Page 287 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Ukrainian by (coercively) emphasizing sameness, efforts to conceptualize Jews as different were

supported by the scientific diagnosis of people whose worldviews were closely aligned with the

Sanacja’s state-centered technocratic vision. While some earlier Sanacja representatives had

suggested that Polish civilizing policies could lift Jews out of backwardness alongside local Poles,

the emerging consensus emphasized that Jews not only resisted the policies of the modern state, but

also further undermined the state’s civilizing project as a whole.

What is particularly notable about these developments is the fact they spanned the supposed

break of 1935. By looking back into 1920s and early 1930s, this chapter has traced how demographic

radicalization in its various forms built upon, rather than pushed against, the Sanacja’s approach.

Perhaps if Piłsudski had lived past 1935 and Józewski had enjoyed continued support from Warsaw,

more overt acts of anti-Semitism would have been curbed and the regionalist narrative would have

persisted in official public discourse. But the shift toward demographic solutions was bigger than any

single politician and instead formed part of an institutional turn that was sweeping Poland and

Europe. Volhynia’s Jews were about to experience a genocide whose proponents drew on some of

the now familiar language of rational, modern “solutions” to demographic “problems.” The totality,

horror, and brutal efficiency of the Holocaust were, however, still unimaginable.

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