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Obama gets his history [facts?] truly muddled

Guy Rundle writing on Crikey on the US presidential election:

"So it's all Obama now, and I think the allegory may have exhausted itself. Goddamit, if this guy wins it won't be for want of trying not to. Today's genius move was to connect to a sense of history by noting that his grandfather had been part of the American forces liberating Auschwitz, after which said gentlemen 'went to the attic for six months' and didn't talk to anyone.

Powerful, moving stuff, the only problem being that of course the Americans didn't liberate the Polish camp Ozwiecim – it fell to the Soviets. Obama's uncle was part of the force that occupied Buchenwald, the largest death camp on German soil. Possibly Obama confused it with Birkenau, Auschwitz's companion camp run as a work for resource for IG Farben in that substantial part of the Holocaust that was a capitalist -run project.

Indeed, the story is doubly inaccurate in that the Americans didn't liberate Buchenwald, Buchenwald did – as Germany collapsed Communist inmates staged an uprising, and the camp had been liberated by the time US forces got there. But Obama is playing into the 'good war' myth of WW2 to make an end run round McCain's 'greatest generation' credentials, so the idea of people liberating themselves is too inconvenient.

Whatever the case, there ain't many rules, but one is you don't confuse death camps like they were restaurants. "Monday we went to Pizza Hut...no it was TGI..Treblinka maybe...I dunno....". Quite possibly the family story was handed down incorrectly and Obama always thought it was Auschwitz, but it's the sort of thing you check – once you've made the crappy decision to participate in Holoschlock politics on the most tenuous of connections.

The reverse effect of getting the camp wrong is of course double penalty points, since it looks like the third-hand experience moved you not at all. Quite possibly it'll be right up there with Al Gore's explanation as to why his family went on growing tobacco for years after his sister died of lung cancer – the family was so frozen in grief that they couldn't act decisively."

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