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The Dehumanizer’s Pattern: Who’s Got the Last Laugh?
“How many Poles does it take to suffer discrimination?”
The “Polish Joke.” Most of us grew up with it. Possibly it seemed harmless at the time.
But do you know that the Polish joke was an important part of the Nazi campaign to dehumanize the Poles so that the world would not defend or support them when the Nazis invaded?
It worked. On September 1, 1939, the Nazi blitzkrieg overwhelmed Poland while the world sat on its hands.
With the takeover complete, the Nazis ramped up their propaganda. There were Polish Jews, Gypsies, and intelligentsia to slaughter, and the Nazis needed the world to acquiesce. In October 1939, Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Ministry issued Directive No. 1306, which stated (in part): “It must become clear to everybody in Germany, even to the last milkmaid, that Polishness is equal to subhumanity. Poles, Jews and Gypsies are on the same inferior level. This must be clearly outlined... until every citizen of Germany has it encoded in his subconsciousness that every Pole, whether a worker or intellectual, should be treated like vermin.”
This is the pattern of the dehumanizer. Their motives are not pretty, altruistic or honest.
Some in the U.S. took up the banner. After the war, NBC popularized Polish jokes in “Laugh-In” and “All in the Family.” They were not alone. The lethal stain of Nazi “humor” has been hard to wash out. In 2013, Bart Palosz, a 15-year-old Connecticut boy, took his own life after years of anti-Polish abuse by his classmates.
This is the pattern of the dehumanizer. Their motives are not pretty, altruistic or honest. Coat the venom with a veneer of acceptance and eventually your target will succumb.
This is why we fight against Leah Remini and other haters of her ilk. ALL she is doing is trying to dehumanize Scientologists. God only knows what her endgame is.
By the way, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this post is 6 million. That’s the number of Polish citizens who died in their homes and neighborhoods, on the killing fields, in battle, and in the ovens of Auschwitz between 1939 and 1945.
