With their mothers’ milk

Those of you who are not familiar with the History of the Jews in Poland would find the following timeline of the gradual escalation of the most recent Jewish-Polish and German sociopolitical conflict enlightening. The controversy began with the “Polish death camps.” The camps were Nazi German – there is no doubt! But many non-Polish media and notable figures in the West continued to use such phrases implying that the gassing of Jews might have been a responsibility of the Poles. Discouraging the use of these terms (since 1989) did not work. Polish Foreign Minister Rotfeld had suggested that there are instances of “bad will” and that “attempts are made to distort history, and conceal the truth.”[1] Subsequently, Warsaw passed a law (since annulled) that made it illegal to accuse the Polish state of complicity in Nazi German war crimes.[2] The bill sparked an outcry from Israel; the Foreign Minister Katz (quoting Shamir) stated: “Poles suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.” Poland withdrew from economic conference in Tel Aviv and canceled a visit by the Israeli officials.[3] Israeli man spit on the Polish ambassador.[4] And the story goes on. Meanwhile, the campaign to damage Poland’s international image with the use of hostile disinformation and provocative commentaries from the press is only just beginning in Wikipedia.[5]

Following my topic ban from the History of Poland during World War II and the Holocaust in Poland, I’ve seen fanatics use my silence to delete my contributions and slander me. One of the more repulsive attacks on my reputation was a smear job about a blurry World War II photo from Bialystok, which I downloaded to Wikimedia Commons. I do not read Yiddish, and the image from the collections of Stowarzyszenie Szukamy Polski (In Search of Poland Society © 2004) was misidentified at source. My contributions to the Final Solution and dozens of Holocaust articles from previous years devoted to memorializing Jewish suffering and heroism during World War II was intentionally overlooked.

Several attacks on my integrity looked like some mental health issue. Users exhibiting signs of paranoia are a dirty secret of the Wikipedia process. There are no remedies: contributors are ‘supposed’ to be healthy in the name of everyone’s online freedom of expression. “Comment of content, not on the contributor” states the policy guideline. And so, even if aforementioned content has already been identified a hundred times as paranoid, it keeps on coming like a universal constant, sanctified by the rules. The bitter irony of these attacks in my absence was the fact that back in 2010 I had become a target of another, the most ghastly attack on my real life identity for contributing to the same subjects in Wikipedia already. The campaign was too dirty to be mentioned, but I can quote the reactions of notable Wikipedians who saw the proof of it with their own eyes.

: Doesn't matter. I don't care if he overreacts a bit. Poeticbent is clearly the victim here, of an extremely nasty and persistent dirt campaign. He deserves the full solidarity and support of all Wikipedia editors as far as this problem is concerned. Exacerbating the issue by calling for sanctions against him is highly inappropriate. [[User:Future Perfect at Sunrise|Fut.Perf.]] [[User talk:Future Perfect at Sunrise|☼]] 07:23, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

:: Ditto about support for Poeticbent. I don't know anything about any dirt campaign, as I haven't read through Poeticbent's history, nor have I been following the Tylman article discussions. But I did just look up the blog page that Poeticbent linked, in his fury. In my opinion the blog page is libelous. One cannot rule out that a WP squabble has spilled out into dirty tricks the blogosphere, and therefore WP cannot just pretend it has nothing to do with it. My opinion is that Poeticbent gets our full support, along with a warning that his legitimate grievance should have been taken up through proper WP channels rather than with this outburst of rage. Then, WP should contact law enforcement authorities and explain the situation. That said, I expect such a nasty trick as this was sent anonymously from an internet cafe and we may never find the perpetrator. Still, the blog site that hosted the information may be liable. In any case, WP legal team need to jump on this immediately and fully investigate it. I think we all deserve a statement from them. – [[User:Chumchum7|Chumchum7]] ([[User talk:Chumchum7|talk]]) 07:59, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Meanwhile, the police detective who familiarized himself with my case at the VPD headquarters in my district advised me to WP:VANISH because he would not be able to help outside the jurisdiction. – I stopped contributing as User:Poeticbent entirely and began creating legitimate multiple accounts for privacy reasons. I never used these accounts to disrupt or undermine consensus, but regrettably, I have become overconfident and in the following months submitted two dozen articles to WP:DYK including the epic “Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland” in June 2011. I was reported to WP:RfCU two months later in a “fishing expedition.” I admitted openly and on my own initiative to creating accounts mentioned in the investigation of someone else’s illegitimate bid. My accounts were blocked with no evidence of disruption on the condition of my return to editing as User:Poeticbent only, with the authorization from ArbCom. I felt the need to look further into the past in search of answers concerning my family’s history including the history of war-crimes in Eastern Poland. With time, I gained the reputation of the most accomplished Holocaust writer in English Wikipedia. My personal quest continued, nevertheless these were the opinions of my peers:

He's a prolific content creator and probably our most active contributor in this area in terms of the number of articles created and amount of text added. . . . I respect his commitment to Wikipedia's Holocaust articles. [[User:AmericanLemming|AmericanLemming]] 05:01, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

You [User:Poeticbent] are Wikipedia's most prolific content creator in this area. [[User:Piotrus|Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus]] 12:24, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

All along, writing for Wikipedia about the Second World War was a part of my personal journey. My father performed forced labor in Nazi Germany. My mother was deported from Kowel to forced labour in Siberia. They both met in Kraków and settled there.

I was born and raised one-hour drive from Auschwitz and visited the Museum at the age of 9 for the first time. I defected from Poland two days ahead of the military crackdown of 1981. – I felt the urge to learn more about what had happened in the course of the war and during the Holocaust in the Second Republic. I needed to be informed on all sides of the issues because no healthy debate can be reduced to a frozen truth written from the inside of an ethnocentric bubble. Although I wrote poetry about my family history, the advent of Wikipedia changed the landscape of information entirely. I learned from my studies that those who use their minds to buffer themselves from the death-related anxiety often buffer themselves from the radiance of life as well. Healing is a long and difficult process. I focused on the memory of the Righteous in Wikipedia to remind others that humans are inherently good and not innately selfish – the ultimate source of evil is the ‘plot mentality’ in social relations; this is the very logic of genocide. Meanwhile, as soon as I left Wikipedia in May 2018, the many Righteous Among the Nations honoured and epitomized by Yad Vashem were removed from my articles about the Nazi ghettos in occupied Poland on false premises; my Ukrainian Righteous were not.

I have little trust in Wikipedia’s ability to resolve the grief between the Jewish and Polish Wikipedians by using administrative means; it is not going to be possible given the totality of the antisemitic and polonophobic tropes already published in so-called WP:RS literature. Once created with the best of intentions, the WP:RS guidelines have become a bottomless pit used for trashing and salting out facts not yet peddled by commercial monoliths. The insistence on using only timeworn resources not only prevents newly established facts from being investigated, but also undermines evidence. Research must span a gamut of materials.

The administration can silence editors like me, and allow our adversaries to continue on, because this is all they ‘can’ do. When presented with the mainspace evidence of prejudice, bigotry, and delusional paranoia, they can penalize the dissenters for getting upset about it. They cannot drive out hate. Unlike in academia (or in politics), in Wikipedia, one cannot call the anonymous liar out, because that’s an “attack,” while the liar’s intentional deception is only a breach of our “verifiability” guideline. In the world of anonymity there are no alternatives for maneuvering. Bowled over, editors who believe in integrity and truthfulness can excuse themselves from further participation. Nothing’s going to change just because one guy you came to admire is leaving.

I did not log in to Wikipedia even once for over one year. I could not possibly continue, because accepting the limitations of my WP:TBAN would inadvertently mean justifying the injustice. I did not read notifications about my user name being mentioned by others. – Logging in as User:Poeticbent would have exposed me to common baiting and badgering strategies of my adversaries. Wikipedia’s anonymity might lead to its ultimate undoing during the course of the social media revolution, because the Generation Facebook is accustomed to acquiring information from the actual real accountable humans.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friends for their continued support; you know who you are; we’ve had an incredible decade working together. Thank you. – A final note. I suppose there must be something inside of me that works like a trigger for the internet trolls hiding behind anonymity. In all likelihood, their ‘gravedancing’ and vengeance are not reactions to what I might have achieved there... but the reactions to who I am as a man. This is not a happy thought, except that I cannot become someone else.

This is User:Poeticbent signing off.

Notes