After you die, before you enter heaven, you have to fight and kill all of the animals you ate in your life. If one kills you, you’ll have to live through another life on Earth.
Polish Social Media Propaganda Campaign: A Masterpost about Poland’s Law Banning the phrase “Polish Death Camps,” and Discussions of Polish Complicity in the Holocaust
The above are two different posts on the matter, but I’m making this my own post for the sake of being able to more easily edit/update this.
This is a part of Poland’s massive push to erase their own complicity in the Holocaust, and in post-Holocaust antisemitic violence. It is part of Poland’s rising antisemitism. It’s not just American youtube, however. It’s also Israeli youtube. So essentially, Poland is targeting the two countries in the world which have the largest Jewish populations today with this propaganda campaign. As of this morning [Tuesday, Feb. 13 2018] I have also seen tumblr users confirm having seen this advertisement campaign in the United Kingdom.
There are multiple advertisements doing this.
Please consider reporting or flagging these ads.
A Timeline Leading to Poland’s Propaganda Campaign:
November 2017: 60,000 far-right Polish nationalists march on Poland’s independence day, chanting “Pure Poland! White Poland!” Demonstrators were highly antisemitic, one claimed he was marching against “Jewry.” Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the Polish government seemed to praise the event: “It was a beautiful sight,” the interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, said. “We are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.”
The text [in English] is as follows: “Whoever publicly and contrary to the facts attributes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich… or for any other offenses constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes, shall be liable to a fine or deprivation of liberty for up to three years.”
Discussion of ANY Polish complicity in the Holocaust is therefore also part of the proposed ban. Punishment can be jail time, fine, or “restriction of liberty.” Supporters of Polish President Andrzej Duda urge him to sign the bill regardless of strong objections from both the United States, Israel, and the academic community/Holocaust scholars. The measure passed through Parliament on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan 27th 2018. This causes Israel to postpone diplomatic meetings with Polish representatives, and both Israel and the USA voice objections to the measure.
10 February 2018, (as of this last Shabbat), Jewish Tumblr users begin to post warnings about Americans seeing these Pro-revisionism Polish videos on youtube. Others confirm Israelis have been inundated with these videos as well. Although I don’t know if it began earlier, I have noticed that people started first seeing these ads introduced on the Jewish weekly holy day/day of rest, and I do wonder if slipping them in when many Jewish people wouldn’t have noticed was intentional, which feels especially sinister.
A brief selection does not do this letter justice, but here is some of it:
It was the Polish state – the Second Republic – that, in 1938, organized a camp in Zbąszyń where thousands of its Jewish citizens expelled from Nazi Germany, who had been instantly deprived of their citizenship by the Polish parliament, were imprisoned. It was the Polish state, represented by the Minister of Education that in 1937 sanctioned the “ghetto benches”, thus dividing the students in university halls on the very basis soon to be used to section people off behind the walls of the Nazi ghettos.
During the war, the Polish state – i.e., the government in London – was for over two years unable to condemn crimes against the Jews, neither on the radio, nor in the clandestine press. Even as the government did so, as late as in June 1942, it still refrained from publishing an open and resolute appeal to Poles that would call upon them to impede the extermination. It did not react accordingly despite mass deportations to death camps and despite the pleas of Shmuel Zygielbojm and Ignacy Schwarzbart, members of the Polish National Council in exile. In March 1943, a few weeks prior to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, when two million Jews had already been murdered in the Polish lands, Schwarzbart appealed to the Council: “I feel aggrieved at the Ministry of Interior Affairs, I feel aggrieved for it still has not addressed, in the name of this community of fate […], the Polish society so that – in this horrendous disaster, in this dreadful tragedy – they would support, as much as they can and by means they have at their disposal, morally and materially support the dying Polish Jews”.
Today, institutions of the Polish state prevent people from telling the truth about what happened during the war. Dwellers of many cities, towns, and villages do know about the murders and looting committed by Poles on their Jewish neighbors, and they want to express their sense of guilt. The national ideology which had inspired the crime is now used to enforce silence. Numerous politicians and journalists are telling us that there was an innocent nation and single atrocities committed by individuals. The opposite is the case: there were individuals who behaved in virtuous or in reprehensible ways, and a “nation”: a concept that served as justification for the crime
“Author Rafal Aleksander Ziemkiewicz, during the TVP2 show TVP Info, mocked critics of the legislation during a discussion with show host Marcin Wolski, who is also the director of TVP2.
“If we look at the percentage of involvement of countries that took part [in the Holocaust], Jews also were part of their own destruction,” Ziemkiewicz said.
Wolski responded: “Using this terminology, linguistically, we could say these were not German or Polish camps, but were Jewish camps. After all, who dealt with the crematoria?”
This is horrifying and appalling.
6 February 2018: an article which asks an important question – Poland wants to outlaw blaming Poles for Nazi atrocities. But what about the Jedwabne massacre?To cut to the chase, in an occupied town of Poland in 1941, the Polish residents rounded up the town’s Jewish population, and then willingly (and freely) slaughtered an estimated 400-1,400 of their Jewish neighbors [numbers are estimates as the site was not fully excavated, but rather exhumed in a controlled section], as German forces looked on. The Germans had even refused to let them use firearms, and so the gentile Polish residents of Jedwabne used farm tools as their method of execution.
