Poland and Orientalism

Jewishness is not a religion determined thingy, but by the ethnicity of ones mother. Its about blood, our PC brigade on PF would tear anybody to claimed that regarding any other ethnicity to bits. Somehow Jews are holding privileged status with the PC types.

just saying:)

You clearly have no clue about Israeli society. No law in Israel requires you to believe in the religion and keep it's laws. That's a private matter. Most people are not orthodox here, although i am. In the public sphere there are laws that are based on the religion, like those governing marriages and the establishment of Saturday as the official day of rest, and the religious holidays are the national holidays. Just like Christmas and Easter are national holidays in most European countries. But if someone wants to drive his car on sabbath and eat meat with milk and go to the beach on Yom Kippur, no one will stop him and there's no law against it. Again I want to repeat. Israel is a Jewish State in that it's the state of the nation known as "Jews" aka Israelites, Hebrews or whatever you like to call them. It's not a theocracy and it's not governed by rabbis. We have elections and political parties like other normal countries.


Talking off the top of your head and making up "facts". Here are some statistics to think about:
“some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.”

By Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes, FrontPageMagazine, October 8, 2007

...and that's not counting the massacres going on now in Syria and Libya.

You might also enjoy writing about this: Poland and Orientalism

You stated in #92 the differences are in religious belief.
I am not talking about the law but ethics. An ethnically Egyptian Jew who renounces his religion, how is the right to that land his, and not Palestinians. You simply change the meaning of Jew to suit yourself.

These statistics are not relevant as most Muslims do not live in the vicinity of occupied Palestine, but rather in Asia and Africa, and a significant portion of Palestinians and Lebanese murdered by Zionists were Christians not Muslims.

Murdered or killed in battle?

There is zero historical evidence to support this fairy story...............lets face it, 40 years wandering around lost somewhere the size of wales doesnt help non religious types buy the tale.....there is no record of the type of slavery claimed in scriptures and Charlton Heston movies.


Nope,they just didnt like jews and wanted rid, typical victorian british mix of bigotry and absurd politness....................British orientalism was more in the line of rich gay men dressing like Ottoman Nabobs........zionism oddly enough became popular with sections of HMs government,surprise surprise as the numbers of Jewish people kicked out of or fleeing from the wild East increased..................glad they didnt all leave for Israel though as my local MP is the great grandson of one of them,a top bloke :)

Deflecto et Impera?

The Orientalism being discussed herein is not about Occidentals adopting Oriental costumes, were that the case the turban wearing Polish Sarmats of past centuries would be guilty of it too, but rather it is about Occidentals creating dehumanizing characterizations of peoples of the East in order to thereby justify their dominance over them and the British surely did this. You know the "white man's burden".

We like to leave a few good ones around for old times' sake.


You're probably right about the motivation of some of the British politicians who supported Zionism. But, interestingly, some of the same people supported Arab nationalism (TE Lawrence supported both), and not necessarily for manipulative purposes. Because in those days it wasn't self-evident that the two nationalisms were in conflict.

DesE, have you ever been to Israel or Palestine?

Because, from the sound/tone of your posts, you are lacking something.

What am I lacking? Just some vague "something" or does your presence on this thread have an actual point?

Yes, I also thought that we were getting off the topic, but Des E insists that it's all about Israel and the palestinians...

A clear knowledge of the situation in Israel, unless you have visited Israel and Palestine, spoken to the people, seen with your own eyes, what is happening on a daily basis, you will never fully understand my friend, your views will always be a " Regurgitation" of another persons pictures, stories or views.

Yes, I have visited both Palestine and Israel on a number of occasions. I do not consider myself an expert on the subject, although I have my own opinion, through my own experiences.

Wrong, it is about comparing Poland's experience with Orientalism with that of other nations, most especially that of Palestine, as the author of the book Orientalism, the late Edward Said, is a Palestinian and many of the Zionists who've oppressed his people were born in Poland. I would like to thank you, Yehudi, for coming onto this thread and calling Muslim people "somewhat primitive" because you thus gave the reader an example an example of contemporary Orientalism, that is of a kind with the denegrating characterizations of Poles that Germans occupying partitioned Poland used to justify their own oppressive reign.

Mate,Im not sure what its like in So Cal, but we tend to create "dehumanizing characterizations of peoples " in the next county...its just human nature played out on a bigger scale than our old tribal/village community ways............not nice,but,well,eternal. Yes, *some* british created dehuminising stereotypes of "the east" but in many cases these were less "created" than simple differences of ways of life being pointed out.


there is so much I could say about the strange nature of britains unplanned Empire and British peoples varied reactions to it,but this is Polish forums, suffice it to say TE Lawrence was far from alone in being both a servant of Empire and someone naturaly against the whole idea.


Nationalisms are always going to clash if they dont have a big assed river or sea to seperate the two ideas...............the crying shame is that Muslims Jews and Christains lived around the ME in far more peace than Europeans saw for a good thousand years untill when,less than a hundred years ago? :(


are they the olympic mascots?

This is of course true, but Orientalism is a special variety of this stereotyping of the of the other, because the party doing the Orientalizing is in a position of political dominance over those Orientalized, and the dehumanizing characterizations of the stereotyping ascribe specific attritbutes, such as primitive irrationality, childishness, and an inability to effectively govern themselves, to those so Orientalized.

As far as I can gather, he has no personal experience of any of the countries of which he writes about.

I've read Said's Orientalism and enjoyed it immensely. The problem is that it spawned an entirely new academic field, i.e., colonial or post-colonial studies, that, while worthwhile, has denigrated into post-modern gibberish that essentializes the Other, a catch-all that includes every marginalized & oppressed class or group on the planet.

Another good read in this area in C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins, an old-style Marxist account of the uprising & revolution in Haiti.

Back on topic: I can see how "exotic" Poland can be viewed from an Orientalist POV by the likes of the Prussian military state. But like others have already pointed out on this forum, even by 19th-century standards, Poland was the most Westernized of the Slavic nation-states, at least its urban class & intelligentsia.

Except for the fact, that is not the way the Prussian military state viewed Poland-apart from the OP's imagination, one just needs to read Prussia's military chief of Staff-Von Moltke's history of Poland to find out.

Perhaps this Von Molte didn't have an Orientalist attitude towards Poland but the example of one Prussian doesn't negate the fact that Poland, and the Slavic world in general, has been Orientalized by numerous other Germans. Hague-cameron, you asked in post #24 "Where in a sentence can you find Poland and Orientalism being used in the same context written by a serious scholar?" and I in post #60 provided an example from a serious scholar named Paul Kriwaczek who wrote of an imperial Austrian saying that states that the Orient begins on the outskirts of Vienna. I also provided an example from one C.J. Schuller writing a review of Paweł Huelle's book Castrop in which he writes "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.' Castrop is set largely in Danzig and it elaborates upon the theme of Germans Orientalizing Slavs which Thomas Mann explored in The Magic Mountain. I highly suggest you read Mann's novel, or any of the Danzig trilogy written by Gunter Grass which also delves into the Orientalist attitudes Germans held towards Poles. I am quite frankly shocked that you seem to be unaware of the Orientalist stereotypes that Germans have projected upon Poles. Do you live under a rock? If you petulantly still refuse to believe me then I recommend you read Natasha's post #79 because she therein eloquently sums up the fact that Slavs, including Poles, have been Orientalized by the West in general and by the Germans in particular. Vato Loco above understands this fact and you should too.

That is not a very smart quote, because it would basically mean that half of Austria would have to be oriental-can you find any serious minded Austrian who believes that is the case?

As for your observations about German views on the Poles: yes it's true they definitively viewed Poland as economically backward at the time in comparison to Germany, which for various reasons was an accurate observation, but at no point did they view them as oriental-in the true meaning of the term.

As for Von Moltke-he wasn't just any man, he was the Prussian chief of staff. And according to him Poland was one of the most civilized European states in the 15th century-not quite what you would describe as oriental is it?

Hague-cameron, German stereotypes regarding Poles see them as more than merely econonmically less developed than themselves but also as disorderly, chaotic, and childish. These attributes which Germans, and not only Germans but other Westerners as well, ascribe to Poles are exactly the same attributes that are ascribed by Orientalists to other peoples from the from the East. Dismissive Orientalist attitudes towards Poles are still in abundance amongst people from the West and one need only peruse this forum to see this fact. Von Molte's describing Poland as one of the most civilized states in Europe in the 15th Century does nothing to change the fact that his fellow Germans, and even he himself, still had Orientalist attitudes towards Poles in the 19th Century. Orientalists have absolutely no problem acknowledging that the Arabs, for example, had been among the most civilized and refined people on Earth back in the glory days of the Caliphs when they kept classical science and learning alive while Europe plodded through its Dark Ages. This acknowledgement of past glories and civilizational triumphs does not prevent Orientalists from claiming that the Orient of the present is wild, disorderly, debased and in need of Western overlords to be properly governed, and Von Molte's comments acknowledging the past civilizational glory of Poland, several hundred years before he was writing, are exactly along these same lines.

It seems to me as though you would like to attribute to yourself a nonexistent victimhood based on a "catch all" term which was never designed in reference to the Poles. Some of the observations you attribute to the Germans, could just as well have been made by the Germans in regards to the Italians, and a 1000 years ago used by the Romans to describe the Germans-every nation has its prejudices.

As Poles are from the east of Europe and come to England, can the ones in the UK then be called WOGS - the acronym of Westernised Oriental Gentlemen. Better still, Polliwogs, as one who has traveled across water but never the equator.

poland has never been imperialistic in its constitution, that might be viewed as backwoods...

it may have seemed backwards cause poland had little need for diplomacy.