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Criminalizing Denial as a Form of Erasure: The Polish-Ukrainian-Israeli Triangle
Author(s): Bartov, Omer
Editor(s): Barkan, Elazar; Lang, Ariella
Date: 2022
Topics: Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Communism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Law, Nationalism, Holocaust Denial
Abstract: This chapter argues that recent laws criminalizing or penalizing certain versions of the past in Poland, Ukraine, and Israel, exploit the urge to prohibit denial of victimization as a tool to obfuscate their own unsavory past. Thus Ukraine has wanted Israel to recognize the Holodomor of 1931–1932 as genocide, even while denying Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust, and criminalizing any defamation of its World War II insurgents. Poland has criminalized denial of these very same insurgents’ ethnic cleansing operations as genocide, and penalizes assertions of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. And, Israel condemns such practices of whitewashing the past by Poland and Ukraine even as it has legislated against commemorations of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces of the Palestinians in 1948.
Holocaust Remembrance, the Cult of the War, and Memory Laws in Putin’s Russia
Author(s): Koposov, Nikolay
Editor(s): Barkan, Elazar; Lang, Ariella
Date: 2022
Topics: Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Communism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Law, Nationalism, War
Abstract: The chapter examines the Russian laws that regulate collective representations of the past and commemorative practices in the context of the conflict between the “cosmopolitan” memory of the Holocaust and the Soviet/Russian war myth. The author argues that protecting the Soviet/Russian cult of the war is the main objective of the government’s politics of memory, including legislation of the past. Attempts to integrate Holocaust remembrance into this cult, undertaken since 2008 and especially 2015, have resulted in positive changes in Holocaust education and commemoration. Its memory, however, is used manipulatively and remains peripheral to Russia’s war myth which is focused on the country’s military glory. This makes Russian laws the opposite of West European memory laws, which protect the memory of the victims of state-sponsored crimes.
Polish Memory Laws and the Distortion of the History of the Holocaust
Author(s): Grabowski, Jan
Editor(s): Barkan, Elazar; Lang, Ariella
Date: 2022
Topics: Antisemitism, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Communism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Law, Nationalism
Abstract: This chapter discusses the controversial January 2018 “Holocaust Law,” which the nationalist Polish government introduced, and which calls for prison terms of up to three years for those found guilty of “slandering the good name of the Polish nation” and implying that Polish society and its institutions were in any way complicit in the Holocaust. The law was speedily approved by the Parliament and signed into law by the Polish president. Shortly thereafter, Polish nationalists rescinded the criminalizing provisions of the law, in an effort to quiet international criticism of the law. The issue is far from being settled, however, and this chapter provides a larger historical perspective about national Polish discourses, and in particular those narratives that stress the citizenry’s foremost opposition to communism, their victimization at the hands of the Nazis, and an emphatic denial of any collaboration with Nazis in their annihilation of Polish Jewry.