Polish concentration camps...

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Well, I don't know if this about in absolute numbers or relative. But I remember vaguely, that nearly 100% of the Danish jews were saved by the Danish.

http://auschwitz.dk/Denmark.htm

 

The articles dendri linked to were most likely backed up by this book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross. You can read the intro and first chapter from this link.

 

Well, in some cities in Poland you would find 7500 Jews and I wouldn't be surprised if they had been fully Jewish cities of that number of citizens in the Eastern lands. The whole number of Jews in Poland would have to be between 3 and 4.5 million people, depending what criterion of assimilation/non-assimiliation you use. Unfortunately, Poles weren't able to send their Jews anywhere safe, as Poland was divided between the Third Reich and the USSR and totally surrounded by enemies. Everyone had to be kept inside unless someone was in for disguise and sneaking past the Nazi.

As regards Jan T. Gross, he has significant scientific achievement, although not exactly in history (physics, sociology and philosophy) and a dubious political record. In the early period of the communist regime, before the balance of power shifted in the communist party and the Jewish activists were pruned, Gross was a member of a zionist organisation with an aggressively anti-Polish programme, demeaning the Poles as a whole whenever possible and spreading slander, up to the point of claiming that there would be no Polish culture without a leading creative force (sic) of the Jewish minority - and those same people aspired to political power in the country under the commie regime. Famous quotes included "for each five Poles there should be one Jew to direct them" (many of the members came from upper class families and made, paradoxically, quick careers in the commie regime).

This shows that, although Gross is not bound to take facts out of thin air, the way he interprets events and the light in which he presents them are quite personal and hardly impartial. I would have nothing against including him in some sort of a commission delegated to explain the problem of Jedwabne, but he needs to balanced and taken with a pinch of salt.

Here you can find quite a lot of excerpts from titled people who would disagree with what Gross said in his book: http://www.geocities.com/jedwabne/english/ekstrakt.htm

Besides, he's a flip-flopper. In books written in Polish in 1983, he claimed that:

Grodno: when the Bolsheviks entered the Polish territories they showed great distrust of the Polish population, but full confidence towards the Jews. They (the Jews) manned all institutions and were entrusted with the leading positions. There are similar reports from the town Zolkwia. A statement of (a Jew) from Lwow seems to illustrate well the situation at that time: 'when there was a political meeting, a demonstration, or another joyful manifestation, the visual effect was always the same: Jews'"

"The numbers of Jews working in the propaganda apparatus was out of proportion with their overall number. Truly, the anti-Semitism grew enormously during the Bolshevik occupation and it manifested itself very soon, namely during first days of the war between the Soviets and Germany."

(refers to the period 1939-early 1940) "As soon as there was a possibility (for the Jewish refugees in Russian occupied eastern Poland) to return to German occupied Poland, crowds of Jews stood entire days in queues to meet with the German repatriation committees that arrived in Lwow,Valdimir and Brest, the Jews cheered by their hundreds and thousands for Germany and Hitler. Just imagine: crowds of Jews shouting "long live Hitler" ("niech zyje Hitler")." (Jan T. Gross' own words, after http://www.geocities.com/jedwabne/english/why_did_gross_changed_his_opinion.htm )

In the Jedwabne book (Neighbours...) he claims that there was no collaboration with the Soviet regime and, obviously, no Jews shouting "Heil Hitler".

Next, Gross draws upon dubious eye witness testimony in his book. Example:

Of the same event:

So, who's going to be believed? For Mr Gross the answer is simple - the latter witness.

Here's Gross debunked by Professor Strzembosz, a prominent Polish historian: http://www.geocities.com/jedwabne/english/inny_obraz_sasiadow.htm

Ultimately, just go and see the site launched by some Poles in response to the book and the articles by renowned titled scientists they bring up:

It is worth noting that some of the accounts are by Jewish people and that some of the Polish professors who attack Gross are former Nazi camp prisoners and have been decorated by the state of Israel - obviously for some reason.

Here's the link to what Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (WW2 courier and the man who warned the allied powers about the Holocaust going on but was not believed by them, decorated with so many medals that there's no point enumerating, professor of a couple of universities in the US and elsewhere in the world). He in no way denies the real participation of Polish villagers nor is he trying to avoid any level of due accountability, but he raises some very important issues. So: http://wings.buffalo.edu/info-poland/classroom/J/Nowak.html

Just a little comment so as to set the record straight: I'm not quoting the above things to attack anyone. I don't enjoy dwelling on the past, and I'd rather we all got along. However, falsification of history does bother me a lot and the charge of anti-semitism, at least in the form of unilateral active hatred, is defamatory and needs to be opposed. This is the purpose of the quotes and not blaming anyone of the living for what happened in the Eastern lands of the pre-WWII Polish state under Soviet occupation.

[ January 26, 2005, 19:41: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Well, Chev, as this isn't my field and I haven't seen the primary materials, I would definitely be willing to entertain the proposition that Gross had shaped the data a bit to fit his thesis, and that there might have been, as your links suggest, more German participation in Jedwabne than Gross allows. This doesn't necessarily make Gross a bad historian; it's simply impossible (as well as unreadable) to cover everything when writing history, and it's the job of a historian to come up with a thesis that makes the best possible use of the historical data, and gives it some sort of hierarchy so it can be read and understood. Kind of a chicken and egg problem: the data might begin to suggest a theory, while a theory affects the kind of data that's gathered. I'm not saying here that history is meaningless because it can argue anything, as I think historians have an obligation not to misrepresent facts. The problem is, facts are meaningless without a theory by which they are assigned value. That being said, I could imagine Gross overplaying his hand bit, especially if one of his targets was a competing theory in the Polish self-image that he saw as incorrect or insufficient: that Poles had little or nothing to do with the persecution of Jews during the Nazi occupation. So, to some extent, Gross must have intended to shock his Polish readers by saying "no, Poles also acted against Jews, and on their own," and bolstering this argument with favorable data, just as Daniel Goldhagen (in a book that's widely considered even more polemical and cavalier in its use of historical data) took aim at the German trope that the average German knew little of the most heinous crimes of the Nazi era in "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

So I could easily imagine Gross playing up his argument for effect and to generate more of a public reaction. Whether this is good or bad is a matter for discussion; good if the volume of the discussion leads to more work on the archives and the gradual establishment of a balanced and informed consensus, and bad if the claims and counterclaims simply become more vitriolic and more a part of identity politics.

I can readily imagine how uncomfortable this book must have been to many Poles, who likely held very strongly to a sense of persecution and victimization as part of a national identity: from the Germans, to the Soviets, to the Western countries that allowed the Soviet occupation to avoid a continuation of the war. And no doubt WW2 was an unbelievable national trauma: the national population dropped from 35 million to 24 million during the war (if 6 1/2 million were killed, with 3 million of those Jewish, does the remaining 4 1/2 million include those who died for other war-related reasons, or as soldiers, as well as those who emigrated?). But given that 10% of the pre-war population was Jewish while nearly 50% of the victims were Jewish, that a clear majority of this population was killed, and that only about 15,000 Jews live in Poland today (is this correct?), it seems to me that a number of Poles must have been engaged in activities opposed to those of the Poles rightly honored as "righteous Gentiles." My own guess would be that in the depths of such an inconcievable trauma, when the "natural order" has seemingly been torn to shreads, people will engage in the full range of human (and inhuman) behavior.

Finally, many of the collected responses to Gross' book seem less than convincing, or even a little problematic, to me. To take the first one on the list, from a Prof. C.I. Pogonowski, as an example:

This seems very disturbing to me, not only in his nationalism, but in his opposition of "Jews" and "Poles." Again, he does not say that "while both Jews and Gentiles were members of Polish communist parties and some of these supported the Soviet invation of Poland as protection against Germany, the high profile of some Jewish Poles as Soviet supporters, and perhaps the (slightly?) higher level of support for international socialism among Jewish Poles (who were more likely to live in cities, where socialism found its greatest support) than among the population as a whole, caused some Christian Poles to associate Jewish Poles in general with the Soviet occupation." No; instead he explicitly treats Jews as outsiders, non-Poles. Moving on, he immediately "internationalizes" the Jews:

Again: (international) "Jewish hatred of the Poles" (and so something that all Jews feel, that they "drink with their mother's milk," as Shamir might have put it?) "manifests itself in the use of generalizations when dealing with accusations" (and what exactly is our Professor doing here?). "Jewish students are often taught" (which Jewish students? where? all of them? by whom? as part of a Zionist protocol?) "that the Holocaust would not have taken place if the Poles did not want it" (a very broad statement, which again unifies all Poles as on nationalist block, and which also contravenes what I'm pretty sure most people are taught about the Holocaust) "... Gross' propaganda helps those who make demands for ransom to be paid by the Polish Government (so that's what's eaten the Professor up: ransom; we can add nother Jewish crime, blackmail, to those Soviet-supporting non-Poles) is about to be demanded of the honest Poles by the Jews to compensate for crimes perpetrated in Poland by the Nazis, the Soviets, and by common criminals ..." (if they weren't Nazis or Soviets they must have been criminals, because they certainly couldn't have been Poles!)

Not to beat up on this guy too much, bit if you're going to go after Gross for being a bit fast and loose with historical conjecture, this guy isn't exactly going to work as a witness for the prosecution...

 

Pogonowski is a bit harsh in his choice of wording and perhaps a little bit paranoid on the supposed cospirational side, but he actually bases those things on facts. It's more the way he talks than what he says.

Gross, I believe, is not merely playing it too hard, or colouring things up a bit. I believe his choice of witness accounts was conscious and deliberate and facts had nothing to do with his desire to cook up a shocking philippic.

Please mind the extensive quote from Gross' own book written in Polish in 1983 where he gives examples of Jews collaborating with the Soviet occupants and even the Nazi ones. Gross comes from a prominent Jewish family, so there's no question of slandering the Jews on his part. It's not a matter of witness accounts who was appointed for what by the commies - it's all on paper, as well as the names of the commies themselves and the proportion of Jews was not just slightly bigger - it was exactly as improportionate as Gross wrote. Heck, some of the reported anti-semitic incidents were actually prepared and enacted by those commie dignitaries who were Jewish in origin (sort of turning on your own people). It's not like the Poles associate the Jews with the Soviet occupation, but especially the older people remember that.

Pogonowski could in fact be a little bit internationalising Jews in what he wrote, but remember that anywhere in the world until WWII Jews were one of those minorities that stood apart the most noticeably. I'm not saying it was bad to be outsiders to some extent, but it certainly is not Pogonowski making outsiders of the Jewish communities in the pre-WWII Poland. Internationalising is best done by the most prominent Jewish organisations which are international and there's nothing surprising in that, considering Jews maintained a separate cultural and religious, and sometimes even ethnic (not in many nations could you find purebloods who could reach with their genealogic tree back to before Christ if they really tried, like the Jewish priestly nobility) successfully despite not having their own state for two thousand years. They were naturally bound to develop international structures and there's nothing wrong in that for them or for Poles or for anyone. It's just a fact in history and a remarkable one.

There could also be a notion that Pogonowski escapes the blame by calling the guilty Poles criminals, but I think it's more intended to show that there's a difference between what the state officially does and what the country's criminal element does. But I would still agree that he seems unlikely to accept even the possibility of the responsibility of Polish citizens for Jedwabne.

As for "Jewish hatred of the Poles", I believe it's as much exaggerated as "Polish hatred of the Jews". Obviously, there have been tensions and conflicts, but hatred... maybe on the part of people directly involved in the conflict that have taken place, but I wouldn't speak of any general wide-spread hatred.

"That the Holocaust would not have taken place if the Poles did not want it" is not a fairy tale. There are people who believe that and I've heard people say such things. Most of it is ignorance rather than malice, but in some cases ignorance seems really improbable.

He's indeed bitter and all, but there have been ideas of Holocaust lawsuits against Poland on the grounds that Auschwitz was on Polish land, for example, and generally a lot of suits v. Poland by Jewish organisations in American courts - and the fact the they were filed in ordinary courts of an equal state (they're more important than they are, but they aren't our sovereigns or anything) was a bit too much for even the more tolerant people involved on the Polish side. Those suits came along with suits by German citizens for property dispossessed according to the Potschdam treaty ending WWII, which to people like Pogonowski might have looked like a surprising alliance.

 

Your response only highlights a dilemma: you only seem able to think of Jews oppositionally, as non-Polish. This might have something to do with the complete decimation or emigration of Polish Jewry; again, where Jews made up 10% of the Polish population before the war, they now, according to my calculations, make up 0.04%. That's a pretty huge demographic change, and one that certainly bears further scrutiny! Naturally, growing up in Poland well after the war, Jews wouldn't have seemed to you like a very significant part of Polish culture, but I guarantee that before the war they were far, far more visible. They weren't all Chassids who only partially integrated with society; as with German Jews at the same time, many of them were highly educated and secularized, and considered themselves Poles before Jews. In fact, an architect friend of mine, who grew up in the US but is decended from secular Jewish Poles, is writing a doctoral thesis on avant-garde modernist Polish architects between the wars, and many of them were Jewish!

So this is the dilemma: Jewish Poles were once a vital part of Polish national culture, but now they've all but disappeared. Now people look back and say "Jews in Poland, I don't see any Jews in Poland," and that moves on quickly to "those Jews and we Poles." And there isn't really a Jewish voice in Poland to protest this, to say "we were once a vital part of Polish culture, and we were as Polish as any of you Catholics." Because, frankly, there are so few left.

Granted, a number of heroic Poles risked their lives to hide Polish Jews or help them escape Poland, and millions lost their lives resisting Nazi occupation. But isn't it a worthy subject to study exactly how it was that the population was so thoroughly liquidated? And though a higher percentage of Jewish Poles than Catholic Poles supported the communists, did this necessarily make all Jewish Poles enemies of Polish culture (lots of important cultural figures, even in the US or UK, sympathized with communism at this time). Or does it in any way justify, given much higher rate at which Jews were killed or forced to emigrate, saying that Jewish anti-Polish agitation was equivalent to Polish anti-semitism? Isn't it a worthy goal to promote a dialogue between Jews and Poles that recognizes some of these Jews as decendants of displaced full-blooded Poles who were forced to leave their country, and not internationalists looking to somehow oppress Poles, who must be shut out of any real historical debate for fear some of them might try to bring a lawsuit? And don't you think this mindset, of suspected Jewish Poles of not truly being Poles or even of being anti-Polish, would have contributed to the fact that so few of the escaped survivors chose to return to Poland?

As to the internationalist charge, even as late as JFK in the US, some Americans questioned whether Catholics were truly American, or whether they had a more "international" allegiance to the Pope...

 

Far from that - in a couple of places I highlighted the fact that many of Polish Jews (between "a great part" and "the overwhelming majority" - sorry, the matter of internal sentiments of people from before WWII is not easy) actually considered themselves not even just Polish citizens but actually Poles. Thus the crime was even greater on the part of those Poles who collaborated with the Nazi and who murdered Jews. Whoever happened to be Jewish and a communist can't be considered a victim of anti-semitism. Mind you, all countries gave a blood bath to their traitors after WW2. Thousands of people were killed for real or imagined collaboration with the Nazi (the West didn't have its Soviets, obviously). Commies, where they took power, typically started from ethnic pruning and killing off their enemies. In Southern France, there would have been a successful commie revolution were it not for the American forces. Up to 2 million anti-commies suffered at the hands of commies, with 40-100 thousand killed. The Italian partisans dispatched 100-200 people after the war was over for cooperating with the Nazi/fascists. In Jugoslavia: 40 thousand Albanians executed, 6 thousand Montenegrians, 12 thousand Italians, 100-200 thousand Croatians, some 300 thousand victims in a modest calculation, of whom 30 were handed over to Tito by no one else than the English. The Russian Soviets took about 600 thousand people from Hungary to their concentration camps. Of 300 thousand Romanian POWs a half survived. Perhaps a million Poles ended up dying somewhere in the Soviet Empire - they would take whole divisions of the Polish army (loyal to the real government) to concentration camps. Those relatively not numerous Polish people (mere exceptions in the scale of the whole nation) turning against their Jewish neighbours still committed an abhorrent crime, but it surely wasn't out of the European context. Ethnic pruning or pruning of massive groups by their political preference was common practice. I'm not accusing, defending or judging anyone. All murderers and others should or should have been tried and punished and all cases should be researched so that the truth could be determined. However, some things that people would have us believe are far from consistent with the truth.

Calculating the number of the Jewish minority and comparing doesn't make much sense unless you include emigration and assimilation. A great number of Jews have lost or loosened the connection with their roots, especially after abandonning Judaism. Some have only really kept their surnames, some have even taken Polish ones and they intermarried with the Polish populace as well. You will find a great number and a great percentile share of people with Jewish origin (and just about anyone has at least a drop of Jewish blood), but not many people who consider themselves Jews. Of the latter, many if not most have "rediscovered" their roots and reverted the process of assimilation rather than kept a continuous connection. There was also a massive exodus in 1968 when the USSR started trying to seduce the Arabs and the Jewish faction in the communist party lost some influence in the clashes within the commie establishment at the same time, which led to their ultimate defeat. Unfortunately, it wasn't only the Jewish faction in the commie party, but many other influencial Polish-Jewish people were forced out as a result of the anti-Jewish mood created on purpose by the prevailing factions in the commie party and the loss of interest on the part of Mother Russia. Understandably, those who decided to stay didn't really announce their Jewish origin in public. So now you will probably find no more than 8000 people considering themselves Jews.

That's correct.

That's correct.

As I explained above, many have assimilated and are probably Catholics now (either that or atheists). Those don't really care. Those who make their Jewish origin public often prefer to stay away from the Poles, often considering them somewhat inferior (this is also a bit of a social issue - those who avoided assimilation were typically the richer, more educated and more influential folks, while the lower classes gradually blended into the rest of the society), although they tend to feel affiliated with the Polish state sometimes even before the state of Israel. It's mostly historians who supply the voice on daily basis and Polish Jews from Israel or the States who do that on bigger occasions. However, today the difference from the Poles is celebrated before the ties, I think. Again, it's not like the Poles go to great length to survey the past links, either. I guess there's a mutual lack of interest.

That percentage varies between the Eastern lands and the sort-of-ethnic-Poland (i.e. the current Polish territory). It was always bigger than in the ethnic Poles, but the biggest disproportion was in the East and among the so called Poles that came along with the commies (people with a shred of Polish descent and some knowledge of basic Polish) who served the regime - whether the Polish commies or their liege lords in Moscow.

There was no such thing as a general, concentrated Polish anti-semitism. I doubt we had more of it than other European countries - in proportion, of course, as we clearly had more Jews. Before the WW2, we had pro-Nazi idiots walking around with transparents, being nasty and making ungodly demands, but pretty much everyone had them - unlike everyone, we didn't have a single pro-Nazi social force after the war started. You must remember that we were the only country conquered by the German Nazi that didn't have a puppet government sending Jews to the camps. If you don't believe me, that's exactly what Shevah Weiss - former chairman of the Knesset and Israeli ambassador in Poland - says, too. Anti-semitism occured where it was instigated by the Nazi occupants, especially using the data from the Eastern front to stir some hatred. Perhaps a couple of local conflicts and people taking advantage of the situation. Probably up to 30 incidents in the whole WW2. I can't tell you how many people died in those, but the number of Poles who died at the hands of the commie regime or in its prisons and concentration camps (yeah, they had many) went in hundreds of thousands - at least 1.5 million in the WW2 alone, add the prisoners who died after the war was over and all the "enemies" of the new order. Can't say how many of those deaths can be attributed to the Jewish members of the communist party. And I'm not really trying to estimate that, either. My point is that conflicts happened and they were mutual. Of course, when conflicts reached the stage of killing, whoever was guilty, betrayed all the noble traditions of Judaism and Christianity, as well as Jewish and Polish and common history. Once again do I need to stress that I'm not making any attacks here. Just pointing out that there was no such thing as the Polish anti-semitism, unless you're going to attribute that name to taking part in conflicts involving two opposing sides. There were, however, several outbursts instigated by the communists and at least one that probably wasn't (don't know why it happened, honestly, and the Nazis had already been driven out of there) shortly after the war. In 1968, as I mentioned, a newly prevailing commie faction made a witchhunt for Jewish communists and instigated anti-semitic, creating an ugly anti-Jewish mood in those who would fall for the propaganda, although without bloody events. Bluntly speaking, the Jewish lobby in the commie party got what they deserved (they messed up a lot and finally made a couple of enemies too much), but what happened to non-commies forced to emigrate was a great shame. I've heard stories of university student girls turned into soldiers the moment they arrived in Israel (both genders have to compulsory military service over there - it's not like you can stick to males for it, if you're surrounded by millions of hostile people, mildly speaking).

I think you're exaggerating on that one and the whole internationalist concern. I don't think there's even a word in everyday Polish for that. In fact, I'm still not sure if I can fully figure out what you mean by that.

You've lost me on that one. If you could explain your though a little bit.

The ethnicity problem is overrated. There's no such thing as an ethnic Pole. Well, either that or close. Before we were cut "back" to our "ethnic" territory (excuses made up to cover the arbitrariness of Yalta decisions), and especially before the partitions in the 18th century, the strength of this nation was not in its ethnic element but in the fact that so many ethnic elements could interact peacefully and creatively and join up into a society bound together by ties of loyalty beyond the simple sticking together of ethnicities. It was a country of immigrants much like the US is now (I would say that many of those people who crossed the ocean to settle down in America would have come to the Polish state if it still had existed). All those ethnicities (Poles, Ruthenians, Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Jews, Tartars, Caraimian people - kill me if I know how it is in English, Armenians, Flemish people, Valonians, Catholic Scots and some English, some French people... heck, we even had a junior branch of the Byzantinian Imperial House - the Lascaris who settled here until the Russians killed the last heir in a Polish uprising... and I'm pretty sure I missed several more nations in the ethnic sense) contributed to the culture. There's no denying. And there's no denying of the fact that the Polish Jews made a great contribution - although, as I pointed out, there was a fair balance between affecting the common culture and staying apart from the Gentiles and cultivating the culture they brought with them (there was no pressure to blend in and be assimilated, unlike in Western Europe). I don't want to repeat myself and the italicised fragment I shamelessly quoted from myself above will do.

We have this even here in the "second Vatican" as some people put it. The commies (eerr... social-democrats, Democratic Left Alliance etc, basically, still the reds) will pull every straw.

In one thing they are right - if a Pole does something I don't like for moral reasons, I won't be on his side just because he's a Pole. They can call me a Vatican drone, Soviet drones that they are.

Edit: IIRC, there was also the problem of Poles being victims or WW2 or not.

In 1938, we had 35 million people. Now we have 39 million with change. Doesn't this say anything? If not, let me just say there were 23 million Poles in 1945. Six million killed by the German Nazi. One and a half million by the Soviets.

Some demographics:

Our 35 million was 78% of the British population. Now it's 66%. To the French, it was 80%, now it is 66%. To Italians - 87%, now 67%. To Germans (without Austria and Sudeten) - 57%, now 47%. Considering the territory, we were the 6th biggest country in Europe, now the 9th.

Those were not just accidental victims, like soldiers and inhabitants of bombed cities. During six years of occupation, the occupants had choice. Already in September and October 1939 they started from the elites - civil and military officers, teachers, scientists, lawyers, clergy, land owners, businessmen. Universities and schools were closed down and replaced with some most basic and rudimentary facilities orientated on spawning obedient Nazi or Soviet thralls. Monuments of culture were destroyed, works of art were stolen. Total destruction of the culture was intended, and so was physical elimination of the nation unless basic work force would be needed. While 20-25% Poles were killed, 28% of all teachers, 30% of all land owners and their families, 38% percent of medics, 58% of lawyers were. That elite has not been fully reconstructed and only partly replaced.

[ January 28, 2005, 03:00: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Didn't the US have quotas on Jews in their universities during this period of time?

We have large communities of Poles in certain cities here from WW2 and I know of no-one that refers to the camps in question as 'Polish Concentration Camps' There is still racism to Poles - just not to the above.

 

@Chev- thanks for the well-considered reply. I would agree that it's hard to accuse "the Polish State" of much of anything during the years of WW2, as, after the successive occupations and cullings of the population, there effectively was no such State at that time. It seems a truism that when war destroys civil society, it destroys the moral order as well, all sorts of terrible things can happen. I appreciate the ethnic diversity of Poland (and find it somewhat amusing that you have a P-M named Miller). Really, the only thing that had riled me up was the oppositional language, the us vs. them discourse, which at the very least seems problematic in terms of fostering dialogue.

@Cesard-

And the relevance of this to the discussion is...

 

... that pretty much any nation or state before WWII could be accused of anti-semitism if we applied modern terms.

I can't speak for other people, but for me dialogue isn't a goal of its own. It's important, but it's still a means. My method of dialogue is to find the common ground and use it as a starting point but to nail down the differences with no beating around the bush. If you don't nail down the differences, you can't decide which of them are desirable or tolerable and which need to be eliminated, so you're going to have a problem addressing the issue at its core, and thus there won't be any working out of the undesirable differences and treating the desirable/tolerable ones are givens, but instead there will be hiding skeletons in the closet and neglecting the source of potential new problems (i.e. the undesirable differences that can still be worked out if they are actually addressed in the very first place). This leads to the conclusion that pretending we're all one happy loving family is equally harmful as overinflating petty disagreements.

Again, this regards people who try to be honest and keep informed. Those who spread lies maliciously should face a proper trial and those who repeat them thoughtlessly should at least be exposed for their ignorance and forced to use it as an excuse in order to avoid punishment for slander unless they revoke the untrue parts after being faced with facts.

Thankfully, the old commie has been out since April and is probably going to be tried soon. Perjury is practically proven, overstepping authority and abuse of power are on the way and they could even try indicting him for treason if they really insisted. And this all despite his party is still in power, only the leadership has changed (the guy currently in lead had been in lead before Miller IIRC).

[ January 28, 2005, 21:43: Message edited by: chevalier ]