History / Why is Poland such an American boot licker? [60]

Well, the relationship of Germany to Israel is naturally fraught with all sorts of added meaning, as the German government from '33-'45 DID in fact try to wipe out the Jews!

Steinmeier especially is always having kittens whenever anything to do with racist violence arises.
That's not ass kissing that's called sensitivity by ANY civilized yardstick known to man:-)

News / Polish Primate condemns EU's anti-Christianity [29]

I thank you for your "approval".

News / Polish Primate condemns EU's anti-Christianity [29]

That's your take, sir, not mine:-)

History / Why is Poland such an American boot licker? [60]

Sarcasm aside, had the US as far back in the early '50's, steadfastly refused to rest on her laurels and remain vigilant of the economic

gains in countries such as then West Germany, China or Japan, America would truly be the most advanced technological country
in history!

Trouble is, we got lazy and were read the mantra of "Sit on you asses! You guys won the War and so nobody can stop you!"

History / Why is Poland such an American boot licker? [60]

Germany "lost" the War yet won the (economic) peace: Welcome to the Fourth, and thus far richest, Reich!
:-)

History / Why is Poland such an American boot licker? [60]

Much of Europe has seen herself as beholden to the US for the liberation from Nazi tyranny. While this is slowly changing, for far too long, in my mind, countries like Germany, France, and Italy saw themselves almost as American clones, taught by the Allies to disregard their historic cultures in favor of the "American Way of Life". This of course meant preferring the use of English.

Only France it appears had the guts to resist the "Americanization" of language and lifestyle.

Poland, so it would seem, is trying to curry favor with Trump and this is unfortunate.

News / Polish Primate condemns EU's anti-Christianity [29]

Can't see in all frankness what, pray, is "anti-Christian" about the EU. All right, Spain has allowed homosexuals to marry freely, and even the sitting Pope, Francis, has declared that gays too are allowed to take Holy Communion, what's wrong with that? Alternatives, gender benders etc. are also at liberty to worship.

While we're on the bigotry band wagon, why not second the claim of the late Rev. Pat Robertson, that G-d doesn't hear the prayer of a Jew?

Seems the Primate is acting in a rather simian fashion, doesn't it:-)

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Hey, I also believe in giving credit where credit is due:-)
No thanks necessary, although I appreciate all the kudos I can get
LOL

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Spot on, mate!

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

I call myself Jewish because that's what I am, both my parents, and, as nearly as I can tell, all members of my family!

I wasn't born in Israel, but in New York City, therefore have MORE right to call myself American than you do to call yourself Polish, unless of course you were born and or grew up there.

Life / Three Reasons Why Poles Are Not Regular Human Beings... [16]

Quite sure about that, paw?

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

The Poles were murdered in the millions, yet had they set up the type of "puppet government" as had
been the case in Horthy's and Szillasy's Hungary, Petain's France, Quisling's Norway etc., then the
Nazis would have treated them quite differently!

The Poles though had guts, moral courage, and the gumption to stick to their guns, qualities unbecoming
for one of The Fuehrer's select vassal states. As they refused to submit, the Poles suffered, yet not solely
because they were Poles, but because they stood up for themselves.

For the umpteenth time, Milo, my posts are quoted from the documents of the Nazis themselves, many
of which were only available in the original.

Pardon, you DID have me on one point, which I'll freely confess was my fault! I made a typo when
I posted "ideologically inferior", I meant to say "biologically inferior".
Indeed, you caught me on a technicality to which I admit I was mistaken:-)

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Then you clearly have misunderstood my posts, Milo, a bit embarrassing, I must say, as English is your first language.
Nobody is saying here that the murder of Polish gentiles is somehow "less of an atrocity" than the murder of Polish Jews, least
of all yours truly.

But I am saying that the Nazis didn't place Poles en masse as ideologically "inferior" to the Germans aka Aryans, as they did the

Sinti-Roma or the Jews.

While this might appear to some people purely academic, scholars continue to argue over the alleged uniqueness of the Shoah,
at the same time realizing that all Slavs were seen fit by Hitler solely for enslavement. However, at least according to the documents
I perused in the archives of the Villa Wannsee Museum in Berlin, ONLY the Jews, those known as "Volljuden", i.e. "Germans of
non-Aryan blood" ("Artfremde") throughout the Nazi dragnet across Occupied Europe were automatically slated for total extermination.
This one has on the authority of Raul Hillberg's "The Destruction of The European Jews", a renowned and respected historical reference work
on the subject.

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Scarcely "brushing aside" anything, Milo!

All I'm getting at is that there are gradations in what was considered "justifiable" homicide by the Nazis vs. what makes any
human life more valuable than another.

Incidentally, this was all brought out at the Nuremberg Trials, as the Holocaust represented an unprecedented "break" with
any known incident of state-sponsored and sanctioned killing in recorded human history.

As any human life is considered sacrosanct according to every known philosophical teaching or religious doctrine of man,
the Nazis were perhaps the first ever to decide that an entire ethnicity was deemed by them as unfit to live, playing a
G-d-like role, once the province solely of mad scientists or alchemists.

Those thousand-plus Polish Christians who perished at the hands of the Germans are hardly being judged by a different
yardstick than those six-million or so Jews murdered during the Shoah.

It was therefore the Nazis rather than I who sought to place a higher value on one certain group over another.

Life / Three Reasons Why Poles Are Not Regular Human Beings... [16]

Not to me, I assure you.

If that's what the dude meant, well then why for the love of life didn't he just say so?

Life / Three Reasons Why Poles Are Not Regular Human Beings... [16]

I would tend to concur.

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

I would be most interested in learning about the identities of those four-thousand odd people.
Wiki, for lack of anything more in-depth, seems to gloss over this fact, mentioning though more or less what you stated.

As I suspected, the operation which you spoke about concerns the clandestine tracking and eventual murder of thousands from the Polish INTELLIGENTSIA!!

Now common sense dictates that if you or I were Herr Hitler and wanted to eliminate the most "dangerous" opponents, one would obviously single out the intellectuals within society, since those would likely be the ones most of a threat to your megalomania, right?

Well then, what purpose could Hitler have had for going after the rank-in-file poor shtettl Jews, NOT merely the Rathenaus, Kurt Eiseners etc. other than to simply extirpate that particular group "root and branch" (mit Stumpf u. Stiel auszurotten), which is what the Nazis almost succeeded in accomplishing?

Again, neither "reason" or rationale is justifiable, but once more, questions of means, not just ends, must be explored as well.

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

I certainly have not forgotten any such thing, kaprys!

However, the espionage operation to which you correctly refer represented a list of thousands of Poles already known to the Gestapo, those perceived by the Reich as potential "trouble makers", if you will, many of whom were in fact behind the Ruch Oporu not to mention the Polish Underground Movement, therefore scarcely random:-)

In the case of Europe's Jews, as you are also doubtless aware, the Jews were earmarked for extermination nearly as far back as when Hitler's autobiography had been published. the fate of the Sinti-Roma was the same. His goal was not merely to enslave the Jews, as were his designs on the Poles along with other Slavs, but rather total annihilation. The cruelest of cruel ironies was that even those loyal "Deutschjuden" who fought and were prepared to give their lives as Germans in WWI, all ended up in the same crematoria as those Shtettl Jews, the unwitting pawns in the Nazis' power struggle for European domination.

Neither fate is clearly "worse" than the other, only the means to such an end clearly differed, and in the case of those deemed "Volljuden" aka Jewish on both family lines, not even the most extreme toadying on their part could have saved their skins.

Life / Three Reasons Why Poles Are Not Regular Human Beings... [16]

What are you suggesting, that they're pod people as in "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers"??
Hey, yeah!! Some extraterrestrials took over people's bodies forcing them to do things they wouldn't normally do LOL

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Although carrying a grudge clearly isn't healthy, being aware of the past might well prevent an identical atrocity from being
perpetrated in the future!

Dictators rely on the almost predictable collective amnesia of the average person, so that the precedent for a future genocide cannot be recalled and those who mastermind it can do so without nagging protest of the people, mostly willing to sit by idly as such atrocities are being committed.

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

And if the tables were turned and it had been Germans wantonly murdering gentile Poles
with the same systematic, assembly-line fashion of the Holocaust, would you be quite
so philosophical or would you be out for blood?

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

German has always reminded me of the "prehensile tail" of modern English, having, so to speak, lost almost all of
its cases from the Old up through early Middle English period. I must though gently caution the rest of us NOT to judge ANY
language, including our native tongue, by the cheap 'standard' of conventional entertainment, above all, Hollywood WWII
movies, which desecrate nearly every foreign language, turning for instance German into the perennial "harsh, militaristic" stereotype,
Italian into the wildly gesticulating operatic screaming match of crazies, French the "language of lovers" (oh, please let me
puke now or forever hold my peace!), Russian, a slovenly-sounding ooze of some ancient LP played backwards etc. ad nauseum.

German is deep in quite tangible emotion, Polish reflects a far different experience and perhaps, less darkly cynical view of life,
leavened by an unswerving Christian faith, long since absent from the modern German experience, for reasons already worked
through to death here on PF:-)

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Bravo, Paw! That's hittin' the ol' boy where he lives:-)

@Ironside,

If Jews accepted past wrongs, it would by definition make them right.
By what twisted, warped logic is that justifiable?

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Of course, kaprys, there were numerous ones who wanted to, and did! Look at Boleslaw Lesmian, Julian Tuwim, Jan Brzechwa (his mother), the internationally renowned tenor Jan Kiepura, the mathematician Lobaczewski (part-Jewish), Tadeusz Rozewicz, the great theater director Kantor, along with many others.

@Ironside, only a fool would believe that any single group or ethnicity actually seeks victim status. You give decent Polish gentiles a bad name. Maybe you ought to follow the example of heroes such as Socha, Sendler, Jan Karski or Wojtyla, instead of isolationist rabble-rousers such as Mieczyslaw Moczar and his followers.

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

All the time, often even among quite famous people too.
Problem is, in a country like Poland, Jews were so segregated, so isolated from mainstream society for ever so long, Christians couldn't look upon them as "Poles" in the same way as they could one of their own majority fellow citizens!

This thinking irks American Jews such as myself no end, since in the US, being born here automatically grants or confers the honor of citizenship, even if one's parents came from elsewhere. I'm an American, but also a Jew.

However in Poland, typically until quite recently with rampant assimilation, being a Jew born in Poland scarcely qualified such a person to automatically consider them self Polish.

Language / Looking for meaning of a phrase ("Yatz Gatz Spetagamie") [47]

Milo, Paw meant that he was unsure if J.J's grandmother's first language might have in fact been Yiddish, rather than Polish!
Such was common among principally shtettl Jews living in Poland who often spoke minimal, if any, Polish whatsoever.

Life / Everything this guy says I feel about Poland [69]

@Rich,
Addiction most certainly is a disease, don't let's absolve ourselves of our societal responsibilities!!
Be it alcohol, drugs, tobacco, yes, even sure, an addiction is a disease. Look the word up in the dictionary.

Life / Everything this guy says I feel about Poland [69]

Addiction though IS a disease, Rich!
But the addict also has to want to be cured:-)

USA, Canada / Thoughts on moving to Poland from USA [62]

Polish produce, I've heard from some ex-pat friends from Poznan who frequently return to visit family, particularly apples, are about the best in Europe!

Organic fruit and vegetables are quite popular, so I read in local newspapers.

History / Your favourite Polish Patriotic films [49]

"Przesluchanie" was indeed a frightening film. It was hardly my favorite Polish movie, and scarcely patriotic:-)