Re: Scott Fraser

"No. I can accept that the Polish nation is resentful of the way they were treated by Stalin and his regime. I understand that after 1945 Poland became subservient to the USSR, and for almost half a century the Polish people were unable to pursue their own destiny. This is not hard for me. What baffles me is that I do not hear the same vitriol coming from Czechs and Slovaks, from Hungarians or Romanians, from Bulgarians, or from Letts, Lithuanians or Estonians, or from Finns. They all have axes to grind, yet they choose not to do so. Only the Poles seem to so unforgiving, so vehement."

I'm not sure if the Poles hate you so much more than other nations from the region... AFAIK the Czech and Hungarians probably do,after crushed rebellion in each case and I think that the Balts and the Western Ukrainians could hate you even more than Poles do.

Remember that it is often said that many of the Eastern European countries join NATO only because of Russia...I'd say it would be justified that every NATO member nation from this region distrusts/hates/fears Russia.

The problem could be that these people do hate you, but you simply have't met with a trace of that personally yet.I recall a interview with some Russian musician living in Poland who told in the the interview that it was such a big shock to discover that the Poles generally consider Russians to be a potential threat and completely unfriendly neighbours- obviously because Russians are unaware of this.
I recall another funny situation (because if somebody knows Poles this is hillarious) on the internet- some Russian poster was telling me that I'm lying about Poles disliking Russians and that 'normal Poles' as he put it, do not have anything against Russians.

This could be the case with the nations you mentioned- maybe they do hate you but you are unware of this. For example, the Lithuanians- my cousins fiance is Lithuanian and he met some Lithuanians too and she said that in some areas like in the city of Klaipeda Russians are tolerated, but in others like Kaunas, Russians are hated very much. My cousin met some Lithuanians himself and it looked like they hate Russians with much more zeal than Poles,like he met Lithuanian people who really hate Russians and compared to whom we Poles merely dislike,not hate Russians.

"There is no outcry against the Germans, who murdered six million Poles, including Polish Jews."

No, there is... and Germans are still looked upon with the WWII.

"There is no outcry against France or Britain, who promised support against Germany, but who delivered nothing."

It is actually sometimes said that the French were total cowards who were too cowardly for anything and it is also said that the Yalta conference was a betrayal by Britain and the US.

Still, it is seen as act of cowardice,betrayal and act of selling us to our enemies, but not the act of being enemies directly.

Overall it is quite common to meet the term like "cowards" attributed to French and "betrayal" applied to the Yalta conference.

"There is no outcry against the Pilsudski regime, who could have stopped Nazi Germany in its tracks by supporting Czechoslovakia in 1938 instead of joining the Nazis in a land-grab."
AFAIK the Czechoslovakians did't really want to help themselves that much and so did't the French and the British stand up to the task. In fact, Pilsudzki proposed an idea of "preventive war" to be waged on Germany long before that, but the French and British would't hear about it.

As for "land-grab" this was not so really so- 20 years earlier, during the 1920 Polish-Soviet war, the Czechosloviakians have invaded Poland, breaking the treaties with us, when Poland was busy fighting the Soviets.

"Instead, all we hear, endlessly, over and over again, is how that dirty Commie bastard Stalin murdered thousands of Poles, betrayed the Warsaw Uprising, and occupied our country."

Largely because he did.

"Sorry, but it still baffles me. The Germans murdered millions of Poles, millions of Poles, and would have murdered millions more had Stalin's Red Army not driven them back to Germany."

Yes, in this aspect the Red Army saved Poles from the Germans. Then again Poles seldom feel gratitude because the Red Army first came in 1939 as an ally of the Nazi's and the subsequent German-Soviet war is seen as a fight between two criminals over stolen loot. To a large extent, the Red Army did save us at that moment,but it did also immediately put as into slavery.

"The Poles he had killed were a small proportion of the total, and they were not killed because they were Poles, but because he considered them as potential threats to his regime."

In Poland it is seen in a different way- for us, Stalin was just one man and he was't even surrounded by other Georgians in Kremlin. It is like Hitler himself was Austrian, but we resided in Berlin not Vienna, and we consider him to be a German leader, and the deeds of his men to be deeds of German nation, not Austrian one. In Poland, Soviet Union is (IMO,90% correctly) seen less as a multinational state of equal nations, more as a country which is supposed to be based on equality but which is in reality Russia controlling other nations.
In Poland,Stalin is sort of considered to have acted not as a Georgian, but as a man acting within the Russian political culture and his actions and methods to be typically Russian and to be expressions of Russian culture and national spirit just like the actions of Russians against Poles during the previous centuries.