German Guilt Diffusion So Endeks Now Are Nazis Krzywiec

Chauvinism, Polish Style: The Case of Roman Dmowski (Beginnings: 1886-1905), by Grzegorz Krzywiec, Jaroslaw Garlinski (Translation). 2016

LEWACTWO Absurdities: German Guilt Diffusion by Equating Polish Patriots With German Nazis

To the unsuspecting reader, this LEWAK (leftist) book at first looks like impressive scholarship. It is loaded with mostly-obscure and unavailable references. However, as the informed reader soon learns, this volume is a mile wide and inch deep. Author Krzywiec flits from topic to topic, and is very superficial in his reasoning. His mindset, already revealed by the insulting title, becomes more and more obvious as one reads this book.

ALL THAT AWFUL ENDEK “BIGOTRY”. ONLY ONE PROBLEM: IT WAS HELD BY LEADING JEWS THEMSELVES!

The author laments that Endeks thought that Jews were “eternally alien” (p. 107), Asiatics (p. 124), incapable of having Polish national feeling even if fully assimilated (p. 288), and constituting a separate nation (p. 305). On and on…What terrible people the Endeks must have been for thinking such hateful things!

The reader would never guess this by reading Krzywiec, but virtually all the naughty teachings of Roman Dmowski and the other National Democrats had mirror-image counterparts in the mainstream Jewish thinking of the time. Examples (See my reviews where available):

Eminent Jewish philosopher Martin Buber: Even after centuries of assimilation, Jews remain a distinctive, Oriental people. [THE JEWISH DARK CONTINENT,by Nathaniel Deutsch]
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Martin Buber: Jews are a “community of blood”. Jews are a VOLK. Jews are a STAMM (community of common descent). [THE RENAISSANCE OF JEWISH CULTURE IN WEIMAR GERMANY, by Michael Brenner]
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Prominent Yiddishist Noah Prylucki: Jews are the inevitable OTHER. Jews are their own VOLK. Jews are in RASSENKAMPF (racial struggle) with other peoples. Jews in Poland were not, are not, and never will be, Poles. Even a fully-assimilated Jew retains an indelible “Jewish spirit” that remains alien to the culture in which he lives. [JEWISH PEOPLE, YIDDISH NATION, by Kalman Weiser]
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Leading Cultural-Zionist Asher Hirsch Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’Am): When Jews assimilate, they do not, and should not, fully join the gentile culture. Instead, they do express, and should express, their Jewishness in terms of that gentile culture–all the while retaining their separatist identity. [AHAD HA-AM ESSAYS-LETTERS-MEMOIRS (Amazon: B000TQGQDA)]

ABOUT THIS BOOK: GERMAN GUILT DIFFUSION–PROMOTED BY GERMANY

The usual suspects are behind the English-language version of this book: The German publisher Peter Lang GmbH of Frankfurt am Main, which has already cranked out quite a few anti-Polish books. If it serves German goals, why not? More on this later. In addition, the author is identified (back cover) as a research fellow at Tel Aviv University and Vrije Universitet (Brussels)[remember Guy Verhofstadt and his pearls of wisdom about Polish patriots being Nazis?]. It figures.

The content of this book is nothing more than the standard Judeocentric fare, with the perpetual-victim Jew and the villainous Catholic Pole. The double standard is palpable. If a Jew is harmed by a Polish act, such as a boycott for economic self-defense, it is something unspeakably terrible. But if a Pole is harmed by a Jewish act, such as profiteering, then it means nothing.

For the truth about Roman Dmowski and the Endeks, see my many reviews on this subject.

SELECTIVE PRESENTATION AND OMISSION OF EVIDENCE

The authors whom LEWAK Grzegorz Krzywiec admires or cites are instructive. They consist of old Communist-ideologue authors, and “winners” such as Zygmunt Baumann, Robert Blobaum, Alina Cala, Feliks Tych, Joanna B. Michlic, Adam Michnik vel Schechter, Brian Porter-Szucs, and Genevieve Zubrzycki. Note that Porter-Szucs wrote the irresponsible Endek-demonizing WHEN NATIONALISM BEGAN TO HATE. [See my review]. Furthermore, Brian Porter-Szucs is much further to the left politically than is apparent from the books he writes. Check out his blogspot [I did], in which he engages in anti-PiS messages.

Just as significant are top-quality scholars of Polish nationalism that Grzegorz Krzywiec ignores completely: Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Leszek Zebrowski, Jolanta Mysiakowska-Muszynski, and Wojciech J. Muszynski. Their scholarship does not fit the left-wing template, so therefore it does not exist. They are Orwellian unpersons.

Some of the author’s thinking is especially telling. Krzywiec reports that the young Dmowski had “a certain arrogance towards his Russian teachers.” (p. 32). So here is Poland under the lash of tsarist Russian oppression; the Russian-run schools are teaching contempt for all things Polish; and it turns out that the teenaged Dmowski is the one who is arrogant. I just love it!

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AUTHOR GRZEGORZ KRZYWIEC PLAYS THE REDUCTIO AD HITLERUM CARD

When all else fails, drag Hitler into the mix. Krzywiec does this when he quotes 1 (ONE!) Endek paper that spoke positively of Hitler as an idealist. (p. 180). That was back in 1934, when Nazi rule over Germany was new. Evidently, according to Krzywiec’s logic, Winston Churchill was a Nazi because, after all, Churchill had once praised Hitler as a dynamic leader. In making his anti-Polish insinuation, Krzywiec completely ignores dozens of Endek publications that unambiguously and consistently condemned both Italian fascism and German Nazism, and had done so long before Nazi Germany had become an imminent threat to Poland.

WHY THIS BOOK? CULTURAL MARXISM AT THE UNIVERSITY

Leftists are masters at manipulating emotions and symbols. Roman Dmowski has thus become a convenient demon-symbol for leftist hate, and author Grzegorz Krzywiec is playing the same game.

This LEWAK (leftist) author is just one of quite a few Poles who can advance his career in academia by ingratiating his leftist and Jewish colleagues, notably by casting aspersions on Poland. It fits-in perfectly with the cultural Marxism (KULTUROWE MARKSIZM) in academia, which always tends towards the undermining and discrediting of the religious and patriotic traditions of nations (of white, Christian-majority ones, that is).

WHY THIS BOOK? REDUCING GERMAN GUILT FOR THE HOLOCAUST

The relativization of anti-Semitism, as exemplified by this book (moreover printed by a German publisher), is part of the overall strategy of muddying the waters and thereby slowly-but-surely retreating from the reality of the solitary guilt of the Germans for the Holocaust. It is like surrounding a mass-murderer with pickpockets and traffic-light violators, and constantly parading them around as “that horde of lawbreakers”. Even though the difference between a mass-murderer and pickpocket is never formally denied, it is still to the mass murderer’s advantage for his action to be constantly framed in terms of just one of many forms of lawbreaking. Such are the subtleties of German guilt diffusion in action.

That is what happens when the German Nazis are conflated with Polish Endeks. The Nazis now become just one of many constituents of “that horde of anti-Semites”. The Holocaust becomes just one of many different manifestations of European anti-Semitism, and the solely-deserved German guilt for the Holocaust is thereby blurred. Owing to the fact that we live in a time of historical illiteracy, postmodernism, and moral relativism (actually, moral confusion), this German-guilt-reducing strategy is more effective than it would have been in an earlier day and age.

Finally, the focus on anti-Semitism diverts attention away from the REAL cause of the Holocaust, which is centuries of German supremacist thinking.