Ethnic Germans in Poland also sent frequent complaints about injustices they suffered to the League of Nations, and Adolf Hitler used the discrimination against Germans as a reason to invade Poland in 1939.
Meanwhile, Polish governments repeatedly denied that the country had a problem with systemic or institutional racism throughout the interwar period.
As well as making Poland into a mockery on the international stage, these denials, which were grounded in the belief that Poles had the right to run their country any way they pleased, fuelled the rise of ultranationalists such as Roman Dmowski’s National Democracy party, destabilising Polish democracy before it even had a chance to find its feet.
State of denial
Further south, Romania expanded from 138,000 km2 to 295,049 km² after the First World War, bringing large numbers of Hungarians, Saxons, Jews, Ukranians, and other ethnic minorities under Bucharest’s control. The prime minister, Ionel Brătianu, resigned in 1919 rather than sign what he called the ‘humiliating’ Minorities Treaty imposed by the Great Powers.
Both he and his successors repeatedly denied the obvious and systematic discrimination against minority schools and churches, violence against Jewish communities, and the harsh policing of ethnic minorities whenever they tried to organise cultural gatherings that the Romanian state saw as subversive.
Denying that racism was a problem encouraged extremists to take it even further, with antisemites and fascists literally getting away with murder in celebrated trials. For example, in 1924 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who would later go on to become a fascist leader in Romania, murdered a police prefect and was acquitted on the grounds that he was fighting for a nationalist cause. His example was followed by another future fascist, Nicolae Totu, who murdered a Jewish schoolboy in 1927 and was again acquitted when the jury decided that the murder was justified because the victim had disrespected a representative of the Romanian state.
Increased support for fascism and antisemitism in Romania resulted in the appointment of a right-wing government in 1938, followed quickly by the collapse of parliamentary democracy and the institution of a royal dictatorship.
A threat to democracy
Both Poles and Romanians, whose governments had repeatedly claimed they were not racist, actively participated in the mass murder of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust.
Even Czechoslovakia, which cultivated a reputation for tolerance, had problems with its minorities. The country’s first president, Tomáš Masaryk, boasted in 1925 that “chauvinism is nowhere justified, least of all in our country”. At the same time, Slovaks felt marginalised and unrepresented in the new state.
Print
Roland Clark | Radio Free (2021-04-22T00:00:00+00:00) What happens when governments deny racism exists?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/22/what-happens-when-governments-deny-racism-exists/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.