Poland's culture minister and deputy prime minister has compared the treatment of members of his conservative ruling party by political opponents to the way Jews were treated by Nazi Germany's notorious propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
In an interview with the Polish news magazine Wprost, Piotr Glinski described how members of his ruling Law and Justice party has been treated when they were still in the political opposition before 2015, as well as the attitude toward them today.
His mention of the Nazi propaganda minister was not coincidental. In the Nazi era, Goebbels peddled anti-Semitic racial theories to sway public opinion in favor of the persecution of Jews and ultimately their systematic murder. According to Glinski, his party was "excluded and treated like lepers" when serving in the opposition, and now "we are compared to fascists, dictatorships."
He said the language often used to describe the party is deliberately meant "to dehumanize," just as Goebbels dehumanized the Jews.
