A Kanye West concert in Poland has been cancelled, the venue has announced, following government pressure and condemnation over a string of antisemitic, racist and pro-Nazi comments by the US rapper. West, also known as Ye, was scheduled to appear at the Silesian Stadium in Chorzów on 19 June, his first performance in Poland for 15 years, but the venue said on Friday it would now not take place “due to formal and legal reasons”. Marta Cienkowska, Poland’s culture and heritage minister, had described the decision to book West as “unacceptable”. It comes days after West postponed a gig in France and a week after the UK banned him from entering the country to headline Wireless Festival. In February last year, West started selling swastika T-shirts, prompting the commerce platform Shopify to take down his web store. Three months later, he released the track Heil Hitler, in which he claimed a child custody battle and the freezing of his financial assets turned him towards Nazism. In January, prior to the announcement of his European tour and the release of his latest album, the rapper apologised for his actions in a statement published as a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.” West added that he had “lost touch with reality” because of his bipolar disorder. Promoting Nazi symbols is a criminal offence in Poland and anyone found guilty of publicly promoting Nazism can be imprisoned for up to three years. The rapper’s comments were particularly painful in Poland, where under Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the Germans built and operated the concentration and extermination camps to carry out their plans to murder Europe’s Jews, including three million Polish Jews. The town of Chorzów itself was one of the first invaded by German forces at the outset of the conflict in September 1939. “We are talking about an artist who has publicly expressed antisemitic views, downplayed crimes, and profited from selling swastika T-shirts,” Cienkowska wrote on X. “This is a deliberate crossing of boundaries and the normalisation of hatred. “Culture cannot be a space for those who exploit it to spread hatred.”
via bbc: Kanye West concert in Poland cancelled over antisemitic comments
siehe auch: Kanye Faces Being Cancelled in Yet Another Country Over Nazi Storm. “In a country scarred by the history of the Holocaust, we can’t pretend this is just entertainment,” Poland’s culture minister said. A third country is moving to cancel a Kanye West concert, as the rapper’s tour of Europe continues to collapse under the weight of his antisemitic history. Stadion Slaski, in southern Poland, plans to cancel West’s scheduled June 19 show, local newspaper Wyborcza reported, days after France’s second-largest city declared him unwelcome and Britain barred him from entering the country entirely to headline London’s largest music festival. Poland’s Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska had already signaled authorities would seek to block the concert. “These aren’t ‘controversies.’ They’re consciously crossing boundaries and normalizing hatred,” she said. “In a country scarred by the history of the Holocaust, we can’t pretend this is just entertainment.” More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz during World War II. Nazi Germany killed over three million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jewish population.
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