Poles considered traitors of true Slavicism

[Bonobo]

Eastern nations which practise Orthodox religion used to believe that Poles betrayed the Slavic spirit.

An excerpt from a Russian analysis 1915:

Only with the Slavophils had there been a national idea, only they acknowledged the reality of the soul of the people. For the Westernisers there did not exist a soul of the people. Our Westernising thought did not deal with work over the issue of a national consciousness. But the attitude of the Slavophils towards the most painful and most important Slavic question for us as Russians -- the Polish question -- was at its root false and not Slavic. The Slavophils never felt in their relation to the Polish people any Slavic unity, a Slavic brotherhood. For the Slavophils the Slavic world in its spirit ought first of all to be Orthodox. They felt the non-Orthodox Slav to be a traitor to Slavic matters. And they could not forgive the Polish people its Catholicism. They could not understand and love the Polish soul, because they could not understand and love the Catholic soul. But everything unique to Polish culture is defined by this, that in it Catholicism is focused within the Slavic soul. Thus it was forged out of the Polish national visage, an altogether unique Slavic-Catholic visage, distinct also from the visage of the Romance Catholic peoples, and from the visage of the Slavic Orthodox peoples. For the Slavophils, Poland was that West within the Slavic world, to which they always set in opposition the Russian Orthodox East, the bearer of an higher spiritual type and the fullness of religious truth. The Polish seemed first of all to be Latins, and it was almost forgotten, that they were Slavs. Polonism represented the Catholic danger. In their repugnance towards Catholicism the Slavophils went so far, that they preferred Protestant Germany over Catholic lands and peoples. The Lutherans in Russia occupied a privileged position in comparison with the Catholics, and they often stood at the helm of government. The intellectual Slavophilism was also bereft of any idea of the power of rule and it concurred in this. In an even more extreme form with Dostoevsky was expressed the hostility towards Catholicism and towards Poland. He saw within Catholicism the spirit of the Anti-Christ and together with Protestant Germany he wanted to crush Catholicism. There was formed a quite strong Slavophil-conservative tradition, which was accepted by our ruling authorities and led in practise to this, that our politics came to be always dependent upon Germany. The hostility towards Poland and friendship with Germany -- were two sides of one and the same matter for us. Indeed not only the Polish -- are Catholics within the Slavic world. And the old-Slavophil attitude towards Catholicism has made impossible a sincere Slavic unity.

www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1915_202.html

[pjotr]

Bonobo,

If Poles are considered traitors of true Slavicism you could say that the Dutch are considered traitors of true Germanism. Although there was some Dutch collaboration with the 'Germanic German and Austrian brethern' of Nazi Germany, the majority of the Dutch was indifferent or against the Great-Germanic idea of the Nazi's. The Poles were and are sceptic to Pan-Slavic propaganda and aspirations of Russia. The Dutch have some resistance agains the Germanisation or Anglification of the Netherlands.

The Netherlands and the Dutch have become very mixed. Not only the 431,000 Indo people in the Netherlands, but also people of Polish-Dutch, Hungarian-Dutch, Dutch- Surinamese background and a lot of Duthc people who were adopted from Korea, China, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, the Phillippines, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. I do't mention the Vietnamese boatrefugees that came in the seventies to the Netherlands, the Japanese and Taiwanese expats in the Netherlands, and people of other Asian nations that are over here. Next to the Islam from Muslim migrants you have the christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism of other migrants (yes we have Israeli migrants too, they love Amsterdam, because it has Jewish -partly Ashkenazi Polish jewish- genes. Israeli's for some reason like the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, three neighbouring countries. They are fond of Berlin. I wonder why?). Again, Dutch easily mix with other people, and are not that race purist. Ofcourse like in any nation you have some ethnic, nationalistic, racist bigots, who believe in a Germanic super race. They dream of a union of the Netherlands and Flanders in a Great-Dutch, Federation of Dutch speaking peoples. However the vast majoritiy of the Dutch don't care about such a thing and I even believe that a majority also never thinks about such an Utopic idea.

In my view part of the Polish mindset, character and identity is the resistance in the past against Germanisation policies of the Prussians in the West and Russification policies in the East by Czarist and Sovjet Russian empires. Today the Polish nationalist climate is a clear resistance against Europeanization attempts of Brussels and the strong influence of a Paris-Berlin axis. The Poles don't trust some Germans due to German-Russian ties.

In the same time Poland has strong ties with some Western nations like the USA, Israel, Great-Britain (the UK), the Netherlands, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries, and the Roman-Catholic nations of Spain, Portugal and Italy (including the Vatican). The Polish-Dutch ties go back at least 700 years. There are strong economical, diplomatic and cultural ties between the Netherlands and Poland.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pjotr]

Lovers of the Russian Word



The Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word (Russian: Беседа любителей русского слова, Beseda lyubitelei russkogo slova) was a conservative and proto-Slavophile literary society founded in St. Petersburg in the early nineteenth century.


Derzhavin's house in Saint-Petersburg

The society began meeting as early as 1807, but its regular monthly meetings began in March 1811 in "a beautiful and luxuriously appointed hall in Derzhavin's large home on the banks of the Fontanka"; as many as 500 people might attend its meetings, and it published its own journal, the Chteniya v Besede lyubitelei russkogo slova (Readings at the Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word), whose nineteen issues consisted mainly of material presented at the meetings. It was controlled by conservatives like Derzhavin and Alexander Shishkov who opposed the liberal reforms of Alexander I; in literary terms, it sought to ban gallicisms and other foreign infiltrations from the Russian language and looked to Church Slavonic and folk traditions to create an acceptable culture. It was opposed and mocked by the progressive Arzamas Society. It dissolved after Derzhavin's death in 1816, but was revived as a literary and scholarly society at Moscow University from 1858 to 1930; among the writers speaking at its meetings were A. K. Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Afanasy Fet, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Bunin.

[pjotr]

Pan-Slavism



Pan-Slavism, 19th-century movement that recognized a common ethnic background among the various Slav peoples of eastern and east central Europe and sought to unite those peoples for the achievement of common cultural and political goals. The Pan-Slav movement originally was formed in the first half of the 19th century by West and South Slav intellectuals, scholars, and poets, whose peoples were at that time also developing their sense of national identity. The Pan-Slavists engaged in studying folk songs, folklore, and peasant vernaculars of the Slav peoples, in demonstrating the similarities among them, and in trying to stimulate a sense of Slav unity. As such activities were conducted mainly in Prague, that city became the first Pan-Slav centre for studying Slav antiquities and philology.



The Pan-Slavism movement soon took on political overtones, and in June 1848, while the Austrian Empire was weakened by revolution, the Czech historian František Palacký convened a Slav congress in Prague. Consisting of representatives of all Slav nationalities ruled by the Austrians, the congress was intended to organize cooperative efforts among them for the purpose of compelling the Emperor to transform his monarchy into a federation of equal peoples under a democratic Habsburg rule.



Although the congress had little practical effect, the movement remained active, and by the 1860s it became particularly popular in Russia, to which many Pan-Slavs looked for leadership as well as for protection from Austro-Hungarian and Turkish rule. Russian Pan-Slavists, however, altered the theoretical bases of the movement. Adopting the Slavophile notion that western Europe was spiritually and culturally bankrupt and that it was Russia’s historic mission to rejuvenate Europe by gaining political dominance over it, the Pan-Slavists added the concept that Russia’s mission could not be fulfilled without the support of other Slav peoples, who must be liberated from their Austrian and Turkish masters and united into a Russian-dominated Slav confederation.



Although the Russian government did not officially support this view, some important members of its foreign department, including its representatives at Constantinople (Istanbul) and Belgrade, were ardent Pan-Slavists and succeeded in drawing both Serbia and Russia into wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1876–77.

When efforts were made in the early 20th century to call new Pan-Slav congresses and revive the movement, the nationalistic rivalries among the various Slav peoples prevented their effective collaboration.

[pjotr]