re: #177 Expand Your Ground

It is just this odd need on some people’s parts to have a simple black and white template: The Nazis were evil and the Poles were just victims.

When we’re talking about Polish victims, they’re indeed “just victims”. Period.

Somebody who would bring what some other Poles did into the discussion of victims would be an asshole. E.g. this is a favorite tactic of Russian Katyn minimizers or deniers - supposedly “the Poles” committed atrocities in their POW camps for Soviet soldiers in 1920s, so whatever Stalin did to those officers and others was justified. But nobody should care about what some Poles did when discussing this particular Soviet atrocity. Moreover, Stalin’s victims shouldn’t have been saints - I’m pretty sure there were plenty of racists (antisemites), homophobes and misogynists among them (as among most other victim groups in history). Does it bear on what Stalin did to them? Not in the slightest.

Discussing the worse side of Polish (or any other history) in other contexts should obviously be done, but there is time for that, and time for commemoration.