Cultural Marxism Example Shibata

Discrimination for the Sake of the Nation: The Discourse of the League of Polish Families Against “Others” 2001-2007, by Yasuko Shibata. 2014

Cultural Marxism in Action: A Smear of LIGA POLSKICH RODZIN. German-Published Polonophobic Japanese Author Tells Us More About Ultra-Leftist Ideology Than About Polish “Intolerance”

This is the same old, standard left-wing fare. Everyone except the white, Christian, heterosexual male is a victim of discrimination. Shibata engages in all the standard leftspeak, freely throwing around such buzzwords as discrimination, racism, xenophobia, reproductive rights, sexual minorities, homophobia, heterosexism, sexual orientation, and hate speech (except, of course, when such speech comes from leftists.)

The consequences are predictable. Yasuko Shibata consistently berates Poles for disagreeing with the left-wing and homosexual agenda.

So Poles have the audacity to want to have their own nation, and to choose how to run their own nation. How horrible!

POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS

Shibata is VERY shallow in her analyses. She parrots all the standard “Poles are anti-Semites” talking points without any deep thought (or ANY thought). She repeats the mantra about Endeks, the LPR (Liga Polskich Rodzin), and other traditionalist Poles being awful people because they believed that even assimilated and converted Jews retain an “insurmountable strangeness”, and do not become “authentic Poles”. (e. g, p. 76, 80; see also p. 163). Predictably, she fails to inform the reader that many Jews ALSO believed in Jewish essentialism–even an immutable essentialism that is quasi-racial or racial. For instance, please click on Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture), read the detailed Peczkis review, and then see additional references in the first Comment under my review.

The author’s understanding of the Jedwabne massacre is nothing short of flippant. Poles are guilty, that that’s that. Shibata’s grasp of the historical fact of the prominence of Jews in the post-WWII Soviet-imposed Communist government of Poland (p. 145) is zero. I could go on and on about her abysmal ignorance of the most basic issues, but that would give me little time for anything else.

The author cannot even get her terms straight. She translates INNOWIERCY as “infidels”. (p. 162). It means no such thing. It simply means “of another faith”. (The word comes from INNE–other and WIARA–faith, and has no pejorative connotations).

FELIKS KONECZNY AND LATIN CIVILIZATION

Historian Feliks Koneczny is the bugaboo of leftists, now also including Yasuko Shibata (pp. 109-110), as his scholarship does not conform to the leftist dogma of cultural relativism. If Koneczny actually implied that western Latin civilization is “superior”, then it was no more than other cultures that usually consider themselves exceptional in some way.

For the truth about the detailed comparative analysis of civilizations conducted by Feliks Koneczny, which, BTW, had been endorsed by eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee, please click on On the Plurality of Civilisations, and read the detailed Peczkis review.

MANY UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT MINORITY RIGHTS

Shibata’s ultra-cursory approach raises many issues but never develops them. Here are a few of them:

Where do the rights of the majority end, and where do the rights of a minority begin?

As for the question of undue privileges (p. 127), where do equal rights leave off, and where do special rights begin?

Since Poles are supposed to grant what arguably are special rights to minorities, and Germany is not obligated to give the same expansive rights to the Polish minority in Germany (BTW, the same situation existed regarding the 1918-era so-called Minorities Treaty: p. 157), why should Poles take their “obligation” seriously?

ARE “ANTI-BIGOTS” THE MOST BIGOTED?

The Polish Jew, Anda Rottenberg, had wanted to paint a picture that would “expose” Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteor. Poles did not issue a fatwa against her. They merely suggested that Rottenberg be removed as director of Zacheta Galleries so that Polish Catholic tax monies not be used to support this art. Instead, Rottenberg should obtain funding for her controversial art from Israel. (p. 154). Yasuko Shibata would have us think that Poles are “racially discriminating” against Jews for balking at Polish Catholic financing of Rottenberg’s anti-Christian bigotry. I just love it!

Let us consider the book and author from another angle. Everyone knows that Japan had savagely persecuted Christians. Japan has a long history of xenophobia. Even today, Japan has never come to terms with her imperialism and her egregious atrocities as Hitler’s ally in WWII. So why is this Japanese author so interested in finding dirt in the Polish house when there are so many mountains of dirt in her own Japanese house?

The publisher is none other than the German publisher, Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Evidently, the Japanese and Germans are in alliance once again. The Axis Powers want to bash Poland.

GAY RIGHTS

Shibata’s reasoning about gays follows the standard party line. She confuses tolerating something with agreeing with and endorsing it.

The author is predictively selective about LGBT issues. The reader would never guess that homosexuals in Poland march during the Feast of Corpus Christi, one of the most sacred religious feasts in Poland, and dress in mock costumes of the Pope.

The unstated issues are even more basic. Where does a society draw the lines between not tolerated, tolerated, and endorsed sexual behaviors, and who decides where to draw these respective lines? Is being gay a private matter, or must sexual preference (or, if your prefer, sexual orientation) be a matter of group identity and public policy? And so on…