{"id":36342,"date":"2018-02-06T19:58:43","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T18:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/36342-poland-tries-to-rewrite-history.html"},"modified":"2018-02-06T19:58:43","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T18:58:43","slug":"poland-tries-to-rewrite-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/36342-poland-tries-to-rewrite-history.html","title":{"rendered":"Poland tries to rewrite Holocaust history"},"content":{"rendered":"

After putting pressure on the judicial system and the media, Poland\u2019s authorities are now clamping down on how the country\u2019s Second World War history is told. This authoritarian trend is worrying the European Union.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

January 27 marked the commemoration of 73 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. The day before, Poland\u2019s Senate adopted by 57 votes to 23 against plus two \u00a0abstentions a law under which people who mention \u201cPolish death camps\u201d or attribute any responsibility of the Polish State in Nazi crimes can be sentenced to up to three years in jail. On February 6, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed this into law<\/a>. The law has provoked the ire of the Israeli government, which \u201cadamantly opposes\u201d <\/a>any attempt to modify historical truth.<\/p>\n

From a historical standpoint, nobody denies that death camps such as Auschwitz and the \u201cFinal Solution\u201d (extermination of the Jews) were the work of the Nazis in occupied Poland, nor that Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. Some two\u00a0million non-Jewish Poles were killed along with 3 million Polish Jews. Whilst some 6,600 Poles were recognized for having saved 30,000 to 35,000 persecuted Jews (the Poles are the people most recognized<\/a> amongst the \u201cJust\u201d), historians say that Polish people also killed thousands of Jews during and after the war. The new law on remembrance poses a problem, because it tries to deny this part of reality. This is what Holocaust museum Yad Vashem criticizes on its website<\/a>, saying that \u201crestrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion\u201d (of historical truth).<\/p>\n

The ideology of Poland\u2019s governing Law and Justice party is a return to traditional values, especially those of Catholicism, national pride, Euroscepticism and rejection of homosexuality. This all goes hand in hand with pressure on the media and the courts, as well as xenophobic anti-migrant rhetoric.<\/p>\n

A narrow view of national identity<\/h3>\n

By rejecting any historical record of anti-Jewish pogroms during and after the Second World War, Poland\u2019s parliamentary majority is playing to nationalist sentiments. It is also a way of affirming a closed and narrow view of national identity, supporting a rejection of multiculturalism and hence migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East that the European Union wants to share amongst different EU member States. Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski is clear on his stance, saying in 2015 that migrants \u201chave already brought diseases like cholera and dysentery to Europe, as well as \u201call sorts of parasites\u201d.<\/a><\/p>\n

The ruling party\u2019s stance has divided Polish society but has a certain amount of support. Last November some 100,000 people gathered in Warsaw to celebrate \u201cindependence\u201d, chanting \u201cwe want God\u201d, which echoes a Catholic song now sometimes interpreted as a rejection of Islam, and \u201cClean Poland, White Poland\u201d.<\/p>\n

The perceived enemy for the Polish ultra-Right is not just from outside the country. It is also inside, where it attacks those who negotiated the end of Communism under the principle \u201cyes to amnesty, not to amnesia\u201d, instead of a radical purge. Thus Lech Walesa, who has passed from hero to \u201ctraitor\u201d in the eyes of the ruling party, is accused of having delivered Poland into the arms of the European Union and its liberal values. \u00a0<\/p>\n

It is in this charged atmosphere that on December 20 the European Commission launched an unprecedented procedure against the Polish government, which had remained deaf to its calls for it to stop trying to influence the courts. The EU Commission said in a statement<\/a> that it had \u201cconcluded that there is a clear risk of a serious breach of the rule of law in Poland\u201d, adding that it had therefore proposed to the Council to adopt a decision under Article 7(1) of the EU\u2019s rules. \u201cIn the absence of judicial independence, serious questions are raised about the effective application of EU law,\u201d it says. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After putting pressure on the judicial system and the media, Poland\u2019s authorities are now clamping down on how the country\u2019s Second World War history is told. This authoritarian trend is worrying the European Union. January 27 marked the commemoration of 73 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. The day before, Poland\u2019s Senate adopted by 57 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":63592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[],"ji_location":[2417],"class_list":["post-36342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other","ji_location-poland"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoland tries to rewrite Holocaust history - JusticeInfo.net<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"a law under which people who mention \u201cPolish death camps\u201d or attribute any responsibility of the Polish State in Nazi crimes can be sentenced to up to three years in jail. 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