Kerfoots YouTube Video on Paczki Day Vicious and Racist

February 20, 2013

Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski, President of the Piast Institute issued a statement today calling the YouTube video Fat Tuesday by John Kerfoota vicious and racist attack on Polish Americans and on the City of Hamtramck. Dr. Radzilowski, a historian of East Central Europe and of the immigrant experience in America, said: "It is hard to believe that in the early 21st Century one would hear such open expression of virulent and vicious racism." What is most striking is the eerie parallel between his video and the depictions of Poles as subhuman in German propaganda that justified the genocidal murder of millions of Christian Poles by the Nazi only two generations ago. Drawing on recent scholarship, Dr. Radzilowski noted that Nazi propaganda portrayed Polish homes and communities as filthy and decrepit and Poles resembling as animals. Polish people, in the words of one historian, were described as "less educated, less cultured, slovenly and utterly deficient in habits of personal hygienic".