Obama called Auschwitz a Polish Death Camp. It was about as Polish as the 9/11 attacks were “American” Atrocities. Both crimes took place somewhere, but the perpetrators were from elsewhere.
This entire snub almost certainly arose from the same reason Obama so often gets various historical facts wrong: he, and others like him, are in love with themselves and having the right sorts of opinions, but they’re all deeply immersed in the kultursmog, are not necessarily that curious intellectually. In addition, the elite schools they attended do a worse and worse job of inculturating them in the basic historical facts of the last few thousand years. They run around with thoughts like “the Americans gave Indians blankets infected with smallpox” and “the US had these terrible racist ‘concentration camps’ for Japanese” without ever looking beyond the headlines, so to speak.
Indeed, various fields including “structural realist” international relations and the like are all about skipping over the difficult and murky work of real historical understanding and coming up with various shortcut formulae to understand the world, but as a result we end up with stupid-sounding and overconfident people like Obama and his speechwriters. And they end up creating real practical problems in both domestic and foreign relations because they do not understand real human beings very well.
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While I agree with all you say here about the shallowness of our elites (see the reset button for an excellent example), I am not so sure about this one. I am perfectly willing to believe that they were simply trying to describe the location of the camp in Poland, and didn’t mean to imply that the camp was run by Poles. If you read the entire paragraph, there was also a mention of the Polish resistance, which makes it seem unlikely that they didn’t realize the camp was a Nazi camp.
They still lose points for insensitivity though, especially since they haven’t really made any effort to apologize. I think in this case it is more an issue of Obama’s personal animus towards the Poles (which is probably shared by a lot of others in his administration). For instance, Obama prohibited Lech Walesa from receiving the award on behalf of the deceased recipient, even though Poland requested this. While it is mostly an issue of animus, I think they probably also have no understanding of how the structure of Slavic languages would make this mistake seem much less ambiguous in translation.
Really, it wouldn’t hurt for Obama, who loves to apologize to certain other foreigners, to take a minute to issue a heartfelt apology. So in my mind I’ve got to chock this one up mostly to animus rather than the usual ignorance.
I wonder. The “Polish Death Camp” thing has been a common usage among certain Jewish critics of the Poles. There’s no love lost between those groups, and it goes back to Jewish-Polish conflict that existed before, during, and after the war. It’s why we hear about Jedwabne and see imaginary Polish soldier in their distinctive square covers in the 1978 epic film The Holocaust. But Obama himself seems kind of neutral on Jews and not particularly in their back pocket nor with a great deal of affection for Israel, unlike bush. Another possibility is that Poles are “ethnic whites” who were notably hostile to forced integration and other efforts by Barack the Community Organizer back in the day. And then again, there’s always the possibility that all these people just don’t know shit from shit. After all, they were giving an award to the amazing Jan Karski.
I doubt Obama harbours a specific anti-Polish animus. Rather, as Mr. Roach noted, Poland is just some obscure, unimportant European land full of pale-faces in Obama’s eyes. He is too busy wrapped up in his own cult of intellectual self-aggrandizement to bother with trivial topics like modern Polish and Central European history. Even if Obama was capable of lowering himself to bother with such trifling matters, the whole notion that the Poles were anything other than perpetrators of the Holocaust would probably be anathema to him. We all know that non-gentile whites can never be victims – only evil oppressors.
Oh I don’t think he dislikes Poland because he has some rationale based upon it’s long-term history. I think he dislikes it because they supported the Iraq-war and were seen as pro-Bush, which was probably why his administration has handled this affair and the radar issue so callously.