Anti-Polish Sentiment - Use of The Term in A Modern Political Context

Use of The Term in A Modern Political Context

The term "anti-Polonism" is said to have been used for campaign purposes by political parties such as the League of Polish Families (Polish: Liga Polskich Rodzin) or Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland (Polish: Samoobrona Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej) as well as by Polish far-right organizations such as Association against Anti-Polonism led by former presidential candidate and leader of extremist Polish National Party Leszek Bubel. Bubel was taken to court by a group of ten well-known Polish intellectuals who filed a lawsuit against him for "violating the public good". Among the signatories were: former Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski and filmmaker Kazimierz Kutz.

According to writer Joanna Michlic the term is used in Poland also as an argument against the self-critical intellectuals who discuss Polish-Jewish relations, accusing them of "anti-Polish positions and interests." For example, historian Jan T. Gross has been accused of being anti-Polish when he wrote about crimes such as the Jedwabne pogrom. In her view, the charge is "not limited to arguments that can objectively be classified as anti-Polish—such as equating the Poles with the Nazis—but rather applied to any critical inquiry into the collective past. Moreover, anti-Polonism is equated with anti-Semitism." Publisher Adam Michnik wrote for the New York Times that "almost all Poles react very sharply when confronted with the charge that Poles get their anti-Semitism 'with their mothers' milk'." (see: Yitzhak Shamir's outburst in an interview with Jerusalem Post, 1989-9-08.) Such verbal attacks – according to Michnik – are interpreted by anti-Semites as "proof of the international anti-Polish Jewish conspiracy". For the 1994 anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a Polish Gazeta Wyborcza journalist, Michał Cichy, wrote a review of a collection of 1943 memoirs entitled Czy ja jestem mordercą? (Am I a murderer?) by Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish ghetto policeman from Otwock and member of the "Chrobry II Battalion", alleging (as hearsay) that about 40 Jews were killed by a group of Polish insurgents during the 1944 Uprising. Unlike the book (later reprinted with factual corrections), the actual review by Cichy elicited a fury of protests, while selected fragments of his article were confirmed by three Polish historians. Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz accused Cichy of practicing a 'distinct type of racism,' and charged Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik with 'cultivating a species of tolerance that is absolutely intolerant of antisemitism yet regards anti-Polonism and anti-goyism as something altogether natural'." Michnik responded to the controversy by praising the heroism of the AK, while asking "Is it an attack on Polish people when the past is being explored to seek the truth?" Cichy later apologized for the tone of his article, but not for the erroneous facts.

The notion of anti-Polonism has been used in some instances as a justification for Polish antisemitism. Cardinal Józef Glemp in his controversial and widely criticized speech delivered on August 26, 1989 (and retracted in 1991) argued that the outbursts of antisemitism are a "legitimate form of national self-defence against Jewish 'Anti-Polonism'." He "asked Jews who 'have great power over the mass media in many countries' to rein in their anti-Polonism because 'if there won't be anti-Polonism, there won't be such antisemitism among us'." Similar concerns, but with less display, were echoed in Rethinking Poles and Jews by Robert Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska who noted that anti-Polonism and anti-Semitism remain "grotesquely twinned into our own time. We cannot combat the one without combating the other." In 2001 PhD Andrzej Leszek Szcześniak published Judeopolonia - the Jewish state in Poland, explaining the origins of pre-war Jewish saying 'our tenements, your streets'. In 2002 Stanisław Wysocki published Antypolonizm Żydów polskich (English: Antipolishness of the Polish Jews) naming incidents in Polish-Jewish relations, criticised by Prof Jerzy Tomaszewski as selective, unrepresentative and ignorant.