An apology to Poland: Trump-decreed Smithsonian scrubbing humbles once great nation.

 

     Pride goeth before a fall, the Bible says.
     Well, not really. Like many widely-quoted phrases, that's an improvement on the original, polished smooth by longtime use. The actual line in Provers 16 in the King James Bible is "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
     Either way, a reminder to tack toward humility. 
     I try to bear that in mind. But sometimes I get carried away.
     Such as in February, 2021. The future was bright. The Trump era had seemingly ended the month before. If you told me the guy who sicc'd a mob on the U.S. Capitol would sweep back into office in four years, I'd have laughed. America was back, and what better way to celebrate than to brag about our freedom?
     It being Black History Month, I chose our nation's bleakest chapter. My column began: "You know the great thing about centuries of slavery in the United States? The big positive that gets 
overlooked ... ?"
     A tease — what could be good about slavery? — to draw readers in, leading to the reveal. The good thing about slavery was:
     "That we can talk about it now, honestly, openly, write and discuss, and contemplate our nation’s difficult and tortured past, unafraid. That is an undeniable greatness of America, one to be proud of. Because not every country can manage it."
     To provide an example, I decided to kick Poland, because that winter, two historians, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski with Warsaw's Polish Center for Holocaust Research, were hit by a lawsuit by the government-funded Polish League against Defamation, which sued the authors, as I put it, "for recounting history that contradicts their sense of unmitigated national glory."
      The column I wrote was peppered with translated quotes from Yiddish letters from my great uncle, Zalman Bramson, about life in Poland in the 1930s. Let's just say Poles didn't need the Germans to teach them to abuse Jews. 
     “The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale,” said Grabowski. “... which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists.”
     Not forgotten. Actively suppressed. Nationalists have a way of pushing the nations into the abyss. History teaches this, so must be prettied up so as not to give away the game.
Feeling myself on safe ground, I indulged in some analysis.
      "Like our own country for the past half decade, and nations around the world, Poland fell in the grip of resurgent nationalism. A shameful political philosophy that believes a country becomes great, not by actually doing great things, but through talk, threats and pressure. Their greatness is declarative — tell everybody “We are great!” Over and over and over."
      The nation of Poland, through its embassy in Washington, demanded the column be taken down, while finding nits to pick — this supposed "historians" I cite, his degree was in sociology!

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