{"id":57596,"date":"2017-11-19T18:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-11-19T16:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=57596"},"modified":"2017-11-19T08:48:40","modified_gmt":"2017-11-19T06:48:40","slug":"26-00-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=57596","title":{"rendered":"Poles Cry for \u2018Pure Blood\u2019 Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Poles Cry for \u2018Pure Blood\u2019 Again<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

JAN T. GROSS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Nationalists marching in Warsaw, on Saturday. Credit Jaap Arriens\/NurPhoto, via Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

If you want a sense of where Poland could be heading, look no further than the events last Saturday in Warsaw.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tens of thousands of people \u2014 many of them young men with crew cuts, but some parents with children, too \u2014 flocked to the Polish capital to celebrate Independence Day in a march organized in part by two neo-fascist organizations. They waved white and red Polish flags, they brandished burning torches, and they wore \u201cwhite power\u201d symbols. They carried banners declaring, \u201cDeath to enemies of the homeland,\u201d and screamed, \u201cSieg Heil!\u201d and \u201cKu Klux Klan!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The official slogan of the march was \u201cWe want God\u201d \u2014 words from an old hymn that President Trump quoted during his speech in Warsaw in July.<\/span><\/p>\n

A dozen incredibly courageous women showed up to protest the march. After mixing with the marchers, they unraveled a long strip of cloth emblazoned with \u201cStop Fascism.\u201d They were immediately attacked. Their banner was ripped apart. Marchers pushed some of the women to the ground and kicked others.<\/span><\/p>\n

Were these women exaggerating in calling the march fascist? Or are we in fact witnessing a resurgence of fascism in Poland? To steal a phrase: I believe the women.Though the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, condemned the march, saying Poland has no place for \u201csick nationalism,\u201d the interior minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, called it \u201ca beautiful sight.\u201d He added: \u201cWe are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Given what transpired, this sounds shocking. But for those of us who follow Polish politics, the minister\u2019s take didn\u2019t come as a surprise.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since the Law and Justice Party won both the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2015, Poland has been undergoing a disturbing political transformation. Law and Justice is an Orwellian name for a party that constantly violates the law, breaks constitutional provisions and is hellbent on subjecting the courts to its control. The party is dismantling the institutional framework of parliamentary democracy piece by piece in order to remove any restraints on the personal power of its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. \u201cPrezes,\u201d the Boss, people call him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two years ago, the party bet that latching onto the refugee crisis in Europe would give it purchase on the votes necessary to win. Its calculation proved entirely correct.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the first institutions the party hijacked was public television. Law and Justice has turned it into Fox News on steroids, paid for by the taxpayers. It feeds viewers nonstop propaganda about the mounting threat to Poland\u2019s sovereignty from the European Union, specifically in the form of Muslim refugees.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those refugees present a threat to our way of life, the government and the press insist. They will assault our women, they say, and they are carrying infectious diseases to boot. A year ago, a quarter of Poles opposed accepting anyone fleeing the ravages of war in the Middle East; after months of relentless propaganda, 75 percent are now opposed. This year the country has let in only 1,474 asylum seekers, nearly all of them from Russia or Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the marchers in Warsaw seem to feel that their country is being overwhelmed. \u201cWe don\u2019t want Muslims here,\u201d they cried. \u201cNo to Islam.\u201d And \u201crefugees get out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Until very recently Poles had never given much thought to Islam beyond occasionally expressing a sense of historical pride that a Polish king, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Turks in a 17th-century battle near Vienna, thus saving Christian Europe from the infidels. This fits a recurrent theme in Polish national mythology: Poland as a rampart of Christianity, the Christ of Nations. Poland, according to this trope, has repeatedly, and heroically, suffered for the sake of others, especially the rest of Christian Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the Warsaw demonstrators paraded with burning torches, Mr. Kaczynski gave a speech in Krakow expressing a new twist on this familiar narrative: The Poles\u2019 mission now is to save a \u201csick Europe\u201d from itself. The neo-fascist marchers in Warsaw suggested, as if on cue, how it could be done: \u201cPure Blood,\u201d read one banner. \u201cWhite Europe,\u201d another said.<\/span><\/p>\n

But most Poles couldn\u2019t tell a Muslim or a Buddhist from Jesus. Their animus, which carries Polish nationalism into such an aggressively xenophobic articulation, springs primarily from a deep pool of ethnic-cum-religious hatred, which is indigenous to Poland and has historically been aimed at Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anti-Semitism is a deeply entrenched and historically rooted element of this Polish nationalist worldview. It was the ideological cornerstone of the prewar National Democratic Party of Roman Dmowski, at whose statue the Independence Day march began this year. A youth organization that helped organize the march in Warsaw is a descendant of a fascist offshoot of the party, whose members took to the streets in the 1930s to beat Jews and to slash them with razor blades affixed to wooden canes. Those who marched on Saturday are the heirs to this vile legacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Poland\u2019s leaders have let an evil genie out of the bottle. What we\u2019ve witnessed on the streets of Warsaw represents a threat not only to liberal democracy in Poland but also to the stability and welfare of the European Union.<\/span><\/p>\n

Half of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were Poles. Two million more Poles were killed during the German occupation. How many deaths are required for leaders to learn that words and ideas can kill?<\/span><\/p>\n

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Jan T. Gross<\/strong> is an emeritus professor of history at Princeton and the author of \u201cNeighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 17, 2017, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Poles Cry for \u2018Pure Blood\u2019 Again.<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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Poles Cry for \u2018Pure Blood\u2019 Again JAN T. GROSS Nationalists marching in Warsaw, on Saturday. Credit Jaap Arriens\/NurPhoto, via Getty Images If you want a sense of where Poland could be heading, look no further than the events last Saturday in Warsaw. Tens of thousands of people \u2014 many of them young men with crew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57596"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57639,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57596\/revisions\/57639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}