Why do some people never learn? Especially, it would seem, those who should know better. The Times of Israel has this item about a Professor of History (which is what I mean about knowing better) who gave an interview in which he apparently blames the Jews, at least in part, for the Holocaust.
Call me old-fashioned, but I truly, honestly, believed that this silliness about blaming the victim for the behaviour of the aggressor had finally gone the way of the dodo, at least as far as people such as social scientists (and I stretch the term to include historians) were concerned.
After all, enlightened people no longer blame women for men's misogyny (or so I've been told), nor members of ethnic minorities for the behaviour of the racially prejudiced. And all of us enlightened folk out here don't blame all Moslems for the beliefs and behaviour of the Islamists and Jihadists. So why blame Jews for the Holocaust? Unless, of course, one is antisemitic. Or, apparently, a certain type of Polish historian.
So, what did Professor Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Head of the Department of Analysis of Eastern Issues of the Polish Academy of Sciences, say? Among other things, he said that “generations of Jews worked for centuries to bring about the Holocaust,” that “without the active participation of the Jews the Holocaust would have been impossible,” and that “it is a waste of time to dialogue with the Jews.” So, you see, it's all our fault: we wanted to be slaughtered in our millions. This means I really hated the family I never knew I had so much that I wanted them dead, or maybe my father did.
He said other things too, such as that role of the Polish people was reducing to apologising to the Jews. Not quite: the Catholic father of one of my older daughter's teachers had an Auschwitz tattoo on his forearm , because of his involvement in the Polish underground resistance to the Nazis, so that's another load of rubbish from the Prof.
The article also contains links to other items about this unlovely man.
By Brian Goldfarb
1 hour ago
2 comments:
Thousands of Catholic priests were imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp outside Munich for not toeing the Nazi Party line. Although they were not systematically exterminated, many were starved or beaten to death. I recently finished a good memoir by one of those who survived:
http://tinyurl.com/k8cwzzk
This is true. One of the results of not standing in the way of the Nazis, same as Jews and many others who were later trod upon.
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