Yesterday's New York Times had a dispatch from a little corner of Donald Rumsfeld's "new Europe." Funny thing -- it looks an awful lot like the old Europe.

As reported in the Times, a 1941 massacre of Jews in Jebwadne, Poland, was revealed in 1999 to have been not the work of Poles under orders from Nazi occupiers, but of townspeople acting on their own. This revelation led to a national wave of soul-searching, and an investigation of the massacre was reopened. The investigating prosecutor found details that demonstrated the guilt of townspeople, but said no one still alive should be prosecuted.

Now it gets unpleasant.

Despite those damning details, to most local people, the closing of the investigation seems like vindication for their firmly held view that there is little or no need to apologize for the past.

"The Jews were cooperating with the Russians," an elderly man leaving Jedwabne's church shouted at an interviewer. "You can ask what the Jews did to the Poles, but no one asks."

...Cardinal Josef Glemp ... attended a Mass to honor the Jedwabne Jews, then asked Poland's surviving Jews to apologize for having brought Communism to Poland.

Nice man, that Cardinal Glemp.

I also noticed this a couple of weeks ago in the Times (emphasis mine):

The World Health Organization warned today that many countries, particularly in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, were at risk from mad cow disease, even though the worst appeared to be over in Britain....

Hmm ... unrepentant provincial bigots ... reckless agribusiness corner-cutters ... y'know, I can kind of see what the Bush administration might find so appealing about Eastern Europe.