Anti-Polish sentiment

Polonophobia,[1] also referred to as anti-Polonism (Polish: Antypolonizm)[2] or anti-Polish sentiment are terms for negative attitudes, prejudices, and actions against Poles as an ethnic group, Poland as their country, and their culture.

[3] This prejudice led to mass killings and genocide or it was used to justify atrocities[4][failed verification] both before and during World War II, most notably by the German Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists.

During World War II, when most of Polish society became the object of genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, anti-Polonism led to an unprecedented campaign of mass murder in German-occupied Poland.

[21] The "Polish plumber" cliché may symbolize the threat of cheap labor from poorer European countries to "steal" low-paying jobs in wealthier parts of Europe.

[23][24] The assertion that Poles were heretical was largely politically motivated as the Teutonic Order desired to conquer Polish lands despite Christianity having become the dominant religion in Poland centuries prior.

Sweden, which developed anti-Polish sentiment due to previous Polish–Swedish wars in hope to gain territorial and political influence, as well as dispute with the Polish Crown because of Sigismund III Vasa, launched an invasion known as the Deluge.

[36] When Poland lost the last vestiges of its independence in 1795 and remained partitioned for 123 years, ethnic Poles were subjected to discrimination in two areas: the Germanisation under Prussian and later German rule, and Russification in the territories annexed by Imperial Russia.

At the same time, with the emergence of Panslavist ideology, Russian writers accused the Polish nation of betraying their "Slavic family" because of their armed efforts aimed at winning independence.

The German campaign of discrimination contributed to the Silesian Uprisings, where Polish workers were openly threatened with losing their jobs and pensions if they voted for Poland in the Upper Silesia plebiscite.

[52] The British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote in 1945 that National Socialism was inevitable because the Germans wanted "to repudiate the equality with the peoples of (central and) eastern Europe which had then been forced upon them" after 1918.

According to Soviet NKVD archives, 111,091 Poles, and people accused of ties with Poland, were executed, and 28,744 were sentenced to Gulag labor camps, for a total of 139,835 Polish victims.

The Poles resident in Britain served under British command during the war,[78] but as soon as the Soviets began to make gains on the Eastern Front both public opinion and the government turned increasingly pro-Soviet.

These phrases refer to the network of concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in order to facilitate the "Final Solution", but the wording suggests that the Polish people might have been involved.

[91] Cardinal Józef Glemp in his controversial and widely criticized speech delivered on 26 August 1989 (and retracted in 1991)[92] argued that the outbursts of antisemitism are a "legitimate form of national self-defence against Jewish anti-Polonism.

[99] According to Polish historian Joanna Michlic, the term is used in Poland also as an argument against the self-critical intellectuals who discuss Polish-Jewish relations, accusing them of "anti-Polish positions and interests."

"[100] For the 1994 anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a Polish Gazeta Wyborcza journalist, Michał Cichy, wrote a review of a collection of 1943 memoirs entitled Czy ja jestem mordercą?

by Calel Perechodnik,[101] a Jewish ghetto policeman from Otwock and member of the "Chrobry II Battalion",[102] alleging (as hearsay) that about 40 Jews were killed by a group of Polish insurgents during the 1944 Uprising.

[104] Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz accused Cichy of practicing a 'distinct type of racism,' and charged Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik with 'cultivating a species of tolerance that is absolutely intolerant of antisemitism yet regards anti-Polonism and anti-goyism as something altogether natural'.

These jokes were fueled by ethnic slurs disseminated by German National Socialist propaganda, which attempted to justify the Nazis' murdering of Poles by presenting them as "dreck"—dirty, stupid and inferior.

[122][123] The Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski, of Polish origin himself, said that the increase in violence towards Poles is in part "a result of the media coverage by the BBC" whose reporters "won't dare refer to controversial immigration from other countries.

"[124][125][126][127] Kawczynski voiced his criticism of the BBC in the House of Commons for "using the Polish community as a cat's paw to try to tackle the thorny issue of mass, unchecked immigration" only because against Poles "it's politically correct to do so.

On 14 October 2009, Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff alleged that: "the second world war narrative [...] has been distorted since independence and the transition to democracy to make it more palatable to their electorate and to minimize the role of local collaborators in Holocaust crimes.

In response to the above articles, Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the same paper on 23 December: "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.

He accused Poland of complicity in the six million Jewish deaths of The Holocaust,[137][138][139] prompting not only an official letter of complaint to The Times, but also an early day motion in the British parliament, followed by an editorial in The Economist.

[140][141][142][143][144] The ambassador, Tuge-Erecinska, explained that the article was "unsupported by any basic historic or geographic knowledge," and that "the issue of Polish-Jewish relations has been unfairly and deeply falsified" by Coren's "aggressive remarks" and "contempt".

"[158] On 30 October 2009, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, complained about this new British political row playing on a "'false and painful stereotype that all Poles are antisemitic', whereas the truth was that the problem was around the same there as elsewhere in Europe.

[163] Following the British referendum of EU membership, there were more cases of Polonophobic occurrences including anti-Polish leaflets distributed in Huntingdon[164] and graffiti against the Polish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.

[175] Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said: "We express our fullest sympathy to the ambassador and our shock at the attack," while the suspect apologized and said he had been provoked earlier by a Polish Embassy employee using an anti-Semitic slur against him.

The slur involved Marsh trying to convince the show's lone Polish-American character, Gary, to go bowling after work by saying: "Come on, it's in your blood, like kielbasa and collaborating with the Nazis."

"[178] In August 2005, a series of allegedly organised attacks against Polish diplomats took place in Moscow,[179] which prompted the then-Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski to call on the Russian Government to stop them.