Obama O’Trauma
By Truthteller on May 27, 2008 at 3:23 PM in Bamboozling, Barack Obama, Hoodwinking, Obamaisms
Only a desperate candidate raises the specter of the Holocaust for electoral gain.
[UPDATE: WORM Obama intended to mention Buchenwald, not Auschwitz. But the point that he shamelessly exploited the trauma of the Holocaust for political gain still stands, as do my contentions that he does not understand PTSD, military history or European and American Jewry. He remains a man who will do and say anything in order to win an election. And one still must ask why he mentioned Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps. Indeed, Americans know of Auschwitz, not Buchenwald, which was, by the way, liberated by Americans in April 1945. Just substitute one camp for another for maximum effect, I guess. Obama also acknowledges that it was his "great uncle" and not his "uncle" who served in WWII. Those who fabricate autobiographies have a difficult time remaining factual.]
American troops did not liberate Auschwitz; the Soviet troops of the First Army of the Ukrainian Front liberated the Birkenau death camp and the Monowitz labor camp on 27 January 1945 under the leadership of Marshal Koniev.
The three Auschwitz camps and its many satellites in Poland on the Eastern Front were abandoned by the Germans nine days before the Soviets arrived. And the gassing of prisoners at the Birkenau death camp of Auschwitz had seized in October 1944. Yes, Soviet soldiers did encounter carnage, destruction, destitution and desolation at the camps, but what they encountered was not as gruesome as some may believe, as the Germans removed and destroyed the evidence before the Soviets arrived. What they did encounter when they arrived were the tales related by those who remained in Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Some claim the Soviet troops did not even liberate the camps; according to some eyewitnesses, the Soviets just happened upon them. And others claim Jews and other political prisoners simply liberated themselves after the Germans abandoned the prisons. The Soviets were the ones to first approach the Auschwitz camps, however. But the photographs preserved for posterity of prisoners embracing Soviet men in uniform near the arch that reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” were staged one month later. No one should be surprised that the Soviets exploited trauma for political gain in February 1945. But one should be surprised that Barack Obama would in 2008, especially as his “uncle” [UPDATE: His campaign now admits that he should have said "great uncle"] and all American forces were fighting on the Western front, not the Eastern front, in January 1945.
Notice only Soviet armies were on the Eastern front in January 1945. And notice the Allied Forces of the West on the Western front had just crossed the Western border of Germany. The Allied Forces were nowhere near Auschwitz.
Auschwitz, by the way, was not the first death camp to be liberated; that distinction belongs to Majdanek, a camp in in Eastern Poland the Soviets liberated on 23 JULY 1944. When the Soviets did arrive at Auschwitz, they knew what to expect, as they already saw gas chambers at Majdanek. They were also aware of all the reports on the gas chambers the BBC had been circulating since 1942.
What I find particularly objectionable about Obama’s attempt to stake a claim in the Holocaust is his exploitation of one of the most traumatic moments of Western history in order to buttress the claim that he is both a patriot and a friend of the Jewish community. Certain aspects of history are not to be blithely invoked and distorted. Indeed, only leaders such as Stalin would exploit the Holocaust for political purposes.
Even more offensive is Obama’s deployment of the rhetoric of trauma as it pertains to the Holocaust in order to elicit the sympathy and empathy veterans who are genuinely concerned about men and women in uniform who are presently suffering from PTSD. For the PTSD engendered by a war involving attacks from all sides from ununiformed enemies unaffiliated with any particular state is very different from the pain and suffering experienced by those who served on the fronts of WWII. It is also very different from the trauma engendered by those who witness of carnage and coordinated acts of genocide. Not all trauma is the same, and psychological maladies of the 1940s are not the same as those of in 2008: the weapons are different; the cultures are different; quotidian experience is different.
Certainly Obama’s “uncle” and other WWII veterans experienced trauma in the wake of all that occurred in the Japanese and European theaters. But to debase those experiences by fabricating a tale of heroic liberation one would expect to view in a Soviet propaganda film while speaking to veterans on Memorial Day 2008 is simply beyond the pale. Anyone with any real relation to the Holocaust would understand this is to be unacceptable. And anyone with any knowledge of World War II would know that it is false. People seriously believe this man should be Commander in Chief?
All of us attempt to render uninteresting anecdotes poignant, but many of us exercise a bit of discretion and historical fidelity when embellishing aspects of our autobiographies.
Obama does not understand veterans, the Holocaust, WWII, PTSD, trauma or the pain experienced by a community that literally had to start from zero in the wake of Hitler’s atrocities. For Obama to mobilize all this pain in order to gain the allegiances of veterans and of Jews convinces me that he is cynical, heartless and reckless. This is a man who I believe will do and say anything to become President. But even worse, he will traumatize us with any and all specters, real, fabricated or otherwise, in order to hoodwink and bamboozle us into submission.
Obama should either clarify his statements or issue an apology, for civilized human beings do not play politics with the most horrifying atrocity of documented Western history.
by Ronald Scott
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