If you Google the word polonicide you won’t find a definition for it. In fact, if you’re not a very astute student of World War II you likely won’t know what it means or, more importantly, what it represents.
Polonicide is the word for the largest unrecognised genocide in Europe. It was a programme run by the occupying Nazi forces in Poland to wipe out the ethnic Polish population so as to make room for expanding the German population’s living space.
You see, Hitler had a concept of how he wished his citizens to live and it was hinged on the need to expand German territory. Poland, as I’m sure you know, shares a border with Germany. It also shared one with the Soviet Union, so it was in a pinch from the get-go.
To realise their ambition the Germans killed three million ethnic Poles. This is separate from the three million Polish Jews they killed, which is captured by historians under the Holocaust. We hear nothing of the ethnic victims.
Polonicide, though, remains a faded understatement of history. I can’t really understand why. Why is this history buried? Why don’t the Poles themselves do more to ensure that those who were killed are appropriately memorialised?
I also don’t understand why the 1970s civil war in Jamaica has been buried and is omitted from the pages of our history books. I was old enough to feel the effects but too young to understand the reasons, therefore, I listened to several versions.
My grandparents told me that the country was deceived by Michael Manley, who got elected democratically and then drew a communist agenda from a hidden pocket.
My father told me that the country needed drastic change because it was an unequal society — and major change rarely occurs without conflict so I guess he and his dad didn’t agree on this issue.
I believe as a country, though, we need clarity. Thousands were killed, the gang culture was born, and the economy was destroyed. It was a big deal. It deserves to be taught in schools.
More importantly, historians need to agree on the narrative. Was Michael Manley about to turn the country communist? Did a heroic Edward Seaga save Jamaica from becoming Cuba and then becoming Grenada? Or was it a grand misunderstanding?
I can tolerate this being an unsettled debate, although I would prefer a consensus. I can’t, however, accept silence. We are at a time in our history when it is no longer acceptable to speak ill of Michael Manley. It is also no longer acceptable to blame Germany as a country, or its citizens, for the 69 million killed in World War II.
I am comfortable bringing the 70s up, not because I want to blame the actors but because I want to ensure that it never happens again. Who would have believed that it would become okay to be anti-immigrant in the United States? But look at it now.
Who would have believed that anti-Semitism could be politically correct in our lifetime? But since the Gaza/Israel crisis, the verbiage sounds like 1940.
That being said, I am comfortable discussing the 70s civil war in Jamaica because I am confident that the two leaders of the two major political parties are good men who would never participate in the activities the leadership of the 70s did. Does this mean that the leadership of the 70s were bad men? I don’t believe anyone, with rare exceptions, is totally bad or totally good. I believe that they were both a part of a bad period of our history. There can be no question of certain facts, at least in my mind.
Jamaica, like many countries in the 70s, was an imbalanced society. I was told a story recently by a friend of mine — who is a few years older than I am — that she went to the North Coast with her friend’s family in the early 70s. She was the only black person she saw at the hotel. By 1975 when she returned to the same hotel the story had flipped and there were black people everywhere.
What was the reason that black people were rarely seen prior to 1975 in our hotels, unless they were cleaning them? What did Michael Manley actually do to change it? I don’t know and won’t know because there seems to be almost a secret agreement with the powers that be to keep it out of our written history.
So change was needed, I agree. Was violence necessary to achieve it? Was Manley really planning to turn Jamaica into a communist State? If so, why wasn’t this presented as part of the 1972 political agenda? Who first began to use violence as a mechanism to further their ideology? So many questions for which we must depend on word of mouth answers rather than a stated position in a history book.
Then there is the creation and use of Tivoli Gardens in the conflict; the Cuban Brigadista programme; and the presence of, and association, with characters like Claudie Massop and Feather Mop. This is our history, even if we are ashamed of it.
Can you imagine what would happen if Germany stopped teaching World War II history, or South Africa stopped teaching the apartheid horror story? Omitting pieces of history can also become a practice. So we start with the 70s and soon after we stop teaching Maroon history because of their disgraceful participation in suppressing the Morant Bay Rebellion.
Some say that if historians write on this issue they will write it to fit their own prejudice. I can’t accept this as a basis for the omission. Truly, the political parties need to just be honest. If the Government of the day felt it was necessary to embrace communism then own it, justify it, or apologise for it. If the Opposition felt that it was necessary to engage in armed conflict, then we wouldn’t be the first country to have done so.
Mandela did it in South Africa, admitted it, and justified it in the trial that sent him to prison. It is when you hide behind a screen of silence that you appear guilty or ashamed. We are bigger than this.

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