Ignorance May Be Bliss For Some But It Annoys Me
Rosemary the Queen
In this thread about Gen. Petraeus resident anti-Islamophobe warrior Ali Eteraz said this:
" i opposed the war but even as i opposed it i was like: we cant do this alone. we went in with freaking poland (have they ever resisted anyone) and freaking spain (who still elect socialists). i mean, come on!"
Well, I for one appreciate learning all I can about Islam, so I don't mistakenly condemn the religion. I'd much rather condemn the fascist terrorists that are perverting it.
I'd appreciate it, if, in return people would READ HISTORY before making moronic claims about an entire group of PEOPLE that they obviously know NOTHING ABOUT.
Hypocrite!!!
For those of you that want to know about Poland and their many victories in war and their countless uprisings and resistance of Communism, Nazism and the like read it here. Better yet, you can read The History of Poland online.
Or you can just rely on the ignorance of others to guide you. But if you do, remember, I'll be waiting and I won't be this nice next time.
Update: Thanks to all of you, in the comments, for your support of Poland and her people. Your recognition of their valor and resistance in history is a soothing balm for the sting of ignorance displayed by others.
In fact you'd think people would figure out the implications of naming the Soviet alliance the Warsaw Pact, indicating the importance of that country to the USSR.
But then, I remember that Poland was the first country to really kick up a ruckus during the 1980s. I also remember back in the day when Poland was the big dog in eastern Europe.
Ali also demonstrates his ignorance by not citing just who else even has projectable military power. To put it another way, there are not very many countries who have the ability to use their forces very far from their own territory.
The short list: NATO, Russia, China, India, and Japan. It should be self-evident why Russian and China would refuse to help the United States, especially in an oil-producing country.
Just about every NATO country which can support a few hundred (perhaps a thousand or two) outside their own borders has done so. The major exceptions are France and Germany.
Germany is still psychotically obsessed over WW2 to the point where the few German soldiers in Afghanistan aren't allowed to shoot at anyone. And France is, well, France. They've been butting heads with America since DeGaulle kicked NATO out of France.
Japan has sent troops over, has has Australia. I honestly don't remember if India has sent anyone.
So just who are we supposed to have gotten? This is why I've always considered that one of the more idiotic criticisms of the war.
A valid criticism? Ara raised one over at Ron Coleman's the other day: Bush was dumb enough to trust Tenet to run the CIA despite how the company obviously screwed the pooch before 9/11 and before the invasion. "Slam dunk" my rear end!
Poland is not and has never been a wimp. Do some reading, you obviously need to.
My post was 100% joke. Lighten up!
Cheers,
Daniel
I grew up in Michigan, so I have an idea of how much anti-Polish prejudice still exists -- I can't tell you how many "Polak" jokes I heard. Funny that kids don't even think twice about such things.
- Daniel
I'm not sure Dean suggested anything.
That explains some of "Dean's" posts...
I meant Rosemary. Oh well. lol Don't post right after waking up. :p
Ummm, I don't do batshit crazy so don't go blaming me for those posts...
Most of the people of polish heritage whom I've encountered in a long life have been far more intelligent than any other group I have known.
My own daughter-in-law -- a beautiful young polish-american girl, is a graduate mathematician who is now working toward a doctorate in one of the medically-related sciences at the University of Wisconsion-Madison. Her own brother and sister-in-law are computer programmers on the Mars landing craft control team at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California. And I could point out numerous other examples of people of the same sort of qualities.
In World War II, the resistance forces of the army of Poland defended Warsaw against the surrounding Nazi armies for some three weeks. The French army, in contrast, simply retreated out of Paris and fired not a single shot in defense of their capital.
And in the aerial battle of Britain that followed the fall of France in the summer of 1940, it was the availability of Polish and Czechoslovak pilots who could barely understand a word of English, who gave Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh C T Dowding, the chief of RAF's Fighter Command, the sufficiency in pilots he so desparately needed to fight off Goering's Luftwaffe so that Britain could live to fight another day. And in those air battles, the Polish and Czech pilots, once admitted to operational status with Number 11 Group that defended southeastern England which was closest to the German air bases, racked up some of the leading scores of knockdowns of German bombers and fighters.
And when the Polish army of liberation under General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski organized itself in 1944 and at least temporarily liberated Warsaw from nazi rule, the Germans were compelled to divert major forces from elsewhere along their military fronts, to retake the city. The Poles who fought that battle did so by fighting their way through sewers flowing with human wastes and other poisonous stuff. Show me anybody else who has fought so hard for their own freedom.
So don't go making any jokes about these people, because if you, then you have shit for brains and no sense of honor whatsoever.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
See the Battle of Monte Cassino.
What the hell, Arnold? Did I suggest that I approved of those jokes.
It's not a myth it was just a little misreported. The Poles did fight with their Cavalry. They did not attack tanks with them, they were stopped by tanks.
Really, for all their faults, the Poles kicked quite a bit of German buttock before the Soviets invaded and took the Eastern half of their country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko
And of course it was Lech Walesa and the Polish solidarity movement that were as instrumental as any in the destruction of the Soviet Empire.
Major blows against the two great evils of the 20th century, I would call that resisting and I don't think that any nation has contributed so much, with so little, at such great cost, and against such long odds to the cause of freedom as Poland.
When have they ever resisted anyone? When have they not!
I am proud that they are on our side in this one, and if I was an Islamofacist I certainly would worry about them as an enemy.
They didn't use horse cavalry, but they did bravely use P.11 fighters against the 109s of the Luftwaffe.
Look up the history of the Battle of Britain, and see what the polish and czech pilots did to those Messerschmidt Bf109e fighters and Heinkel 111 bombers, when they rode the clouds over southeastern England in the RAF's modern Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires, with their eight Colt-Browning machine guns preset to 650 yards target range, closing with the enemy aircraft sometimes head-on at combined speeds as high as 750 miles per hour.
The great men who commanded them, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh C T Dowding, chief of Fighter Command, and Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, commander of Group number 11, needed them badly in late August and early September 1940, when the had plenty of planes but were running out of pilots. They never let the Brits down, and they didn't let too many Luftwaffe flyboys stay airborne. Even though the Brits had let all Poland down when Hitler's blitzkrieg was smashing through their country.
It was one of Poland's proudest moments, even though the battle was fought far from their country, because the future of the world, during 3-4 cloudless weeks in the summer of 1940 in far western Europe, depended on the stamina, bravery and skill of about a thousand young combat fighter pilots who wore RAF blue.
And not a few of them didn't even understand enough English to read the London newspapers while they sat exhausted on the ground between combat flights. But they knew what the battle was about, and they knew the stakes for the world if they lost that battle.
Its too bad that after the war, their people had to endure more than 40 years of communism.
And that the Polish nation as a whole can still look at the world and smile, considering the horrors and degradations they were put through by their german and russion neighbors, tells you quite a bit about their magnificent spirit.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
How many countries in the world can support a standing army of ANY size? Very Few. The eastern bloc of countries sent what they could, in percentage of their military, about what the USA has sent. The coalition of the willing, the able, and the winning.
Remeber Iraq was the 4th largest army in the world, behind the US, Russia, China.
For my part, I rejoiced in Poland's emergence from behind the Iron Curtain, and thank the Polish people for their many contributions to the Free World as it exists today.
If he's smart, he's looking for a bunker deeper than Hitler's to hide in until the Queen calms down a bit. :-)
The first is Norman Davies' God's Playground. This is a magisterial history of Poland up to the mid-1980s, it's date of original, hardback publication. Davies has written many other things that touch Poland as a topic (e.g. Europe: A History, which is centered on the city of Wroclaw/Breslau, or the more recent Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw). [See what having a Polish wife can help one accomplish?]
The second is a tetrology, "The Gleiwitz Suite", which starts with the novel First Polka, by Horst Bienek. Bienek, half-Polish, half-German, was born in 1930 in Gleiwitz, on the then German-Polish border in Silesia, and where the Nazis perpetrated their fraudulent 'cassus belli' to start the war against Poland.
It tells an incredible story of the build-up to and during WWII, the clashes between the German and Polish citizens, the tragedy of the Jews in th town, and then the displaced as the war was drawing to an end. This series, sadly, is out of print, but can be found if you look hard enough. The other books in the suite are September Light, Time Without Bells, and Earth and Fire. The first, I think, is the strongest and best-written, but YMMV.
All of these books are worth reading.
So when you say "two," you really mean "six"...
You don't happen to run a store with a two-for-one deal, by any chance, do you?
A dumb sentence by Ali and now the readership are obliged to share in the outrage as well as to be obligated to read books on Poland history, pontifications on Arnold's dtr-in-law's brain power and how Poland won WWII with a little help from the allies.
This belies basic every day street wisdom and smacks of the political correctness of today and the idiocy thereof. The offenses are nearly fatal,
aarrgh.
There are children to raise and if they are not immunized to name calling by the age of (fill in the blank)__________, then the parents will have failed. If the parents aren't immunized to it, they need help.
In my parents generation, we were taught by motto and sayings. From my youth, I recall, the response:
"sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will not harm me".
It always worked.
One would hope, however, the Ali's religious faith would inform some of his internet proclamations.
That's not a pile-on, only an observation.
Ali said a dumb thing but how would he know it was dumb if he wasn't told that it was? He believed that tripe and I felt obliged to inform him of his mistake.
That everyone who responded felt the same wasn't about being PC because shitting on Poland is a very accepted practice in America. I'm sick of it and so I said so.
sorry ur offended rosemary.
im quite glad 4 the hist lesson.
u are also free to call me a hypocrite but i kno im not since i always accept my errors.
I accept your apology.
Glad you enjoyed the lesson it was a needed one. Accepting errors is fine but you slammed an entire country of people based on no info, exactly what you hate when it happens to Muslims. The act was hypocritical, that you realized you were wrong makes it better.
ok i just read the comments. i think a pile-on is an understatement. bringing up how my religion should inform my internet protocol. wondering if i was hiding (while in fact i was sleeping).
most importantly: each of you accepted from the pole that the comment was insensitive.
yet when me, matoko or aziz say something is islamophobic we dont get 44 comments supporting us. many commentators dont accept from us muslims that the islamophobic comment was actually insensitive. things have gotten much better since dean's purge. but that purge shouldnt have been necessary (and i still wish it hadnt happened).
im just asking for consistency.
ps - i feel comfortable bringing this up now bc me n mrs esmay are cool.
Especially right now, it helps keep those creative juices flowing for my research proposal I'm writing.
How did I miss this post and blog fight!!
Pope John Paul, Lech Walensa -- the take down of soviet Communism.
Hell, my proud Polish grandfather, Mike, God rest his soul, is smiling somewhere!!!
HBarnes
Well, it helps that those who commented actually knew a bit about Poland so they knew that your comment was baseless and insulting. They weren't accepting my word for it, they knew better.
What we know about Islam is still ongoing and we are all willing to learn more.
I shouldn't have had to have the purge. He's right.
Among those of us who know a little something about European history, there is the rememberance of the great king of Poland, Jan III Sobieski, who in 1686 led the armies of Poland, Austria, and the various german states of that era, in their victory over the ottoman Turks, who for a second time had laid siege to Vienna in a grand islamic assault against christian Europe.
Chances are it would be far different for you and yours if the Turks had broken the Christian forces in that great battle on the Danube 321 years ago. Your religious kinsmen would probably have destroyed western civilization as we have come to know it.
And for us -- even the unbelievers among us -- that would have brought us something we view today as the degradation of endless slavery.
Because the christian West has given us freedom, in a fundamental way that Islam never would have done. I can be a non-believer in a civilization such as this. Because despite the Hitlers and the Stalins who essentially were products of our civilization, freedom has survived among us, the children of old Europe, and seems to be growing. It is yet to be seen whether any such freedom will emanate from much or most of the islamic world, despite my hope for just such an outcome.
Ali, we will never forget the history that binds us of the West all together. It's a kind of process described best by the Russian word "pamyat" -- remembrance.
So when we celebrate out heroes, they shall always include the great Frankish leader Charles Martel, who over three terrible days of combat fought off the moslem Arabs and Berbers who had conquered Spain and half of France. And Geofrey de Bouillon, who took back Jerusalem for the same western civilization some 366 years later. And King Jan III Sobieski, who led the Poles, Austrians and Germans in the struggle against militarized Islam in 1686.
I would have to be some sort of fool to imagine that Moslems like you, Ali and Matoko do not practice your remembrance in honor of the Arabs, Berbers, Turks and other Moslems who fought against our heroes of the austrasian Franks, the norman Crusaders and the Poles, Austrians and Germans of that battle-line around Vienna, for purposes of conquering and enslaving the nations of the same West that you have now chosen to join.
So what about it, Ali? We can't change our remembrances. And you can't change yours. How exactly do you work all this out, inside your own head? And how do you want us to work it out inside our heads?
I think it's a reasonable question. Maybe you do too. Or maybe it's just something you want to avoid discussing at all.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ali ain't all that bright to do the Charles Martel thingie.
He doesn't even do a good matoko imitation.
I could be wrong, but he did surrender when he said,
"fair nuff", in response to:
"Well, it helps that those who commented actually knew a bit about Poland so they knew that your comment was baseless and insulting."
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thanks rosemary.
ok i just read the comments. i think a pile-on is an understatement. bringing up how my religion should inform my internet protocol. wondering if i was hiding (while in fact i was sleeping).
most importantly: each of you accepted from the pole that the comment was insensitive.
yet when me, matoko or aziz say something is islamophobic we dont get 44 comments supporting us. many commentators dont accept from us muslims that the islamophobic comment was actually insensitive. things have gotten much better since dean's purge. but that purge shouldnt have been necessary (and i still wish it hadnt happened).
im just asking for consistency.
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Because I think Ali in fact deserves an answer as to the fact that "yet when me, matoko or aziz say something is islamophobic we dont get 44 comments supporting us."
And I think I gave him a reasonably well thought-out answer why he probably never will get consistency on this. Because Islam is one one side of a 1400-year-old skirmish line, and european-american civilization is on the other side of that line.
Or should we just forget all about the pamyat of western civilization?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
You are correct and I support what you said 100 %. You gave a more than a reasonable explanation.
But I don't think Ali gets its or will ever get it . There isn't any consistency on the internet. And he isn't the victim that he so cherishes to be.
For Ali to insist that it be so is disingenuous even if when he invokes his religion.
I see that as bunk.
I know nothing about a 1400 year skirmish line.
As an american, he has no claim as victim.
I brought up the word pile-on and he clamped on to it as its victim.
That's also bunk.
But it wasn't how I used the term.
In short, islamophobic has nothing to do with this discussion regarding:
" i opposed the war but even as i opposed it i was like: we cant do this alone. we went in with freaking poland (have they ever resisted anyone) and freaking spain (who still elect socialists). i mean, come on!"
The 9:12pm post?
Great stuff! Well done.
Postscript? Maybe it's not as islamophobic as you think. Like those buttwipe taxi drivers who want to refuse fares with dogs, or the "hate crime" in a middle school involving someone putting some sliced ham (in a freaking bag) on a lunch table where some Somali Muslims were sitting.
If you do that to some Zionist/Jews, it's funny. If you do that do Muslims, it's a hate crime. Oh, the tragedy!
Excuse my while I go puke...
Respect the Poles.
The "West" (i.e. Western, Christian Europe)would never have developed the way it did if it hadn't conquered the learning centers of Sicily and Spain from the Muslims, which (along with Persia), were the height of civilization in the Middle Ages.
Aquinas would have been nowhere without Al-Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Maimon (yes the last is a Jew). Roger Bacon would have been nowhere without Ibn Haytham (Alhazen).
I don't think know where your precious Europe comes from.
Salam,
Daniel
And yes I think this shows you to be quite ignorant about history -- for at least half of these 1400 years of this "conflict" it was the Muslim lands that excelled in terms of education, art, wealth, and yes, even freedom. So what are you fighting for, blood-ties? Religious truth? If not, you would feel more gratitude to the Muslim countries that helped give birth to Modern Europe.
Nope.
Now it is time to drag those tyrants and mullahs into the 21 century where people have rights to speek up, to dissent, to protest, to disagree, and to choose their own life, and religion.
Pre christian scandinavian thralldom, while otherwise similar to slavery, was NOT hereditary, unlike the mediterannean culture slavery. Before that was also the Althing, which christian kings eradicated. Basically both christianity and islam are the products of mediteranean slaver cultures
Victor Krueger
Athiest Redneck Texan
I don't think know where your precious Europe comes from."
...And that's all I need to know where you're coming from, Danny. Thanks for calling!
Poland gave a lot to art, science, literature, religion, music, and society as a whole.
I get Daniel's point but I also suspect that he doesn't think the Poles have done much to advance civilization either. Here's a link.
Thanks for understanding, but I have no doubt that Poland has done much for civilization. I think John Paul II was a great man, who bravely stood up to Communist tyranny. I don't have an answer to the question I posed, though I suspect some people here (not you) do, and mostly due to an ignorance of Muslim history. C'est la vie!
- Daniel
That said, I'm sure many of you could learn a bit more about the achievements in math, optics, medicine, astronomy, theology, poetry, and painting.
(And of course I recognize that the midieval Persians built of many great achievments of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians, and even Chinese.)
I'll read your link, Rosemary. I'm sure there's always more I can learn. Thanks.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.