Prominent Polish bishop: Shoah is a Jewish invention

[Alatriste]

"There are bigger evils than those suffered by poor Haitians these days... the ones we are suffering are perhaps bigger than those innocents' pains... We should shed tears too for ourselves, for our poor spiritual situation, for our materialistic conception of life".

I see nothing wrong with this.

Personally, I'll take the materialistic conception of life over the earthquake any day. Even with poor spiritual situation flavoring added. And the Bible agrees, The Four Riders are War, Famine, Disease, and Death, not Laicism, Tolerance, Science and Atheism

[grumbler]

Does it?  People mention that all the time.  Maybe it doesn't get as much coverage as he would like but anybody who is interested in the Holocaust at all knows that.  It is hardly "completely ignored" it is rather "not ignored at all" except by those who are too lazy to care that much about the Holocaust.

Correct.  The only reason to argue that every victim of the Holocaust except the Jews is ignored is because one is Polish, or is not Polish and still is an anti-Semite.  It is true that the visibility of the Jews killed in the holocaust is greater than that of, say, the gypsies, but that is unsurprising given the higher visibility of Jews as compared to the gypsies.  In fact, I would argue that the visibility of gypsy victims of the Holocaust is higher among Jews than among non-Jews.

[Neil]

Has there ever been a Pole who wasn't retarded?  Maybe once, but they all fled the country or were killed before the country got Russianized.  I think it's safe to say there isn't someone even halfway intelligent within the borders of modern Poland.

[Razgovory]

"There are bigger evils than those suffered by poor Haitians these days... the ones we are suffering are perhaps bigger than those innocents' pains... We should shed tears too for ourselves, for our poor spiritual situation, for our materialistic conception of life".

I see nothing wrong with this.

Personally, I'll take the materialistic conception of life over the earthquake any day. Even with poor spiritual situation flavoring added. And the Bible agrees, The Four Riders are War, Famine, Disease, and Death, not Laicism, Tolerance, Science and Atheism

This is an acceptable since you don't believe in it.  However if you do believe then it would make sense that an earth quake is paltry compared to an eternity of damnation.

[Alexandru H.]

You're not prejudiced against anyone, you're just an idiot.

Why are so many great Poles born in a country that's populated mainly with Martinus' idiot clones?

[Malthus]

This seems typical of ethnic attitudes of attitudes still in force in Eastern Europe, and demonstrates that many of the pressures present in the past still exist today.

Many an ethnic group considers *itself* hard done by, that its sufferings have not been sufficiently acknowledged, and that those of the Jews have been unfairly highlighted; and that the behaviour of "the Jews" in Israel is no better than, or in fact worse than, their own past behaviour during WW2 etc.

Some of these points do indeed have a certain validity. The sufferings of the Poles in particular during WW2 and under the Communists were severe, and Hitler had plans for them quite comparable to those of the Jews (though obviously not as fully realized!). There is indeed an ethnic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which is sorta reminiscent of those back home in eastern Europe.

What differs is the scale and intensity. Fact is, there are hardly any Jews left in Poland any more; most were exterminated by the Germans, and those few who were not, were mostly driven out by a population highly hostile to them *after* the war (this was not a unique accomplishment, as the same fate befell "ethnic" Germans, Ukranians and many others in Eastern Europe - and Poles in Ukraine, etc). The Poles, while they undeniably suffered horribly under the Nazis (and would in all likelihood have been "next" had the Nazis won) are still there; it is not the fact of suffering that makes the fate of the Jews remarkable, it is the thoroughness of it - the fact that the Nazis more or less succeeded in their extermination campaign. The Nazis were using the Jews as their 'test case'.

If the Israelis behaved like 20th century eastern Europeans towards the Palestinians, there would be hardly any of them left - they would have been killed or driven out.   

[Ed Anger]

The only good Pole is a dead Pole.

[Gambrinus]

The only good Pole is a dead Pole.

Or a Pole dancer. 

[Syt]

Does it?  People mention that all the time.  Maybe it doesn't get as much coverage as he would like but anybody who is interested in the Holocaust at all knows that.  It is hardly "completely ignored" it is rather "not ignored at all" except by those who are too lazy to care that much about the Holocaust.

In German public discourse (i.e. mainstream media) you mainly hear about the Jews in concentration camps, to lesser extent of the gypsies Roma and Sinti and barely about socialists, homosexuals and the rest.

[Valmy]

In German public discourse (i.e. mainstream media) you mainly hear about the Jews in concentration camps, to lesser extent of the gypsies Roma and Sinti and barely about socialists, homosexuals and the rest.

Strange...any  story of the concentration camps usualy mentions they were used first for political opponents like Socialists and Liberals but at first they were run by SA which usually humiliated and bullied rather than massacred.

[Neil]

In German public discourse (i.e. mainstream media) you mainly hear about the Jews in concentration camps, to lesser extent of the gypsies Roma and Sinti and barely about socialists, homosexuals and the rest.

There's a small monument in front of the Reichstag for all the assorted flavours of communist persecuted by the Nazis.  It looks suspiciously like a bicycle rack.

[Malthus]

In German public discourse (i.e. mainstream media) you mainly hear about the Jews in concentration camps, to lesser extent of the gypsies Roma and Sinti and barely about socialists, homosexuals and the rest.

Strange...any  story of the concentration camps usualy mentions they were used first for political opponents like Socialists and Liberals but at first they were run by SA which usually humiliated and bullied rather than massacred.

My understanding is that the actual *extermination* technology was first used on the insane and others considered "defective" by the regime.

With the Jews and other ethnic "enemies", the original Nazi notion appears to have been "deportation" to some faraway place, where they could be put to work as slaves (with how much sincerety it is hard now to know). Inevitably or not, "deportation" came to mean, in practice, killing or death through labour.

The death camps were thus the convergance of three seperate programs: the "concentration camp" system, used for political-type prisioners; the death machinery used for "defectives"; and the ethnic "deportation" and slave-labour system.

It is notable that the Nazis used the exact same "deportation" language vis. the Slavs, and in particular the Poles, whose lands they particularly coveted. The implication is that the same basic program was in store for them, once circumstances permitted.

[Valmy]

My understanding is that the actual *extermination* technology was first used on the insane and others considered "defective" by the regime.

True but Syt mentioned 'Concentration Camps' specifically...which were of course first used by the Germans for hostages and forced laborers taken from occupied France and Belgium during WWI and invented by the British during the Boer War.

You are correct in that the first instances of extermination started with "defective" children in Germany and resulted in a public relations disaster for the regime.  It was alot easier to do the exterminating part while the public was too busy dying in a war to protest too much.

[Martinus]

"I repeat, from a historical perspective it is not true that only Jews days in death camps, but this is completely ignored today."

The only point that he makes that has some validity.

Does it?  People mention that all the time.  Maybe it doesn't get as much coverage as he would like but anybody who is interested in the Holocaust at all knows that.  It is hardly "completely ignored" it is rather "not ignored at all" except by those who are too lazy to care that much about the Holocaust.

Gay rights group were not allowed to participate in the previous official Auschwitz liberation celebrations. Ironically, this bishop probably wasn't talking about gays being killed in Auschwitz either.

[Valmy]

Gay rights group were not allowed to participate in the previous official Auschwitz liberation celebrations. Ironically, this bishop probably wasn't talking about gays being killed in Auschwitz either.

When I was in the Holocaust museum in Washington DC there was a big thing about the extermination of Homosexuals including, of course, they unusual tolerance during the Weimar era for Lesbianism in particular and then they sudden 180 once the the depression really got going leading to the death camps.  I do not recall if it was both gays and lesbians who were killed or just the gays.  The Germans seem to have had a bigger problem with male homosexuality.