Poland Seeks to Outlaw References to Polish Complicity with Nazis

A Polish police officer checks a Jewish man's documents at the Kraków Ghetto, 1941

A story in the Washington Post shows just how far tight wingers will go to rewrite history in the hope of erasing references to their complicity in moral turpitude or even war crimes.  The story relates to a pending law in Poland that would make it a crime to acknowledge the fact that even though Poland was occupied by Hitler's Nazi regime, there were plenty of Poles only to willing to participate in the genocide against Jews and other horrors.  Yes, there were many Poles who tried to do the right thing and oppose the Nazi agenda as resistance fighters and by other means, but the shocking truth is that a large number were complicit - something the right wing wants to wash away from public memory and rewrite history so that only Germans were involved with, in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the murder of over 1 million men, women and children. With the Trump/Pence regime pushing a racist, bigoted and homophobic agenda, will Trump loyalists including morally bankrupt evangelical Christians want to sanitize history to delete their own complicity, if not active engagement in moral wrongs?  The effort in Poland shows the critical need that history tell the whole story lest future generations forget just how horrible individuals can be when confronted with evil - especially those who park themselves in church pews on Sundays and seemingly forget the Gospel message the moment they walk out the church door.  Here are article highlights:

A diplomatic crisis between Israel and Poland appeared to be deepening on Sunday as Poland’s deputy chief of mission, Piotr Kozłowski, was summoned to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem over a law approved by the Polish parliament making it a criminal offence to mention Polish complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.

Polish lawmakers voted Friday for a bill that would fine or jail people who blame Poland or Poles for Nazi atrocities committed on its soil during World War II, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The law still needs final approval from the Polish Senate and the country’s president.

It comes as the country has become more nationalistic. Tens of thousands of people chanted and marched through Warsaw last year in an annual gathering of Europe’s far-right movements, and the majority party has sought to protect Poland's image.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Kozłowski the vote's timing was “particularly surprising and miserable," pointing out that Friday was the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was also the 73^rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland.

Polish officials say the law would not limit Holocaust research or the freedom of expression.  Even though several death camps, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau, were built on Polish soil, Poles say they should be referred to as Nazi extermination camps or camps in occupied Poland, disassociating Poland from the Nazi crimes committed there.

The bill, which would jail even foreigners for up to three years for using terms such as “Polish extermination camps,” passed the lower legislature overwhelmingly. For the country's ruling Law and Justice Party, it's part of a years-long effort to prevent people from “slandering the good name of Poland,” as officials once put it.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, . . . . said the law was “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.” . . . . restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion,” read the Yad Vashem statement.

[B]etween these broad strokes of Nazi genocide and Polish heroism, some Poles also turned on Jews — or at least helped Germans kill them. . . . Villagers in Jedwabne, for example, reportedly locked about 300 Jewish residents in a barn and burned them alive in 1941, the BBC wrote. Some modern-day Poles deny the story or blame Germans for pressuring the villagers, but others see evidence of willing complicity throughout the occupation.

Jan Karski, a famed Polish resistance fighter, once told an interviewer of the “ruthless, often without pity” attitude some of his countrymen held for Poland's large Jewish population.

“The truth is that local authorities were often left intact in occupied Poland, and many officials exploited their power in ways that proved fatal to their Jewish constituents.”

Some Poles welcomed the forced removal of their Jewish neighbors from their homes, he wrote. Some happily enriched themselves at the expense of their dispossessed neighbors, and some “did not recoil from committing acts of murder, rape and larceny — not always orchestrated by the Germans.”

When Will the Media Condemn All Homophobic Denominations?

If one takes the time to research the origins of homophobia, it always eventually traces back to Christianity and some of the ugliest passages of the Old Testament.  While many are quick to point to Islam as the main source of anti-gay animus in the wake of the Orlando massacre of 49 gays and gay allies, that assessment is ultimately incorrect since Islam adopted the homophobia that increasingly permeated Christianity.  Before this adoption of Christianity derived animus, Islam was relatively tolerant of those of different sexual orientations.  And while much progress been made in many Christian denominations in terms of how LGBT individuals are treated, the root causes of anti-gay hatred and animus remain alive and well in the Bible and the Old Testament in particular.  This fact made clear after the Orlando horror as a string of "Christian" pastors lauded the murderous rampage and others could not even bring themselves to note the sexual orientation of the victims - and their own complicity in maintaining an anti-gay atmosphere in society.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this lingering poison that taints Christianity.  Here are highlights:

After the massacre in Orlando, Fla., American religious leaders spoke in a largely unified voice, condemning the killer and mourning the dead. But at some extreme conservative Christian churches, there was another message: good riddance.

In the weeks since 49 people were slaughtered at a gay nightclub, remarks by pastors celebrating the deaths have brought attention to several outposts of anti-gay hostility across the country that until now had been operating mostly under the radar.

“The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die,” Roger Jimenez, a Sacramento preacher, exhorted his congregants on June 12, the day of the assault. “The tragedy is — I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job! Because these people are predators! They are abusers!”

Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Arkansas State University who has researched Christian extremists, said she had tracked about five churches — in California, Texas, Arizona and Tennessee — where preachers had endorsed the killings in Orlando.

Many of the preachers identify themselves as so-called independent Baptists, meaning that they are not a part of any of the denomination’s groupings, such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Barrett-Fox said the Baptist emphasis on church autonomy — recognizing no central authority — allowed pastors to interpret the Bible for themselves.

The independent Baptist churches where anti-gay hatred has flourished tend to have small congregations, more likely to number in the dozens than the hundreds, experts said.

Sermons posted online since the attack have been interspersed with dehumanizing labels for L.G.B.T. people reminiscent of those used by the perpetrators of historical genocides. The Orlando victims were “sodomites,” “reprobates,” “perverts” and “scum of the earth,” preachers have said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, said it was alarmed by the comments of extremist pastors after the mass shooting in Orlando. Heidi Beirich, the center’s director of intelligence, warned that they should not be dismissed as empty rhetoric.

“I think it is entirely possible that someone could be inspired by this and kill gay people,” Ms. Beirich said. “This kind of message is exactly akin to Hitlerian ideas of exterminating Jews. It’s that extreme. It’s basically genocidal toward a population.”

However, while many conservative Christian leaders no longer want to be seen as anti-gay, the change in tone should not be interpreted as full acceptance, Dr. Barrett-Fox said. The “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach to homosexuality continues to be deeply woven into Christian thinking.

When all is said and done, Dr. Barrett-Fox said, “They don’t really believe that these people had a right to be peacefully doing what they were doing, partying at a gay bar.”

The bottom line is that until denominations fully and loudly reject the "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach to LGBT people, they remain an enemy and a threat.  Until the theology is fully repudiated, we cannot be lulled into thinking "they're not really so bad"  This applies to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Roman Catholic Church (not withstanding Pope Francis' latest disingenuous statements) and many other denomination. Saying words of condolence when we are murdered doesn't wash away the guilt that comes from the failure to reject anti-LGBT dogma.  Dogma that is based on ignorance and Bronze Age levels of knowledge.