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| China Heavily Reliant on Emissions Heavy Coal The world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases is now pushing ahead with plans to develop renewable energy sources. www1.voanews.com |
As at Auschwitz, the gates of hell are built and torn down by human hearts | Timothy Garton Ash A wrenching debate about antisemitism in Poland's past leads us, in the end, to ask questions about ourselvesBetween Hanukkah and Christmas, the sign over the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp is stolen. Polish police recover it and catch the thieves, who were apparently carrying out a commission from abroad. We struggle to imagine the kind of human being who would want such a thing in his private collection. For all the mass murder, enslavement and torture that has been perpetrated since, Auschwitz remains, for a European of my generation, the symbol of human evil in our time.This grotesque episode ends a year in which the relations between Christians and Jews in general, Christian Poles and Polish Jews in particular, have again been the subject of debate. The ghosts of a tortured east European past even howled through the corridors of Westminster, as the Conservatives announced their alliance in the European parliament with a group of rightwing parties, mainly from central and eastern Europe, and then put their MEPs under the leadership of Michal Kaminski, from Poland's Law and Justice party.In the ensuing controversy, the author and actor Stephen Fry said "there's been a history of rightwing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on". A little history, indeed. To blame Catholic Poles for the Nazi extermination camp in German-annexed Polish territory, a camp in which Catholic Poles were also imprisoned and died, is so absurd that Fry's remark met with a torrent of criticism. And Fry, to his credit, swiftly apologised.Yet this is not just one Englishman's folly. Watching a German television news report on the trial of John Demjanjuk a few weeks ago, I was amazed to hear the announcer describe him as a guard in "the Polish extermination camp Sobibor". What times are these, when one of the main German TV channels thinks it can describe Nazi camps as "Polish"?In my experience, the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and antisemitism – and thence a slide to guilt by association with the Holocaust – is still widespread. This collective stereotyping does no justice to the historical record. It has no place, for example, for the incredible story of Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer who in 1940 volunteered to get himself imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to discover what was going on there. He remained as a prisoner in Auschwitz for two and a half years, smuggled out reports, organised resistance cells inside the camp, and then escaped. Having fought in the Warsaw rising against the Nazis, Pilecki survived the last months of the war in a German POW camp, only to be arrested and tortured by the communist secret police in Soviet-occupied Poland, and executed in 1948.Blanket stereotyping produces a defensive reaction among Poles, and therefore also hinders their coming to terms with a deeply troubling history of Polish and Catholic antisemitism. (It is not confined to the right: the Polish communist party was convulsed by a notorious antisemitic campaign as late as 1968.) Especially since Poland regained its freedom, that process of facing up to a difficult past has been well under way. At the beginning of this decade, a historian's exposure of the slaughter of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish Catholic fellow villagers, in the summer of 1941, sparked off what the Polish Jewish writer Konstanty Gebert calls a "stunningly profound and stunningly courageous" debate. In its wake, Gebert says, "the country has undergone a serious moral transformation."I yield to no one in my criticism of the Conservatives' new alliance in the European parliament, but the political verdict must be kept separate from the historical and moral one. The language of today's party politics, with its prefabricated phrases and glib half-truths, is so pathetically inadequate to the terrors of Auschwitz and the heroism of a Pilecki, that even to bring such synthetic verbiage close to them feels like a kind of sacrilege.There is a political judgement, for which the issue of what a rightwing opportunist like Kaminski said in Poland's Jedwabne debate a few years ago is a relevant though subsidiary consideration. There is a historical judgment, which scholars are enabling us to make with a growing appreciation of the complexity of east European and Jewish history. There is a legal judgement, which must apply to those who committed crimes against humanity. But beyond all these, there is a dimension of human understanding which perhaps only the language of art can fully encompass.To see what I mean, please buy, beg or steal yourself one of the last available tickets to the brilliant first production of a play called Our Class, by the Polish writer Tadeusz Slobodzianek, which is on at the National Theatre in London until mid-January. Drawing on the now extensive documentation of what happened in Jedwabne, Our Class tells the tragically intertwined life stories of 10 pre-war schoolmates, five of them Jewish, five Catholic.It spares you nothing of the horrors of one of the worst chapters in the history of Polish antisemitism, showing a gang rape, a man beaten to death, and finally the Jews being burned alive in a barn. But it also shows you Wladek, the Catholic peasant farmer who shelters and then marries a Jewish girl. Then there's Menachem, the Jewish survivor who after the war becomes a communist secret police interrogator. And Zocha, the Polish Catholic woman who saved Menachem's life by hiding him in her barn, then emigrates to the US. Hearing an American Jewish couple banging on about Polish antisemitism, she explodes: "And what did the Americans do for the Jews during the war?"And Abram, the lucky one, who emigrated to America before the war, became an unctuous rabbi, and, 60 years after the fact, exacts from his former schoolmate Heniek, now a Catholic priest with a liking for little boys, endorsement of his entirely unfounded claim that back in 1941 the rabbi of Jedwabne led his flock into the barn with Torah held high, glorifying God's name, Kiddush Hashem. No one's self-comforting myth is left intact.The historian's proper questions about strict historical accuracy, about what is typical or exceptional, cause and effect, are secondary here. For here is a deeper truth: this is what human beings are capable of when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And to be a small town in eastern Poland occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, then by a Soviet-imposed Polish communist regime, is almost a definition of wrong place, wrong time.) Anyone born in a luckier place and time must say: there, but for the grace of geography, go I.Except that we all walk that way, only without the extremes. It is not just that some people are villains, others heroes; it is that the very same man or woman can behave terribly at one moment, magnificently the next. We can be both lower than the apes and higher than the angels. We are weak; we are strong. We acquire a burden of guilt; we stake a claim to mercy. Then we grow old, sicken and die.• Comments on this article will remain open for 24 hours from the time of publication but may be closed overnightPolandGermanyJudaismCatholicismChristianityEuropean UnionHolocaustTimothy Garton Ashguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Snow and ice close dozens of schools Thousands of schoolchildren across the north of England enjoyed an extra day's holiday as dozens of schools were shut due to the wintry weather. telegraph.co.uk |
Michael White's diary Despite the Speaker's airy dismissal ageism is a worry in the Commons. After all, only two MPs are under 30• Talk about imposing Harman-style quotas for women MPs is all very well. But what about anti-discrimination quotas for the over-65s now that so many are retiring and Âtaking their duck houses with them? An Âelderly reporter challenged Speaker John Bercow (47 next week) on ageism at a press gallery lunch yesterday. ÂBercow had been recklessly candid (we call it "brave") on a range of hot topics, from a Commons creche (coming soon) to Commons civil partnerships (ditto: Chris Bryant is first in line) and a secret repayment deals over expenses (Bercow's against them). But he retreated into airy generalities about bus-pass inclusivity. Not to over-worry. A chunk of the 93 over-65s MPs are quitting along with a swath of had-enough youngsters. But Sirs Peter Tapsell and Gerald Kaufman (79) are both hanging on, so is not-Sir Dennis Skinner. Sir Ian Paisley (83) has not yet declared. The average age (55 and a half) won't drop much. How many MPs are under 30? Two, and when Lib Dem Jo Swinson is 30 next month, just one: Tory new girl, Chloe Smith (27).• Apropos wrinklies, one sends a cutting from The Boy's Own Paper, dated 6 October 1880. It seems that, then as now, hooligan Afghan tribesmen and their mullahs are "preaching a fresh rising against the English", despite being biffed by General Roberts. A Colonel St John gives an upbeat media briefing. The BOP is having none of it. "In Afghanistan hopeful anticipations are apt to prove baseless."• In 2010 the modernising occupation forces bring modern scams to Kabul. An Afghan version of the "I am a Nigerian businessman. Please help me launder $30m" missive has British soldiers accidently taking possession of a shady American security specialist's Blackhawk helicopter. They find it contains $16m in cash. "We want to move this money out of this place ... we take 70%, you take 30%." And so on. Please send details. Yeah, right.• A scam of a different kind arrives from Russia, where a report allegedly prepared for Vladimir Putin suggests that the Haitian earthquake was actually caused by the Obama administration. Come again? Ah, you didn't know that ("virtually unknown to the American people") both Russia and the US have developed nuclear "earthquake weapons" – and both cunningly used them against Iran. This one was a test that went wrong. Read enough? You may care to know that ÂAssociated Press footage put on YouTube mixes shots of crushed-car carnage in Port-au-Prince with a pop-up Google advertisement about "New Mazda ÂScrappage deals". No wonder the ÂChinese hack them.• David Cameron's new airbrushed election poster (pictured) is turning the staid old billboard into a viral online medium. Clifford Singer, a non-party creative, has set up mydavidcameron.com which allows visitors to tweak Dave's slogan. Examples so far include "I love the BBC so much I want to cut it up into little pieces and give it to all my friends", and Dave (plus syringe), saying: "This is going to hurt. Don't worry, you won't feel a thing." There is also an Eton-baiting "Embarrassed by baldness" version and "Puzzled by economics? Don't worry, so are we". Such frivolous behaviour means that rival parties no longer need a lad with an aerosol. It could kill billboards. There again it could rejuvenate them – online and cheaply.• An untypically Âintroverted spat has broken out in the blogging community over whether ÂEx-Brown aide Damian McBride has predicted a hung parliament, which would count as a Brown "win". Actually, he thinks Gordon will do a Harry Truman and really win.• Late flash: Diarist Lady Antonia Fraser and husband Harold Pinter attend the 2003 anti-war demo with Jesse Jackson. "Naturally he was incredibly pleased to meet Harold and me – we got the impression that it made his day."Michael Whiteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Haiti earthquake: government fears toll could rise to 300,000 Fears that the death toll will top the Asian tsunami in 2004. The count of bodies so far found and collected in the capital Port-au-Prince is 150,000, alone. telegraph.co.uk |