History / Good enough for British - Joseph Conrad? Poland-born novelist. [30]


Conrad's British publisher tried to convince him not to give the novella that title, but he refused to change it. However, in the United States, his publisher refused to use that title, and thus the novella was initially published under a completely different one. Although this was long before the term "politically correct" even existed.

Conrad meant no offense by using the "N-word" in the title. One of Conrad's dear friends from his sailing days was a black man, who continued to visit Conrad and his family after Joseph had become a professional writer, and that is how they referred to him. Conrad seems to have been unaware of the infamy of the word in the United States.

History / Sarmatism in Poland [119]

The title of this merged thread, Turks says that Sarmatism wasn`t Polish but Turkish thing, misrepresents the content of the article it references.


muftah.org/islams-long-lasting-influence-polish-culture/#.VUjsfpNs1-w

There is absolutely nothing controversial in acknowledging oriental influences on the martial, sartorial, and culinary fashions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth because they are obvious. The reasons that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth orientalized parts of her culture are numerous. Some of these reasons were pragmatic I.E. Turkish, Tartar and Magyar influenced cavalry tactics won battles, but many cultural appropriations were done out of aesthetic concerns. There is an interesting story behind the adoption of these aesthetic concerns.

Tacitus' Germania, lost since late antiquity and discovered in Hersfeld Abbey in 1425, ascribes the rule of the area, that would later comprise the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Sarmatians. The szlachta wholeheartedly took up the Sarmatian label for themselves. They conjectured that their ancestors must have come from the East, conquered the area, and subsequently adopted the Slavic and Baltic languages of their subjects. They had the example of the Slavic speaking, but originally Turkic, Bulgars for the plausibility of this belief. The szlachta mistakenly believed that the Sarmatians were a Turkic people (they were actually Iranic) and so they began adopting some Turkish styles to celebrate their supposed heredity. Sarmatism allowed the diverse szlachta to believe in a distant common origin for themselves, and to create a style of living unifying them in the present.

Despite, the possibly misleading, title of the article, Islam's Long Lasting Influence Polish Culture, this style had very little to do with the religious precepts of Islam and a lot to do with the aesthetics of certain oriental peoples who had adopted Islam. Another originally oriental people, the Magyars, had at least as much influence on Sarmatism as the Turks and Tartars. The szlachta saw the Hungarian nobility as their closest peers because they had embraced Christianity like themselves.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

Hey, TheOther, why don't you post on the topic of the thread? Is making stupid claims about "usual suspects" and extending your friendship to condescending Germans really more important?

Hey, Jolly, I asked you if you are ashamed to be hijacking a thread about Polish Jews to make it about ethnic Germans. I ask because Germans murdered three million Polish Jews during WW2. Do you not see how the reader may find this shameful? As for the AK. They fought to liberate Poland from the very same Germans that murdered all those Jews. I am proud of the AK.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


Can you explain this claim? Are you in the least bit ashamed to be complaining about the plight of ethnic Germans in a thread asking about the terrible past for Jews in Poland?

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

How many "guts" does it take to be a German, whose government perpetrated the worst genocide in the history of mankind, to lecture Poles on not being culpable enough?

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

Harry now claims he mentioned the Madagascar Plan in conjunction with the Final Solution in order to contrast their vast difference! What an asinine attempt to backpedal! Harry, are you taking lessons from Netanyahu?

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

Here, again, is the post in which Harry implicates Poles in the creation of the Final Solution:


What do you think reader? Am I right? If not, then why does Harry mention the "Madagascar plan" in conjunction with the "final Solution" and why would a plan that was merely investigated, and not implemented, be "by no means the least" part of a terrible past for the Jews in Poland?

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

Harry, I have already quoted the post in which you stupidly use a slippery slope fallacy to implicate Poles in the creation of the "Final Solution". The reader can see this above. Acting like a petulant baby about it won't get you out of the disgusting hole you have dug for yourself. Lie in the mud.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

Harry, when you use a slippery-slope fallacy to blame Poles for the Holocaust it is blood libel. You brought it up and you should be ashamed of yourself. You have done this in the service of your fetish, the Holocaust. Holocaust fetishism exists and your disgusting post is a clear example of it.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


It is enough to say that using the slippery-slope fallacy to blood libel Poles is a particularly disgusting example of Holocaust fetishism.

History / POLAND: EASTERN or CENTRAL European country? [1080]


Please understand that "Central Europe" is not a term that is used much in the USA. In accordance with simple binary thinking, Americans divide Europe into East and West. In the USA itself the "Mid-West" is on the Eastern side of the center of the country and "Central-America" is an isthmus far to the South. You really shouldn't believe that Americans are somehow stereotyping Poles as barbaric or impoverished when they call Poland Eastern-European. I understand the inveterate Polish desire not to be lumped in with autocracies like Russia and Belorussia, but you shouldn't assume that Americans see "Eastern" European culture as a monolith even if they are using one term to refer to it geographically. They haven't been educated to discern a distinctly "Central" part of Europe as you have.

History / POLAND: EASTERN or CENTRAL European country? [1080]


The combined population of Rumania, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia is around 36 million. There are estimates that place the total number of Slavs in the world at 350 million people, but that includes Southern-European Slavs and Russians East of the Urals. I wonder what percentage of "Eastern-Europe" is Slavic if one includes the Wends, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles as Eastern-Europeans.



Poland's wealth relative to countries farther West is not the reason many consider Poland part of an "Eastern-Europe". It is the fact that Poles are Slavs and they speak a Satem tongue which speakers of Romance and Germanic languages find exotic.

You really shouldn't have a chip on your shoulders about this. "Eastern-European" is not a derogatory term.

History / Origins of Polish Slavs [138]

Here is Jordanes' text in English translation:


harbornet.com/folks/theedrich/Goths/Goths1.htm


Very true, Herodotus writing in the Fifth Century BC mentions several peoples in the area (including a race of seasonal werewolves) and Tacitus wrote of the Venedi at the end of the First Century, but the text above from 550 AD is the oldest one to use the name Sclaweni.


The names of Polish rivers meaning nothing in Slavic languages is not irrelevant, even if they are of Indo-European origin. Names from different branches of the Indo-European language family would be consistent with the widely accepted theory that posits Indo-Europeans migrating in waves, with the Slavs being the last wave.


One may say this, but although Poland has been proposed as the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat, the most popular candidate for this place is the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Others argue forcefully for Anatolia.

History / Origins of Polish Slavs [138]


If the Polish Slavs are the autochthonic population of Poland then they did indeed arrive as hunter-gatherers many thousands of years ago, but if Slavs had been in Central Europe all along then why are they not mentioned in any written sources until 550 AD? The more widely accepted theory is that Slavs migrated into the area not as hunter-gatherers but as horticulturalists and herders during the Fifth Century.

Genealogy / Do I look Polish? (my picture) [375]


Going to Ellis Island would probably be pointless because her OP states that her family is from Baltimore:


A lot of the Polish immigrants coming to the USA, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had the port city of Baltimore, and not Ellis Island, as their landing point. All of my paternal great-grandparents arrived in the USA via Baltimore. Much of this Polish immigration through Baltimore was "illegal" and so there is no government record of the processing and admission of these immigrants.

History / Differences between Poland and Russia [43]


I went to public high school in Southern California and the partitions of Poland were included in the history curriculum.


Are you really sure that you know this for a "fact"?


Polish-Americans live throughout the United States. It isn't just in places wherein they are highly concentrated that Poland is mentioned in history courses. It isn't always lobbying by an ethnic group that gets its ancestral homeland's history included in curricula, and it most certainly isn't the case with respect to Polish history. The partitions of Poland are included in history courses in the USA because they are such blatant cases of the greed and immorality of autocracies. The republic of the United States uses the actions of Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and Russia as negative examples when educating her citizenry.

History / Differences between Poland and Russia [43]


The partitions of Poland are mentioned in high school history classes in the United States and the textbooks used often include a famous political cartoon, of the time, depicting three fat and ugly caricatures of the partitioning powers.

Life / Halloween vs All Saints' Day in Poland [48]

Halloween is only superficially about shallow consumerism. The deeper meaning of the holiday is about acknowledging the reality of death. Children face their fears on Halloween, engage in adventurous pranks and gorge themselves on the candies that they so enjoy, but Halloween is even more fun for their elders. Adults indulge their passions for creativity, and satire, in the clever costuming that they devise for themselves, and at the house parties and nightclubs they attend a delicious atmosphere humor, and eroticism prevails. Halloween is a celebration of joy and sex in the face of death and it is grand!

News / Poland will have a queen again [75]


Hahahahahahaha! Way to bungle, Belgian!


Hear Hear!


Barney it appears that the bitter British on this forum cannot forget that the Irish revolted and threw their monarchy out. Every time you post, Barney, they will read your posts as those of an Irish rebel. A rebel like the ones who humiliated their imperial monarchy. Poland and Ireland and the USA all know that the republican form of government is far superior to governments that maintain royal families at the public expense, and Britain's monarchy is most certainly maintained at the public expense despite the pathetic lies of Harry, jon357 and the rest.

Barney, when faced with an angry royalist gang you have acquitted yourself admirably by exposing their lies. PF would be a far worse place were it not for republicans like you.

Horsefaced Lizzy is the Queen of England and she, and her "regal" ilk elsewhere, are a stupid anachronism.

This post is nothing more than flaming.

History / History of Poland in a pill - illustrated [38]


I wonder how many cultures have a version of this story. The Muslims tell of Muhammad and Abu Bakr's flight from Mecca. Pursued by Meccan soldiers, led by Satan himself, they sheltered the first night in a cave, and Allah caused a spider to weave a web over the entrance, thus fooling their pursuers into believing the cave was unoccupied.

History / How different would WW2 turned out if Poland accepted Hitler's offer [219]


Hitler was an Austrian that joined the German army, rather than the Austrian army, in WW1 because he didn't want to serve in an army containing such a high percentage of Slavs.


Indeed, threads like this one, that proport to give "answers" to questions involving massive counter-factuals, may be interesting to read but these answers have absolutely no historical value. History is about what actually happened and no one can claim to know the truth about how WW2 would've turned out if the titular counter-factual had actually happened.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

People believing that a mandatory interview about prospective residency had no bearing on whether residency would be allowed are either deluded or disingenuous.


Yes trolling, that is exactly what Jon357 is doing here. He is trolling because he cannot allow any information to be revealed on this forum that shows that some Jews in Poland have actually been discriminatory towards Gentiles in Poland. Such information deviates from the myth of eternal Jewish victimhood. So he personally attacks people by calling them unhealthily obsessed. These are low-down, dirty and scummy smear tactics. Foreigner4 put it well earlier in this thread:

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

If the obligatory interviews with the Jewish Community Board that were required for Gentiles requesting permission to move into the center of the town of Bransk were just a formality, that had no bearing upon whether of not said Gentiles would be allowed to move into the center of Bransk, then why were they mandatory? People that are not insane will infer that these interviews were indeed held to decide wether or not said Gentiles would be allowed to move to the center of town.


Please "PM" the mod. All of the moderators here are sick of your ridiculous antics. I am sure that this mod will have a good laugh at your paranoiac assumption that my reference to sane readers is worthy of suspension.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


He is also a historian and he was interviewed in the documentary because of all the research he has done regarding the history of town of Bransk. He may not be a professional historian but he is a historian nonetheless. Herodotus didn't get paid for his historical research either, but he is nonetheless considered a historian. Harry, you are grasping at straws and it is hilarious! Hahahahahaha!


Hahahahaha! He said the following:


The readers of this forum, that are not insane, can infer, from the above statement, that the Gentiles subjected to this mandatory interview were indeed required to receive permission from the Jewish Community Board before being allowed to move into the center of Bransk, otherwise the interview wouldn't have been required.


Hahahahahaha! So my citing this interesting fact about the power granted the Jewish Community Board in Bransk is an attempt to "focus attention" away from the centuries! How paranoid are you? Do you really believe that my daring to relate this interesting fact about the history of Bransk is an Anti-Semitic plot?


What mod did I mention? My story is as straight as an arrow unlike your hilariously serpentine illogic.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


The documentary made the claim in that a historian featured in the documentary made it.


I don't care.


Hahahahahahaha! Harry, you really are clowning now! Do you honestly believe that these mandatory interviews were not about the granting of permission to live in the center of Bransk? If not then why require them for prospective residents?


Harry, you accused a poster of being drunk on the main forum and you were suspended. A moderator had previously warned you to stop trolling in that manner. Your suspension was not the result of a "PM". I would like you to know that I reported your obnoxious slur against said poster and reminded the moderator of his promise to suspend you. It worked! For three months this forum was free of your lies and your logical fallacies.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


No, Harry you are the one that is lying. I never claimed that a Jewish-American filmaker stated this fact about Bransk. A Polish historian in a film produced by a Jewish-American filmaker stated this fact. Your claim that I have "repeatedly" stated otherwise shows the forum, yet again, that you are delusional.


How about poster like you that repeatedly lies like a rug and posts logical fallacies? Are you drunk on booze or just drunk on resentment towards others who speak the truth about Polish history? Weren't you just suspended for three months for accusing another poster of being drunk? Yes you were. Will you ever learn?


Jason, I have never seen "Fiddler on the Roof" because I despise musicals. Your claim to know the contents of my mind is stupidly presumptuous.


Jason, if a Gentile wanted to reside in the center of Bransk, in the 19th Century, then he had to receive permission from the Jewish elders of Bransk. This permission that the Polish historian spoke of, in the documentary Sztetl, was for residency, not for merely for conducting business.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


Yes billpawl, the privilege that the Jewish elders of Bransk had in denying Gentiles the right to live in the town center of Bransk does date from the time after the partitions, but since Harry is wrong to claim that this privilege never existed then he cannot be right. Harry uses the false dichotomy fallacy in the following statement:



Who is this "we" you are speaking of Harry? None but yourself is pretending that your four possibilities are exhaustive. Why are you using the plural "we" to put forth this fallacy? Perhaps you are using the "royal we", H.N.R.I..........hhaha!


You find laughter suggestive of disrespect. Others, without a huge chip on their shoulder, may see it as an expression of amusement, and it certainly is amusing to watch the purveyor of logical fallacies put in his place.


Yehudi doesn't understand what "anachronism" means. Just because people were born into their respective social groups in medieval times in no way makes the privileges enjoyed by one group over another somehow "unreal" by modern standards.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


Hahahaha! I have given my word upon the forum that I saw it. Anyone can aquire the documentary and see for themselves if I am mistaken. If it matters that much to you, and, given your obsessive performance upon this forum regarding the subject of Polish Jewry, one may assume that it does, then see the documentary for yourself. But, be forewarned: The documentary is several hours long.


Are claiming that Jews were not allowed to live in Bransk? The documentary was produced by a Jew whose Jewish ancestors were from Bransk.


Wrong, Catholics could live in the center of the town if the Jewish town elders approved. That is what the documentary stated and I found it surprising, but there are a lot of things revealed in that documentary that were surprising.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]


According to the documentary I saw the center of the town of Bransk was uniformly Jewish and the Polish authorities granted the leaders of the Jewish community the right to refuse residency to Polish Gentiles attempting to move into that part of the town. This doesn't mean that the Polish authorities didn't also place restriction on Jewish residency in Bransk as well. You seem to be ignorantly believing that these residency regulations are somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.

History / Terrible past for the Jews in Poland? [930]

Harry, I saw the film about the history of Bransk and it said that Gentiles were required to obtain permission from the Jewish town fathers before being allowed to reside in the town's center. If you don't believe me then so be it, but you need only watch the film to be disabused of your ignorance.

Harry, in the future I would also like you to address me by my full screen name. The use of a diminutive of my screen name sounds very creepy coming from someone like you.