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Wednesday, April 6, 2011
"Bieganski"
argues that the Brute Polak stereotype is not an innocuous feature of ethnic
jokes; it is not an innocent mistake. The Brute Polak stereotype, rather, is,
inter alia, a culture-wide rewrite of the Holocaust, a recasting of Polish,
Catholic peasants in the role properly occupied by German Nazis.
In response to a previous post, "Why
Stereotype Poles? Why Distort World War Two History?" a blog reader
alerted us to a Suzanne Moore article appearing in The Guardian UK entitled
"Dirt
Is Everywhere – In Sex, In Class, In Art, and Yes, Readers, In My Home."
In this article focused on dirt, Moore equates Poles with
Nazis. Moore's exploitation of the Bieganski stereotype is in no way central to
her main point. After blithely equating Poles with Nazis, Moore goes on her
merry way. So do most of her readers. There are many reader comments, and most
of them ignore Moore's rewrite of Holocaust history. Bieganski is so much a
part of Western culture today, no one need pay any attention to it at all, even
after some readers point out Moore's falsehood.
Moore
wrote: "Racism nearly always
depends on defining others as somehow dirty … A look at some of the antisemitic
posters … should be on the national curriculum, as far as I am concerned. In
pre-war Poland, antisemitism became medicialised. Jews were associated with
disease. One shocking image reads: 'Jews are lice, they cause typhus.' Ethnic
cleansing depends precisely on defining a whole swath of people as 'matter out
of place', as a dirty disease that needs to be eradicated."
Racism is a bad
thing. Poles are essentially bad people. Let's pin racism on Poles. Let's take
a German, Nazi, wartime poster and re-identify it as a prewar, Polish poster.
Comments under the article talk about the benefits to be
gained from various cleaning products. Some, though, are not so easily lead.
One poster wrote:
"Poles in that
case are reduced into collective mass murderers of Jews, while Holocaust into
singular crime that had nothing in common with German Nazis … S. Moore try to
whitewash German nazis and blame Poles"
Subsequent
posters don't care about this reader's outraged correction, and go back to
thanking Moore for her "thoughtful article" and reporting on home
dispensers of hand sanitizer.
One poster refuses to
follow the herd:
"Suzanne Moore just managed to
pull a very clever propaganda stunt. She took a German poster created during WW
II, for Poles, in Polish, in Poland that was brutally occupied by Germany, and
wrote that it was from prewar Poland. She did this in an innocuous article on
cleanliness where this historical Faux Pas would enter the unsuspecting
reader's consciousness without question. She should be severely punished, and
the Guardian should be shamed into a public apology. The question is not
whether she and the Guardian did this deliberately, but why?"
After this, reader comments return to vacuuming the house. And
to Eastern European domestic servants: "Still, I imagine the Lithuanian
domestic does her best."
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