With all the recent controversy about the plan for the General Assembly of the United Nations to vote on Palestinian statehood, it is important to recognize that there are other nationalities cruelly deprived of a state of their own. Jonathan Swift over at Pajamas Media makes the case for a homeland for the oppressed Prussians.
It is melancholy to contemplate the homeless condition of the Prussians, an ingenious people whose remarkable antics in prior ages did so much to enliven the politics of Europe. Indeed, now that world opinion has grasped the necessity of returning the descendants of the Arabs of Palestine to their ancestral residences, it must certainly be the hour for a similar service to be rendered on behalf of those belonging to the tribe of the great Frederick.
For while it has been some time since that glorious state known as Prussia graced the map of our fair continent, still the lands of the Prussians were theirs and theirs alone, until that fateful day not yet seven decades past, when the awful Poles, seeking to reestablish a country for which the world had no apparent need, rudely cast them out.
Thus exiled, at barely the same moment as their Arabesque counterparts, the poor Prussians have ever since been forced to endure life stateless, wandering amongst such diverse foreign peoples as Saxons, Westphalians, Rhinelanders, Bavarians, and, even in some cases, Americans, people with whom they have nothing whatsoever in common, and whose company they must certainly find nearly beyond endurance as they continue to pine away, yearning in eternal agony for their lost homeland.
Oh, the pity of it all! Does not Justice herself cry out in anguish, denouncing the continuance of such hideous circumstance? Surely all men of reason and good will must give their whole-hearted assent to the proposition calling for the rightful return of the Prussians and their reestablishment upon their native land in their natural state. But how can such a noble and necessary project be accomplished?
This done, a conference could be called of all the principle powers of the planet to agree upon new boundaries for the two states, Prussia and Poland, so as to enable them to live together amicably in accord with the principles of eternal Justice, in precisely the same wise manner as is now contemplated for Israel and Palestine. As a starting point for such apportionment, the borderline should first be chosen to be that which pertained in 1942, before the rude Polish annexations made during a particular moment of Prussian disadvantage distorted the previously established arrangements. These boundaries, however, could then be adjusted by such further trading of territories as might be mutually agreed between all the parties in attendance.
Clearly the illegal occupation of the Prussian homeland by the Poles must be ended!
David's Commonplace Book 