The Soviet Occupation of Poland, 1939–41, and the Stereotype of the Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet Jew
The article analyzes two opposing trends that have emerged in Polish postcommunist historiography with regard to the cliché of the procommunist and pro-Soviet and anti-Polish Jew. It traces the origins of this cliché and its development in Polish political thought during the interwar period and its persistence during and after World War II. At the center of the analysis is the application of this cliché in the debate about the Jedwabne massacre on July 10, 1941, by four (ethno)nationalist historians: Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Bogdan Musiał, Tomasz Strzembosz, and Marek Wierzbicki. The article also focuses on the attempts at challenging the cliché in contemporary historiography by Jan T. Gross, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Dariusz Libionka, and Andrzej Żbikowski.
PARANOIA AND PARTISANSHIP: GENOCIDE STUDIES, HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND THE ‘APOCALYPTIC CONJUNCTURE’*
ABSTRACT Recent literature on the Holocaust and (other) genocides reveals that on the whole differences in approach persist. For many historians, as for the public, the Holocaust is the prototypical genocide, such that mass violence must resemble the Holocaust to constitute genocide. Whereas ‘normal’ ethnic/national conflict is commonly believed to involve ‘real’ issues like land, resources, and political power, no such conflict is discernible in the Holocaust of European Jewry, whose victims were passive and agentless objects of the ‘hallucinatory’ ideology of the perpetrators. But is this distinction sustainable on closer inspection? This review suggests that genocide is mistakenly identified as a massive hate crime based entirely on ‘race’. In fact, it has a political logic: irrational or at least exaggerated fears about subversion and national or ‘ethnic’ security. Prejudices do not cause violence: they are mobilized in conditions of emergency. Recent research tends in this direction by emphasizing paranoia rather than racism in the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis but does not transcend the customary distinction between the ‘delusional’ grounds for the former and ‘real’ ethnic conflict. This separation of categories feeds into the anxieties in some contributors to this literature about potential genocides in the present by forecasting apocalyptic scenarios unless drastic military action is taken against specified enemies. Scholarship is better served by deflating rather than inflating such anxieties.
Mathematical Time and Physical Time in the Theory Of Relativity
In the Theory of Relativity time is an imaginary quantity that can not be observed; it is a multiplication of a number that indicates duration of material change and number i that is an imaginary number. i on the square is -1. Time i⁄t is a mathematical time that describes the speed and the duration of material change. In the Universe one can observe physical time only as a stream of material change. It is not that change run in physical time, change itself is physical time.. Distinction between imaginary mathematical time and visible physical time opens some new perspectives into interpretation of Theory of Relativity. c