History / Hollywood stars to act in Italian film on Poland's Battle of Vienna [19]


I wonder if this film will foreshadow Austria's horrible ingratitude at all. What scum the Habsburgs truly were! This film may be used to increase Islamophobia but the sad truth is that Poland "saved Europe" only to have her fellow Christians destroy her a few decades later.

UK, Ireland / Are Polish people importing a new wave of ancient racism into the UK? [402]


To those Poles who might read this forum hoping to improve their English comprehension don't worry if the latter part of this sentence above is unintelligible to you, and I think the writer meant to type "college" rather than "collage" althought the perhaps the "pack drill" and the "lash" are slang for art supplies.

Life / Who is poor in Poland? [720]

Poles educated in "useless" information are more interesting to talk to than some damnable Germanized statistician. Who is really poor in Poland? The people who are poor in spirit. The people who ignore the ontological because they never get beyond the ontic.

News / Warsaw is the natural capital of Europe, not Brussels [67]

Seanus you must mean the Imperial Russians not the Soviets.

News / Warsaw is the natural capital of Europe, not Brussels [67]


Making businessmen more comfortable is a banal reason to choose Budapest for a European Capital

News / Warsaw is the natural capital of Europe, not Brussels [67]


I agree. The Ister is very much Europe's central river and since the Magyars are neither Slavs nor Latins, nor Gemanics their capital would be a good neutral choice too. Another good choice would be Crete because that is the first place in Europe that its Phoenician namesake was taken to.

News / Warsaw is the natural capital of Europe, not Brussels [67]

What does that scuptural looking building to the left of center in the OP photo house? It looks like the prow of giant ocean liner or a work by Constantin Brancusi.

Genealogy / How Polish am I? What is the correct formula? [58]

In the American South people with any African ancestry were always considered black. One of the posters in this thread used the term "mulatto", which was for a black with one white parent, but there were also "quadroons" and "octoroons". The last term meaning 1/8th black. Even "quintroons" (1/16th) were black. Thus, it is hardly surprizing that the majority of mixed race people today, in America, consider themselves black.

Genealogy / How Polish am I? What is the correct formula? [58]

wrong, people have 8 great-grandparents. If only one of them was Polish that makes you 1/8 Polish.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]

No it is not. Read the rest of the post you have just quoted and realize that Orientalism doesn't necessarily involve calling its subject Oriental.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]


Lots of people from Ibn Khaldun to Oswald Spengler have all sorts of interesting theories as to why these cycles occur. Nietzsche felt that societies must live under a strong constraint for many generations before something removes it and they flower into the highest culture but decadence inevitably follows.

Food / Polish grape-wine industry emerging? [26]


This is one of our best Californian vintages. Every bottle I've drank has been superb.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]

Truly, one is also reminded of Conrad's narrator in the Heart Of Darkness who as they wait for the Thames' tide to change reminds his audience that London was once the primitive land that civilized forces came to occupy rather than the other way around.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]

The Orientalism that Poland has been subjected to by Germans is not that they called Poland "Oriental" but that they characterized Poles in the same manner as the French and British Orientalists did the inhabitants of the Orient. The German stereotypes about Poles are along the same lines as the Orientalist steoreotypes of Levantines, namely that the Poles are chaotic and childish primitives. This is not merely a generic feeling of superiority that one nation feels for a neighboring nation but an Orientalist type of one.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]


You are wrong. Orientalist attitudes towards Poland are a German tradition. Read Gunter Grass's Danzig Trilogy to find some or try Paweł Huelle's new book Castorp about which a reviewer wrote the following: "What gives Castorp its drive and resonance is his investigation of German attitudes to their Slav neighbours, towards whom they harboured an orientalising outlook that saw them, in contrast to German orderliness and rationality, as a force of disorder - and dangerous sexual attraction."

independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/castorp-by-pawel-huelle-trans-antonia-lloydjones-464233.html

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]


Oriental literally means Eastern. When writers from a country, that is to the West of a country that their government is dominating, put their pens to use in dehumanizing the inhabitants of that Eastern country then that is type of Orientalism.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]

Paul Kriwaczek in his book Searching For Zarathustra quotes an Austrian saying that goes something like "The Orient begins at _____Strasse." This street (whose name escapes me) is on the Eastern outskirts of Vienna. As for Prussia/Germany many of its Orientalist critiques of Poland came from its chauvinist organizations such as the HAKAT. Even if they never specifically called Poles Orientals their denegrating characterizations of Poles used the same terminology that British and French Orientalists used when justifying their domination over Orientals. Poles, and Slavs in general, have portrayed as wild and irrational subhumans by Western Europeans for centuries, and this is a type of Orientalism. Many people on this forum object to Poland being called "Eastern European" because they buy into the Orientalist paradigm wherein the "East" is bad and the "West" is good.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]

The post is not an analogy and you clearly don't understand what Orientalism is. It doesn't matter what direction the country that is Orientalized looks because Orientalism is mode of interpretation perpetuated by people from another country that are dominating the country being Orientalized. In the case of Poland the Occidentals doing the Orientalizing were intellectuals in Prussia/Germany and Austria that wrote articles and books about how the Poles were a wild, relatively primitive people, that were incapable of governing themselves effectively because of these unfortunate Asiatic character traits.

History / Poland and Orientalism [115]


Read Orientalism and then study the literature recounting German justifications for their rule over Western Poland and you will realize that almost the exact same negative characteristics that French and British Orientalists ascribed to Arabs were ascribed to Poles by the Germans. Just because this hasn't been widely noticed doesn't make it untrue.

Travel / Poland in photo riddles [3134]

It looks like the little, pink babushka'ed, mistress of the bronze coated robots is directing them to crush Britain by squeezing its likeness upon that globe.

News / Nature: Discovery of lonely planets - Polish + NZ-JP-USA astronomers [4]


Indeed, the L.A. Times had this story in it today. It made me wonder what would happen if one was in a spaceship flying through the lonely reaches between the stars, and one of these planets was in one's path, what would happen? Would the planet be too dark to see, or would one's eyes detect it? Since they are all gas giants, would one's spaceship be able to fly through the planet unharmed or would one be killed upon impact?

Food / What's your favorite Polish beer? [870]


Is this the beer with the figures in Cracovian costume on the bottle? It is the only Polish beer available where I live. Does Poland have a problem with people consuming light beer? It is very common in the USA and it is probably the worst beverage one can drink. Upon your first sip of light beer your body, after expecting to taste something good, can even go into shock, or you may even become violent and strike the person who gave you this deceptive lie of a drink. Poland, do not allow light beer past your boarders and supress it if it is already there.

History / Russians 'tortured to death' in Polish camps? [58]


Indeed that guy's claiming Germans acted respectfully towards Poles on the basis of one photograph of a marked grave some Germans dug for some Polish soldiers killed in battle during WW2 infuriated me not only for its revisionism but for the stupidity of the inductive reasoning of the revisionism, but I can't believe that a majority of Germans are that shameless.

History / Russians 'tortured to death' in Polish camps? [58]


Indeed, the Franco-Prussian War saw them ravage and abuse France in ways that shocked civilized people everywhere but even that pales in comparison to their savagery in subsequent wars. I don't know about your Nazi extermination plan though. It would've caused even more misery and nations really never learn "lessons" that way anyhow.


Of course I'd thought of qualifying the "Germany" of the Napoleonic Wars as "what later became Germany" but I thought it would read as overly pedantic.

History / Russians 'tortured to death' in Polish camps? [58]

Well Napoleon did conquer Germany slightly over two centuries ago.

History / Hollywood stars to act in Italian film on Poland's Battle of Vienna [19]

They should get Gerard Depardieau to play Jan Sobieski. He is fat and a great actor. They should also get Leelee Sobieski to be in the movie as she is one of Jan's descendants.

History / Hollywood stars to act in Italian film on Poland's Battle of Vienna [19]

Harvey Keitel is too short and too thin to play Jan Sobieski.

News / Don't let Poland become like my country, France. [630]


This is a bald-faced lie. Illegals come here to work and are not eligble for welfare. Polonius you have been misled, and your use of the term "wetback" shows that you are a lowbrow moron.

Work / Holocaust and gender studies in Poland? [33]


Holocaust is a term from ancient Greece which refered to a sacrifice in which all of the victim was allowed to be burnt up, rather than the regular procedure in which, thanks to Prometheus, humans got to eat the better part. I think the Jewish word, for the WW2 Nazi genocide directed at them, is "Shoah".

News / Dumbing-down in Polish schools and the Matura [185]

Hey! now it says Dumbing-down in the title. I thought you were discussing Down-dumbing.