Is The Phrase “Green River Killer” Offensive? (Polish Death Camps II)

At the end of last year, I published an article called “Polish Death Camps” going after the idea that such a thing was fiction, as well as heavily criticizing the Polish government for its denial, censorship, and pressure on US officials. Since then, I’ve come to find out that the phrase “Polish Death Camps” ignites the same anger in people that we heard using the phrase “China virus” could. That using it is nothing short of pure bigotry, and might even make me a Nazi.

As such, I have decided to bring this up as often as possible — just as the “China virus” people do. During the most recent example of me doing this, a fellow named Lucas (full handle @Lucas02072054) came to the defense of this nation. He himself is a Polish citizen who could not believe I was daring to say his about his homeland. You see, as he put it:

Saying Polish camps suggest Poles created them. Global cabal is attempting to discredit Poland and turn it from victims of WWII to co-creators of it. All that is to create international pressure to coerce reparations from Poles.

Now, I have no idea what the whole “global cabal” thing is about. As I covered last time, Poland has been very much pandered to, even getting Barack Obama to apologize to them for using the forbidden three words while he was giving a Nobel Peace Prize to a Polish Nazi resister. If the “global cabal” is going after poor Poland, they are doing a really bad job.

For that matter, if the “global cabal” is looking for reparations, one would think Germany would be a much better topic than Poland. Even the most anti-Poland historian admits that Poland was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany — meanwhile, Poland passed a resolution last year saying the USSR was equally as responsible for World War Two as Nazi Germany. It seems like it is them who are trying to “discredit” other nations and turn Russia “from victims of WWII to co-creators of it.” (Side note: I’m not quite sure show reparations for the most infamous genocide in human history is a bad thing, let alone an evil plot by the “global cabal”, but that’s another point.)

(Also, maybe, if you want to prove Poland had no connections to the Nazis, you shouldn’t be using phrases like “global cabal.” A phrase which sounds rather Nazi-like to many Americans.)

But let's accept the idea that it’s offensive to use the phrase “Polish death camps” because it implies that it is citizens of Poland who built those camps. Well, I would like to respond by talking about a man named Gary Ridgway, who was convicted of 49 murders between 1982 and 1998. Because his first five victims were found in the Green River in Washington State, the same state where all his murders took place and where he is currently imprisoned, he became known as the “Green River killer.”

However, Ridgway was not born in Washington, he was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Yet, nobody in Washington, no matter how close they are to Green River, consider it offensive for people to call Ridgway the “Green River Killer.” They realize that it does not mean everyone in Washington, even if they live near Green River, is a bad person — just that bad things have happened in that area and been done by people in that area.

The fact is, many nationalists cannot accept the idea that, yes, bad things have happened in the past but that does not make people who live today bad. That’s why his response to the 1619 Project by The New York Times was so negative, with calls in the United States Senate by people like Tom Cotton to ban it. It’s not just that it’s bad history (which you can fairly criticize it for being in many ways), there’s tons of bad history out there, and yet almost none of it has been as harshly criticized as the 1619 Project. It’s the same reason so many have spent four decades trying to tear down Howard Zinn’s book A Peoples History Of The United States, again a title only given to it in spite of how much pseudohistory is published. It’s because a core point of nationalism is the worship of the past, which makes it so anything negative in their history must be explained away. It doesn’t matter if it’s slavery in the United States or death camps in Poland, the past of a nation must be perfect otherwise the entire ideology is thrown into question.

The real reason for the controversy over the phrase “Polish Death Camps” is not related to its historical inaccuracy, the phrase is perfectly historically accurate, it’s because it implies something bad might have happened in Poland’s past. I recommend the people of Poland take a lesson from the people of Washington, and the people of America at large, and learn to either deal with their history or just not give a shit.