International Law

A New Low for U.S. Politics

By Stan

This is an amazing story, and even though it is way outside the scope of this blog, I gotta say something.

Speaking in New Mexico on Memorial Day, Obama said a great-uncle had helped to liberate the Auschwitz death camp at the end of World War II. "I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps," Obama said (a YouTube clip of the remarks quickly went viral online).

He continued: "And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn’t leave the house for six months. All right? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain."

That may be a fact, the RNC noted gleefully — but only if Obama’s uncle had served in the Red Army of Joseph Stalin, which liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945.

Obama’s campaign said yesterday that he had erred in naming the camp but not in describing the role of his great-uncle, who partook in the liberation of Buchenwald.

Certainly this shows the vile nature of some Republicans, but we already knew that. No, the reason this story hits close to home and pisses me off is that I also had an uncle who was in the U.S. military in WWII (served as a medic); he too entered one of those camps and had to deal with those memories the rest of his life.

I have no idea whether my uncle was part of a "liberating" force, and I don’t know the name of the camp. He never told me, and I never asked. One time, and one time only, he begrudgingly talked to me about the subject when I did some sort of oral history project in school - must have been almost 30 years ago, and I can’t remember any of the particulars.

What I do remember is his demeanor when he was telling me about it. Spooky and emotional. Some years later, my aunt told us that he had been plagued by nightmares about the experience for decades afterwards - I’m not sure if they ever left him, in fact.

Some things should not be screwed around with, even in the midst of a political campaign. This whole thing is disgusting on many levels. And now you have the spectacle of a bunch of white, Christian young Republican types arguing on Right-wing blogs about whether Buchenwald was as bad as Auschwitz . . .

I think I better stop there.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).