Far-right MP forces abandonment of Holocaust scholar’s lecture | Hacker News Reader

Far-right MP forces abandonment of Holocaust scholar’s lecture

notesfrompoland.com

19 pointsjruohonen27 comments

I’m quite disappointed that HN gets more and more political news here (which are not objective truths but are portrayed as such). Could we please keep it free of politics and more technology focused?

It's more complex than that. Some on-topic stories have political overlap and it would be neither possible nor desirable to exclude them.

There's lots of past explanation here for anyone who wants to understand how we approach this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

(This is not a comment on the OP, which I haven't looked at.)

This is a very much on-topic post because of its relation to:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Wikipedia+holocaust

Far right extremism - call it with its name: fascism - is gaining traction every year in may EU countries, including mine. I have no idea if that's more the result of ruthless politicians speaking to people's bellies rather than their minds, which is a well known recipe for success among uneducated masses, or simply that more people don't trust progressive parties anymore (which could be explained by growing vote abstentionism in some countries), or both, but the result is anyway a worrying slide towards another backward destructive era which shouldn't find place in a modern civilized world.

Not sure how this is fascist. Explain?

Not sure what storming, disturbing and leading to the cancellation of an event that describes historical occurrences else is. A normal hobby? Surely not.

A protest?

Left-wingers also storm, disturb, and try to cancel events, so it's not an exclusively "fascist" pastime.

Don't disagree, the wing doesn't matter, both can still apply fascist strategies

Not me, but OP seemed to be claiming that this brand of far-right extremism is better described as fascism. As opposed to claiming that storming a lecture is fascism.

I sympathise somewhat with the claim. Fascism has evolved since political parties literally used it in their names and marched around in customised military uniforms.

There are certain narratives continue to demarcate modern fascism from other extremist politics. A striking one is the focus on a pure nation or race, and the idea that some impure foreign invader is conspiratorially undermining that nation, and dragging it down from its purity and former glory.

For Braun this is the gays and the Jews (as it was for Hitler); for Trump it's the Mexicans; for Farage it's the Romanians; for Orban the "non-Europeans"; for Bolsonaro the indigenous Native Americans, etc...

This is pretty distinct from, say, authoritarian communist narratives, which are often about liberating the workers of the world from their capitalist masters.

The problem with the scholar mentioned here is that a lot of his research is considered biased. This case is not so black and white.

The MP mentioned in the article is considered by most Poles a freak at best (and a foreign agent by many).

The Polish holocaust debate is rather interesting, because Polish people (as in, ethnic Poles) were both victims and perpetrators; millions of Polish were killed during the holocaust, and the plan was to kill up to ~85% of them and use the rest in forced labour (i.e. slavery, basically) to make lebensraum for more worthy people. Slavs weren't considered as bad as Jews, but still untermenschen.

At the time same, it's obviously true that some Polish people were also perpetrators.

It's interesting to watch the debate; it's not just far-right extremism or fascism that opposes the more nuanced view. There are a lot of emotions involved and it raises interesting questions about what it means to "be Polish", to "be a victim", group identity, shared national identity, etc.

If you’re interested in what those who criticize people like the scholar mentioned in the article have to say, I can provide some background (I live in Poland).

Basically many Poles feel like they’re being framed as perpetrators (as a whole nation) instead of victims (6 million Poles were killed during WW2). There were many people who helped Jews during war. Among Righteous Among Nations Poles are the majority. Also some historians, like the one from the article, are considered to be biased by neglecting the majority of sacrifices of Poles while showing only wrong doings of some minor groups, which were never supported by Poland as a country.

At the same time they fail to mention the scale of collaboration among Polish Jews during WW2 and after, which very often was punished by death by the Polish Underground Government.

Question, since your there. How much of this fight is linked to modern fights or Soviet Union era fights in your opinion? Or is this mostly just related to fights over people/remembrance over WW2?

> Slavs weren't considered as bad as Jews, but still untermenschen.

The plan to exterminate Slavs:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

was actually formed before the plan to exterminate Jews:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

Germany itself actually didn't have a large Jewish population (as a percentage), and would probably have been happy to simply have them leave (though they didn't make it easy for people, and no one was really welcoming):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

but when the Nazis conquered (half of) Poland, suddenly they had millions more to 'deal with', and so they needed something on an industrial scale.

Generally, all the folks stuck between Stalin and Hitler had a bad time in the 1920s and especially 1930s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

I agree with what you say, but Nazis didn't conquer Poland. Germany did. Word Nazi was invented in 1980s. There were no Nazi soldiers speaking Nazi language from Nazi country conquering Poland.

Aside from being wrong, this is also exceedingly pedantic. Even if it was correct (which it's not) everyone understands "Nazi" means "Germany under control of the NSDAP".

"After the NSDAP's rise to power in the 1930s, the use of the term "Nazi" by itself or in terms such as "Nazi Germany", "Nazi regime", and so on was popularised by German exiles outside the country, but not in Germany. From them, the term spread into other languages and it was eventually brought back into Germany after World War II. The NSDAP briefly adopted the designation "Nazi" in an attempt to reappropriate the term, but it soon gave up this effort and generally avoided using the term while it was in power."

Peak usage: 1940s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nazi%2Cnsdap&y...

Letters using "Nazi" in 1933: "I was in Hanover about two years ago, just when the Nazi movement was gaining strength" https://www.theguardian.com/world/1933/apr/01/secondworldwar...

Everyone today understands "Nazi". During the WW2 it was almost completely not used. It was reinvented and popularized later in the 1980s. See for example wiki article Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact [0].

It says it was between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

While in the actual Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact[1] there is no mention of any mythical Nazis, even the title says Nichtangriffsvertrag zwischen Deutschland und der Union der Sozialistischen Sowjetrepubliken, 23. August 1939

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

[1] https://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokume...

> During the WW2 it was almost completely not used.

I literally showed you a bunch of letters from 1933 which used the word in several of them and a Google ngram which showed the peak of popularity in the 1940s.

Here you can hear Churchill use it in 1939: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWqf4wxam14

> mythical Nazis

Nazis were not mythical creatures. They were very real, whatever name you decide to use.

You hit the nail on the head there with "that opposes the more nuanced view."

It seems no one wants that in the current age of point scoring in the twitter-shout wars.

I'm not so sure the powers that be aren't gleefully stoking these big topic arguments to distract us all from the atrocities and corruption going on in the background.

Yes, everyone get enraged and shout slogans about birth control, race, gender, war, celebrities! Just don't check on all the deals we're making behind your back, that's misinformation.

There's no doubt some people using emotive topics such as this for "quick point scoring", and/or use it to distract the news cycle from other less favourable stories. But these sort of "distractions" do fall in to very fertile ground with the general public, so I'm not sure it's actually all that meaningful really.

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