Polish Media Issues posts Twitter
response to Echo article on Legutko
by Noa Gutow-Ellis
Not long after my article “Legutko Talk Wasn’t Just About Diversity of Thought: It Was About Lies” went live on the Colby Echo website, I felt my phone buzzing repeatedly, more than is ever usual, with notifications from Twitter. I had been tagged in something, and many users seemed to be reacting to it.
An account called “Polish Media Issues” had picked up the Echo piece, linked to it, and sent out the following: “A US ‘historian’ @ngutowellis insinuates that @ipngovpl_eng [Institute of National Remembrance] ‘oversees history education, museums, archives, and more, actively revise and rewrite Polish history in pursuit of their nationalist project, and Polish Jews are on the losing end.’ Thanks to the propaganda of left-wing scholars and students like @ngutowellis the universities in the United States resemble more and more schools in the Soviet Union. Noa Gutow-Ellis defends Gross, Grabowski, and attacks Legutko. The liars G&G become heros [sic] of the left-wing stream.”
From what is written on their website, Polish Media Issues has, since 2005, been “the leading global organization enacting corrections to be made in various media (predominantly digital media) in response to the appearance of, typically: ‘Polish death/concentration camps and ghettos,’ and these camps being placed in ‘Poland.’”
It makes sense that Poles would want people to avoid a leading term like “Polish death camp.” Poland was, after all, occupied by Germany during World War II and so a more accurate term would be “Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.”
Yet there was no mention of any death camp in my Echo piece. Polish Media Issues attacked not the argument or the wording of my piece but me — stripping away my legitimacy to write about history by placing “historian” in quotation marks, for instance — and scholars Jan Gross and Jan Grabowski, both acclaimed historians.
Recall that the question I asked Ryszard Legutko during his Colby visit had to do with how he could argue that communists and liberal democrats casted away memories of the past when his own party sought to do just that by trying to strip Jan Gross of the government-awarded Order of Merit. In his answer, he claimed Jan Gross is not a real historian.
It is telling that Legutko and Polish Media Issues attack not the content of Jan Gross’s (or my own) work but rather the title of “historian” and the question of who has the legitimacy to write a history attributed to a nation or a group of people. For the record, Gross is a member of the Princeton University Department of History. His current title is “Norman B. Tomlinson ’16 and ’48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus; Professor of History, emeritus.
The Polish Media Issues website calls for volunteers to “Show your support in the fight against ‘fake history’ or the ‘propaganda’ against Poland/Poles by becoming a member of PMI.” The only “fake history” I see is the one they purport.
