Well, that was certainly interesting, if not very enlightening or uplifting, when it comes to on-line discussion.
I see that some blogs are continuing to mischaracterize my post as saying that Buchenwald was “not as bad” as Auschwitz. First, I didn’t say that. My point was never about whether one camp was “better” or “worse” than another. They obviously were all horrific, in different ways, and there’s no sensible or universal way to make such an assessment. As some commenters have pointed out, it’s perhaps better to be gassed immediately than worked to death (on the other hand, in Buchenwald, you had a much better chance of survival).
My point was, and remains, despite all the idiotic straw men (like the above) and insults, that Auschwitz was more notorious, to the point that it almost came to be an icon of the Holocaust. While Buchenwald was certainly one of the more well-known camps, I’d be willing to bet that many more people know the word Auschwitz and what it represents than they do Buchenwald. And among those people is, apparently, Barack Obama. Auschwitz is like Holocaust 101, which it would appear to be as far as Senator Obama ever got in his education on the subject.
From Rand: Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war.
From a survivor of Buchenwald:
I never forgot how General Eisenhower kept rubbing his hands together as we spoke of the horrors inflicted upon us and the piles of our dead comrades. He insisted on seeing it all, hearing it all, learning it all. He knew!! General Eisenhower knew. He wanted to have it recorded and filmed for the future. He said that sometime in the future there may come a time when people will say it never happened that way — it’s an exaggeration, it’s propaganda, it was just the end results of war.
You must be so proud, Rand.
“They Died 900 a Day in ‘the Best’ Nazi Death Camp” by Edward R. Murrow, 1945
We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised; though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little.
I arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles. There was a German trailer, which must have contained another 50, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed.
But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp. There had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?
I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.
If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry…
You, sir, are a terrible, ignorant person. Were I you, I would shutter my blog in shame.
Were I you, I would shutter my blog in shame.
And if I were you, I would educate myself on the history and horror of warfare.
I see that no one wants to read what I actually write. They prefer to live in some fantasy world in which I wrote something else.
“You, sir, are a terrible, ignorant person. Were I you, I would shutter my blog in shame.”
And both of you are liars, bigots and ignorant fools who are incapable of comprehending the english language as Rand clearly and precisely stated what he ment.
But please, continue with your ass-rapery of strawmen……..
And if I were you, I would educate myself on the history and horror of warfare.
I’m pretty sure Dwight Eisenhower, quoted in the section above, was educated on the horrors of war, Rand.
You can keep repeating the Mel Gibson/Holocaust denier line about “that’s what happens in war,” but the Nuremberg court saw it differently.
The dead of Buchenwald are listed on the Holocaust Memorial, right along with the dead of Auschwitz.
Please, keep telling us, especially those of us who quote you, how much trouble we have reading.
Since I’ve never said that what happened at Buchenwald wasn’t horrible, you apparently continue to argue with someone other than me, who lives in some fantasy world of yours. Repetition of illiterate arguments doesn’t render them sensible.
I wouldn’t want to cop to what I’d written either, Rand, but it’s right there in black and white. You wrote that what happened at Buchenwald was
and not historically abnormal in a time of war.
You went on to describe it as the horrors of war.
No, you creep, it wasn’t “not historically abnormal.” It wasn’t “the horrors of war.”
It was the Holocaust, Rand, in all of its glory. It was a war crime, the worst ever committed. It was genocide. It was what the Nazis did to Anne Frank once they got their hands on her.
And you continue to minimize it, for your own political purposes. THAT, and not some misreading of your point, is why decent people are going to perform the cyber equivalent of flinging rotted vegetables at you.
Shame on you. Shame!
Good luck with that.
I wouldn’t want to cop to what I’d written either, Rand, but it’s right there in black and white. You wrote that what happened at Buchenwald was
and not historically abnormal in a time of war.
You went on to describe it as the horrors of war.
No, you creep, it wasn’t “not historically abnormal.” It wasn’t “the horrors of war.”
It was the Holocaust, Rand, in all of its glory. It was a war crime, the worst ever committed. It was genocide. It was what the Nazis did to Anne Frank once they got their hands on her.
And you continue to minimize it, for your own political purposes. THAT, and not some misreading of your point, is why decent people are going to perform the cyber equivalent of flinging rotted vegetables at you.
Shame on you. Shame!
Only a moron could think that I am “minimizing” what happened at any of the Nazi camps.
If you have nothing new to say, please stop wasting my disk space and bandwidth with your verbal graffiti.
“Only a moron could think that I am “minimizing” what happened at any of the Nazi camps.”
…….Or a Jimmy Carter Jr. Kool-Ade drinker but then I repeat myself.
Really? Let’s go to the tape:
“…merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war”
“I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal.”
Nothing to see here, folks. Just the ordinary horrors of war. Not like Auschwitz.
“I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal.”
Hell, Russia did it in peacetime.
Ever hear of a “Gulag”?
Joe from Lowel said “It was genocide”.
Rand, I think that’s the part that I think you still haven’t acknowledged — that Buchenwald was part of a genocide, and as such, it was historically abnormal. An industrially inefficent contribution to a genocide is still a contribution to a genocide.
The medical “experiments” at Buchenwald also seem historically abnormal.
I’ll drop it if you like, since I like your blog and I want to be a commenter and not an irritant, but I would be sad if you came away from this thinking that the problem was only with the word “merely”.
To prove that Buchenwald was not historically abnormal, all Rand has to do is to show that another nation – any other nation – treated people the same way that the Nazis treated people in Buchenwald.
I don’t know if such a thing is possible, since, for all I know, the Nazis could have been worse than anyone else. But if I were to research it, I’d probably start looking at the practices of the Assyrian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the city-state of Sparta.
(Or, if I were a kool-aide drinking liberal, at the U.S.’s practices at Guantanamo Bay. After all, according to liberals, Bush is worse than Hitler.)
Eisenhower “wanted to have it recorded and filmed for the future. He said that sometime in the future there may come a time when people will say it never happened that way — it’s an exaggeration, it’s propaganda, it was just the end results of war.”
You, Rand, are denying that what happened at Buchewald was the Holocaust, the unique horror of mass-extermination carried out by the Nazis at their concentration camps.
You, Rand, are saying instead that it was “merely a slave labor camp,” “not historically abnormal in a time of war,” and “the horrors of war.”
What went on in that camp was the Holocaust, and just like Eishenhower predicted, you are saying that it never happened that way, at least not there, but Eisenhower himself had the horrors of that camp filmed, specifically because he knew that people like you would try to distort what happened there, to claim that it was just the end results of war, for their own political purposes.
Holocaust deniers have given up on arguing that the whole thing never happened, and have turned to more subtle arguments. For example, Mel Gibson’s statement (and now, your statement about Buchenwald) that what happened in those camps was just the consequences of war.
You are wrong in this, both in the factual sense, and the moral sense.
What joe seems to not understand is this proposition; if the atrocities at Buchenwald and Auschwitz is equal, then why didn’t the Senator from Indiana, running for President of the US, get his facts straight about what his family member told him?
Look, my father served in the Vietnam war. Now, I won’t tell you my father survived the Battle of Khe Sanh or the Gulf of Tonkin, because my father was in the USAF. He flew in B-52’s out of Guam and Okinawa. I know the difference between Guam, Okinawa, and Vietnam.
Rand’s point was clear. None of Obama’s ancestry could have possibly freed anyone from Auschwitz, unless they were part of the Soviet Red Army. So the question is, why did Obama state that his uncle fought with Patton and liberated Auschwitz, when that didn’t happen? Rand’s supposition is that apparently Obama doesn’t consider Buchenwald to be at the same level as Auschwitz in the public conciousness (or Obama’s own), so Obama said Auschwitz, which is wrong.
The question is why does Obama say Auschwitz? If this is the story of his family, then shouldn’t Obama have his facts straight? Even if it wasn’t his family, shouldn’t Obama, the man running for US President, know history well enough to know it was the Soviets that liberated Auschwitz? I guarantee you, President Eisenhower knew the difference between Patton’s Third Army and the Soviet Red Army.
No, Kevin, pointing at Charles Manson does not prove that Ted Bundy was not “abnormal.”
People wearing our nation’s uniform know damn well what the difference is between war, and what happened to the 12 million who died in German concentration camps.
This has litigated, you know. They convened a court at Nuremberg. People made your argument. And then, they were hanged.
Rand, no amount of clarification will appease these goons. Your original post was fine. It was obvious to the non-sanguinary that your point concerned the difference between Buchenwald and Auschwitz in popular memory, and the calculated use/misrememberance of the more widely recognized emotionally charged word – truth and honesty be damned. Further clarifications just egged them on, as they perceived they were getting to you.
They aren’t posting here for education or clarification, they’re here for your blood. Hence the many lame attempts at shaming you into closing your blog – quite laughable.
You shouldn’t have wasted your time. All they ever really accomplished was making themselves look like idiots.
Leland,
if the atrocities at Buchenwald and Auschwitz is equal, then why didn’t the Senator from Indiana, running for President of the US, get his facts straight about what his family member told him?
Probably, because that’s the way he heard the story. Who fact-checks their momma?
^^ was me
Leland asked “why didn’t the Senator from Indiana, running for President of the US, get his facts straight”
Leland, was that intentional or unintentional humor? Here in Illinois, we do notice when someone calls our state “Indiana” or “Iowa”!
You continue to betray a profound ignorance of the history of warfare. I see that I have to repeat from yesterday:
Emphasis mine. He built pyramids of the skulls of the inhabitants of the cities he conquered. This was not an anomaly of warfare–it was typical. Throughout history, losers of a war could generally expect to be killed, raped, and/or enslaved.
What was different about the Holocaust was the desire to wipe out an entire race of people (though the Romans essentially did this to Carthage). Buchenwald played a role in that evil design, but it had other war purposes. Auschwitz-Birkenau had this as its sole purpose.
BTW, for all your yammering about who can and cannot read, and how utterly empty my objections are, you have not written a single word in response to the main point, which is that what happened in Buchenwald was not “the horrors of war” or “not abnormal in a time of war” or somehow different from the unique nature of the Holocaust.
It WAS the Holocaust, just as much as at Auschwitz, contrary to your claim. Which is why the names of the victims of Buchenwald are right there next to the names of the victims of Auschwitz on the memorial.
BTW, Auschwitz had slave labor camps, too.
Please, guy who doesn’t realize there were slave labor camps at Auschwitz, tell me more about my profound historical ignorance. *rolls eyes*
Your little description of Tamerlane, as fascinating as it is, does nothing whatsoever to make your point about Buchenwald being different from Auschwitz, since what you describe is MORE SIMILAR TO WHAT HAPPENED IN AUSCHWITZ.
There is a long history of massacres in warfare…therefore, a camp where a higher % of the dead were worked as slaves before being murdered is different from a camp where a lower % of the dead were worked as slaves before being murdered. I’m sorry, Rand, that doesn’t come within 1000 miles of making sense.
Leland asked “why didn’t the Senator from Indiana, running for President of the US, get his facts straight”
Don’t worry about it, Leland.
So you mixed up two place names?
It’s no big deal.
Well Rand, you made one fatal mistake. You tried to use historical fact to make a logical argument. Silly boy don’t you know it is all about what people Think happened not what really went on. 😀
I haven’t been watching too close to this whole brewha but I feel that there is only a few likely explanation:
1. Obama is lying for political gain. (Seems to fit the Democrat MO.)
2. His Uncle was in the Red Army. (Seems to fit with his mothers side of the family.)
3. Obama doesn’t know what he is talking about. (Seems to fit with precedent data.)
Your basic point is valid: I’ve studied WWII a bit (mostly battle strategy, tactics and weapons as opposed to the whole “German home front issues.” It always seemed to me that if the bad guys are bad enough to need killing then arguing about how bad they are is pointless. Was one bad thing they did worse then another? As my father would say, “Who cares! Less talk more shooting, Pass the ammo if you aren’t using it.”
“I’d be willing to bet that many more people know the word Auschwitz and what it represents than they do Buchenwald. And among those people is, apparently, Barack Obama.”
Seriously? You think that’s “apparent”? I think its apparent that he used the wrong name in a speech. I think your continued attempts to draw deep insights from that fact are beyond ridiculous.
“I see that no one wants to read what I actually write. They prefer to live in some fantasy world in which I wrote something else.”
Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy watching you explain to joe from Lowell and others how his taking your remarks out of context and drawing big conclusions from them is totally unfair and unjustified. How many of your blog posts on Obama would be left if you gave him even half the interpretive charity that you claim for yourself?
I think its apparent that he used the wrong name in a speech.
He did it in at least two speeches. In his 2002 Iraq speech, he talked about how his grandfather heard tales from his fellow soldiers about liberating Auschwitz and Treblinka. It was no slip up.
Joe,
Yeah, he’s from Illinois. Glad you can tell the diffence. Now perhaps we should all start writing how insensitive you are about the people of Indiana?
Robert,
It was intentional. Joe’s should just now be understanding that.
Here’s what he said in 2002:
“He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
Are you saying that it is impossible that his grandfather heard stories about the Soviet troops that entered Auschwitz? I have heard such stories; there’s no reason his grandfather couldn’t have. I expect that stories about Nazi atrocities spread like wildfire near the end of WW II. They were probably intentionally picked up and distributed as part of the war effort.
BTW, the Tamerlane example you keep using is pretty silly. Tamerlane was by all accounts one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty conquerors in history. Using him as example of what is historically “typical” is at best a distortion.
Are you saying that it is impossible that his grandfather heard stories about the Soviet troops that entered Auschwitz?
The Soviets were “fellow troops” of his grandfather? Who knew?
It would explain a lot, though, now that I think about it… 😉
Ah, so now the issue is the word “fellow.” Let us examine this deeply. I predict the argument goes something like this:
“It is quite revealing that he would use a word that is so linked with communism in the popular imagination–perhaps his grandfather was a “fellow” traveler. Apparently, Obama’s family is full of communist sympathizers.”
Give me a break.
“Primarily, however, it was a day for the little man of the armies — for the GI and the junior officer — and each made it a merry one, forgetting war while toasting the United States and Russia, swapping insignia and watches, snapping pictures and trying out one another’s weapons amid noise, danger and laughter reminiscent of the Fourth of July at home.” – Catherine Coyne of the Boston Herald writing at the time about the meeting betwen the Soviets and the Americans after crossing the Elbe.
That was the 69th Infantry Division on the US side. I wonder how much Soviet – American commraderie there was amongst the average soldiers over the days and months following that meeting . Although I’m not expecting Obama’s Auschwitz story to be accurate (since, after all, the campaign said that he named the wrong camp), I do wonder whether the 89th Infantry Division ever bumped into Soviet soldiers. The 89th website mentions that the Soviets were camped 15 miles away from the 89th after V-E day, but also mentions that passes were often given and recreational activities were enthusiastically pursued. It does seem reasonable that someone from the 89th would know someone who had swapped stories with the Soviets, although of course, perhaps not the Soviets who had liberated Auschwitz.
“It is quite revealing that he would use a word that is so linked with communism in the popular imagination–perhaps his grandfather was a “fellow” traveler. Apparently, Obama’s family is full of communist sympathizers.”
No, actually that was a joke (though in fact his mother was pretty clearly a communist sympathizer, not that I would hold that against him per se).
The point is that if he was hearing the stories from his fellow (American) soldiers, it couldn’t have been about Auschwitz and Treblinka, since they didn’t liberate those places. He’s just invoking well-known Holocaust place names, because he doesn’t know about the German ones (likely) and/or he thinks they’ll make his point better rhetorically, not knowing that it makes him come off as historically ignorant. Not to mention his staff. I find it interesting that no one pointed out the Messiah’s gaffe at the time.
That last anonymous comment was me. If anyone has references, particularly books, on Soviets – American meetings, I’d be appreciative. Right now, it is harder than usual to do research via Google because all the keywords are tied to the Obama controversy!
Ah, I see. “Fellow” means “American.” I guess I must have been using an outdated dictionary.
I do wonder whether the 89th Infantry Division ever bumped into Soviet soldiers.
I certainly wouldn’t discount it, but that still doesn’t really explain Obama’s words, unless you torture their meaning. He doesn’t talk about his grandfather’s “fellow soldiers” (I’m assuming that he’s referring to US troops here, and not their Soviet allies) hearing tales of the Soviets liberating Auschwitz and Treblinka. In any clear reading, he talks about their tales of doing so.
I think that Occam’s razor would indicate that these two (I wonder if there are more?) gaffes are evidence that to him, “Auschwitz” is an all-purpose term to attempt to demonstrate his historical and military-loving bona fides.
He’s a fast learner, though. I don’t expect him to make that mistake again.
Ah, I see. “Fellow” means “American.”
??
Well, he was an American. What else would it mean?
Are you saying that he was referring to Soviet troops as his “fellow soldiers”? If so, when did he meet and talk to them? Who did he use for a translator?
If not, what are you saying?
“(I’m assuming that he’s referring to US troops here, and not their Soviet allies)”
Oh, “assuming.” I’ll have to add that to the list.
Here’s one: I’m assuming that Rand knows that Tamerlane is universally regarded as one of the most exceptionally brutal and bloodthirst conquerors in history. Given that, I find it quite revealing that he would continue to use that example. Apparently, Rand is attempting to wilfully distort history in order to cover up his own Nazi apologism.
That was me.
“[H]e heard stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
He didn’t have to meet the Soviets for this to be true. He just had to hear stories of the first troops to enter Auschwitz. Do you think he never heard any stories about the first troops to enter Auschwitz?
BTW, the Tamerlane example you keep using is pretty silly. Tamerlane was by all accounts one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty conquerors in history. Using him as example of what is historically “typical” is at best a distortion.
Stalin, Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, Tojo, Pol Pot, the Hutus in Rwanda, the Sudanese in South Sudan and Dafur, the Serbs in Bosnia, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, Mugabe and both Kims (mainly via starvation). Plenty of examples of people who behaved like Hitler in the twentieth century alone. The biggest difference between them is how systematically they behaved this way and how many resources they could bring to bear. Both Stalin and Mao exceeded Hitler in terms of numbers. Pol Pot far exceeded Hitler in terms of percentage of his own people killed (one quarter to one third).
I’m against treating the Holocaust as a wholly unique event far above and far apart from other democides. I believe that makes it too easy to say ‘Never again’ without actually doing anything to stop other democides. That’s the main form of Holocaust denial which leads us to do nothing, not the one which says the Holocaust didn’t happen.
BTW, did you know that 20 to 30 million people perished in the Taiping Rebellion? Twenty. To. Thirty. Million. Few westerners know this.
Does it really matter how those millions died?
Yours,
Wince
He didn’t have to meet the Soviets for this to be true. He just had to hear stories of the first troops to enter Auschwitz. Do you think he never heard any stories about the first troops to enter Auschwitz?
I have no idea whether or not he heard stories about the first troops to enter Auschwitz. But I doubt if, in the telling, they were called his fellow troops. Unless you’re saying that Americans called Soviet troops their fellow troops. That seems quite unlikely to me.
And this line of argument doesn’t seem tenuous to you Rand? It doesn’t seem at all silly to be drawing broad conclusions about Obama’s historical literacy based on whether allied Soviet soldiers who battled into Germany from the East can be regarded as “fellow troops” of American soldiers who battled in from the West?
And this line of argument doesn’t seem tenuous to you Rand?
No, not at all. I can see why someone losing the argument might want to think that, though.
I’ve only skimmed through the last 90 or so comments in the thread that caught fire, skimmed because it’s too depressing to see just how deeply the ignorance runs among what I can only assume to be mostly leftist Americans. Some claimed to be this or that but that doesn’t matter at all.
By failing to recognize what was particular to Auschwitz and extermination camps those people are also failing to recognize the history and motivations behind it. Intentional or not the sum of that results in a kind of denial by obfuscation: they’ve already forgotten a lot.
Sorry about the double post. I knew about the commenting issue but didn’t think carefully enough about what the forward button might do.
And this line of argument doesn’t seem tenuous to you Rand? It doesn’t seem at all silly to be drawing broad conclusions about Obama’s historical literacy based on whether allied Soviet soldiers who battled into Germany from the East can be regarded as “fellow troops” of American soldiers who battled in from the West?
Tenous might be a good description. Demanding is much better. The level of historical literacy being demanded is rare. We don’t prequalify our candidates with mandarin style exams. We just vote. One problem with Obama is that the elections he has experienced before these primaries have not been rigorous. But if we did prequalify our candidates via exams, would any of the current crop pass? Would any of the commenters here pass?
Yours,
Wince
Really, you aren’t embarressed to be making these arguments at the same time you are begging dozens of people to give you the benefit of the doubt about what you have written?
I, frankly, think there is no reason that Soviet troops cannot be called “fellows” of their American counterparts. There is a well documented history of feelings of comaradarie and fellowship between soldiers of different nations, and the final victory over Germany was certainly an occasion where such feelings flourished (as the Anonymous poster pointed out above). More to the point, I think a single ambiguous word choice in a speech is an insufficient basis for any claim about the general knowledge level of anyone. There must be hundreds of hours of Obama speaking on the record available. There are bound to be many mistakes in that body of work, because that’s how people are.
You, of course, are interested only in taking the least charitable interpretation you can come up with–that this was a mistake by Obama–and drawing the most damaging possible conclusion from that interpretation–that this demonstrates his ignorance of the Holocaust. Yet simultaneously you will howl if anyone applies the same rules to you. You are participating in a feeding frenzy over a single mistaken word, yet you marvel that your one little mistake in your prior post could cause such outrage.
Your entire argument throughout these two posts has been a study in hypocracy. And I think you know that, even if you won’t admit it.
He did it in at least two speeches.
Really?
I’ve seen others point out that these were anecdotes told to press in Q&A after the speech.
Do you actually have the texts of the speech so we can settle this?
you aren’t embarressed to be making these arguments at the same time you are begging dozens of people to give you the benefit of the doubt about what you have written?
I’ve never “begged” anyone to “give me the benefit of the doubt about what I have written.”
People have made outrageous and insane comments about me, calling me a Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier, and I have justly pointed out that they are idiots.
I, frankly, think there is no reason that Soviet troops cannot be called “fellows” of their American counterparts. There is a well documented history of feelings of comaradarie and fellowship between soldiers of different nations, and the final victory over Germany was certainly an occasion where such feelings flourished (as the Anonymous poster pointed out above).
Of course you do. You have to think that, or your argument falls apart. Regardless of the amount of “camaraderie and fellowship,” this was George Patton’s Army, that had no love for the Soviets or the Soviet Union (he wanted to keep the tanks rolling all the way to Moscow), even if they could get on well with individual Soviet soldiers. The notion that they would refer to them as “fellow troops” is ludicrous.
And the notion that I’m drawing “the most damaging possible conclusion” about Obama from this is equally ludicrous. I could, for example, draw the conclusion that his grandfather marched with the Soviets, or that he was (as you said) a “fellow traveler,” or that he is lying but thinks that Auschwitz would go over better than some other camp name and is just fooling the rubes again.
But no.
I merely draw the (I think obvious) conclusion that he was unfamiliar with the location of Auschwitz (as he was over the weekend), and he is unfamiliar with who liberated it, though it’s certainly been drilled into him by now. He is simply not familiar with the history of the war in any detail, or he would never have said such a thing.
Your laughable notion that “fellow troops” means Soviet troops is what is tenuous.