more about your point of them being mercenaries
Finally, face facts that Jews were a mobile, rich group of people who could have left (and DID leave) persecuting nations (as they did from France, England, Spain) -- and yet they came and stayed in Poland and PROSPERED. They called Poland "Polan" -- the blessed land.
Why did they stay? Because the stories of them being persecuted are just that, stories.
When the Tsarist pogroms happened in the 19th century, that started a wave of migrations to the USA. Why would they have stayed if the Poles were persecuting them over such a long period?
Slavic antisemitism is STILL particularly strong.
I took a language course in Germany in ‘06. Never met one German who, if the subject came up, wasn’t totally ashamed and saddened by the Holocaust and WWII. Never met one German I thought was antisemitic.
I did however meet some foreign students from the former USSR who were openly antisemitic. One girl in particular, about as cultured and well educated as can be, a concert pianist, spoke multiple languages, brilliant conversationalist, etc. etc,....but looked me straight in the eyes saying “Ohh, I HATE the Jews!” She just seemed to assume that was normal.
Really shocking and sad.
Did you ever see the end of Schindler's List, when the liberated Jews asked where they should go, the answer was..."Don't go east, that's for sure. They hate you there. I wouldn't go west either, if I were you."
Don’t waste time on this clueless xenophobe, FBI guy has already been criticized by many, including some Jewish organizations and prominent individuals. What some sad dick thinks is rather irrelevant.
“Slavic antisemitism is STILL particularly strong.”
Funny racial remark. There’s no such thing as “Slavic antisemitism” just like there’s no “Slavic... anything else”. Slavs are simply too heterogeneous group.
Exactly: they carved out a space for themselves at the outer reaches of the powers that surrounded them. I read Russian and Ukrainian serfs would flee to Cossack areas to be free.
There's a great scene in the film With Fire and Sword where a Polish nobleman held hostage by the Cossacks is informed that he will be released for a payment of 10,000 zloty by his family.
He reacts with fury, saying to one of the Cossacks "Those cheapskates! If I were you, I would have held out for at least 20,000!"
One, the simple fact that many Poles harbored and still do at least some anti-Semitic sentiments (as many, maybe even most, Europeans did, and and still do today). It's difficult for us to recall that sentiments and expressions we now consider outrageously anti-Semitic were considered normal in the West (even in the United States) before WWII. The war, I think, changed a lot in Western Europe (although they seem to be reverting to the historical norm now).
However, in the case of Poland, whatever amount of antisemitism existed was never generally understood any in historical period with which I am familiar as a license to kill or attack Jews, and there was no tradition of pogroms in pre-partition Poland.
Second, a large number of American Jews are descended from unassimilated, Yiddish speaking Jews fleeing Russian sponsored pogroms in the 19th century. My guess is that to many of the Jews, having lived for centuries in what had been parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, every Gentile was a "Pole". This folk misidentification has simply been transferred from one generation of American Jews to another. Anti-Polish propaganda (supported at least in part by Zionist organizations between the wars) didn't help either: I recall reading in a 1920's or early 1930's Jewish newspaper from Canada about a "pogrom" in Cracow. If I recall correctly, the death toll was 3 Jews and 4 Poles: not exactly a successful "pogrom". It was clear that they were talking about an ethnic riot, and not some organized or state-sponsored attempt to kill Jews or to force them out. The article was simply a propaganda piece to support Jewish immigration to Palestine.
the anti-semitism in the East is a mixture of historic Tsarist attitudes and the visible people of Jewish extraction who were in the communist leadership (Trotsky, Bela Kun etc.) -- conveniently ignoring the fact that these were mostly atheist and also half Jewish at best
Exactly
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