Polish deputy PM says ruling party is being treated like ‘Jews by Goebbels’

Piotr Glinski decries opposition rhetoric, likening attacks on government to Nazi propaganda minister’s dehumanizing messages

By JTA 19 November 2018, 7:32 pm 3 Edit

Polish Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Glinski attends a parliament session in Warsaw, Poland, January 25, 2017. (AP/Alik Keplicz)

Polish Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Glinski compared opposition rhetoric toward members of his right-wing party to how Jews were portrayed in Nazi propaganda.

Glinski made the comment in an interview for the Wprost magazine this week, Polish media reported Monday.

“The language toward Law and Justice is to exclude, annihilate, dehumanize, delegitimize, as Jews were treated by Goebbels,” Glinski, who is also Poland’s minister of culture, said in the interview.

Joseph Goebbels was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.

Law and Justice was elected as Poland’s ruling party in 2015.

Illustrative: Joseph Goebbels with his daughters, Hilde (center) and Helga, at a Christmas celebration in Berlin, 1937 (JTA/German Federal Archives)

Domestically, Law and Justice is under attack for its revamping of the judicial system, allegedly to bring it under tighter political control.

The party’s criminalizing of rhetoric blaming the Polish nation or state for Nazi crimes triggered a diplomatic crisis with Israel, where many claimed it was designed to whitewash complicity in the Holocaust by locals and would interfere with historical research.

The crisis was resolved earlier this year after Poland amended the law, decriminalizing the action it targets.