Greatest Generation Chic
Or just making the most of dead Jews and old uncles? Obama’s using Buchenwald for political purposes, says beloved Great-Uncle Charles Payne, via Der Spiegel:
Barack Obama’s great uncle was one of the soldiers who liberated a subcamp of Buchenwald. One week before the US president’s planned stopover in Germany, where he is expected to visit the concentration camp memorial, SPIEGEL spoke to Charles Payne, 84, about his experiences in WWII.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Payne, early in June your great-nephew, President Barack Obama, will visit the former concentration camp Buchenwald, which you helped liberate at the end of the war. Will he be travelling in your footsteps?
Charles Payne: I don’t buy that. I was quite surprised when the whole thing came up and Barack talked about my war experiences in Nazi Germany. We had never talked about that before. This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I’m sure, but for political reasons.
Ouch. Great uncle and life-long Democrat.
SPIEGEL: At first Mr. Obama claimed that one of his family members was involved in the liberation Auschwitz. How did this misunderstanding come about?
Payne: He couldn’t have gotten it from me since we had never talked about this particular episode in the war. My sister and her husband were both great storytellers and sometimes made up the details to go along with it. They told him about my deployment with the 89th Infantry Division and apparently they mixed up a few details. Of course it came out immediately that he was wrong since there are enough people in America who know that Auschwitz is in the East and that the camp was liberated by the Red Army.
SPIEGEL: Afterwards, Obama called you. What did he want to know?
Payne: He wanted to know where this camp was that I had helped liberate. I told him that it was Ohrdruf and that it was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. I described a little bit of what I had seen.
It’s kind of fun to read on, for other reasons. Spiegel seems a lot more interested in how young Charles was indoctrinated to hate Germans, how he got dragged off to war to kill them, and whether he’s gotten over it, than in the subject matter at hand … what he saw at Buchenwald. Never mind whether his nephew ever gave a damn about it.
Via Gateway.
Topics: Germans, Obama, history, media, mockery
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:18 am Comments (3) on Friday, May 29, 2009
3 Responses to “Greatest Generation Chic”
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May 29th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
[...] Jules notes, Payne is not only Obama’s great-uncle, but a lifelong Democrat — and a mite too honest [...]
May 29th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Great-Uncle Charlie sounds like a pretty sharp mind, still. Of course, I don’t share his opinion of his great-nephew, but then I suppose you gotta support family and political party (even if it’s not the political party you think you know — I offer my own in-laws as example).
June 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Something else bothers me about the Auschwitz-no-Buchenwald flap from last Memorial Day, and how the Ominions instantly ran cover with how Obama “mispoke”, his ‘obviously’ meaning Buchenwald.
Obama’s used the Auschwitz-adds-gravity to proxy familial accomplishment memo since at least 2002:
“My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.”
Recognize the speech? It’s the same one that his limited foreign policy creds have stood on for his whole national public duration.
http://www.barackobama.com/2002/10/02/remarks_of_illinois_state_sen.php