Poland’s explosive “Holocaust complicity bill” may or may not be about to become law. After Israel raised concerns about the proposed penalty for anyone accusing Poland of complicity in Nazi crimes, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s explanation that the Holocaust also had its “Jewish perpetrators” then sparked further outrage. Poles had good reason to be lumped together with Germans as perpetrators of the Holocaust, but Poles also have a lot to answer for. So what is Israel to do?
This is a segment from The “Assassination, Prevarication & Narration Peroration” Edition.
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Photo by Tomer Neuberg/Flash90: Holocaust survivors and activists take part at a protest outside the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv, February 8, 2018.
The besotting problem here is the shackle of “we,” forcing a conscious identity onto an abstraction, thereby punishing or conditioning actual people who are subsumed into that abstraction. So the Poles have not faced their role in the Holocaust while the Germans have. So Poles decree, through their speaking organ of legislature, that they will not live the affront of attributing false guilt onto them. The world is divided into nations, and you must be part of one. Dual nationality or citizenship is anomalous to true world and, um, national, order, in any case a small aberration from which not much should be made.
Did the US Congress, when apologizing for the internment of overwhelmingly US citizens who were Japanese, providing modest money for those not yet gone of old age, apologize for the nation? Could it? Can Congress speak for all–is that what representative democracy actually does? I’d say that the government acted against a prior political event and structure (the camps) so as to in part reduce their chance of recurrence, as well as link the event via condemnation to race neutrality both in law and politics of the moment. But this is not identical at all to speaking for a nation which, in the US’s case, has changed through immigration from the 1940s.
The nation is a rather recent tool of forced, unique inclusion. Inclusions forced and otherwise there have always been, many local, such as vassals to lords, some interstate, such as the Catholic Church. The nation, as it evolved, suppressed the importance of these others, often wiping them out. But this is no claim for a natural ontology of the nation. That assertion is for political control: contest over what the nation is, then submit to the outcome now flowing in “us” all. It is not, then, surprising to see this Polish law coming from a rightward move in politics going so far as to trump the legislature, the voice of the People and Nation, over the courts as independent rule of law. And it is not surprising that Israel, a country deeply engaged in memory of assaults over millennia, also moving toward the same internal political goals, should have prominent politicians cry out against what the Polish nation wants to protect the Jewish nation. Fascism, where the State becomes the sole voice of the People and Nation, is the unrelenting path of this logic.
I cannot argue a nation must do anything. “Nation” is a shorthand, more coercive than not, which we are all tempted to use. Our dilemma is that we need must have a forced inclusion, one accepted for safety and the fear of our neighbors as well as the love we hope will spring forth from them. And one argument used for nation is that other nations there are, so be prepared against them. That argument did not rely once on the mass politics of nationalism; now it does, and doing so, has even more force–for your neighbor may look at you in hatred if you do not conform. When you see a nation acting, know there is enslavement as well as patriotism afoot.
This Polish law is wrong, but no nation created it. That forgotten brings the same on in righteous defense against it. What that law does is not so dissimilar from the Israeli tort against advocating a boycott of settlement products. The rationale for both is defense of the nation to which one must belong and so conform.
Before you get too outraged,: “As far back as 1933, Nazi policy makers had discussed establishing Jewish-led institutions to carry out anti-Jewish policies. The concept was based upon centuries-old practices which were instituted in Germany during the Middle Ages. As the German army swept through Poland and the Soviet Union, it carried out an order of S.S. leader Heydrich to require the local Jewish populace to form Jewish Councils as a liaison between the Jews and the Nazis. These councils of Jewish elders, (Judenrat; plural: Judenräte), were responsible for organizing the orderly deportation to the death camps, for detailing the number and occupations of the Jews in the ghettos, for distributing food and medical supplies, and for communicating the orders of the ghetto Nazi masters.”. Race or nationality had no influence in producing bad people.