Hi Larry - thanks for your response
Quoting: NED
There was no Final Solution for the Russians and the Poles. They were allowed to survive as nations but only as slaves for the Aryan nation. The total extermination of Jews was one of the underpinnings of the Nazi state ideology and was the natural outcome of hundreds of years of official blaming of the Jews for all the ills of the world. It is not surprising then that so many were the 'willing executioners' and that so many today are still negative or ambivalent about Jews.
What I'm arguing for is not less sympathy for the dead Poles or Russians but more understanding and sympathy for the dead Jews and more condemnation of the causes of their perishment, as tall an order as that may appear.
You rightly point out slavery, but omit the ultimate fate which was simply death. A nation of slaves cannot be rationally seen as a nation in the political/social sense. My argument is not for sympathy- it is simply for evenhandedness and temperance before judgment is cast, which I'll comment on in response to your view on context.
When you say the 'willing executioners' I take it you mean in the main the Nazis, and to a lesser extent any Pole or fellow Jew who participated. I ask that because the ambience of the post seems to suggest you refer to the Poles, but surely I must be wrong. I included fellow Jews not out of spite but just to put the fact across that it is inescapable that there were some Jews who regretably caused the deaths of other Jews through pointing them out to the Nazis. I would put this down to the context of the circumstances they faced so I wont judge their actions.
Quoting: NED
Context is not everything. What your paragraph implies is that somehow individual or collective victims of the Holocaust may have deserved their fate. I can't ask my father what the context was because he is dead, but I think it would've been scurrilous to do so. No matter how imperfect some individual Jews may have been that perished as part of the Final Solution, none of them deserved what happened to them. This was concluded at the Nuremberg Trials and confirmed by countless scholarly works by Jews and non-Jews since. It is a closed chapter for most civilized, well-meaning individuals except for those who are still on the wrong side of history.
It seems you misunderstood me. I dont think I can explain it any clearer than what I did. There is no implication of any body deserving their fate in the holocaust. To be blunt, the clear implication is that Poles sometimes get fed up with modern day apologists who use gentile and 21st century morality to criticise and inflame Poles as a collective group of people for the actions of a MINORITY during WW2. Some react by saying bugger it, if I'm going to be blamed for it no matter how much I try and defend myself, I'll just slag off the Jews anyway. Others ignore it (to their credit). Others are clearly Anti semitic per se and their reactions need no comment. Myself, I react with thought and words.
Quoting: NED
The basis of modern society is the individual (not a member of a tribe), who bears full responsibility for his actions. That's an American and cosmopolitan concept, which is still alien to many Europeans, whose thinking is controlled by the notions of nation, blood, the sacred native ground, and similar atavisms.
Actually, I would submit individualism in the sense you describe was probably first conceptualised by the body politic (the szlachta) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwelath in the C16 - C18. Students of history will no doubt know what those concepts led to for the Commonwealth. I'll admit that my thinking is sometimes tinged by the atavisms you point out - I distill that branch of thought down to my pride in my Polish blood. Hey, I even throw on my Polish eagle t shirt and observe a minute's silence on the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. With respect Larry, I think that if you do some sole searching yourself you'll find your admirable championing of your heritage to be tinged with simialr atavistic compulsions.
Quoting: NED
I'm not aware that anyone has quibbled about the ethnicity of the dead. The Russians lost a couple of million in the Nazi camps, the Poles lost even more - that's not the issue here at all, and that's what's so infuritaing about debates like this - not understanding or pretending not to understand the difference between the causes of Jewish deaths and those of others.
I hold out an olive branch in the hope that we can come to some concensus so that we may both honour the memory of "native" Pole and Pole of "Jewish descent/faith/extraction" as one and the same and you lose the meaning.
If you have indeed posted your last, thats regretable. I enjoyed discussing this matter with you and hope I have given you some food for thought. Kind regards to you and yours, Dan