Poland says no Polish killed Jews, but Jews killed Jews.

[ScotsAlan]

Listen up. I live in China. Mao killed at least 45 million. Maybe 70 million. Mao is a hero. He is on our bank notes.

It would be the same as Germany having Hitler on modern bank notes

It needs to change.

[GD4ELI]

Poland is saying that the Polish state didn't, as the country was host to their western neighbours and any government wasn't ligitimate.

[Chinahand]

Sad reflection on the thought police wanting to simplify hugely complex and horrible issues to no-true Pole had anything to do with the holocaust.

Violence such as happened at Jebwabne are being quietly swept under the carpet.

Hitler had many willing executioners in all the countries he brought violence too, just as Mao did in China.

Both men created the circumstances, but the evil was committed by their underlings at a scale which is hard to comprehend.

Thank goodness we live in a society where it isn't necessary to plot the murder of your neighbour, and where such thoughts are, in the main, thought of as being repellent rather than something to glory in - nutters, religious and otherwise excepted.

 

 

[Rog]

There's enough well documented and three way verifiable details of who did what in the attempted eradication of Jewish people without trying to spin history. There's also enough upsurge in Judenhaas across Europe to be cause for concern.

Trying to create the image that the people of Poland want to create, many Polish people, and Poland is far from unique in this respect, may go down well with the Snowflakes and those who hate Jewish people for a variety of reasons, but bonafide history can't be changed other than in the strange minds of Snowflakes and Revisionists.

As for Mao, that's nothing to do with what took place in Europe.

[quilp]

The majority of the killing was carried out by Ukrainian and Latvian SS units and special squads who often relished in their work, buoyed by copious quantities of strong liquor and the methamphetamine 'Pervitin' to enable 24 hour production aided by a sonderkommando made up mostly of Jews and other groups who worked under sentence of death if they didn't collaborate and deal with the dead, sometimes themselves doing the killing also. They were shot out of hand for the slightest error or signs of dissent, which was usually the refusal to carry out the murder of other Jews. 

It was a difficult time for ordinary Poles who had lived side by side with their Jewish neighbours for generations. On the one hand they were obliged to report anyone with Jewish connections and possibly hiding Jews, and on the other, loyalty to people they saw and spoke to on a daily basis, whose children played together, conflicted with concerns for their own safety. And of course, there were those who willingly exposed Jews and the Christian Poles who hid them, without conscience as antisemitism was commonplace in Poland, a country with the highest population of European Jewry at the time who had lived in basically assimilated and peaceful harmony within Polish society for hundreds of years. 

Collaboration with the Nazis was rife in every nation which came under the swastika; the Dutch, French and Belgians, some of those people Jews themselves, all contributed to the round-ups of Jews, some quite willingly, seduced by the antisemitic nazi propaganda and financial reward. The trains ran on time, the transports went like clockwork aided and abetted by the countries they passed through. It's not as if, by 1943-44, not many people in nazi-occupied Europe knew what the fate of the Jews was. In his New York Times article of December 22nd 1943, William Vanden Heuvel published, 'The Holocaust Was No Secret' subltitled, "Churchill knew, we all knew and we could not do anything about it except win the war."

Poland has set a precedent here. By putting themselves under the spotlight, the extent of the involvement of other nations who enabled the Holocaust may also be called into question.

Interesting the media reaction from the Israeli dailies over this...

[Rog]

Re Mao, unlike Hitler Mao fought a war to get rid of feudal oppressive rule and replace it with what for most was a much improved way of life. Revolutions all to often morph into a period of civil war and as with the case of Russia such was the case in China. 

I used to visit Beijing and Guangdong Universities back in the 90's for a few days each year to present papers on quality management and control and always found it a trip that I really looked forward to, the only thing is that it's f'ing cold in Beijing in February!

I disliked Hong Kong immensely. Revolting place.

Maybe getting stuck in the turnstile of the Pearl Ferry one lunchtime and facing the anger of goodness knows how many locals facing a delay to getting their lunch had something to do with it?

[Chinahand]

Mao deliberately shot millions of people who were the wrong class ... if you were a landlord, or a capitalist your life after liberation was at great risk.  If you were lucky you were subject to struggle sessions and re-education, but a bullet was just as possible - and it wasn't just you.  Your children were marked out as members of the bourgeoisie too ... many escaped the initial terror of liberation only to be declared bad elements and class enemies in the cultural revolution.  And often the most violent red guards were these children beating up and killing to prove their loyalty to Mao's thought.  Don't glorify post revolutionary China - it murdered, seized and starved millions. 

[quilp]

Glad you said it, china. Needed saying. 

[ScotsAlan]

It is very difficult at times to see my daughter being indoctrinated to accept a mass murderer as the father of her country. 

Revision of history is very strong in China at the moment. CCTV now says Chinese steel production in 1954 was greater than UK production. The official line is that Mao met his targets before the backyard furnaces of the GLF.

History is being reinvented on an unprecedented scale in China today.

I have had people ask me, for example, do you have trains in the UK, do you have GPS in UK, do you have online payment systems, do you have internet？

I have even had people ask me if we have Uber in the west.

Many people here honestly believe the Party invented everything, and that people in the west are riding around in horse and carts, pre iPhone era. And that China invented the mobile phone, the train, the car, internet and hotels. Cinese people think westerners are stupid and are not capapable of anything, apart from being foreign.

And they hate us for being foreign.

Too strong sorry. They don’t hate us for being foreign.

I think it’s a strong dislike. 

We fucked up in the past. Hitler and Stalin. We know we fucked up, and we started again. 

We don’t have Hitler or Stalin on our banknotes. But China still has Mao. That means they have to reinvent history. The Party makes history fit their policy of Mao worship.

Thats a tough target to meet. Small lies become whoppers. And history becomes a tool rather than a lesson.

[ScotsAlan]

Theresa May....wow. She comes to China.... does it all wrong. She has no idea about how China works. Her begging bowl is an embarrassment.

[Freggyragh]

May is typical English. They actually think they are respected for what was done to China, and think China is bound to cut them a favourable trade deal. The U.K. needs some lessons from Germany in how to deal with a problematic history. One day the CCP will have to deal with its own history too. 

[ScotsAlan]

On 2/19/2018 at 7:32 AM, quilp said:

Glad you said it, china. Needed saying. 

China said it well.

I have been seven years in China now.

I work in China on a Chinese contract, with a Chinese work permit.

I have a Chinese wife, Chinese daughter, I totally completely live in China.

Lets all back chinahand. 

ignore anything I say about China. What the fuck do I know about China.

[quilp]

It's all about the bullet points. 

[TheTeapot]

The Guardian is running a story claiming 1 in 20 britons don't believe the holocaust happened. The research was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Trust who seem to have something to plug. I'm not sure if this should be news, the poll was conducted by a market research company, and had a sample of 2000 people, but seems a big thing is being made of it. You could easily argue 5% of people are astonishingly dumb, so these results are to be expected. 

Has anyone ever seen a holocaust denial documentary? I saw one a fair few years ago by an australian guy. Fucking mental.

I think I'm getting more and more cynical with age, I find almost every story in the news has an agenda behind it, or has been planted or written to gain some kind of deliberate response. And it's getting worse. All seems to be to further create divisions within society, all across the western world. I'd love to know whats going on.

[John Wright]

What I find sad, on holocaust Memorial Day, is that across the world there is still hatred and oppression of minority groups, often by other minority groups,  manipulated by others to suit ulterior motives.

I’ve visited Auschwitz Birkenau, twice, and other camps. I expected it of Communist era revisionism - the film introduction blamed the West for not intervening earlier and bombing the place and of course there were only rooms dedicated to some of the minorities who were incarcerated and killed. Notably ignoring the mentally ill, LGBT and Roma.

What is staggering is that 30 years after the fall of communism the same film is shown, there is still no acknowledgment of the suffering of certain groups. And it’s not the size of the group that counts, it’s the fact that, for all of them, from Jews to Christians who opposed Hitler, to LGBT to Roma the aim was extinction.

We forget at our peril.

Most minority groups have much in common in how they are marginalised and how they are encouraged to not find things in common with other marginalised groups, lest, together they find support, strength and protection.

Niemöllers words are truer now than ever:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

And how we treat outsiders, from refugees, the mentally ill, the sick, disabled all the way through races and religions to those who identify as trans and LGBT is a measure of the decency, or otherwise of our society.

What is remarkable, and worrying, today, is how the majority are being manipulated into seeing themselves as an oppressed minority, when asked to treat others as equals.