As I’ve mentioned before, many post-Holocaust Jews have bad communal memories about Poland. In this case, when I say ‘memories’ I mean communal beliefs, even among people who’ve never been to Poland or had any personal contact with the events of the 1940s. Of course, that isn’t the entirety of the story or the history. This is why I enjoyed so much Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations, which introduced me to a very different strain of Polish history, one with a deep civic, cosmopolitan heritage and multi-national vision of Polish history and nationhood. I discussed that here and here in this interview with Snyder himself.
The politics of the Polish current government and these rallies we saw over the weekend come out of something very different.
TPM Reader HL shared this background …
Thanks for alerting people to the anti-Semitic Polish nationalist protests this past weekend. I had missed them, but the rhetoric was oh so familiar. It was 100% PiS grievance politics. I know you try to keep an eye on the immigrant press, so you may already know this, but the recent Polish immigration tends to be big backers of the PiS, and finds the kind of Poland had clean hands rhetoric that was somewhat implicit in how the Holocaust was presented in the old Polish People’s Republic reassuring.
One of the ironies of the PiS, is the extent to which its leaders successfully play on nostalgia for the old PRL (PPR) all in the guise of rooting out the ostensible betrayers of the Polish people, which now include Walesa and most of the top level of Solidarity figures who a role in the Round-Table talks. In the case of the Kaczynski brothers, this seems grounded in sour grapes and an inflated opinion of their place in the anti-Communist opposition, if they were real opponents of it at all. Yet, another side of this are the younger people, the children/youth of the 1980s the eldest of which are now in their mid-50s and the youngest in their 40s. While often active in anti-Communist opposition in student groups and such, and as such played an important role in the agitation in the late 1980s that led the government to initiate talks, but were then not represented in the talks, which has reinforced some ugly conspiratorial thinking, often tinged with anti-Semitism if not worse. Tom Junes touches on this at the end of his book Student Politics in Communist Poland, and he has written about it articles about it for Open Democracy and other news sources.
