A Short History of 20th Century Poland

Repost from the old blog. More dealing with Jews, Eastern Europe, WW2, ethnic conflict, etc etc. Eat it up antisemites. One thing I realized in writing up this stuff was how monumentally complicated all of this was. Even the history of Poland in the 20th Century left my head spinning. Great thread on the UK Guardian’s comment page about Poland’s enormously complex recent ethnic history, with Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews all fighting with, killing and making nice with each other. I don’t begin to understand it all, but I can grasp the outlines. Pay attention to the anti-Semitic and anti-Russian Polish nationalists and their usual distortions, generally along the lines that Stalin was far worse than Hitler. Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalists were cut out of similar cloth during this war, and most of them are still wearing these silly clothes. Their anti-Communism and hatred of the USSR is leavened heavily with anti-Semitism, and most of them fought alongside the Nazis during the war. This is what this crap about the “Holodomor” (or man-made famine – falsely named because there was no intentional famine) and the Katyn Massacre is really all about – trying to make the Soviets seem worse than Hitler in the interest, in effect if not in intention, of furthering Nazi propaganda. The alliances shift back and forth, Poland invades the USSR in 1920 and anti-Communists blame Soviets for starting the war (!!). Russia conquers eastern Poland early in the war, not a nice thing to do, but those under Russian occupation fared far better than those under German annihilationist occupation. The theme of Polish anti-Semitism runs through the whole thing. Jews were resented for a variety of reasons, principally the fact that Poles were Catholic and Jews refused to convert to Catholicism. Many Jews also supposedly refused to learn Polish. There were also allegations of economic competition that surface wherever Jews exist in large numbers. Holocaust survivor and Israeli resident Israel Shahak’s much-derided book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion is a great read. It’s not that long, and the whole thing is up on the Net. The late Shahak is accused of anti-Semitism, mostly by other Jews. Unfortunately, most of his fine works can only be found on anti-Semitic websites. In Chapter 4, there is a section on the history of Poland. During the 1600’s, many Jews were serving as tax collectors for the Polish Roman Catholic nobility. The peasants they were collecting taxes from were Orthodox Slavs. The Cossacks revolted against the Polish Roman Catholic overlords and their Jewish agents. The revolt resulted in the severing of Ukraine from Poland. Russians and Ukrainians view the rebellion positively and Poles have tended to view it negatively. Khmelnitsky is regarded as the Father of Ukraine, similar to our George Washington. Given this difficult history, you can understand why Jews and Ukrainians have had such a hard time. This rebellion, called the Chmielnicki Rebellion, lasted from 1648-1656, and resulted in the deaths of many Jews, but the numbers have been exaggerated. Chmielnicki is seen by Jews as an anti-Semite, but he called upon the poor Jews to join him in his rebellion, which was just a peasant rebellion against feudalism. The poor Jews refused, citing ethnic solidarity to stand alongside their brethren fighting alongside the feudalists. The Soviet Union created the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (Chmielnicki) for heroism during the Great Patriotic War. There were three classes of the order. Altogether, over 8,423 Soviet citizens were granted this order. Some Jewish soldiers were upset when they heard they were going to be granted the medal because Khmelnitsky is regarded by Jews as a vicious anti-Semite. Jews focus on the 20,000 or so Jews killed during the rebellion – 1/2 of the Jewish population in the Ukraine (not 100,000 as some Jews say) but during this horrible period in the mid 1600’s, Poland was invaded by multiple nations at once, including Sweden, and was riven with horrible wars all across the land. In the context of the typical human deprivation caused by feudalism itself, an incredible 1/3 of the population of Poland died. Yet the Jews see only 25,000 dead Jews and turn their eyes from the larger genocide. Typical Jewish myopia. The Jews welcomed Stalin’s forces with open arms early in World War 2, then Germans overran Soviet forces a year later, and eastern Poland was under the slaughterhouse of German rule. In 1944, the Soviets “re-invaded” (according to Polish nationalists!) and whatever Jews that remained, along with many Poles, thought the Soviets were just fine as they were fighting Germans. Yitzhak Shamir once said that Poles suck in their anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk, a nasty thing to say, but yes, there is truth to it. The Polish Communist government had quite a few Jews in it, and this also fed anti-Semitism along with Polish nationalism and pro-Catholicism. It’s true that Stalin put a lot of Jews in the Polish government because he did not trust native Poles to run the new Communist state very well, as Communism was so unpopular. After a while, there were plenty of Poles running the Polish Communist state and few Jews; by 1970 or so, the Polish state was officially anti-Semitic, running campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “Zionology” in tune with the now anti-Semitic Soviet state. But not all Eastern Bloc states mirrored this anti-Semitism from the USSR, which was rooted in the Jews’ mass flight to Zionism and the new Israeli state, aligned with the West, so there must have been some uniquely Polish animus at work there, even in Polish Communists. The Israeli state has since become most famous as being the World’s only single race-religion state, a most dubious distinction. Someone asked why Stalin was persecuting Jews after the war, and he blurted out, “But you don’t understand! They are all Zionists!” Stalin was also afraid of East Bloc and Soviet Jews spying for the West in tandem with the Israelis’ turn towards the West in the late 1940’s. In this he was partly correct, as we now have some evidence, via Terry Kollek, Jewish CIA agent, that a number of Eastern Bloc Jews followed their loyalty to the pro-West Israel by spying for the US against the Soviets and their allies, beginning as early as 1946. Jews in the Eastern Bloc were helping to implement Communism and at the same time working for the CIA to stop it. As usual, there were Jews on both sides of a major issue. To call Stalin an anti-Semite is wrong, but he did turn into one late in life. Stalin persecuted all sorts of minorities, not out of racial supremacism as is often alleged (a sort of hyper Georgian nationalism), but generally only those minorities he saw as disloyal to the USSR. Yet early in its history, the USSR laid down a new model for the best treatment of minorities by a state, a model that is mirrored now in many progressive states the world over. The paradoxes go on and on like funhouse mirrors. The Jews are coming back to Poland, which is very heartening. The anti-Semites are re-awakening too, as we would expect. It’s not correct to be either excessively optimistic or pessimistic about Jewish prospects in Poland today. Nationalist Jews will usually sneer at any notion that things are any better there – as they see Poles as some sort of metaphysical eternal anti-Semites, corrupted probably in their very souls with nary a hope of salvation. Neither is it correct to cheer these events on too much. But in Polish-Jewish relations, any forward progress should be cheered, as it should in most any other arena of life. Deborah Lipstadt, a whole thread and found it fascinating. It’s very long, but you may wish to dip in if you have any interest in the history of Poland in the past century. Note the nationalist Jew or Jews on the thread throwing the anti-Semite epithet around promiscuously. There are some excellent comments by readers at the end of this post on the old blog.

Please follow and like us:
error3
fb-share-icon20
Tweet 20
fb-share-icon20

8 thoughts on “A Short History of 20th Century Poland”

  1. ” The Jews are coming back to Poland, which is very heartening. ” So heartening for the Poles that most of them seem to have left. I wouldn’t be surprised if their corrupt neocon fascist government gave most of Poland away to the jews at firesale prices; and the Ukraine too – how long till it’s got an Israeli prime minister like Georgia. Then the jews could return to their rightful position as slavemasters of the Poles and Ukrainians. I get the feeling that a lot of the Eastern European jews have an attitude to slavs which is much the same as the Southern US Ku Klux Klan has to negroes; slaves who’ve escaped and got uppity – one day we’ll get them back under the whip and teach them their station in life.

  2. Olive – yes, I suspected that, I was just indulging in a bit of hyperbole, but that means they’re not ‘coming back’ but ‘buying up’.

  3. The jew mafia wants the whole world and do you know what they say after you gave it to them?
    – You owe us 35 percent backinterest.

  4. Neighbours, Eastern Poland, 1940
    I turn my shoulder to the grey and think
    of Yosel, son of Saul Rabinsky, how
    he slammed the doors of crowded cattle cars
    bound for Siberia, although the faces
    inside were those of neighbours, Catholic Poles.
    How haplessly they looked back through the cracks,
    their petty gentry voices cursing him
    and the red star on his cone-shaped traitor’s cap,
    their love of Poland beyond his comprehension,
    their foolishness not worthy of his grief.
    He did not know few would survive the journey
    and those who did would perish in the gulags,
    their tundra-bitten bodies heaped beneath
    Lavrentii Beria’s orders, like forgotten
    enemies of a freedom-loving state.
    The son of Saul Rabinsky did not know
    the Wehrmacht would attack within a year
    and soon behind them come the Waffen SS
    to mock the bearded rabbis of the town
    and herd its Jews into a killing field.
    He did not know he’d be betrayed by neighbours,
    who, in a cabal of silence and revenge,
    would watch the gendarmes drag him through the square,
    neighbours with whom he’d played and gone to school
    and whose unbridled hatred matched his own.
    – Leo Yankevich

  5. No English translation of Solzenhitzen’s history of the Jews in Soviet Russia and no forthcoming expose on the Harvard School of Economics and the rape of Russia by Ann Williamson http://www.russians.org/williamson_testimony.htm
    Here’s an article mentioning Williamson’s long overdue book Contagion about Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Rubin and the other Clinton court Jews who were in on the looting of Russia’s free market after communism collapsed.
    http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_32_18/ai_91210681/pg_2/?tag=content;col1
    -whodareswings

    1. It definitely seems like Jews were quite prominent in the looting of Russia after the USSR collapsed. The Russian Jews for sure, and it looks like they had some help with their Diaspora buddies. I wonder why? Is it a beef thing. The Russian Jews and their Diaspora buddies wanted to rob Russia blind in part because of revenge against the anti-Semitic Russians?
      OTOH, Sachs, Summers, et al are just neoliberals who would gladly rob any country blind. Sachs was also involved in mass theft from other countries masquerading as World Bank IMF neoliberalism.

  6. The worst culprit at this point in history is the regime of the American Empire run by opportunistic white anglo christians. A regime responsible for countless deaths. Coutless, because they can’t be even bothered to count the deaths that they are responsible for. They are devastating the world economy, for their own personal benefit and rapping our resources. The world will be a scary place to live in 20 years from now due to this abuse.

Leave a Reply to Lafayette Sennacherib Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)