And of course, if there is an absurd story that wingnuts will love, Tapper is on top of it:
Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”
The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”
Sikorski, for what it is worth, is a former journalist who wrote for the National Review (the place that pays Jonah Goldberg) and was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (the place that pays Jim Pethokoukis). That should give you an idea what we are working with, here. At any rate, this is neither the first or the last time this issue has come up. Type in “polish+death+camp” in good ole wikipedia, and you will find this:
Polish death camp and Polish concentration camp are terms that occasionally appear in international media in reference to Nazi German concentration camps built and run by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust in the General Government and other parts of occupied Poland. Usage of the term has been condemned as insulting by the Polish foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld in 2005, who also alleged that it—intentionally or unintentionally—shifted the responsibility for the construction or operation of the camps from the German to the Polish people.[1] Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita has criticized international media outlets, including Haaretz from Israel, as “holocaust deniers” over usage of the term. However, all foreign media articles so criticized by Rzeczpospolita (as of November 2008) make clear that the perpetrators were German, and none claim Poles built the camps.[2]
Opponents of these terms argue that they are inaccurate, as they may imply that the camps—located in Nazi-occupied Poland—might have been a responsibility of the Poles (i.e. Polish), when in fact they were designed, constructed and run by Nazi Germany with no collaboration from Poland or Poles; and, used to exterminate millions of Poles alongside Polish Jews, including Jews transported by the Nazis from across Europe.[3][4] Non-Polish media also make similar references to the German-run extermination program in Nazi-occupied Poland such as the “Polish Ghetto”, “Polish Holocaust”, “Nazi Poland”,[5] etc. Polish Foreign Minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld in 2005 suggested that there are instances of “bad will, saying that under the pretext that “it’s only a geographic reference”, attempts are made to distort history and conceal the truth.”[6]
I guess we are supposed to believe that absolutely no one in Poland had any idea what was going on in the Nazi death camps.
jrg
Where is this “Polish” you speak of? Is it close to uz-becki-becki-stan-stan?
Brian R.
Yeah, ordinary Poles just knew nothing about what went on in those camps. They were all innocent bystanders.
Cato
OFF TOPIC:
It turns out Governor O’Malleys high tax policies are causing jobs and taxpayers to flee Maryland. Where are they going? Low-Tax Virginia!
handy
Don’t forget Poland!
Villago Delenda Est
“Goodbye Jews! Goodbye Jews!”
Jerzy Russian
It looks like I picked the wrong week to stop drinking, etc.
Hill Dweller
@Cato: What would Virginia’s economy look like without all that sweet government cash being funneled to defense companies in the northern part of the state?
salvage
Now, now, we all know that it was the Nazis that invented antisemitism (and they were all gay atheist liberals) and that the rest of Europe was shocked! Shocked that there was genocide.
Was it a death camp? Was it in Poland? Polish death camp seem quite literally accurate.
Craig
Guys. Seriously. The Poles, by and large, were victims of the Nazis (and the Soviets) too. The President fucked up here. It may be a small fuck up in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a fuck up.
Forum Transmitted Disease
A Pole jumping at the chance to insult a black man and imply he’s incompetent. Huh. Never would have seen that coming.
FlipYrWhig
This is like Fidel Castro complaining that the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t really Cuba’s fault. Well, it took place in that physical location, and that’s how adjectives work, you fuckstick.
Cato
@Hill Dweller:
What would Maryland’s look like if the federal capital were in Chicago instead of on the Potomac?
Linda Featheringill
I think the govt of Poland is protesting too much. It probably would be more accurate to use the phrase “death camp located in Poland” but it really isn’t that big a deal, in my opinion.
Besides, we all know how fucking tolerant the Poles were before the 20th Century, during the 20th Century, and after the 20th Century.
Yutsano
And how many electoral votes does Poland have? Sounds like Sikorski is looking for an outside distraction to cover up something he’s fucking up right now. I could also just be cynical…
SatanicPanic
Just add this to the list- 57 states, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, “Corpsemen”, etc.- that wingnuts are always yammering about and the rest of us just ignore.
JPL
@Cato: A quick google shows the unemployment rate of Maryland to be 6.6 percent while the proud right to fire state that I live in has an unemployment rate of 9 percent. You need to broaden your horizon.
longtime lurk
Glad to see BJ’s record of knee-jerk Obama defense remains intact. But, meh, whatever — the Poles can take up for themselves on this one.
What interests me is that there’s been zero mention here at BJ on yesterday’s NYT story on the WH’s drone death panels. I find it odd that the folks here have avoided the subject entirely. Ditto for Sullivan. Not even ABL has popped up to lure traffic over to RS to read a disingenuous circle jerk about how the firebaggers are using the issue to ensure Romney’s election.
I guess this should be considered progress…
JPL
Jake Tapper can be easily used. Someone needs to teach him how to use the google.
Villago Delenda Est
@salvage:
Well, technically at the time it was in the “General Government”, which was the legal fiction that constituted occupied Poland (that part that wasn’t annexed outright to the Reich) that was, formally, not Poland. It was something else within “Greater Germany”.
Most of the death camps were sited on what was prior to 1939 Polish territory…an area that the Germans planned on basically deporting all Poles from to who knows where and turning it over to ethnic German settlers who were refugees from various other parts of Europe (the “Volksdeutsche”).
foggy follansbye
Bataan death march.
Hue massacre.
Kansas City massacre.
Dresden firebombing.
Oklahoma City bombing.
English. Do they speak it?
Steve
In the English language as I understand it, “Polish death camp” could mean either a death camp run by Polish people, or a death camp located in Poland. I guess some people understand English differently than I do. Either way, I think we can all agree that it was the Nazis, not the Poles, who sent people to death camps.
I can accept that this is a legitimate diplomatic gaffe, as opposed to a complete fauxtrage, since this is after all a well-documented pet peeve of Poland’s. But that’s all it is. I guess the President is supposed to have staffers who are alert to this sort of thing, but I can’t exactly hold it against him personally because I would never have understood what was offensive about those words in a million years. And it’s a bummer that everyone is talking about this stupid issue when they should be talking about Jan Karski, one of the most incredible heroes you could ever know.
Southern Beale
Today’s Darwin Award winner is a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher who died from a rattlesnake bite. Nobody could have anticipated ….
The best part:
The definition of Doing It Wrong.
Amir Khalid
This is a helluva big fuss to kick up over a slip of the tongue (or speechwriter, as the case may be). I believe an admission of error and apology are in order, but hasn’t the White House already come out with these?
4tehlulz
I wonder why all the extermination camps were in Poland.
I’m sure it was just an accident.
MikeJ
@Hill Dweller: NoVA’s entire economy is based on socialism, and NoVA is the economic engine that drives Virginia. Without the socialism of the DC burbs Virginia would be Mississippi.
Brachiator
Sweet Jesus on a Kraków!
Are there really people making a big deal over this? And media coverage?
Wow.
Craig
@Linda Featheringill: It kind of is a big deal. “Polish Death Camp” means something very different from “Death Camp located in Poland”. You’re talking about atrocities that killed millions. It’s pretty important to make sure your words don’t confuse the question of where the blame lies.
AA+ Bonds
WILL they now
That’s a pretty goddamned Soviet statement for Sikorski of all people to make
Cato
Why are taxpayer fleeing Maryland for Virginia?
jibeaux
Seriously, “Polish death camp” requires the clarification that the camp is in Poland, not that the Poles started the death camp? I try not to credit the intelligence of education of your average joe too much, but I think most people over the age of nine know who the bad guys were in WWII. Under nine, if you saw Indiana Jones as a wee lassie like I did. *
* Parents, not recommended. The Nazi face-melting scene. I won’t spoil it by telling you what nationality the Nazis were.
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL:
Cato is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, he’s more like a spoon.
Mnemosyne
@Craig:
You can argue that Poles had no choice but to stand by and watch the Nazis massacre their Jewish neighbors, but you can’t excuse the ones who participated or went to work in the death camps.
MattF
@Cato: In what way does that respond to Hill Dweller’s point? In fact, both Maryland and Virginia feed, big time, off the Federal teat. And Maryland has significantly lower unemployment. How did that happen?
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL:
Cato is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, he’s more like a spoon.
liberal
@MikeJ:
Yep.
J.W. Hamner
Eh I dunno… I can see why the Polish people would be a little upset by this one.
Hill Dweller
@MikeJ: No, no, no. It is the super low tax rates that heros like Bob McDonnell support. Although, the mandatory vaginal probes are also a big selling point.
Less Popular Tim
@Craig: Agreed. It is arguably literally correct to call them “Polish death camps.” But it offends Poles, who, while in some cases complicit and antisemitic, didn’t invite the Nazis into Poland, and didn’t mastermind the Holocaust. So don’t call them “Polish.” I know the word “niggardly” isn’t derived from n*clang. But many people think it is and get offended. So I don’t use that word either, even though technically there is no basis for taking offense.
oldswede
This article describes an event in Poland after the defeat of the Nazis:
The Kielce Pogrom
askew
Steve Benen had a good piece on this:
ChrisB
John,
As you note, the real problem with the story is Tapper’s failure to point out Sikorski’s right wing ties. That would indeed have given the reader an idea of what he or she was dealing with. But did Tapper mention it? Of course not.
The question, as always, is whether Tapper was just lazy and did not know Sikorski’s background or knew but decided not to say anything.
FlipYrWhig
@Craig: Well, the Bosnians weren’t responsible for the Bosnian War, either. It took place in Bosnia. And the Armenian Genocide was against Armenians, not by them.
EconWatcher
@Craig:
Yes, count me with those who think Obama (or, rather, his aides) goofed. He owed an apology for a poor choice of words, and he gave one. But it’s an awfully pathetic excuse for a scandal.
AA+ Bonds
A quick search of Google Scholar pulls up 34 results for “Polish death camp”, no doubt all from authors personally dedicated to the same rampant anti-Polish pro-Holocaust-victim bigotry as the President
As soon as Jewish advocacy orgs weigh in on this, the fake story dies a quiet death
4tehlulz
@Cato: Shush, birther trash. The adults are talking.
Someguy
Polish death camps, death camps in Poland, same thing. Everybody knows what you mean.
Just like
Fuck, John Cole. is exactly the same as Fuck John Cole.
and only an asshole would tell you different.
aimai
@foggy follansbye:
Correct.
aimai
stratplayer
The shocking extent of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust is extremely well-documented and no secret. To their credit, there are many Poles today with the moral courage to acknowledge and confront the hideous truth about Poland’s historical anti-semitism. On the whole, however, Poland seems to remain mired in deep denial about its past, and the forces of denial there are getting a major assist from the forces of Obama Derangement Syndrome here. Right-wing Jews might want to think a little about the kinds of people with whom they’ve chosen to ally themselves as a matter of political convenience.
butler
@Cato: From the Google:
Maryland’s top tax rate: 5.5%, which kicks in at 500K in income.
Virginia’s top rate? 5.75%, which starts at 17K.
Low tax, indeed.
Martin
Uh, I think you’re supposed to believe that Germany invaded Poland and killed about a million Poles in such death camps.
They’re not wrong to be upset by this. We wouldn’t tolerate a foreign force running death camps in the US to be called “American Death Camps”. Hell, look at the continued reaction over the usage of the confederate flag. Imagine if some Republican referred to it as the ‘American flag’. We’d have the outrage meter pegged at 11 over that – and it’s much less of a slight.
AA+ Bonds
@EconWatcher:
Anyone even feeling they need to have an opinion on this = right-wing victory
Hill Dweller
Wasn’t Obama actually reading prepared remarks when this was said?
AA+ Bonds
I mean I hope at least all of you people saying “shame on the President for saying this” spend a little time to yourselves and try hard not be puppets of the right-wing in the future
Or, IDK, apply some consistency and stop saying “Bataan death march” because you bizarrely believe that it makes Filipinos look like the bad guys in WWII
Mino
@Craig: Snark, right?
MonkeyBoy
Human languages can concisely convey a lot of information because they depend upon shared assumptions and a charitable stance by the listeners to interpret what the speaker means.
It is impossible to exactly convey some information in a way that doesn’t depend on assumptions and presumed interpretation, and attempts to make some instance more precise greatly increases the verbiage – see for example legal documents.
I am really tired of nitpickers and their gotcha moments – particularly when such are often attempts to derail a conversation.
Cato
@JPL:
Wrong. Look here. Virginia 5.6%, Maryland 6.7%.
Low taxes win again.
catclub
OT: Romney’s iPhone App has a big mis-spelling:
“A Better Amercia”
Mercantilism for the win.
Craig
@Mnemosyne: I’m not “excusing” anyone. Two things:
1) It is not an accident that Poland was the home to the largest community of Jews in Europe prior to the Nazi invasion. Poland, before it got sliced and diced into (temporary) oblivion by the Great Powers, was generally very kind to the Jews.
2) Anti-Semitism was a problem throughout Europe in the early 20th century. Poland was not immune to this wave. Some people there were certainly not only passively but actively supportive of Nazi aims to eliminate the Jews.
All of this is a matter of historical record, as is the link that you posted. What is also a matter of historical record is that these camps, located on what was previously and currently Polish soil, were run by Nazis, under the regime of the Nazis, and based on a Nazi plan for extermination. What individual Polish citizens, even groups of Polish citizens, did during the war does not change this. These were Nazi camps.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@longtime lurk:
And when Romney wins, the “drone panels” will stop immediately, amirite?
VICTORY! PURITY! ASCENSION!
Thor Heyerdahl
@Villago Delenda Est: No thanks, I’m not spooning with that.
Comrade Dread
I believe we should take others feelings into mind and be respectful when we speak, but at what point do we cross the line from being empathetic to living under the tyranny of sensitivity?
Anyone who has picked up a history book knows that the death camps were built and operated under Nazi German policies by Nazis.
It just seems a bit over the top to impart ill will or motive to the president when 99.9% of the people hearing him would understand exactly what he meant to say.
LGRooney
@Forum Transmitted Disease: That’s what I was thinking. Eastern Europeans tend to be very, very racist and the Poles and Russians are in competition to see who can be the most so. Anyone who’s ever been to a football (the real one, the one played with your feet?) match over there can attest to the chants made about anyone who is less than pasty – including their own. Antisemitism also has a very long history in Poland and most other parts of Eastern Europe.
butler
@Cato:
Which explains why Nevada is doing so well.
Bubblegum Tate
@FlipYrWhig:
Not when the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Constitution it wasn’t! KENYAN SOSHULIZM!
FlipYrWhig
@Martin: We wouldn’t? It sounds perfectly reasonable to me: in an alternate history where Japan invaded chunks of America, it would be perfectly natural to speak sentences like “Emperor Hirohito’s American death camps systematically massacred thousands.” “A brave resistance movement liberated prisoners from the American death camps.”. That’s just how place names work as adjectives.
Steve
@Martin:
Uh, unless there was some dispute about whether the foreign forces were the bad guys, I honestly couldn’t give a shit whether someone says “American death camp” or “death camp located in America.”
Of course, judging from all the people in this thread who are babbling about Polish collaborators and totally missing the point, maybe there is some dispute about whether the Nazis were the bad guys. But I doubt it.
Linda Featheringill
@Craig:
It is my point that the blame is already confused. Yes, the German Nazis instigated the process but they got a lot of cooperation from Polish people inside of Poland.
The Poles weren’t the only collaborators, of course.
rlrr
@catclub:
I bet Romney’s iPhone app was developed off shore…
Hill Dweller
Obama was awarding a medal to a Polish citizen for his bravery in exposing the death camps, but instead we’re supposed to believe he was actually attacking the Polish people.
Their wingnut Foreign Minister should probably think twice before barking orders.
EconWatcher
@AA+ Bonds:
Not really. No one will remember Obama’s blooper in a week, and no one will remember the comments posted here in three days. That’s about the shelf-life of a gaffe.
Bubblegum Tate
@SatanicPanic:
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney can’t even spell “America.”
slim's tuna provider
the polish government is obviously grandstanding. however, being eastern european in origin, I find the american inability, even at educated levels, to distinguish between states, nationalities, and ethnicities, even when the difference and the importance of the difference is pointed out, to be unspeakably annoying. no, it is not unreasonable for poles, who were as brutalized by the nazis as the jews were (read “bloodlands” by timothy snyder), to get a little pissed when a nazi concentration camp is called “polish” on the ludicrous justification that it’s in poland. it’s in poland because poland was invaded, and the camp was placed there. the naivete of conflating that with being “polish” is frankly infuriating. americans seem to do it all the time, though, which makes it more infuriating. that said, they apologized, so case closed.
AA+ Bonds
@Craig:
Who exactly are you citing on this one, the Sejm? Because their findings on interwar Poland are as objective as you’d think they’d be
catclub
@stratplayer: Thanks for the reminder.
I do remember now that after the war and for many years thereafter, there were essentially NO Jews returning to Poland, and miniscule numbers still there. I think that is probably still the case.
handy
Maybe Obama will invite
SikorskiPoland to the South Land and have a beer. That would be a riot.Brachiator
@Martin:
Which, of course, Republicans have done.
That Confederate flags exist at all anymore could be seen as an outrage. But hell, Six Flags Magic Mountain was a merger of two amusement parks, one of them “Six Flags over Texas,” which proudly celebrated the six flags associated with the state.
Including the Confederate Flag. As American as apple pie for many.
Faux outrage, phony story.
AA+ Bonds
@slim’s tuna provider:
No offense, but that isn’t true by any measure.
4tehlulz
ITT Polish whitewashing.
I guess I find it hard to believe that almost two-thirds of Germany’s Jews can survive while only 9% of Poland’s does and accept that it was merely accidental that the extermination camps were in Poland by accident.
Martin
@stratplayer:
I don’t think that’s in question. But it’s simultaneously true that Poland was invaded and that many Poles were killed in those camps. Does it benefit anyone to suggest that Poland, as a complete entity, is fully culpable for those camps? Does it benefit anyone to second-guess Poland on how they would like this to be handled – or are we better managers of Polands social views than they are?
pseudonymous in nc
And is also Mr Anne Applebaum, so he’s doing this as a DC insider, not as a foreign pol.
And for fuck’s sake: Poland moved west after WW2, and while this is one of those times where I think you have to be very careful with your language, this is also one of the times where Obama can’t win, because very carefully scripted language equals “OMG TElePrOmpTeR!!11!” for wingnuts.
Steve
@slim’s tuna provider:
I keep reading these words over and over and over but I still can’t quite process that a human being wrote them.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve:
Let’s just say the Nazis took the initiative, and a lot of Poles were not terribly distressed as long as it was Jews being liquidated.
FlipYrWhig
@Craig: They were the Nazis’ Polish death camps. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Especially when you’re already speaking about resistance to them, and there’s no possibility that you mean to suggest Polish responsibility. This is outrage by text string.
AA+ Bonds
@EconWatcher:
I still don’t see why you want to operate as a miniature Breitbart tool, especially as there’s no “gaffe” there, but YMMV
Mike Lamb
@butler: And Arizona.
Back to the topic at hand–this probably requires a legit clarification. Is it overblown? Sure. But I get why some people would be a bit upset about it.
AA+ Bonds
Anyway, as the Koch employees like Martin have arrived to stir the shit, we can count this entire thread as a point in the Republican column
JPL
@Cato: The state of GA would love an unemployment rates like that. We need more government spending.
Sophist
@foggy follansbye:
No. The speak Polish.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Stupid stupid stupid.
Willful misinterpretation of historical context and language ambiguity to make a political fuss is moronic, so we’ll see the crazies grab onto this one.
I’m glad you talked about it though, I was wondering what the crap NPR was talking about when I heard the tail end of the TOP OF THE HOUR leading news story… sheeesh.
MikeInSewickely
My parents both spent 4 years in concentration camps. My Dad was a Serbian POW and my Mom was Russian slave labor.
Believe me, everybody knew what the hell was going on. My Dad met some locals after the British freed Bregen-Belsen, the camp where my parents were.
Some of them not only knew but thought it was a good idea to get rid of some undesirables.
And I’m supposed to believe the majority of people listen to their higher angels? Bullshit.
4tehlulz
@AA+ Bonds: 0/10
Craig
@AA+ Bonds: I’m not talking about interwar Poland, I’m talking about pre-partition Poland. The Russian Empire, in particular, had very little use for the Jews, and they exported that shit. But it’s worth noting that the Poles, left to their own devices, were much more decent to the Jews than a lot of European countries.
FlipYrWhig
@slim’s tuna provider: Names of countries and peoples, made into adjectival forms, have more than one meaning. Nobody complains that when you say “Mexican drug cartels” that you’re suggesting the Mexican government or the Mexican people are collectively responsible.
slim's tuna provider
@Steve: @AA+ Bonds: millions of polish civilians were murdered on racial grounds. millions of jewish civilians were murdered on racial grounds. i call it close enough for my point. i respect disagreements, though.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@stratplayer: Dismayed that it took until post #48 to hit the salient issue here, but I’m glad one of my fellow Strat enthusiasts got it.
catclub
“was generally very kind to the Jews.”
I think this might mean: had fewer pogroms than Czarist Russia. High praise indeed.
Never mind the fact that there was a Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, while new york city or paris, did not have one, indicates long term issues.
— Those people just prefer living with their own.
LAC
@Cato: What does it matter to you? Neither state is going to hire you anyway. And don’t carnys like yourself make better money down south?
AA+ Bonds
In celebration of this absolute debacle of a thread that does everything the Republicans want, I offer the TOP FUCKING BREAKING WEEPING HEADLINE on FoxNews.com
THINK NEW YORK CABBIES ARE SECRETLY MULTIPLE-MURDERER MUSLIMS? YOU ARE PROBABLY RIGHT SO MAKE SURE YOU BOTHER THEM ABOUT IT
Steve
@Villago Delenda Est: You can say that if you want, but it’s completely beside the point at best and a slander of the Polish people at worst.
Let’s not be dumb here. When Obama used the words “Polish death camp,” he obviously meant nothing more or less than the fact that the death camp was located in Poland. Does anyone want to make the case that he was actually trying to make a point about Polish complicity in the Holocaust, and he thought this medal ceremony was the right place to do it?
All of you talking about Polish collaborators, whether your view of history is right or wrong, are completely and utterly missing the point. There is not a chance in hell that Obama said “Polish death camp” because he was attempting to assign the Polish people some responsibility for running the death camps.
Brachiator
@Bubblegum Tate:
And I, for one, am outraged.
@handy:
Especially if they serve a German beer.
EconWatcher
@Mike Lamb:
I think one of the reasons this is getting excessive play is because Obama so rarely misspeaks. I can only think of one other instance where I thought he really needed to be more careful with his words (“clinging to their guns and religion”).
This sticks out because he (and his aides) so seldom get it wrong.
slag
@Steve: Agreed.
We’ve arrived at Stupidville a little earlier than usual today. Not enough rest stops, maybe.
slim's tuna provider
@Steve: this reveals your ignorance of “how stuff works in europe”. in europe, saying “polish concentration camp” means “the polish nation and the polish ethnicity bears responsibility for this camp for all time.” it does not mean “the camp is located in poland”. people who deal with foreign nations (i.e. presidential speechwriters) should be aware of this stuff.
stratplayer
@Craig: The problem here is that Polish outrage over Obama’s use of the phrase in question is not driven by a desire to ensure that Germany is not excused from its central responsibility for the Holocuast, but rather to ensure that Poland is excused from responsibility for its significant role in helping the Germans execute their monstrous plan. The Obama-haters are willing to let Poland completely off the hook as long as it damages the object of their loathing. This should have been a teaching moment. Instead, we are witnessing the wholesale erasure of history for short-term political gain.
FlipYrWhig
@MikeInSewickely: Even that story is a good example of how national and ethnic identifiers are complicated. Is a “Serbian POW” a Serb who’s been made prisoner, or a prisoner in Serb territory, or a prisoner of the Serbs? It might need additional clarification, but it’s clearly not a gaffe or an offense against decency.
Craig
@AA+ Bonds: Do you seriously think that Republicans read this shit? Basically you’re saying that we can only ever act as brainless tribalists, because otherwise the other side is going to use it against us, and that is the most salient factor under dispute. The President, it should be noted, has already apologized for this fuckup.
Cermet
@Craig: What a total misunderstanding of history – very large numbers of Poles helped the Nazi’s and often killed Polish Jews themselves or captured thhem to then turn the Jews over to the Nazi’s. The Poles wanted their lands and hated Jews – can’t change facts.
That all said, all camps were built and operated solely by Nazi’s so the President misspoke.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve:
You obviously do not know about the extent of Polish collaboration with the Holocaust. Or you choose to ignore it. I’m sure a lot of Poles don’t want to remember it.
AA+ Bonds
@Craig:
That must be some good Koch you’re snorting
For the people who aren’t actually involved in this process:
the idea is to make up a “controversy” to encourage left-wing infighting, and then hire whiny unemployed college grads at minimum wage to pimp the conflict on well-read left-wing blogs
The National Review/Mrs. Sikorski/etc., the people who invented this “fuckup”, only exist to do this – the magazine and website never turn a profit and subsist entirely on wealthy donors and benefactors who use them to ratfuck public discourse
The Ancient Randonneur
Yawn …
Hey Cole, West Virginia is in the news again.
Oops.
FlipYrWhig
@slim’s tuna provider: “In Europe,” or “according to one member of the Polish government who’s a veteran wingnut operative and is fast becoming the equivalent on Polish matters to William Donahue on Catholics?”
Spaghetti Lee
Jesus Christ, what a stupid fucking story. Slip of the tongue or poor choice of words allows for a bunch of wingnut grandstanding. Yeah, there’s nothing else important going on right now, let’s talk about this!
But I am surprised at the racist responses from some people here.
@LGRooney:
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You two in particular can go fuck yourselves with a red-hot pair of pliers. Why is this kind of racist bullshit acceptable? Just go ahead and say ‘dumb polack’, you ignorant bags of dog shit.
slim's tuna provider
@FlipYrWhig: for the colloquial american english speaker, it does not. for the colloquial eastern european ear, when speaking about stuff like the holocaust, IT DOES. this is not about how english should be understood. this is about how poles understand english.
slag
@slim’s tuna provider:
And British people drive on the other side of the road. Why didn’t the President’s motorcade do that today? Oh that’s right…he’s not in Britain!
At this point, the Polish Prime Minister should be apologizing to us for misunderstanding our use of the English language. Whiny bastard.
TK421
The nerve of those people! How can people live in a country that is openly killing innocent people and pretend there’s nothing wrong with it? I can only imagine what it would be like to live in a nation like that.
“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&pagewanted=print
***
“As for the morally indefensible position that any male killed in such an attack is “probably up to no good,” isn’t the Obama administration saying the EXACT same thing that George Zimmerman said about Trayvon Martin?”
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/If-youre-probably-up-to-no-good-then-President-Obama-wants-to-kill-you.html
Steve
@slim’s tuna provider: No, sorry, Eastern Europe does not get to decide how the English language is spoken. Saying that it is a “ludicrous justification” to call something located in Poland “Polish” is laugh-out-loud funny.
It was a diplomatic gaffe, nothing more, and I am happy that the White House apologized. But there actually is no difference between saying “Polish death camp” and “death camp located in Poland.” If Poland feels there is a big difference, then fine, we should say it the second way because that’s what diplomacy is about. But that doesn’t change how the English language actually works.
Craig
@AA+ Bonds: Christ. “Something something Koch something something 5th column.”
slim's tuna provider
@FlipYrWhig: he is making way too much of a big deal of it, because he is a wingnut, and for other internal political reasons. but he is right.
AA+ Bonds
In response I take back everything I ever said on any topic on this thread other than about how stupid and shitty we are all for discussing it further, and suggest Cole close the discussion before it gets further Koched up than it already has been
Spaghetti Lee
Jesus Christ, what a stupid fucking story. Slip of the tongue or poor choice of words allows for a bunch of wingnut grandstanding. Yeah, there’s nothing else important going on right now, let’s talk about this!
But I am surprised at the racist responses from some people here.
@LGRooney:
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You two in particular can go fuck yourselves with a red-hot pair of pliers. Why is this kind of racist bullshit acceptable? Just go ahead and say ‘dumb polack’, you ignorant bags of dog shit.
bemused senior
Another example of political correctness on the right.
AA+ Bonds
@Craig:
You said it, not me
Steve
@Villago Delenda Est: Did you wake up on the dumb side of the bed this morning? Obama was not assigning the Polish people even an iota of responsibility for the death camps. If you want to have that argument with someone, go nuts, but that’s not what Obama said or meant.
Sly
BBC Panorama did a special on Polish and Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Soccer Hooligans, called Stadiums of Hate, in light of the upcoming UEFA Championship series. Polish Soccer Hooligans, in particular, are well known for referring to opposing teams as Jews and making ape sounds whenever a black player gains control of the ball. Sol Campbell, a former captain of England’s national team, is openly telling fans not to travel to the host cities and the families of several black players are not attending over safety concerns.
This is, of course, causing a big row with the government of Poland, who want to use the series to portray their country in a positive light. They certainly don’t want soccer fans worldwide turning on their TVs to see shit like this and a throng of skinheads giving a Nazi salute.
Obama’s comment comes right in the middle of this, possible explaining some of the hostility.
Hawes
Does this mean that the Japanese Internment camps in the US were actually misnamed? I guess they were US Internment camps.
slim's tuna provider
@Steve: we agree on everything except that you seem to think “diplomatic gaffes” are not important.
FlipYrWhig
@slim’s tuna provider: All right, instead of my just being a dick about it, I’ll ask a question. What would be a parallel case? Because it’s my understanding that, for instance, “Armenian Genocide” is not a gaffe that suggests that Armenians did the killing.
AA+ Bonds
@AA+ Bonds:
Why what a good point AA+ Bonds I think it belongs here as the newest comment on this thread
MikeInSewickely
@FlipYrWhig: Never thought of that.
He was a Serbian soldier caught during the attack on Belgrade.
And, yes, have we completely lost our minds that we go to war over a single phrase?
What am I saying? Of course we have.
Yutsano
@Spaghetti Lee: Bright shiny object and the media. It’s like a moth to the flame. Plus maybe this will wake up the sheeple enough to coronate Willard.
Villago Delenda Est
@bemused senior:
The left sees “political correctness” as a joke. Snark.
The right is dead serious about enforcing their take on it. At all times.
Mike Lamb
@Sly: I believe A. Cole and Lescott (and a couple others) have said their families will be staying home.
Brachiator
@slim’s tuna provider:
Yep. And that should be an end to the entire phony issue, especially since apologies were issued.
It’s not just an American thing. Nor is it unusual that one person’s set of big and important “differences” is unspeakably trivial to someone else.
EconWatcher
@Sly:
Wow. That’s one nasty photo.
geg6
No Poles have ever been anti-semitic. Ever.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1706315,00.html
Fucking idiot emessem.
liberal
@Craig:
Exactly. It’s like asking why bank robbers rob banks.
The extermination camps were there because, by and large, that’s where the Jews were.
liberal
@geg6:
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that Poles bear any appreciable fraction of responsibility for the Holocaust.
quannlace
Oh man, that is the funniest thing. Add that to the folder labeled ‘Worst Campaigner Ever.” His staff can’t even run Spell Check.
Amercia? Maybe that’s that Canada-America-Mexico alliance the wingnuts are always talking about.
Marcin
John,
Of course people in Poland knew about the camps. Nobody asked anyobody to believe that they didn’t. The question that is usually asked next is “why they didn’t do anything?”. If they didn’t, they must have collaborated, right?
Now, we can talk about the brutality of the war in Poland, that was uncomparable to anything else in Europe (maybe with exception of Ukraine), we can talk about the fact that 2 million Poles of non-Jewish origin died from nazi hands, beside 3 million of Jews, we can talk that Poland had never a collaborative government like almost any other country in Europe had.,etc.
There is an answer (not perfect, in any way) but it is kind of difficult to explain in few words. Let me try this. One of the reason why Jan Karski’s mission was so important, was that he was a first-hand witness, who was presented to Allied governments to testify about the camps, and who had the full backing of Polish government, including your president Roosvelt (who spoke with Karski personally). Because of him, the Allied governments knew fully well about the camps. Early enough, by 1942-43.
Why didn’t they do anything about it? Why didn’t they bomb the railroads to Aushwitz, as Polish government asked many times? Or, the camp? Why didn’t they declare publicly what are they going to to with Nazis who participated in genocide.
Now, you should deliberate on these questions before you start making ignorant comments about history.
geg6
@Craig:
Yeah, the Poles have always been open and welcoming and completely fair and friendly with Jews. They’re the victims here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland
Well, at least that was true until after 1795 or so.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve:
Steve, of course Obama was not assigning responsibility to the Poles. The Nazis initiated this. They didn’t treat the Poles well, either, and had plans on enslaving the lot of them and taking all the land that was Poland and giving it to Germans. The Polish state, the Polish nation, was to be destroyed in the course of the New Order in Europe. The Polish intelligentsia was to be annihilated.
However, the sad fact is, Poles did collaborate with the Nazis on rounding up Jews. It’s historical fact. A historical fact that the Poles would rather not mull over.
Truth is an ironclad defense against slander or libel.
MJ
@longtime lurk: So nice of you to delurk & ask for a slice of Blueberry Pie. Hope you’re hungry!
chopper
@Spaghetti Lee:
gotta remember, the GOP is frontin a dude with no FP experience at all. they gotta get a few wounds in however they can.
if this is really the best they got, god help them. or don’t, actually.
Craig
@geg6: It’s useful that you repeated the exact thing that I said. That way it’s been posted twice.
Corey
C’mon, folks. The comment was certainly not meant to offend, but it was inappropriate.
Are we this deep in election silly season that no one can see that?
liberal
@Cermet:
It’s not a misunderstanding of history at all.
Yes, the Poles were at least in some small measure complicit in the Holocaust. The question is, however, did they bear any major responsibility for the Holocaust?
ISTM the answer to that question is pretty clearly “no”.
Spaghetti Lee
@geg6:
That’s 2 strawmen arguments that no one in this thread has actually used in just 5 posts. Impressive.
Amir Khalid
My own take on this incident is that the White House did indeed err: some speechwriter wrote that sensitive phrase “Polish death camps”, it got past the approval process, and eventually passed the president’s lips at a public function. True, given the way the English language works, it does have the less-accusatory meaning “death camps in Poland”. True, history does record some Poles’ collusion with the Third Reich’s death camps so there’s some humbug in Poland protesting its innocence now. But as a matter of practical diplomacy, it was an unforced error. It might look like a small offense to Americans, but it’s not the offending party’s place to insist that an offense is small. Rather than leave it to Jay Carney, Obama himself — the ranking US official involved — should make a public statement of apology. America will not lose face; Obama understands that, whatever the Republicans might say.
If, after that, the Polish foreign minister still wants to kick up a fuss, the US is then free to decorously ignore him, and he can go fuck himself.
Wayners T
Yes and the Bataan death march was the fault of the phillipinos
Jeez o pete
Southern Beale
Yesterday Tapper was Tweeting about how everyone in the White House misuses the term “ironic.” I guess someone’s been listening to too much Alanis Morisette lately.
r€nato
@Craig: I’ll point out that Italy was largely tolerant of the Jews and everyday Italians wanted little to do with the Fascists operatives who tried to implement Hitler’s pogrom in Italy. There are many stories of Italians who actively hid Jews.
I’m more than a little disappointed by this attempt to avoid admitting that Obama misspoke. Sounds a little too much like the knee-jerk defending of whatever mangling of the English language Bush committed on a regular basis while in office.
The classic example being Bush referring to ‘the internets’ in a debate with Kerry in 2004 (which totally swung that election!). Bush cultists lamely insisted that Bush made no mistake, since it’s technically possible for there to be more than one internet. Never mind that Bush surely did not know that and… simply misspoke.
Let’s not be like the Bush cultists, mmkay?
Sly
@EconWatcher:
“Smierc Garbatym Nosom” roughly translates as “Death to the Hook-Nosed People,” and the group holding the banners call themselves the Aryan Horde. Soccer Hooligans are a thuggish bunch in general, but Neo-Nazis in Central European countries like Poland and Ukraine use soccer matches as a kind of ersatz political rally.
dead existentialist
Japanese Internment camps . . . . Polish death camps. Who’s confused now, huh?
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s also a historical fact that they bear at most a very small responsibility for what happened.
If you want to “go there,” Americans were hardly free from blame; we couldn’t even lift a finger to bomb the death camps.
The sad fact of the matter is that today’s world, where many of us in the liberal West profess concern for our fellow humans regardless of their ethnicity, would be completely alien to antebelum Europe, or indeed most of humanity in almost all eras.
Rafer Janders
Release the Kraków!
dead existentialist
@Hawes: Dang it. I hadn’t gotten that far in the thread.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, yes, unforced error by Obama. He should have caught that before it left his lips.
Of course, the fact that Rmoney’s staff can’t spell “America” or use a fucking spell checker reflects the incompetence of the candidate himself. However, you’ll note what the media is screaming about, and it’s not Rmoney’s fuckup.
One could argue, I suppose, that Rmoney fucks up so often that it’s dog bites man, but then on the other hand, we know of the media’s desperate need to maintain the horse race narrative at all costs.
Brachiator
@Hawes:
Exactamundo!
And there is room for double outrage here since the people put into the camps were Japanese Americans, American citizens whose civil liberties were ripped away, and not people who were foreign agents loyal to Japan.
Some people still don’t get it (and yeah, I’m atalkin’ bout you Michelle Malkin, and wingnuts like you).
liberal
@Amir Khalid:
Exactly. Obama made a minor, honest mistake. Presuming he has, or will, make an appropriate apology, any ensuing shitstorm is just right-wing nonsense.
Linda Featheringill
@MikeInSewickely:
Yes.
I picked up a Master’s in history studying this stuff. There was a lot of ugliness all around. I developed the personal theory that Evil can always find lots of helping hands, while Good often works alone or in small groups.
I do think that several different nationalities do not complain enough about the numbers of their people that were exterminated. I think they should complain to high heaven about that. But that is just my opinion.
[Glad your folks survived to produce you, though. :-)]
Beauzeaux
@stratplayer:
Poles are mostly devout Catholics who still believe that Jews killed Christ.Before, during, and after WWII they collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation and murder of the Jewish population.
Sikorski is an asshole and the White House should not cooperate in what amounts to a whitewash of Polish history.
Ben Cisco
And while all this kerfluffle is going on, voters are being purged in Gov Skeletor’s Florida, and a Michigan rep is being forced to run a write-in campaign because 90% of the signatures he turned in were either duplicate signatures or PHOTOCOPIED sheets from a prior campaign.
Since these cases have national implications for the general election, one would think a reporter, say one who covers political events, for example, might do a story or two so that the public at large could be better informed.
g
@Craig: Actually, it was probably his protocol office that f’d up, since avoiding this kind of thing is what they’re paid to do.
However, I note that on another website, a wingnut Sarah Palin supporter was holding this up as an example of Obama’s unfitness for office. I’m sure Sarah has a much more nuanced and diplomatic understanding of the delicacies of communication with our European allies about matters of past history and cultural sensitivity.
Marc
@r€nato:
Obama admitted that he misspoke. There are wingers refusing to let it go.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
More like the crumbs in the corner of the silverware drawer you can’t get out without removing it and shacking it upside down.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
Sure. Let’s bomb the death camps. That way, the inmates will die dignified deaths by bombing as opposed to the other way.
There’s also the minor matter that they were located in, you know, Poland? Outside the range of most Allied bombers?
No one here questions who is actually responsible for the Holocaust. Note that Pat Buchanan doesn’t post here, at least to my knowledge. But the fact is, as I stated earlier, a number of Poles were not terribly upset to see the Jews shipped off to the “relocation centers”.
liberal
@r€nato:
Same thing was largely true of Hungary. I don’t remember one way or the other how anti-Semitic Hungarians were. But the extermination of Hungarian Jews didn’t begin in earnest until the Nazis took over direct control of their erstwhile ally.
Beauzeaux
@Cato:
And the state with the highest unemployment (Nevada) has no state income tax at all.
Corpus Christy
I didn’t realize that “millions” of (non-Jewish) Poles were exterminated in the Nazi death camps in Poland. So the ‘trage, faux or not, was a learning experience.
slim's tuna provider
@FlipYrWhig: the Japanese Internment Camp example upthread is good. Would you ever call it that in an official speech? No! You’d call it “the internment camp for Japanese-Americans”. You’d never call the Armenian Genocide “the Armenian Genocide” in an official speech — you’d call it “the genocide of ethnic Armenians.”
geg6
@Craig:
@J.W. Hamner:
Then I’m sure you will both be using the terminology “Sandusky sex abuse scandal” instead of “Penn State sex abuse scandal” from here on in, right? And you will insist that everyone else do so, too, right? And you will both be coming to the defense of the administrators who got fired and the ones going on trial, right? After all, Sandusky wasn’t an employee of the university any longer, so the fact that it happened on campus at least once is merely an unfortunate coincidence. And no one could expect them to do anything about it, right?
Fuck. I got a degree here and work here and I don’t agree with that. I hate hearing about the “Penn State sex abuse scandal” because it doesn’t reflect the vast majority of students, alumni, faculty, or staff. But I am resigned to the fact that people here acted badly and illegally and it is what it is. Too bad you can’t do the same.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
With all due respect, that’s the usual response I get when I make this point, and it’s fundamentally wrong.
The point of bombing the death camps would have been to dismantle the machinery of death.
Yes, it’s a utilitarian argument—the lives saved would have outweighed the lives lost (though most of those in the death camps at the time were going to die anyway)—but that’s the grim calculus that was operating at the time.
That wasn’t true the entire war. IIRC Allied forces attempted to drop materiel to the Polish resistance at some point in the war.
g
@liberal: Just Google the ship named St. Louis for a story about the US’s culpability during the Holocaust.
My piano teacher was on that ship. He was lucky, he was able to get off in England instead of being shipped back to Hamburg.
Brachiator
@r€nato:
Sorry, this is not a mangling of the English language. “Polish Death Camps” contains an ambiguity which is made clear by context by anyone not looking to be outraged. It is very similar, as another poster has noted to Japanese internment camp used to describe Japanese American internment camps in the US.
It’s trivial, and would be trivial even if it involved a speech by a Republican.
But it’s a slow news day.
Martin
@Bubblegum Tate: Well, you can’t trademark America because its a common use term – so there’s no profit opportunity in it. But Amercia™ – now that’s something you can market and pull serious revenue off of.
That’s how a corporate leader would run this place.
Midnight Marauder
Moments like this just really put into perspective how badly the Fourth Estate has failed in this country.
pseudonymous in nc
@slim’s tuna provider:
I’m not sure who appointed you spokesperson for Europe, but you’re not very good at it.
The shifting borders and ethnic distribution of pre- and post-WW2 Europe are tricky subjects. No need to try and overblow this by talking about Polish collaboration: you just say that the wording was not as precise as was intended, apologise, and move on.
And Mr Applebaum can fuck off.
liberal
@geg6:
What you’re saying is perhaps true in the sense of logic and language, but as far as I can tell, NO ONE routinely uses the phrase “Polish death camps.” So, if we also look at history of usage, AFAICT almost everyone talks about “Nazi death camps” or “Nazi extermination camps located in Poland.”
Does that mean that Obama made a heinous mistake? Of course not. But to pretend it wasn’t a mistake at all, regardless of how trivial, is silly.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Southern Beale: I teased Tapper on the twitters today about Fox News being, in his words, a “sister org” after that 4 minute Fox and Friends GOP infomercial they ran this morning. He was relatively gracious but made excuses and continues to think they should be defended from the WH calling them “not a news organization.” He’s very invested in his worldview.
Keith G
@AA+ Bonds: You seem to be rewriting history.
Poland and the Polish people were brutalized by the nazis. Up until a day ago, that would not even be a point open for debate. Funny how that works
beltane
If the Poles insist on beating this dead horse the only thing they will accomplish is to highlight their history of virulent anti-semitism, a history that includes atrocities against the Jews committed before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Bubblegum Tate
@Martin:
Well played, good sir. Well played.
Someguy
So, what I’ve learned today on BJ:
Obama’s gaffes aren’t really gaffes because we all know what he meant.
Poland has never been made accountable for its crimes against the Jewish People during WWII.
Polish hatred of the Jews is proved by how few Jews returned to the Warsaw ghetto after WWII.
The French were friendly to the Jews. Not like those nasty Poles.
Hmmm. The things one learns here.
Chris
This was my first reaction when I heard about this too.
Being French, it’s a routine source of irritation for me how much the popular narrative of World War Two comfortably hides behind “oh, it was all the mean, nasty Krauts. Certainly none of us was involved, and if we were, hey, they made us do it!” Just ignore the centuries-old tradition of rabid antisemitism in France and Poland alike, and ignore the hundreds of French citizens – can’t speak for the Poles – who cheerfully helped pack their fellow citizens onto cattle cars, because, don’t you know, Jews aren’t really our people.
(Incidentally, the years immediately running up to World War Two in France should look familiar to any American in the age of Obama – the country had just elected a Jewish Prime Minister, Leon Blum, with the predictable infuriated, racially-tinged backlash from the right wing. They finally caught their lucky break when Hitler invaded, enabling them to have him shipped to a concentration camp, which he miraculously survived).
All that to say that, yeah… the “good guys/bad guys” line in World War Two wasn’t as simple as “everyone else/Teh Krauts.” But that’s not something you’re supposed to bring up in polite society.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
The death camps:
“There’s also the minor matter that they were located in, you know, Poland? Outside the range of most Allied bombers?”
Interesting point. They were mainly located east of the Vistula River, some 900 miles or so from London.
I don’t know about the range of the aircraft in use then.
Thymezone
So now I suppose they are going to say that polish sausage is not made from poles?
liberal
@g:
Very good point; cutting down on Jewish immigration was probably the largest component of American culpability, if you want to look at it that way.
Though there’s some evidence even the Zionists didn’t comport themselves well. ISTR reading that some refugees immediately after the war could have gone to the US, but were blocked by the Zionists, who wanted them to go to Palestine. Yes, it was after the war, but those people were suffering and I would assume some died as a result.
Which is just more for my point that the real blame for the entire episode belongs to the Nazis, and the Germans who helped them along. Yes, one could argue that if all the people living in Europe and throughout the rest of the world had been extremely tolerant, inclusive, willing to risk much for others, etc, than maybe the Nazis wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. The fact is, though, we still don’t live in a world with that much inclusiveness; the main causal factor was the Nazis themselves.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
Yet it’s a fallacy that air power in the 1940’s had that sort of accuracy. Despite the notions that Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay had, the post war survey of the strategic air war revealed that the Germans got very good at repairing damaged rail lines, for example. German industrial production peaked in 1944, two years after the Allied strategic air offensive began. Only the loss of resources on the ground made a dent in it.
Would the bombing have destroyed the machinery of death? No one really knows. What we do know is that the western Allies made a conscious decision to concentrate on military and economic targets with what air power they had, in an attempt to end the war sooner. The notion that they intentionally ignored the death camps presupposes that they had the resources to do something about it with certainty, and that is in my view simply not the case.
Hill Dweller
@liberal: No one but every major news organization in the world uses ‘polish death camps’. Someone linked the Steve Benen article earlier in the thread. CBS, ABC, CNN, NYT, USA Today, LA Times, AP, Chicago Tribune, Globe and Mail, Ha’aertz, and last but not least, Fox News, have all used that phrase.
clone12
@Cato
You know what else Virginia’s low tax brings into Virginia besides large companies?
liberal-leaning young people who work for these companies.
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
gbear
@Bubblegum Tate:
Is it too soon for “Rmoney for Amercia” bumper stickers?
liberal
@Chris:
I’m not French, but my admittedly vague impression is that the French did work to save the truly “French” Jews. But many Jews living there at the time were actually immigrants who arrived between the wars.
Not that I think that makes a difference, but…
geg6
@liberal:
Actually, quite a LOT of people use the terminology “Polish death camps.” I pretty much have never seen or heard the clunky phrase “Nazi extermination camps located in Poland.” But just to give you an idea of how pervasive Obama’s usage is, give a gander to Steve M’s place where he has a listing of all the media that have used this very term.
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2012/05/obama-becomes-8749th-person-to-offend.html
karen marie
@Yutsano: That was my reaction — what kind of scandal is he fighting off/election he’s trying to win/support he’s attempting to accrue?
You would *think* that our fine public political minds would have that question on the tips of their tongues but, nah, it’s easier to just trash the president.
ADD: Wow! I learned something new! If you put an asterisk on each side of a word, the word becomes bolded! *w00t!*
Ash Can
@Amir Khalid: This. It was the wrong choice of words under the circumstances. An apology is the right thing to do.
And that’s the long and short of it. Ideally, the reaction of the Polish government would have been, “Let us highlight the exact words the president used and use this as a teaching opportunity to explain why we Poles find this term objectionable.” Instead, the Polish foreign minister flipped out to the extent of insulting Obama right back — and deliberately, in contrast to Obama’s lack of intent. But the situation is what it is, and this —
— sums it up perfectly.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linda Featheringill:
Well, it’s a question of both the range of the bombers AND the range of their escorts. They’d have to fly across the Reich and its air defenses (and ignore all sorts of targets along the way) to bomb the camps or the rail lines near them. One also presupposes pin point accuracy, which is a pretty bad supposition, even with the Norden bombsight.
It’s a matter of what is really doable. The death camps were, as you noted, in what had been Polish territory. The Soviets were NOT going to allow western Allied airbases in their territory so that an overflight with landing in Soviet territory was possible.
slag
@r€nato:
As many have pointed out, this was a perfectly standard use of the English language in this country (and others). And this statement was made in this country. So, let’s not compare apples to Raisinets, please.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
That’s a silly argument. The question here is of intent. Strategic bombing as a whole during WWII was largely and often pointless.
The point is that they were quite willing to bomb economic and military targets, and even drop supplies to Polish resistance fighters, but not to bomb the death camps. Certainly, from the perspective of your argument, aiding Polish resistance fighters was pointless.
In fact, a good case could be made that, apart from indifference (which would unfortunately be the likeliest reason for taking no action), it was in the Allies’ strategic interest not to bomb the death camps or really do much to interfere with the machinery of death. Why? Because the Nazis gave it an extremely high priority, so high that sometimes it interfered with military logistics, IIRC.
Spaghetti Lee
@Keith G:
It’s fucking ridiculous. It’s amazing how about a dozen people in this thread have (re)discovered their deep and righteous concern for the legacy of Polish anti-semitism in the last few hours. And obviously, the point Obama was trying to make in this diplomatic speech about a Polish resistance fighter was about how the Poles were really just complicit in the Holocaust, and mostly a bunch of pig-ignorant Nazi racists anyhow, so they get what they deserve. Yeah, that’s obviously the point Obama was trying to make. He’s so glad you have his back.
I generally fall on the obot side of the firebagger/obot continuum, but this shithole of a thread is helping me see what ‘reflexively defending Obama’ really means, even when it’s about something Obama wasn’t even meaning to say. Good lord.
slim's tuna provider
@geg6: what about soviet concentration camps in poland? were those “polish concentration camps” too? do you see how potentially misleading and uninformative this usage is?
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
Wasn’t true for the entirety of the war.
The elimination of the Hungarian Jews occurred extremely late.
Brachiator
@Linda Featheringill:
Not so fast there.
Here’s a bit of Amerian and Polish History trivia. There is a General Kosciuszko Way in Los Angeles, a two block long street near the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown LA. Named after a Polish aristocrat, Tadeusz Kościuszko, who fought in the American Revolutiionary War, and was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson.
Kościuszko fought in the American Revolutionary War as a colonel in the Continental Army. In 1783, in recognition of his dedicated service, he was brevetted by the Continental Congress to the rank of brigadier general in a mass promotion given to all officers who had served during the war and became a naturalized citizen of the United States. The United States also gave him a land grant.
On a visit to America in 1798, Kościuszko collected his back pay and entrusted it to his friend Thomas Jefferson in his will, directing him to spend the American money on freeing and educating black slaves, including Jefferson’s. Kościuszko died in 1817, but Jefferson never carried out the terms of his will, nor did a friend to whom he transferred the executorship. In 1852 Chief Justice Roger Taney of the U.S. Supreme Court transferred the money, by then worth more than $50,000, to Kościuszko’s heirs in Poland, ruling that his American will had been invalid, because blacks had no legal standing as American citizens.
r€nato
@slag: I am pretty sure that Obama did not mean to say that the death camps were conceived of and run by the Polish government, which is what any ordinary person would think was meant by the phrase, “Polish death camps”.
I don’t buy bullshit just because it’s being peddled by people I otherwise agree with.
He misspoke. Get over it.
Odie Hugh Manatee
S.E. Cupp is on Bashir right now. Can someone put the dick back in her mouth already?
A cork will work if nobody wants to volunteer to be the stopper.
Heliopause
Interesting that the Juicers reflexively defend this hours after the President has already apologized for it. You folks are way behind the curve, it’s now time to defend the apology.
@foggy follansbye:
Maybe he should have called it a “Jewish death camp” since most of the dead were Jews. I’m sure the Jewish community wouldn’t have minded.
phil
@geg6:
Maybe it’s time to start calling them what they were – Nazi Death Camps, the location is not really that important. If the location is that important, you could be more specific. Pres Obama could make a start with an apology and ask the US press to stop using the other term. Fascism is what we were fighting and we should always be willing to remind folks of that evil.
liberal
@geg6:
Yawn. I’ll stand by my claim that almost no one calls them “Polish death camps.”
Hill Dweller
@Spaghetti Lee: Setting aside the Obot criticism for a second, the President’s critics say we are supposed to believe that during a ceremony honoring a Polish citizen’s bravery in fighting the holocaust, he decided to assign all blame for the death camp to the Polish people.
It boggles the mind, yet it is implicit in every news story.
dr. luba
@pseudonymous in nc: Poland did not “move” west–the borders were redrawn after the war to better align with ethnic realities. The “eastern” bits of Poland that it lost were predominantly ethnic Belarus and Ukrainian areas which are now a part of those countries.
And keep in mind that the eastern regions that Poland kept were ethnically cleansed after WWII, with ethnic Ukrainian populations being “repatriated” to the UkrSSR or resettled in western areas of Poland and Polonized.
Chris
@liberal:
I’ve heard that too. I could see it being true to some extent, but obviously there were limits on that principle too. Leon Blum, as Prime Minister, was about as “French” as a Jew could get, it didn’t do him any good.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
That is a good point, but it presupposes that the western Allies knew at the time what they discovered after the war…that the Nazis were indeed putting a priority on the Final Solution above that of their on military logistics needs.
DURING the war, if you suggested that, you’d be laughed at. No one in their right minds would prioritize like that.
No one knew just how not in their right minds the Nazis were.
Which is why the liberation of the camps hit so hard.
Chrisd
@Someguy:
Close. Actually the take-home message is that Obama’s gaffes aren’t really gaffes because Poland has never been made accountable for its crimes against the Jewish People during WWII. See how that works?
Now I remember why I visit this site less and less.
slag
@r€nato:
If, by “ordinary”, you mean “willfully ignorant”, I’ll agree with this statement. As others have stated…”Japanese Internment Camps”, “Armenian Genocide”…Those are “ordinary” phrases we use in this country. Get over it.
Villago Delenda Est
@phil:
That’s the only thing I ever call them. Nazi death camps…or, if I want to be fancy, Vernichtungslager, the original German, which means literally “annihilation camp”.
r€nato
@Brachiator: You missed my point. I did not at all mean that Obama mangled the language. My point was this knee-jerk impulse to defend whatever your favorite politician says, even when it’s patently clear that the guy (or gal) simply misspoke, as you would too from time to time if you had to talk to the media and large audiences all the time like a politician does.
When someone says, “Polish death camps”, that clearly implies that the Poles had primary responsibility for conceiving of, building and maintaining those camps.
Does anybody talk about American military bases on German soil, as “German bases”?
No, they don’t. Thank you.
Citizen Alan
Of course, all these calls for Obama to apologize (which I believe he has already done) will soon be followed by complaints that Obama is once again running around apologizing for America. Or perhaps Amercia.
liberal
@Chris:
Well, of course not. Who inflicted 5/6 or more of casualties on the Wehrmacht? The Soviets, of course; the Western contribution in terms of actual military action was far, far smaller. But the USSR itself was hardly a benign force in the long run.
The fact is, though, that in terms of the mass killing that took place in Europe at the time (with-Soviet killing by the Soviets themselves notwithstanding), there really were bad guys and good guys.
Or, to put it another way, morally ambiguous guys (most of Europe, an admixture mostly of mildly good and mildly bad, relatively speaking), and the Nazis who were just amazingly bad.
Look at the killing of non-Jewish Poles, for example. The Soviets killed hundreds of thousands, the bastards. Yet even there the Nazi f*cks shined; my calculation is that they killed an order of magnitude more.
It’s like some WWII documentary, about Hitler’s treatment of the Ukraine. The historian was saying that if Hitler hadn’t treated the Ukranians like shit, it would have redounded to Germany in a strategic sense, since the Ukranians hated the Bolsheviks. But that’s like saying “If Hitler wasn’t Hitler…”
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
Only exception to that is that some were labor camps per se. IIRC part of Auschwitz was largely or partly a labor camp; Birkenau (or Auschwitz-Birkenau) was nominally the death camp.
Of course, that’s splitting hairs, insofar as the people at that kind of work camp would be worked until spent, and then sent next door.
Hill Dweller
@Chrisd: Taking the time to tell everyone that you visit this site less and less is pretty fucking ironic.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chrisd:
Actually, considering that a gaffe has come to mean “a politician accidentally blurting out the truth”, Obama’s blunder isn’t a gaffe. He wasn’t implying that the Poles built the camps then invited the Nazis to put them to use.
It was just a fuckup. He’s apologized. It’s over.
Well, except in the wingnutosphere. They’ll fauxrage for days over this. Meanwhile, the Rmoney brain trust has problems with spell checkers.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
No, I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. At least closer to the war’s end—but I assume enough time to start worrying about the Hungarian Jews, for example—segments of Western intelligence knew about the death camps.
Does that mean it was common knowledge among people? No.
Chrisd
@Hill Dweller: Oh, ya got me there!
liberal
@Chris:
Yeah, of course. And it’s not like there was no history of French anti-Semitism.
r€nato
@slag: for. fuck’s. sake.
Believe me, I got over it a long time ago. But I won’t stop pointing out mindless tribalism when I see it, whichever side indulges in it.
They were German death camps.
They were Nazi death camps.
There may well have been significant anti-semitism in Poland at that time.
There may even have been Polish slave labor used to build those camps.
Some of them certainly did sit on Polish soil.
Within certain contexts, “Polish death camps” may well be uttered or written without implying that the Poles bore chief responsibility for the camps, instead meaning to impart the idea that the camps were sited on Polish soil.
But, in ordinary usage and without context to indicate other meaning, “Polish death camps” is a phrase which most certainly is meant to say that the Poles were responsible for them.
An American air base in Frankfurt is not ordinarily spoken of as a German military base.
A McDonald’s in Beijing is not ordinarily spoken of as a Chinese restaurant.
An American car driven on a Mexican road, does not become a Mexican car.
He fucking misspoke. Trust me, the election won’t turn on this.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
All of the extermination camps had labor satellite camps. When inmates first arrived, they were split into two groups…those to be used as slave labor, and those to be exterminated immediately.
Eventually, the idea was for all of them to die. It was just a question of when. Some were useful as slave labor for the present.
Chris
@stratplayer:
Luckily, that category still doesn’t include the large majority of American Jews, a fact I’m both grateful for, and proud of for them. Wish I could say the same for my religious demographic (American Catholics).
slim's tuna provider
@FlipYrWhig: i just thought of another one. would you call japanese internment or POW camps in indonesia, or burma, “indonesian” or “burmese” internment or POW camps? wouldn’t indonesia and burma be justified in having a cow if you did?
Heliopause
@slag:
I’m sure this sentiment will get passed along to ABL the next time she hyperventilates over something or other. Or not? Hard to tell with Juicers.
Somebody needs to compile a list of which groups get to decide what offends them and which don’t. So far I’ve got Poles under “Don’t”.
kc
Fuck him.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
“Closer to the war’s end” the death camps in Poland were being overrun by the Red Army. Mid 1944 onwards.
Those camps still were out of operational western Allied air range (bombers with escorts), and the Soviets had no strategic bomber force worth mentioning.
GregB
Republican Political Correctness strikes again!
dedc79
There are a number of jewish deaths that very clearly cannot be blamed just on the nazis. Take for example, the murder of 40 jews a year AFTER THE WAR:
lacp
I don’t get it. Why are Poles telling us how to speak English? The only Pole I’d listen to on that score is Joseph Conrad, and he’s all like dead and shit.
Chris
@pseudonymous in nc:
This.
You know what a pathological need Republicans have to get even. This is their attempt at revenge for Palin’s “Paul Revere warned the British” gaffe, IMO.
EconWatcher
@liberal:
My grandmother (American farm wife) used to say that she heard rumors about the Holocaust during World War II. But she did not believe them because she was old enough to remember World War I, when many rumors of German atrocities were circulating, most of which later turned about to be untrue. She was very shocked by the newsreels when the camps were liberated. Of course, military intelligence types presumably knew much more.
Chris
@MikeInSewickely:
Yep. This can’t be stressed enough when discussing the legacy of the Holocaust.
Suffern ACE
In an ideal world, this gaffe would lead more people to find out about Jan Karski, who seems very deserving of a medal of freedom for what he did during the war.
Villago Delenda Est
@EconWatcher:
Military intelligence types told Hitler that the Soviets had no manpower reserves left in 1942, yet somehow Stalin managed to find entire armies in his pants pockets and use them to surround Stalingrad.
We’re seeing a lot of conflating after the fact knowledge with while shit is going down knowledge here.
28 Percent
I don’t know whether to be happier that this isn’t veering into Holocaust denial, or that a mouth of the AEI is foaming at the mouth that the President wasn’t sufficiently politically correct.
And of course there were a lot of Poles who knew what was going on in the camps, from the first-hand experience of being starved and slaughtered in them. And Poland hardly bears more than a sliver of responsibility for what a country occupying them at the time did to their own political leaders and citizenry.
“Nazi camps located in Poland” isn’t an elegant phrase, and throwing a snit fit over the inexactitude is more about domestic politics in both countries than it is about this being a real blow to our international relations with Poland (anybody here seriously think that Poland wants a cooling off of relations with the US? Can I interest you in a timeshare opportunity?) There was room for better phrasing regarding the camps, but the real point here isn’t whether the phrasing was adequately exact based on Polish complicity with the Nazis. The real point is whether or not a gaffe like this matters, which it doesn’t, because overall we’re pretty good to Poland and overall the Polish leadership knows it, and what on earth could they really do about it if we weren’t?
slag
@Heliopause: When Obama stands up and makes a Pollack joke and then whines when people are offended by it, your comparison will be apt. Until then…
lacp
Anyway, American politicians have always been sensitive to how different ethnicities view themselves. Consider this remark by an American Vice President: “Very frankly, when I’m moving in a crowd, I don’t look and say, ‘Well, there’s a Negro, there’s an Italian, and there’s a Greek and there’s a Polack.’”
FlipYrWhig
@r€nato: OTOH, people do refer routinely to US military bases in Afghanistan as “Afghan Military Bases,” and detention centers there as “Afghan prisons.”. To wit, this article from The Nation: America’s Secret Afghan Prisons. No one has suggested that that phrase suggests Afghan responsibility, merely that the facilities are in Afghanistan, and in fact it’s vociferous critics of
American policy who use that phrase most forcefully.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@liberal:
Were they making supply drops in the extreme southwest of Poland?
Bostondreams
As a proud 3rd generation Polish-American, with the Polish flag displayed as proudly as the American one in my classroom, I am outraged. I am outraged that my ancestral homeland would try to whitewash its own complicity in terror by jumping on a perfectly accurate geographic reference and blaming all of the horror on the Germans.Admitting a role does not lessen German guilt, after all.
Now, I’m as anti-German as the next Pole, but to ignore our own complicity and at times active participation is to deny reality and dishonor the dead.
Bostondreams
As a proud 3rd generation Polish-American, with the Polish flag displayed as proudly as the American one in my classroom, I am outraged. I am outraged that my ancestral homeland would try to whitewash its own complicity in terror by jumping on a perfectly accurate geographic reference and blaming all of the horror on the Germans.Admitting a role does not lessen German guilt, after all.
Now, I’m as anti-German as the next Pole, but to ignore our own complicity and at times active participation is to deny reality and dishonor the dead.
Bostondreams
As a proud 3rd generation Polish-American, with the Polish flag displayed as proudly as the American one in my classroom, I am outraged. I am outraged that my ancestral homeland would try to whitewash its own complicity in terror by jumping on a perfectly accurate geographic reference and blaming all of the horror on the Germans.Admitting a role does not lessen German guilt, after all.
Now, I’m as anti-German as the next Pole, but to ignore our own complicity and at times active participation is to deny reality and dishonor the dead.
slim's tuna provider
@Corpus Christy: that is awesome.
lacp
American politicians have always considered the feelings of people of various ethnicities. As an example, this statement by a former Vice President: “Very frankly, when I’m moving in a crowd, I don’t look and say, ‘Well, there’s a Negro, there’s an Italian, and there’s a Greek and there’s a Polack.”
eemom
@Steve:
You had me after “let’s not be dumb here.” Know your audience, etc.
Once again, two entirely distinct and reasonable points:
1. Polish complicity in the Holocaust — or not — is a reasonable topic of debate.
2. That debate is NOT WHAT THE FUCK Obama meant by the phrase he used.
mangled into insanity by the willful refusal of so many people to mentally walk and chew gum at the same time.
FlipYrWhig
@slim’s tuna provider: I would be comfortable calling them Japan’s Indonesian camps, yes, insofar as the word “Indonesian” describes the place where the action happened.
slag
@lacp:
Mindless tribalist.
pseudonymous in nc
@dr. luba:
In other words, Poland moved (or, if you prefer, was moved) west. Thanks for the completely unnecessary lecture.
eemom
@Chris:
Are you familiar with Suite Francaise and its author Irene Nemirovsky?
slim's tuna provider
@FlipYrWhig: I’d be somewhat comfortable with “Germany’s Polish concentration camp” but that’s not what was said.
geg6
@liberal:
Look, I agree that the most correct way to label the camps are Nazi death camps. But your claim that almost no one calls them Polish death camps is pretty much bullshit, regardless of how bored you are by actual evidence that it is true. If Obama misspoke, then all the media reporting this must, first, own up to their own misuse of the term. And second, Poland needs to fess up to its own responsibility for the death and plundering of the Polish (and other) Jews who either died there or left fleeing for their lives during pogroms after WWII.
Brachiator
@r€nato:
I got your point.
And I reject it.
It’s not about Obama or another favorite politician being given a pass.
I don’t even think that he misspoke. Some phrases are ambiguous. That people took offense here is ridiculous. But it’s not a big deal, or shouldn’t be since an apology was quickly offered.
I would feel exactly the same way no matter who made the comment. I know this for an absolute fact since I have made similar comments about other notable figures in a similar context.
And I am far less offended by this kind of stuff than, for example, accepted deliberate phrases that dance around delicate foreign policy issues (e.g., the Armenian Genocide) where both Turks and Armenians often feel offended.
Nonsense. Total and absolute nonsense. And it is not true historically. So, in context of the whole freaking speech, it is clear that no disparagement of Poles was intended.
I would be much more concerned about this whole thing had there been some controversial or sensitive background to the speech or to the occasion that was flubbed or which inflamed some contemporary issue.
“Polish death camps” does not have one unambiguous meaning. That’s not how the English language works.
And as another poster pointed out, one can easily find other news accounts and statements where the same phrase was used to denote death camps in Poland, not death camps run by Polish authorities.
I can understand that this is a big deal because some people want it to be, or need it to be. But no matter who had said this, it is much ado about nothing.
geg6
@Heliopause:
Hmmm, methinks you need need to look in the mirror. I don’t see ABL or an ABL post anywhere near this one. Nor do I see her commenting on this thread. But you had to bring her up, for what reason exactly? Go fuck yourself, asshole.
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
@Villago Delenda Est:
You’ve pretty much covered this, but given the vast investment in each four engine bomber, and the vast droves of them that were hacked out of the sky, the allied air forces were only going to bomb targets that they thought would directly help win the war–as opposed righting a moral wrong.
When coupled with the distances involved, I just don’t see the concentration camps moving very far up the priority list.
Of course, you could make the argument that the allies had pretty piss-poor priorities and a muddled idea as to what to bomb to make a difference, and the bombing campaign didn’t really accomplish much until 1944; but the decisions were made with an eye towards knocking te Third Reich out of the war and not accomplishing humanitarian goals.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Incredible, this thread reaching past 250 comments.
There was one death camp, I forget which, but I think it was in Poland, that a liberating American Army officer noted the stench of death in a nearby town, where every non jew citizen swore they had no idea what was going on next door to them.
Could they have stopped it?, probly not, but they sure as shit knew what was happening, and I doubt shed few tears. It is why Israel exists today, Euro anti semitism runs deep, and has for a very long time.
Obama had a protocol fopu, and apologized. End of story.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E):
Wouldn’t winning the war be righting a moral wrong?
Maybe it was a case of the long game versus the short game- sometimes the latter negates the former.
Heliopause
@geg6:
Which groups get to say what offends them and which don’t? Trying to compile the list here.
Heliopause
@slag:
So you’ve got Poles on the “don’t” list. Thanks.
TG Chicago
To those saying Obama should apologize, I agree.
But remember what comes next: “APOLOGY TOUR!!!!”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Definitely not Poland if liberated by the U.S. soldiers. I’m having a hard time coming up with the name, but I believe the camp we’re both thinking of was a labor camp- not one specifically and/or initially designed for extermination- in Bavaria.
eemom
@Suffern ACE:
Please try to stay focused here. We are trying to come to grips with the fact that Obama uttered the words “Polish death camp.” That’s all very nice about some Mr. Karski and a medal of freedom but it has nothing to do with what Obama said.
slag
@Heliopause: Not the most nuanced knife in the drawer today, are you?
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
You are correct, couldn’t have been Poland, but the general point doesn’t change. Everyone knew what was going on. Some brave individual non jews, tried to help in individual acts of courage. But that courage was not widespread in Poland, or anywheres else where the death camps operated.
I saw it on some documentary, and am pretty sure it was an extermination camp, but not certain.
eemom
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
hahaha. Yer killin me here, General.
Mnemosyne
@slim’s tuna provider:
Huh? I live in an American city that’s mostly Armenian, and it’s always called “the Armenian Genocide.” My rep got the US in trouble with Turkey by supporting an official Congressional resolution condemning the Armenian Genocide.
Weird how all of these Armenian immigrants in my city who have been clamoring for the resolution haven’t been demanding that it be renamed “the genocide of ethnic Armenians.”
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Well, yeah….
I’d say your “short game” vs. “long game” is decent way to put it though.
Like I’d mentioned, the allied strategic bombing effort was muddled, and not very effective, but the plan was for each mission to advance the aim of making it harder for the Germans to continue to fight. Whether that was by blowing up factories (USAAF) or destroying the German’s morale by flattening cities (RAF) it was with the aim of winning the whole war, not re-dressing individual atrociites along the way.
FlipYrWhig
@slim’s tuna provider: OK, here’s the offending paragraph:
I don’t think there’s any suggestion of Polish culpability there, although it’s true it doesn’t say “Nazi.”
Then in the official presentation of the medal, he said:
Now there’s “Nazi.” It seems like “Polish death camp” is a red-flag phrase in Poland, or has become one recently, and that’s fine as it goes, but there’s really no ambiguity I can see in the remarks. In the ranks of flubs and gaffes, it’s more like saying “Hispanic” instead of “Chicano” when describing a Mexican-American.
ChrisNBama
I got into a twitter argument with Jake Tapper recently. I pointed out that his blog reads like the Drudge Report. He expressed umbrage, but it’s not like it ain’t the truth.
Mnemosyne
@r€nato:
IMO, it’s less an attempt to excuse Obama’s misstatement and more pointing out the reason why Poland would react so hysterically to a pretty innocuous misstatement. Seriously, saying “Polish death camps” instead of “death camps in Poland” is supposed to create a fucking international incident complete with speeches from Poland’s foreign minister?
RalfW
I wondered how the wingnuts were going to take something like the Presidential Medal of Freedom and fucking ruin it for Obama just like they’ve managed to poison just about anything he touches. So this is it.
I’m so fucking sick of the fauxtrage on the right. They really can’t leave anything alone for 10 seconds. Not one damn thing this president does can ever, ever just be the job of the President of the United States, it all has to be fodder for their inchoate rage against the black man/Democrat/whatever.
They must destroy the solemnity of the office to save it.
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: No, no, this isn’t “Poles,” this is a relatively new pet objection by a Polish right-winger. It’s like how a right-wing government in India decided that everyone should say “Mumbai” instead of “Bombay.”
MikeInSewickely
@Linda Featheringill:
Thanks, I’m glad to be around too.
And I am not being antisemitic but my Dad was always mad how much attention was paid to “The Holocaust”. I’m not sure how accurate he was but he said that Serbia had the highest death rate of all invaded countries and many in the camps where not Jewish.
In fact, the Serbians having Islamic background were widely killed by Croatian Christians that were supported by the Nazis. They had the nickname of Skullcrushers, which described their preferred method of killing Serbian children. But you never hear these “side” stories.
The inhumanity of man never surprises me – the fact that we’ve hung around so long – that surprises me.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Mnemosyne:
Maybe Obama’s misspeak hit a Polish nerve under the Banality of Evil rubric.
ericblair
@RalfW:
I’m wondering what the rest of the Polish government feels about Sikorski derailing an event where the President of the United States honors a Polish hero. Who knows, they might be behind him 100%, but this would be interesting to see.
I’m also wondering where the Polish government got the idea that a person who has pretty deep and partisan ties to political parties and politicians in a foreign government would be a suitable foreign minister.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E):
Well, let’s be honest: It wasn’t about destroying morale, but about destroying the labor force- killing humans. You can rebuild a factory relatively quickly, but you can’t easily replace a skilled machinist. Bomber Harris did this in Europe, Curtis LeMay did it with the firebombing campaign against Japan, both quite on purpose.
pseudonymous in nc
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s the long and short of it: that the current Polish government has established a language-police operation towards foreigners who don’t spell out the “in Poland, not of Poland” part of it. The White House did the right thing to issue the correction; the smart diplomatic move from the Polish government would be to accept it, because they’ve made sure that every speech that invokes Poland gets put through the grammar wringer, but Mr Applebaum appears to be in the middle of throwing his toys out of the pram.
Someguy
@Chrisd:
You know, I must be a moron for not holding as one of my core beliefs that we need to punish the Poles for not having done enough to stop the Nazis in WWII. I guess that shit about charging nazi tanks on horseback, the quarter million slaughtered in cold blood after the Warsaw Uprising, the slaughter of the Polish upper class accomplished by the Nazis and the Soviets (who occupied the other half of Poland), the obliteration of the remnants of the Polish Army at Arnheim, the hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles slaughtered in concentration camps… Not enough. You’d be all brave and stand up to the Nazis and do much better I’m sure… not like those hateful anti-semitic nazi sympathizing Poles.
Let’s be real. You’re just pissed because their current head of state criticized Obama and called him out for making a gaffe that is uniquely offensive, subjectively, to Poles. Calling them anti-semitic and accusing them of complicity in the Holocaust when they were probably the nation that offered the greatest resistance to occupation, calling to hold them to account when they were brutalized in a manner unparalleled by any other nation save perhaps the Dutch, is just a diversion. Obama fucked up. Deal with it. I’m not Polish and shouldn’t be this irritated over it, but jeezus dude, libeling a nation as an accomplice to the holocaust just for temporary domestic political expedience is as sleazy as anything the Wingtards do.
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I’m pretty sure all of the city-wide bombing attacks were intitally sold as way to terrify the civillian population and break their will to fight. Which never happened.
But by all means, the attacks were VERY deliberate–especially the firebombing of Japanese cities, which was done with the benefit of experience in Europe.
In Europe it was found that what worked was destroying homes (people are much more upset about becoming violently homeless than they are by having the neighbors killed) and wrecking oil facilities–especially the coal to liquid synfuels plants. Initially, the air forces resisted attacking oil in favor of things like ball bearing plants, but it turns out that ball bearing plants are easy to rebuild and oil and synfuel refineries are not. Once fuel became in short supply the luftwaffe became progressively less effective and never recovered.
Japanese industry was largely in small neighborhood machine shops which weren’t worth attacking individually–plus the disrutptive effects of mass homelessness, and destroyed labor force made the method of citywide firebombing (brutally) logical.
This isn’t what the thread is about, but when it comes down to it, humans sure are willing to play for keeps.
Mnemosyne
@ericblair:
I’m remembering 2004, when John Kerry scoffed at the idea that Iraq was an international coalition and Bush blurted out, “You forgot Poland!”
That told me all I need to know about their current government. Incidentally, this slimeball bashing Obama for an inapt phrase is probably still pissed off that the US hasn’t dropped all charges against child rapist Roman Polanski like he was demanding a couple of years ago.
Quicksand
Ow, my head.
Ow, my head.
Ow, my head.
Ow, my head.
Ow, my head.
Heliopause
@FlipYrWhig:
Google up the news articles on this. A good many well-known Poles other than this Sikorski fellow have objected. The President said it, the stink ensued, then the President apologized before John even rolled out of bed this morning.
I’m sorry it offended you that Poland’s leaders found the phrase offensive. Maybe they’ll apologize for offending you. Short of that, can I put you down in the “don’t” category for Poles?
Mnemosyne
@Someguy:
You may want to do some reading up on the Holocaust before you decide poor, innocent Poland is being libeled. They certainly weren’t the only ones to cooperate with the Nazis’ final solution — IIRC ordinary citizens in the Netherlands and France were pretty enthusiastic about deporting their Jews — but denying any complicity at all is childish.
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: I put it in the same category as right-wing Israeli leaders who have a hair trigger about antisemitism. A legitimate claim on sensitivity is outrunning its banks and becoming a cudgel. ETA: By the way, that was the worst mixed metaphor ever.
David Koch
All this talk is making me hungry for a polish sausage.
r€nato
@FlipYrWhig:
Apparently you glossed over my careful explanation of *CONTEXT* and why it matters when people say stuff.
The title you quoted was not, “Secret Afghan Prisons”. The writer thought it was necessary to make the distinction that they were America’s secret prisons, located in Afghanistan.
Hence, “America’s Secret Afghan Prisons”.
But, about half the folks here seem to think that the meaning would have been perfectly clear had it been simply rendered as, “Secret Afghan Prisons”.
David Koch
@FlipYrWhig:
How dare you say Jews control the banking industry! That’s anti-Semitic!
Hill Dweller
@Heliopause: The offended parties want us to believe Obama, during a ceremony celebrating a Polish citizen’s bravery fighting against the Nazis, blamed the Polish people for the Nazi death camps. Does that make any sense?
FlipYrWhig
@r€nato: Look at the statement I quoted above. The context is World War II. Once that’s established, I think it’s reasonable to hold that in your mind when you read the phrase “Polish death camp.” (BTW, I don’t hear the mayor of Warsaw saying that the phrase “Warsaw ghetto” implies Warsaw’s complicity.) Similarly, once the context of America’s presence in Afghanistan is established, you can say “Afghan prisons” and have it understood that you don’t mean prisons run by Afghans.
Heliopause
@FlipYrWhig:
Apparently the President thinks good relations with the government of Poland are more important than the feelings of the BJ comment crowd.
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: It seems like the right way for Poland to have handled it would be to say something more like, “Because we believe that the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ may be mistakenly interpreted to suggest Polish complicity, we respectfully suggest that the president refer instead to ‘Nazi death camps in Poland.’ When discussing this tragic phase of our history, we believe precise language and historical accuracy are of the utmost importance.” Instead, the right-wing foreign minister went full tilt immediately. That’s pure Netanyahu, and it’s bullshit.
Heliopause
@Hill Dweller:
So I can put you down that Poles don’t get to decide what’s offensive and what isn’t. What other groups?
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: Well, fine, and that’s appropriate, but I really resist the notion that “Polish death camps” is inherently and obviously offensive, which is what some people on the thread are contending. And I dislike the way it’s being used to create a flap fully out of scale to the offense, which relies on the right-wing noise machine going international.
Brachiator
@slim’s tuna provider:
You’re not being serious, are you?
When you google “armenian genocide,” you get this result; About 18,600,000 results (0.10 seconds)
I’m sure that a substantial portion would be “official speeches.”
And as I noted before, anything that speaks of “Armenian Genocide” is often perceived as being controversial or offensive to many in Turkey, and elsewhere.
Also, too, President Obama used the term that the Armenians use, echoing a first use in speech by Pope John Paul II:
I’m sure that this offended deniers of the Armenian Genocide.
Even though it was an official speech.
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: Was this your reaction when Israel’s government decided to throw a fit about Obama’s mention of the idea of returning to the 1967 borders?
bk
So what should we call the Bataan Death March now? Because otherwise it’s Filipino libel.
Hill Dweller
@Heliopause: Actually, I bet the administration is furious, but decided the best course of action was to nip it in the bud and move on.
I’m sure they’ll eventually let that wingnut Foreign Minister and the rest of the government know how they feel about their little tantrum.
Heliopause
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, that’s how they should phrase it. They’ll never get that apology unless they phrase the request correctly!
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: Careful phrasing is or isn’t important now, I’m confused.
Hill Dweller
@Heliopause: Did I suggest they didn’t have the right to get offended? I think their outrage is nonsensical. Reading Obama’s remarks, one has to try very hard to get offended by what was obviously an innocuous remark.
Judging by their Foreign Minister’s statement, which was an almost comical overstatement, I’m guessing he was looking for a fight.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: I don’t have a problem with saying that we should officially call things what the principally affected parties want to call them, so Armenians can say they prefer “Armenian Genocide” to “genocide of ethnic Armenians” and Poles can say they prefer “Nazi death camp in occupied Poland” to “Polish death camp.” But I’m not sure everyone raising objections actually adheres to that. Particularly on issues related to Israel and the Palestinians, where the Israeli government’s official statements are treated much more skeptically than the Polish government has been in this case.
David Koch
This insult by Obama is just another reason why liberals should vote Green!
Michael Stivic
That Obama is a real Meathead!
As a life long liberal, I can’t believe he stabbed the polish people in the back going all Archie Bunker on us!
Heliopause
@FlipYrWhig:
This is how it works: the President says something. Interested parties say if they are offended or not. Then the President decides whether to apologize or not.
The President has already apologized for the Polish remark.
David Koch
This incident is grounds for impeachment.
This is worse than Watergate and Tea Pot Dome, combined!
Heliopause
@FlipYrWhig:
No, I was making a funny. The apology has already been issued.
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: No shit. But, also, we still get to talk about the language and the nature of the offense and the existence of parallel cases, no? Because if I’m not mistaken we spent days discussing Hilary Rosen and Cory B00ker even after walkbacks and clarifications had been issued.
EconWatcher
By the way, Frum jumped all over this, and tried to jack it up out of all proportion. I think he wants to get back into the fold for a shot at a cushy seat in the Romney Administration. The “reasonable center-right” mask seems to be slipping away…
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: OK, sure, but my sentences were an attempt to sketch out what a “diplomatic” response would be to the remark, as opposed to a willfully trumped up one that recalled the excesses of people like William Donahue and Bibi Netanyahu.
Someguy
@Mnemosyne:
Cheap moral posturing, bub, for a blog commenter sitting somewhere safely typing away to piss on other people for not resisting the Nazis quite hard enough.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
In the Israel case, it outran its banks a long time ago. “Antisemite!” has been a slur hurled for the last sixty years at anyone who’s mildly offended by continual theft of property, house demolitions, mass detentions, night raids, illegal checkpoints and repeated blockades and aerial bombings.
schrodinger's cat
Mr Anne Applebaum causes fake outrage, are we going to be treated several angry op-ed columns in WashPost, seeking to keep this controversy alive?
Patricia Kayden
Yawn. If this is a scandal, then I’m a Cuban cigar.
Next!
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
As I noted, the Armenian Genocide gets controversial, since Armenians refer to it as the Mets Yeghern, while for Turkey, it officially is just the unintended consequences of war, nothing intended or deliberate. You cannot respect one side without offending the other.
And as others, have noted, a political party coming to power may have an ideological axe to grind, or an official policy concerning these types of statements.
And then, you have crazy stuff like how locals prefer you refer to Derry or Londonderry, depending on your views of Northern Ireland.
Or a recent conversation that people got into about Hispanic vs Latino and whether the use of one term or another indicated any particular cluelessness on the part of Romney.
A radio program reminded me that I had totally forgot about a certain aspect of this, namely that there are indigenous people who feel insulted or excluded by either term.
Bottom line is that it is not always easy to be sure that you have identified the principally affected parties or know for sure who you have pleased or offended, or why.
You just have to do the best you can, and be ready with an apology, where required.
As an aside, people can have independent terms for the same horrible event. For Romany people, the Holocaust is often referred to in a sad, but powerfully evocative term, Porajmos, The Devouring.
Michael Stivic
Maybe Pols don’t know how to screw in a light bulb or make popcorn, but their women are hot. And in the end, isn’t that what is important.
http://tops115.blogspot.com/2009/07/10-most-beautiful-polish-women.html
Mnemosyne
@Someguy:
“Not resisting the Nazis hard enough” and “participating in massacres” are not quite the same thing, but you stay steady on your high horse there.
Villago Delenda Est
@David Koch:
The question is, however, is it worse than a blow job?
HyperIon
@stratplayer:
IIRC there are very few Jews left in Poland these days. And not because they all decided to immigrate to Israel.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Indeed. That’s why I think the Polish minister’s reaction felt like an attempt to say that the mere use of the phrase “Polish death camp” was inherently anti-Polish. And liberal and progressive-minded people don’t normally get all up in arms about how the Israeli government doesn’t like it when we say “occupied territories” and such.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: Plus there’s the “Nakba” referring to the displacement of Palestinians from Israel.
Obviously it’s difficult, and that’s why the word “diplomatic” connotes sensitivity. But that’s also why it feels to me like the Polish minister was way out of line to protest the way he did.
henqiguai
@Craig (#)9:
At most it’s ‘misspoke’. But ‘fuck up’ is just silly.
Mnemosyne
@Someguy:
BTW, here’s the horrible, offensive statement by Obama that you’re so upset about on behalf of the Polish people:
It’s pretty clear within the context that “Polish death camp” means “death camp within Poland” and not “death camp run by Poland,” but you just keep your panties twisted over this horrible, defamatory statement by Obama that insults all Polish people everywhere. You know, the one he’s already apologized for.
Heliopause
Flip, this thing has gone on more than 300 comments further than it deserved to and, yes, I am as bad an offender as anybody. I just find it funny that Balloon Juice has had epic threads on the evils of this behavior, and here it is being perpetrated literally hundreds of times over in these comments. We’re paying Obama the big bucks to handle snafus like this one and he already has, so I’m going to make an effort to move on, my amusement be damned.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: It’s vaguely possible that someone who knew nothing about World War II might think that the “Polish resistance” was resisting the Polish government, which had instituted “Polish death camps.” But if that’s the way we have to read all statements, international political discourse is well beyond the point of no return.
FlipYrWhig
@Heliopause: Well, I have the unfortunate habit of enjoying nitpicky discussions about language, which probably comes from years of grading essays on old books. That’s my excuse.
HyperIon
@Hawes:
So I guess Obama should have referred to the “Jewish death camps”. Now, wait, that would mean the Jews were in charge.
Look, the English language can be ambiguous.
Get over it, Poland.
the fugitive uterus
Anyone with a minimal working knowledge of WWII history knows exactly what the President meant. I would assume that, of all people, that would include the Polish people.
Villago Delenda Est
@the fugitive uterus:
Well, that’s why it’s fauxrage. Stirred up by the usual ideological allies of the guys who ran the death camps.
FlipYrWhig
@Villago Delenda Est: According to the info in the original post, it was in 2005 that Polish political figures started to make a point about the ambiguity of the word “Polish” in these (English?) phrases — which IMHO feels like it has a lot to do with Polish nationalists and a moment of taking stock of the nation’s place in the events of WWII.
Given the limited nature of the history of its being a potentially offensive phrase, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Team Obama not to have known that “Polish death camp” has become a tripwire rather than a banal statement about geography, but opinions apparently differ.
Jay
Also, Radek Sikorski is married to Anne “I Heart Romnan Polanski” Applebaum.
So yeah, fuck him.
AxelFoley
Sooooo, this death camp was in Poland. Which would make it a Polish death camp.
I’m not seeing the problem here.
Wait, I take it back. I do see the problem–President Obama said it, so somebody’s got act like a little bitch about it.
the fugitive uterus
@FlipYrWhig: not only a geography statement, but i feel he was talking about Polish people being put to death in Nazi camps in Poland. Perhaps he could have said “Nazi death camps located in Poland” but to me, the phrasing was perhaps meant to be a recognition that a lot of the victims were Polish.
AxelFoley
@Craig:
Was the fucking camp in Poland? Ok, then it was a Polish death camp. Skip the bullshit, dude.
AxelFoley
@J.W. Hamner:
Fuck ’em. I’ve heard that term used many times before, but no one’s ever made a big stink about it. Hell, the dumbasses are drawing attention to their participation in the Holocaust by bitching about this.
Larv
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Dachau?
J. Michael Neal
I don’t have the time to wade through this whole thread, but trying to address a few things . . .
Yes, there was Polish collaboration with the Nazis. However, it was probably less collaboration than in any other occupied country and at least a few not occupied ones. For instance, the Poles were the *only* European nationality from which there were no SS units formed. If we’re going to crucify them for collaboration, we should just burn down the whole continent.
The history of anti-Semitism in Poland is both long and fairly complicated. To start with, the reason the Jewish community in Poland was so large to start with was because for about 500 years it was the most tolerant country in Europe. That started to collapse with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, when everyone was killing people for ridiculous reasons whether they were Jewish or not.
The three partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795 killed off the tolerance for good. Most of Poland was absorbed by Tsarist Russia which imported its own anti-Semitism. Beyond that, just like you get anywhere else that was colonized, the dominant powers deliberately set the Jews and the Slavs in Poland against each other.
That’s not to excuse Polish anti-Semitism, but it does provide some context. Without question a part of what is going on here is Polish desire to avoid talking about culpability, but that’s far from the only thing involved.
Aside from the history before the war, the postwar history complicates this question as well. Polish complicity isn’t the only thing that gets minimized by a lot of people. Polish suffering does, too. World War II killed as many Slavic Poles as it did Jewish ones: about 3 million of each. That’s a smaller part of the Slavic population, but it was still extremely traumatic.
For understandable reasons, a lot of Jews have tried to claim the camps, especially Auschwitz, as exclusively places of Jewish suffering. Understandable, but not really accurate. The battles over who should be allowed to commemorate their dead there have been extremely poisonous on both sides. One of the things that this means is that the question of in what sense the camps are “Polish” is a far more active one than most posters here seem to appreciate.
As with pretty much everything else, the Soviets didn’t help matters. The nations of eastern Europe, including the Germans in the DDR, never grappled with their complicity because the communists denied that there was any such thing as national complicity. The soul searching in Germany was almost exclusively a BRD phenomenon. The communist position was that complicity in the Holocaust was entirely *class* based, not nationality based. Since their ascension meant the destruction of the old capitalist class system, it wasn’t a question that anyone left needed to grapple with. They’d exterminated the problem.
That’s ridiculous, of course, but almost two generations of eastern Europeans were raised with that as their educational background. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they tend to avoid the question of national complicity.
Q.Q. Moar
Dumb fucking Pollock. Jackson, I mean. Couldn’t paint for shit.
FlipYrWhig
@AxelFoley: I agree with you, but apparently certain important Poles have come to see it as an indecorous phrase. Where I get interested is how it stacks up to other phrases. Is it like “Native American” vs. “Indian,” or is it like “Mumbai” vs. “Bombay”? Or something else? And is it objectionable only in English, or are other languages similarly unhelpful in distinguishing clearly between adjective-connoting-agency and adjective-connoting-location?
J. Michael Neal
@FlipYrWhig:
Sort of. It’s very much related to the fact that this debate was frozen in amber until 1989 and then released to get debated with so few of the individuals involved still around.
FlipYrWhig
@J. Michael Neal: I.e., death camp in Poland vs. death camp for Poles vs. death camp run by Poles, all of which starts cutting across lines of identification like “Jew” vs. “Pole” vs. “German.”
the fugitive uterus
you’d think, after Bush, people’s expectations would have been lowered a bit but now they seemed to have shot through the roof and are hurtling towards the fucking sun or something. i’ve certainly had my differences with Obama, but damn.
J. Michael Neal
@FlipYrWhig:
Something else and it is not related to the English language much at all. As I said, the meaning of the extermination camps and who owns the status of being the victims of them is very much a live debate. It’s a debate in which I think neither side (more accurately none of the sides) has behaved very reasonably.
DS
@stratplayer: Good point. There was a documentary on the BBC about what non-white people who visit Poland and Ukraine for the Euro Championships will be facing. So it isn’t just anti-semitism. This isn’t to suggest that all Poles and Ukrainians are racist and anti-semitic, but unfortunately, racism and anti-semitism is still a huge huge problem in eastern and southeastern Europe.
Poland suffered more than any country during the war with something like 8 million casualties, which is a higher percentage than the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, most of them like to forget the whole anti-semitic dictatorship of Pilsudki in the 1930s, the expropriation of Jewish business, widespread complicity in pogroms and denunciations, and the Polish police deporting Jews, etc etc. Not exactly a great time for Poland between 1930 and, well, now?
karen marie
@Villago Delenda Est: The United States government refused to allow at least one boatload of Jewish refugees permission to dock in the United States. I assume it was more than one, so if there was ignorance of what the Germans were up to it was willful.
J. Michael Neal
@FlipYrWhig: “Jew” vs. “Pole” vs. “German.” vs. “Russian” vs. “Lithuanian” vs. “Ukranian” vs. “Capitalist” vs. “Communist” vs. “Fascist” vs. “Nationalist” vs. “Catholic” vs. . . .
For instance, how do you spell
LvovLvivLwowLembergwhatever the fuck you call it?FlipYrWhig
@J. Michael Neal: I get it. It’s more like, “The ‘Polishness’ of the Nazi death camp in the territory that is now autonomous Poland is something we need to talk about and may never settle.”
Doug
I didn’t know it was bashing whole countries of people day!
There’s people in this thread using the exact same logic that Wingnuts use to paint races and ethnicities as unsavory. There are Neo-Nazis in Poland? 40 Jews were killed there after the war? Their whole people past, present and future must be inherently rotten. It would be pretty easy to paint every single person in this thread in the same light using guilt by association.
If an army rolled into your suburb, squashing your military in days, I’m sure you all will act with nothing but valor and kindness for all your fellow man.
I’m half Polish. There were 6 men (including my grandfather) of that generation who fought for the U.S. in the war. I bet they were a bunch of dickheads.
Cole, way to slander an entire ethnicity with that last smug sentence, you fuck.
Doug
Remember when Glenn Beck was slandering George Soros as a Nazi enabler? Glad to see some people in this thread picking up that noxious line of attack.
karen marie
@Someguy:
Thank you for making clear that in fact President Obama *was* deliberately insulting Poland. I must say that presenting one of its citizens with the Medal of Freedom is a pretty extravagant means to do so. The president must have eaten a bad pirogi or something.
Mnemosyne
@Doug:
Your hyperbole doesn’t make the foreign minister’s hyperbole that this single phrase in a speech praising a Polish resistance fighter was “outrageous” and showed Obama’s “ignorance and incompetence” any less ridiculous.
Nobody’s arguing that all Poles, everywhere, for all time, are guilty of perpetrating the Holocaust. We’re pointing out that the foreign minister’s hysteria over using this phrase is overblown. Given the foreign minister’s long history with the American right wing, do you really think that this is an actual controversy?
ETA: His hysteria is overblown given the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Poland, that is.
FlipYrWhig
@karen marie: Someguy must mean that the people doing the “libeling” for “political expedience” are certain of the commenters on this thread, not Obama. At least I hope that’s it…
Eric U.
I don’t know why I’m bothering to comment after 350 posts, but the idea that Poles had no role in the death camps was methodically destroyed by the movie “Shoah.” Granted, if it weren’t for the Nazis the camps would not have existed, but that’s as much as you can say with certainty in the defense of the people that lived near the camps.
Paula
@Sly:
Yeah, I think so.
I hope the people who claim that doc is a bit sensationalist turn out to be right, though. I’m cheering on Ireland to get as far as possible without any bullshit banana-throwing Luis Suarez/John Terry type scandal.
EDIT: Or worse, because I suspect Mario Balotelli won’t handle any incident with the kind of dignity that Samuel Eto’o has.
Omnes Omnibus
Okay, to sum up… Bad phrase in a speech. Obama’s people should have done better, but did not. Therefore, a fuck up occurred. I am surprised that they would have made this simple of an error. In any case, an apology was issued – as it should have been. Context of the speech should come into play on Sikorski’s part. Obviously, it did not. Context of who he should come into play. So, at this point, fuck him.
slim's tuna provider
@FlipYrWhig: “Polish resistance” and “Polish death camp” are used in consecutive sentences with the word “Polish” having totally different meanings. how can you not see the ambiguity? do you really think what makes a resistence “Polish” is its presence on polish soil? or is it that it is motivated by a polish national spirit? so if the resistance is “Polish”, how can the death camp also be “Polish”? i understand that works in conversation, or even in separate statements, but it doesn’t work in a prepared statement. of course the statement is not intended to convey any responsibility of poland, but it also conveys a shocking lack of sensitivity. from the polish point of view, the central truth about these camps is that they were placed on polish soil by a murderous invading force for the purpose of murdering christian and jewish polish citizens. calling them “Polish” is a little like telling a cancer patient that his tumors are technically part of his body, and oh, by the way, some of his cells we complicit. you wouldn’t be wrong, but you would be a douche.
Omnes Omnibus
@slim’s tuna provider: Sure. And that is why there was an apology. Let’s not forget that that the was a reasonable and a douchy way for Sikorski to handle it as well. The US was awarding the Medal of Freedom to a Pole for his heroism against the Nazis during the WWII. I think it should be pretty clear that there was no intent to be insulting to Poland in the remarks that have been quoted more than once above. Nevertheless, Sikorski found a reason to be outraged. Not to correct an infelicitous phrase. Not to suggest that the President’s well-meaning remarks were poorly chosen. Not any diplomatic handling of a mistake. He went straight for outrage. One suspects ulterior motives.
Mnemosyne
@slim’s tuna provider:
Other than the fact that we are native speakers of American English so we understand the syntax, which is not at all ambiguous in American English?
Also, don’t kid yourself — the Polish official raising a stink about this has deep and strong ties with the American right wing, including writing for American right wing magazines. He understands exactly what Obama was saying, which is why this is fake outrage from him.
(Edited to be less of an asshole for once.)
slim's tuna provider
@Mnemosyne: if it’s not ambiguous, how come one word (“Polish”) is used for completely different meanings in consecutive sentences? when writing official documents, one must assume all ambiguities will be interpreted for the worst.
Keith G
My goodness. The Obama team slips up and something gets said that really should have been avoided. All White Houses do it. And when they do, they get slapped around. It happens, that is why most administrations have a process to vet comments. When the president says it, or it is said in his name, it needs to be as diplomatically accurate as possible.
So the Polish PM has a bug up his ass. His is a politician scoring some points. It happens. Ask Mitt, Ask W.
What is really dissapointing is the number of folks here scouring wiki pages to find incidents of Polish anti semitism oor other misbahaviors so they can throw the Polish people under the bus.
“Looky here, they were bad too!!!”
Are you so insecure in your views of the strengths of the Obama Presidency that you have to sink to this abysmal level of nearly hysterical defensiveness? Why do you immediately defend this very good president by immediately attacking others?
He fucked up. He has done it before and he will do it again. Get over it. I am sure he has. Please AA+ and others – please do not act like the the GOP and reflexively attack and disbarrage those who criticize our guy
Poland got fucked six ways to Sunday for much of the 20th Century. And some of them collaborated. That is what brutalized people do. Please don’t show your American Privilege by not understanding this.
Mnemosyne
@slim’s tuna provider:
Because you can do that in American English. If you read the entire paragraph in context and don’t just pull out phrases that include the same word, it’s pretty obvious that “Polish resistance” and “Polish death camp” do not both mean “groups of Poles,” unless you’re arguing that “Warsaw Ghetto” is also defamatory because it implies that the town of Warsaw created the ghetto, not the Nazis.
But when you put everything into the order it appears in, it’s pretty hard to make a case that there’s a change in the way the adjective is used between “Warsaw Ghetto” and “Polish death camp.” Either Obama is blaming Poles for both of those things, or he’s using both of the modifiers “Warsaw” and “Polish” as geographic terms.
Did you think that the reference to the “Warsaw Ghetto” implied that it was organized by Poles, or did you understand that it was a geographic reference to the location of the ghetto? If so, why did you think that he suddenly switched from a geographic reference to referring to a population in the same sentence when he was talking about two locations (“ghetto” and “death camp”)?
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Oh, if you think I’m harsh on the Poles, don’t even get me started on the fucking French, who were running around touting their freedom fighters in the French Resistance while they were selling French Jews down the river. France had one of the worst records in Europe by far, much worse than that of Poland.
But if you want to side with a former AEI writer and staunch Republican ally in deciding that this was the WORST CRIME EVER by Obama, be my guest.
someguy
@karen marie:
Obama wasn’t intending to libel Poland. The commenters here damn sure are. Pathetic.
By Mnemosyne’s standards, the US has never really been called to account for it’s actions during the Holocaust. After all, some U.S. citizens of German descent returned to Germany and served in its armed forces. Ergo the U.S. is just as complicit as Poland.
Of course I won’t get into FDR turning a deaf ear to the please of Jewish refugees… *that* is totally different, right.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:
The above is quite a fucking stooopid statement.
Please be so kind as to indicate where in my comment you find the basis for typing such a patently silly thing.
Sometimes it seems that some of y’all suffer from DODS, Deranged Obama Defender Syndrome.
What is so ironic is that your defense is not a worthy effort for this good man.
Doug
@Mnemosyne:
Of course not. I think Sikorski is being ridiculous here.
That doesn’t excuse the rhetoric in the comments here. But, all right, I guess it’s OK to slam an ethnicity wholesale in a mad scramble to discredit one guy. Great precedent.
CW in LA
President Obama has apologized.
Now I’ll be interested to see when the Polish foreign minister will apologize for insulting the President of the United States, and in a manner calculated to interfere in US electoral politics.
Hey, next time PrimePresidentMinister Putin is making the Poles nervous, they should be told they’re on their own as we’re just too darn incompetent to help.
Keith G
@CW in LA:
About a decade ago when G W Bush was running around being a gigantic asshole, there were many of us who were hoping that the rest of the world would not judge all Americans due to our dip shit leader. I guess you (and many here) were not one to share that notion.
When did our side become home to so many feckless twits?
Mnemosyne
@someguy:
The US never has been called to account for its complicity, the most damning details of which you tried to hide as an inconsequential aside. IBM ring any bells for you?
@Keith G:
First off, it was the foreign minister, not the PM. The foreign minister who, not incidentally, is a former AEI fellow who has strong ties with the American right wing.
Didn’t it strike you at all strange that this guy would try to create an international incident over a single phrase in an Obama speech? At least Turkey withdrew their ambassador in a huff over actual Congressional legislation, not two words in the middle of a speech.
I know, it’s so irrational of us to wonder if a guy with decades-long ties to the American right wing might have an ulterior motive for flipping out over two words in a laudatory speech.
(No link to Wikipedia since I’ve run out, but that’s where this is from.)
Mnemosyne
Also, too, anyone needing an additional reason why the Polish foreign minister with ties to the America right wing would flip out over two words in a speech needs to be reminded which American city brags of having the largest Polish community outside of Warsaw.
CW in LA
@Keith G: And when did the rest of our side become such holier-than-thou prigs?
Ailuridae
@slim’s tuna provider:
Err really that’s how thinks work in Europe. So the Irish bear the responsibility for the Irish Potato famine. What about the Srebrenica genocide. Or contemporaneous with the evens that Obama spoke of the very real Serbian Genocide (still referred to as such to this day in both Serbian and English by the hundreds of Serbians I know in Chicago) when Axis forces mainly ethnic Albanians slaughtered Serbs?
You’re preposterously full of shit. And damn fucking stupid.
FlipYrWhig
@slim’s tuna provider: “Ambiguity” is not the same thing as versatility. You can say, quoting Wikipedia on the Easter Rising,
There “Irish” refers to where the soldiers were stationed, then the nationality of their opponents. It’s confusing, but it’s not offensive.
Villago Delenda Est
@karen marie:
Ah, but Karen, at that time the Germans were looking to solve their “Jewish Problem” by deporting them. They had not yet come to the conclusion that they should engage in industrialized murder. That happened in 1941. In 1940, they were still thinking about converting Madagascar into a giant reservation for Jews.
The point of the voyage of the St. Louis was to demonstrate that the Third Reich was not alone in considering Jews “undesirable”. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Not a good moment for the USA. But well before the Holocaust was conceived. That happened much later.
Again, there are time line problems here, and assumption of knowledge that wasn’t around until years later.
Villago Delenda Est
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
The camps planned from the ground up as factories of death were all in the east. In Germany proper, the camps were of the older concentration camp variety, where various “undesirables” (Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Communists, Socia1ists, “asocials”, etc) were held in “protective custody”. As the war wound down, the resources to support those camps dried up, which led to the condition they were in when they were liberated, and the reaction of the Americans, British, and French to what they found.
This is not to say that under “normal” circumstances these camps were humane. The prisoners were used as slave labor which enriched the SS which ran them. If the prisoners happened to die in the process, it was no big thing. But the camps were not planned as venues for extermination. That happened later, after the Operation Barbarosa started to roll and the advancing German troops had to deal with millions of Jews. Special SS units were created to execute Jews by the score, but the cost of ammunition and the logistics were formidable. So the extermination camps were planned, and the systematic murder of Jews, Romany, and others began.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Villago Delenda Est:
Thanks. I know all of this, but I didn’t have time to bang it all out- getting ready to go to work at the time.
One slight correction to something you wrote in your previous post:
1/20/1942.
Villago Delenda Est
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Well, that was the delayed Wannsee Conference. Originally, it was supposed to take place on 9 December, but it was overcome by events, specifically, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered a series of declarations of war.
The wiki article notes that the decision to “evacuate” the Jews was made in 1941. The implementation of that decision did not get going until 1942.
FlipYrWhig
Another parallel phrase just occurred to me: “Pakistani drone attacks.”. Which exactly no one thinks are being committed by Pakistan.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Villago Delenda Est:
Well, a bill can pass through Congress on day x, but it ain’t a law until it’s signed, which might be on day x+3, or whatever.
Yeah, Heydrich had it ready to go in late ’41, but the agency heads had to be informed before the ball got rolling…And, yes, I’m appalled to be writing it like this, but that’s how the Nazis seemed to view it, as rolling out a new system of death as GM will dot the i’s and cross the t’s before it rolls out a new system of manufacturing.
Chrisd
@Someguy: You misunderstood my snark. I agree with you.
Barry
@Cato: Cato, you are totally wrong here. Virginia has a gross receipts tax IN ADDITION TO its corporate tax; thus, Virginia now has a higher net tax rate than Maryland. http://taxfoundation.org/article/state-corporate-income-tax-rates-2000-2012
In fact, you are also wrong if you look at the macro picture. New Hampshire and Vermont have the fourth and fifth lowest unemployment rate; both have high corporate tax rates. On the other hand, Nevada has no personal or corporate income tax, but it has the nation’s highest unemployment rate. Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia have low corporate tax rates; their unemployment rates are 41st, 44th and 45th in the country. Michigan has a low corporate tax rate but its unemployment rate is 37th.
A total review of all state rates proves it: low corporate tax rates have nothing to do with low unemployment.