Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik Read Free Book Online Page B

Polish political scene founded the National Remembrance Institute, established as an organ to ‘pursue the crimes against the Polish state’, which given our history, were many, but transformed with time into basically a way to persecute anyone who had anything to do with the old system, in a witch-hunt not dissimilar from McCarthyism, touching many leading figures. This led to the absurd situation where it aimed to discredit people like Ryszard Kapuścinski, the Polish star reporter, who was a believer in socialism and later a supporter of Solidarity, but somehow started to be a liability in the new system. Many of our artistic and moral authorities had to pretend they didn’t live under communism, or had to quickly erase their engagement with the system to remain in the government’s good books.

    1.4 Dig your own Berlin Wall, animatronic set in the Mini Europe theme park in Brussels
    What is not remembered enough, and to a greater disgrace, is the Holocaust, which happened nearly entirely on the lands of the current Poland. The recent Polish film
Consequences
, about the aftermath of a pogrom in Jedwabne, caused the outrage not only of the right wing – magazine covers were calling for lynching of the main actor. Many ex-communist countries are plagued with anti-Semitism, which, given the near-non-existence of a Jewish population is all the more outrageous. Many of them were directly implicated in the Holocaust, especially Hungary, Lithuania, Romania and Western Ukraine, those who are now the most willing to commemorate the ‘crimes of communism’, and want to be seen as its ‘great crashers’. One of the biggest “successes” of e.g. Lithuania in the EU was in trying to force a European Day of Memory to the victims of Nazism and Stalinism, trying to enshrine in law the levelling of the two totalitarianisms in the EU parliament a few years ago. This leads to the trivialisation or obliteration of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and justifying anti-Semitism with anticommunism. In all the post-communist countries thereare now great anti-communist museums to be built: in Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Hungary, soon in Poland, where we still have a commonly-used word,
Żydokomuna
, that conflates Jews and Communists. It was justly criticized not only by the left, but also by liberal British commentators, with Jonathan Freedland being appalled by the ideas behind the ‘double genocide’. In his recent
Bloodlands
, historian Timothy Snyder tells the story of the war crimes in the East caught ‘between Hitler and Stalin’, yet doesn’t highlight enough the participation of the locals in the Holocaust, which was pointed out by the Vilnius-based Jewish historian Dovid Katz. In Poland, this discussion is mostly due to Jan Tomasz Gross’s ground-breaking books
Neighbours
and
Fear
on the collaboration of some Poles with the Germans in assisting the Holocaust for the sake of personal financial gain. Focusing on communist crimes not only whitewashes the scale of collaboration with Nazi crimes against the Jews and denigrates the significance of the Holocaust, the real idea behind this elision is to show that the evil comes from the outside, and we are good, therefore we haven’t done anything wrong, ever.
    The backdrop of this manipulation of historical memory is a shadowy justification to all the policies introduced after ’89. How else, than by the ritual beating of ‘komuna’, would the subsequent governments justify themselves? In many countries, Hungary being the most blatant, it leads to some atrocious right wing and racist politics on the part of the government. But as we’ve seen, the European Union didn’t react when Hungarian authorities were introducing censorship. It didn’t react to the president Orban marginalizing the opposition’s legal rights. It didn’t react to government ministers’ recent racist comments on Jews and Roma, comparing them to animals and bringing back the rhetoric