From this blog, August 19, 2016:
Don’t Call Them Polish Death Camps
Those places are German Nazi camps which were and are located in Poland. The government is trying to dictate vocabulary.
(CNN) A law proposal making phrases like “Polish labor camps,” “Polish extermination camps” and “Polish death camps” punishable by imprisonment for up to three years has been approved by Poland’s Cabinet.
The proposal is closer to being law and now the world is catching on:
Amid escalating tensions between Israel and Poland over a new bill passed in the lower house of Poland’s parliament, which would outlaw blaming Poles for crimes of the Holocaust, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem, said that “while the term ‘Polish death camps’ is a historical misrepresentation,” the center opposes the legislation.
The new bill calls for up to three years in prison, or a fine for individuals or organizations using phrases such as “Polish death camps” to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during the war. While the bill is partly a response to cases in recent years of foreign media using “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz and other Nazi-run camps, its provisions extend far beyond use of that phrase. It would apply to Poles and foreigners, including Holocaust survivors.
Why do we care? Don’t think that it is just a foreign thing. The attempts to control the vocabulary and distort history are very serious. If you can teach 20-somethings that words like gal, girls, pro-abortion and a dozen other terms are hurtful to someone’s humanity, then one day these terms will be walled off behind a legal barrier.
The Poles might have a decent argument about who ordered the deaths of Jews from all over Europe in Polish death camps, but instead of arguing that Germany dominated Poland, they choose now to ban words. I don’t know to what extent individual Poles were enthusiastic about killing Jews and others in the death camps, but that’s an issue for historical debate, not historical censorship.
Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid: “No Polish law will change history, Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered on its soil without them having met any German officer.”
As a politician, you should take a certain amount of responsibility not only for your nation’s future, but for it’s past. You are a representative of your nation. Could Poland have made decisions that would have avoided NAZI occupation? Perhaps, but probably not once the tanks started rolling. That said, you represent a nation that failed the test of a NAZI invasion. Don’t worry. France has your back.
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