FBI Head Comey is Maliciously Wrong on Holocaust Facts about Poland

It’s been said the victors write the history books.

This should not be equated with the smartest, or most intellectually honest people, writing the history books.

There is an penetrating New York Review of Books review of the Benoit Peters tome Derrida: A Biography where we hear the following about American intellectual stupidity, but also, I think, cynicism:

But Americans, it’s been said, often got Derrida wrong: deconstruction was never intended as a reproducible methodology, let alone a political weapon. (To her credit, Spivak, who went on to help found the field of postcolonial studies, applying Derridean theory to representations of Third World “subalterns,” did not present it this way.) The critic François Cusset, who devoted a whole book to explaining French theory’s unlikely US success, notes the “ironic paradox that the least directly political author in the corpus of French theory (compared to Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault) was the most politicized in the United States.” Even Derrida claimed astonishment at the way his elusive and poetic glosses on Heidegger and Husserl were refashioned into a blunt, all-purpose tool—a kind of lethal deep-reading app—wielded by Americans determined to wage war on a canon they hadn’t always bothered to read.

While it might be unfair to blame ALL Americans for the misinterpretation of Derrida and phenomenology, it’s fair to claim that most American humanities department academics got Derrida wrong, except for some Catholic philosophy departments who understood his Derrida’s significance best.

But American sloppiness is not confined to the ivory walls. It seems that at least twice a year major American news outlets (such as the NYT) and major policy figures (who really should know better) make completely ignorant remarks suggesting Poland was an accomplice of Nazi Germany in the extermination of Jews.

Take, for example, the head of the FBI in a speech he gave recently as reprinted in the Washington Post (shame on you for giving him a forum!) last week:

I want them to see that, although this slaughter was led by sick and evil people, those sick and evil leaders were joined by, and followed by, people who loved their families, took soup to a sick neighbor, went to church and gave to charity.

Good people helped murder millions. And that’s the most frightening lesson of all — that our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil. Of being so cowed by those in power. Of convincing ourselves of nearly anything.

In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.

The obfuscation that is so great a part of historical memory might make you say, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, it is a lie to compare Poland to the Nazis and their Axis Allies Hungary and THAT should frighten us.

Poland’s Marshal of the Sejm set the record straight in a tweet:

Yes, the historical record is clear enough to be summarized in a 140 character or less tweet, but Comey, the head of the Federal Bureau, couldn’t be bothered to investigate.

Comey could’ve also looked closer to home at slavery, decimation of whole indigenous peoples, putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, and lynchings (I really could go on indefinitely) as examples of nice decent people looking on as horrors were being perpetrated among them. But as the victor he prefers to scapegoat other nations by obscuring their historical record. Such are the things victors do.

If you are looking for something broader than this adequate twitter reply then look at my 5 Facts Holocaust Remembrances Frequently Forget (especially if you don’t know that 2.7 million Polish-Catholics died in the Holocaust and they nonetheless saved more Jews than any other nationality).

If you don’t believe Sirkorski account, then take a look at Karski’s devastating retelling of his meeting with Roosevelt where the latter turned down his desperate call to stop the Holocaust. Maybe the American should look closer to home when it comes to distributing the blame for the Holocaust?