Polish group sues Argentine paper under new Holocaust law

[sandensea]

A Polish campaign group is suing an Argentine newspaper it says breached a new law that makes it a criminal offence to suggest Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.

In what appeared to be the first legal action under the so-called Holocaust law, just hours after it took effect, the Polish League Against Defamation said it filed a complaint against Argentina's leading progressive daily, Página/12.

The dispute refers to a December 18, 2017, article by Federico Pavlovsky on the Jedwabne pogrom, ‘Familiar Faces’.

The 1941 incident, in which Polish locals colluded with Nazi occupiers, resulted in the massacre of at least 340 Jews.

A minister from Poland’s conservative government applauded the move to invoke the law which Warsaw says will protect it from slander - but which the United States and Israel said would suppress authentic historic research and free speech.

The League, a non-governmental group that campaigns to protect Poland’s historical reputation abroad, said that Página/12 used a photograph of Polish ‘doomed soldiers’ who fought against communists after the war to illustrate an article on the Jedwabne pogrom.

The ruling Law and Justice party has praised the ‘doomed soldiers’. While many are seen as national heroes in the struggle against Soviet domination, some led killings of Jews, Belarusians and other minorities.

Página/12 noted Saturday evening that “this newspaper did not receive any legal communication and only learned of the information through international news agency reports.”

“If successful, this attempt at international censorship could threaten freedom of expression worldwide,” the article read.

At: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-poland/polish-group-sues-argentine-paper-under-new-holocaust-law-idUSKCN1GF0RF

Link to Pavlovsky's article (in English): https://www.pagina12.com.ar/99401-familiar-faces

[Judi Lynn]

1. Wildly evil behavior summoned suddenly from neighbors in a small community.

This information shows it doesn't seem to take long at all.

Where were the stories of acts of great heroism, of people coming forward to protect, or at least to refuse to participate in this situation?

They might have been entertaining the fear that if they didn't torture and terrorize the Jews, their more violent neighbors might come after them. Not one decent person stepped forward to do right, from the way it sounds.

Amazing now vicious and degraded people are willing to be, how vile, how evil, to protect their own self-interests, while their neighbors, and their children burn in agony, after an outpouring of hatred and physical violence carried out face to face.

The line being drawn from Poland to Argentina is apt. It's appropriate now more than at any time since the right-wing Dirty War by the fascist military and supportive business class in Argentina "ended." Is there really any way to truly end a dictatorship which had so many selfish supporters?

Thank you for this intensely important information on a Polish situation which never got popular illumination here. One has to wonder how and who so many things have been done to mask or totally bury evil events against helpless people, people like the original citizens of the Americas, still ongoing, and those who follow a conscientious way of living and thinking and believing.

Evil has been so easy to perpetrate throughout history, when it's generally seen that evil doesn't get blocked in this world by those who are likely to harm others. The idiots among us assume that because they can commit evil against others it must mean they are favored by the gods, and grow even bolder. They don't realize there is something far more powerful at work which will someday reveal itself to them in unmistakeable ways even they can't avoid.

It's good to learn about this finally. Thanks for being the one who brought the enlightenment, sandensea.