Reply #36: Fighting fascism must be continuous

[izquierdista]

Poles and Lithuanians are NOT anti-Semitic by some accident of birth. Every human culture values itself and cautions about getting too close to the other. The other culture might be dangerous or evil or swarthy or dirty or greedy or misogynistic or violent or any of hundreds of other epithets that have been hurled back and forth. What Kazimierz and Schindler realized is that people are just people, and should be given the chance to live in peace, whatever their culture.

What Nazis do is to take advantage of cultural suspicions and fan the flames of hatred for their own purposes. Nazis only picked on the Jews because they were a significant minority. They couldn't pick on Japanese; there weren't enough living in Europe of the early 20th century. They couldn't pick on Lutherans because they were too large a minority, in fact a majority in some places. Jews were a minority everyone came in contact with, they dressed different, they worshiped different, they celebrated different holidays, they called themselves "God's chosen people". What a convenient target for a lazy demagogue to vilify!

The formation of ghettos is not as easy as you seem to think. Sometimes, it was because Jews wanted to live in close proximity to their own, to facilitate social interaction. Harlem did not become a ghetto by forced migrations; it was a cultural renaissance that led African Americans to want to live there in the 1920s. But by the 1960s, it had become an economically depressed area with a lack of opportunity for the residents. Lodz was barely a spot on the map in the 1820's; in the 1920's it was one of the largest cities in Poland because of the textile industry that grew up there, an industry in which Jews were very well integrated, not shunned. When the Nazis rolled in, the first thing they did was to put walls around the Jewish neighborhood and turn it into a ghetto. And the more people they packed in and the less food they supplied, the worse the living conditions became, proving what the Nazis said all along that Jews were dirty and sub-human. If you took any exclusive gated community anywhere and applied Nazi methods, you could also turn it along with its residents into a ghetto and call the people living there sub-human. Just look at what the Gaza Strip has become today.

Poles have suffered along with the Jews that used to make up a large fraction of the population of the country. After the partitions, the Germans, Austrians, and Russians used the cultural differences between Catholics and Jews to keep both types of Poles subservient to their ambitions of Empire. And with enough propaganda, yes, they did turn on each other to the detriment of both.