A far-right member of the Polish parliament Janusz Korwin-Mikke said last week that pogroms against Jews had been of benefit to the Jewish people since through it winnowed out the weak in Jewish society through natural selection.

Korwin-Mikke, a leading member of a coalition of far-right parties called Confederation, Liberty and Independence, was speaking on a news program on the Polish Polsat TV channel last Thursday about the effects of the coronavirus epidemic.

During his interview Korwin-Mikke said that there was an upside to coronavirus because it was eradicating the weak through natural selection and improving humanity’s gene pool.

Not content with these comments, the Confederation MP tried to prove his point by pointing to Jewish history.

Korwin-Mikke said that murderous pogroms against Jews in Europe had a positive outcome because the weak in the Jewish community died and the strong survived, implying that this improved the stock of the Jewish people.

And he went further still, saying that rabbis had even been in favor of such pogroms in order to benefit from the “natural selection” benefits of such massacres.

Korwin-Mikke has a history of making comments distorting the Holocaust and of an antisemitic nature.

In 2013 he said that Adolf Hitler had probably not known about the Holocaust, and in 2019 protested the decision to ban Holocaust denier David Irving from entering Poland.

He also accused a British Jewish activists of “working for the Freemasons” after international media organizations broadcast footage of an annual antisemitic ritual over Easter in the small town of Pruchnik in which residents beat an effigy of a Jewish man representing Judas Iscariot.