Polish Government Criminalizes History

These are Facebook posts I wrote about Poland criminalizing talking about Polish atrocities during the Holocaust. 


The Polish government is releasing disgusting, sophisticated propaganda to justify their asinine, autocratic, ethnonationalist, backwards law criminalizing discussing Polish atrocities during the Holocaust. No one refutes that the Polish people suffered during WWII. No one refutes that many Poles were righteous among the nations. Also, no one thinks that Poles today need to take responsibility for the atrocities of their ancestors. HOWEVER, that does not change the fact that ordinary Poles indeed committed atrocities against their Jewish neighbors. You can't change history to suit your narrative and these lies spit in the faces of not only those murdered, but the Poles who were righteous. This is a shameful turn in Polish history and portends more bad things to come.

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The Polish Prime Minister explains that Jews perpetrated the Holocaust to explain criminalizing history. Some Polish people are excited by this! But guess what? That's not news.

To my Polish friends, there were Jews who collaborated with Nazis: Capos and the head of the Judenrat. But they all met the same fate as the people that they betrayed, and if they didn't, they were put on trial for war crimes or exiled from the community. During slavery in the South, there were slaves who supervised other slaves or were the head of the household. Does that mean they weren't slaves? The Jewish collaborators were so few when you think of the 6 million who died. But why is your prime minister's focus on this? Why does he have no problem calling out these problematic figures, yet he supports a law that criminalizes mention of Polish atrocities during the Holocaust. There is no such laws about discussing or learning about Judenrat or Capos in Israel or anywhere else in the world that is democratic. When your leader and your people feel the need to distort history, you are heading down a very dark path. I hope that the people of Poland have the courage to confront their leaders and leave the past in tact, for better or worse.

There are many Nikolas' Cruz's in the world but only one America

Let's take a look a Nikolas Cruz: Adopted father died 10 years ago. Adopted mother died suddenly in November. Suffered from depression. Was bullied. Wrote scary, stupid things on social media. Fixation on guns. This profile is not that unique, especially on a global scale. However, the difference between Nikolas and the rest of boys in the world with this profile is that he had easy access to buying an "5.56×45mm, magazine-fed, gas-operated semi-automatic rifle." So the argument that people kill people; guns don't kill people, is really stupid. Because if you gave every depressed orphan boy in the world, who was fixated on guns and hated other people an AR-15, you would have even more violence in the world. (In fact, those people are often illegally conscripted as child soldiers.) You want to own a hand gun? Fine. Buy a hand gun with a certain number of bullets. You want a couple of hunting rifles to go kill bunnies. I think that's crazy, but go ahead. No one needs an AR-15 in their home. So here's the thing. We are at a crossroads. If Congress does not pass common sense gun legislation, our representatives are actively saying that they want children to be killed; that the NRA's money is more important than the lives of children. Let's be clear. If you vote for someone who takes money from the NRA, you are voting for someone who is okay that children will be killed. You are prioritizing whatever it is that makes you vote for said person over the lives of children. That's your choice, that's democracy, but own your choices.