Poland's Nationalist March


Poland had a 60,000-person nationalist march Saturday, something that hits close to home for me since my family comes from the Poland/Ukraine border, and nearly all of my great-grandfather’s (who I knew) family was likely killed in Auschwitz. The march is terrifying, but I don't find it surprising based on my experience visiting Krakow a few years ago.

I went to Krakow largely to visit Auschwitz but also, to a small degree, to see the region where my ancestors lived (even if they did not have a connection to Krakow itself).

My visit to Auschwitz was highly commercial: people smiled for pictures by the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, and we of course exited through the gift shop. People on my tour were uncomfortable when I put rocks on memorial sites in keeping with Jewish tradition. When I returned from the tour and was walking around Krakow, I kept getting solicited by guides in golf carts, each one claiming to offer the best deal on a tour of Auschwitz and the Jewish quarter.
Then I visited the so-called Jewish quarter or old ghetto. The city heavily advertised its five still-operating synagogues, but my own exploration made obvious to me that this was a ruse–operating in name only. I think I saw the only five Jews still living in the city. (Alright, it’s about 200–barely enough for one synagogue.) Then I went to a gift shop where I bought my mom a figurine of an old-fashioned Jewish guy carrying water. As I was on my way out of the town, I saw one of the artists who makes the figurines. There was one more figurine being sold that I had not seen at the gift shop: a greedy-looking Jew holding money bags.

All that is to say that I saw a strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism. It seemed deeply interwoven with Catholic nationalism.

Shortly after I visited Poland, it became a poster child in the U.S. for recovery from Communism and rediscovery of religion, the free market, and national pride. At the time, I was unsettled given what I'd seen, but I hoped I was wrong. Now, I hope people can see the connections between the religious nationalism and Saturday.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What I Learned from a Year Spent Studying How to Get Policymakers to Use Evidence

Image
Source: http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/on-evidence/ The past year I was a senior research analyst at Northwestern University's Global Poverty Research Lab on a study of evidence-based policy. Specifically, our goal was to work on a question often on researchers' minds: how can I get my ideas acted upon? To do this, I dug through a number of bodies of evidence on how science influences policy. One area I looked at is what is called "implementation science" in medicine, which looks at how to get doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators to adopt evidence-based practice. Another was a series of papers by social scientist Carol Weiss and her students on how policymakers in government agencies claim to use evidence. There is also a small literature on how to implement evidence-based policy in public schools, and a little work on policymaker numeracy. I've included a bibliography below that should be helpful for anyone interested in this topic. Most of my yea...
Read more

How Much Do Wild Animals Suffer? A Foundational Result on the Question is Wrong.

Image
NOTE: I would like to clarify that the post below and the published paper show that a result from 1995 does not hold, but they do NOT make the case for the 1995 model being correct. There are many reasons the models in both papers are likely to be deeply flawed: path dependency, dynamic ecosystems, philosophical problems with the definition of suffering and enjoyment, and so on. The primary point here is to treat the 1995 result and other work on wild animal suffering with caution. In 1995, Yew-Kwang Ng wrote a groundbreaking paper, "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering"  that explored the novel question of the wellbeing of wild animals as distinct from the conservation of species. As perceptive as it was innovative, the paper proposed a number of axioms about evolution and consciousness to study which animals are sentient, what their experiences are, and what might be done about it. Among the many results in the paper wa...
Read more

We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It: A Lesson the Animal Rights Movement Could Learn

Image
This fall, I've been listening in on a course I always intended to take as an undergraduate, U.S. Gay and Lesbian History by George Chauncey, and I've had to pinch myself for the last week or two as I read my way through Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities  by John D'Emilio to remind myself that I'm not reading about the animal rights movement. The debate is so similar to, and the rhetoric so evocative of, the modern animal rights movement that it's impossible for someone in this movement to miss. So I've decided I should share some of the most interesting parallels in the book with a wider audience. The book covers the early (pre-Stonewall) movement for gay and lesbian rights, particularly centering around the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two 1950s groups. The movement was known as the homophile movement in those decades. I don't think many of these examples are that biased by D'Emilio's own perspective, as the previous book...
Read more