The limits of personal experience
May. 31st, 2012 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbPresident Obama never had a Polish friend, obviously. If he had, he would never have committed the gaffe of speaking of a "Polish" death camp in the context of Nazism. My friend bufo_viridis, the wisest and mildest of men, showed me long ago that there is no faster way to get a Pole mad - even one who has doubt about his country's victim mythology and no sympathy for extreme nationalism. And I can see what he means: it would be like calling the foibe where Tito's Yugoslav executioners disposed of the bodies of tens of thousands of Italians "Italian death caves". Not smart, Mr.President. And a word of warning: apologize without ifs or buts. Some of your supporters have shown a disposition to try and minimize the impact of your words or question their national significance. Don't. Just don't.
bufo_viridis, the wisest and mildest of men, showed me long ago that there is no faster way to get a Pole mad - even one who has doubt about his country's victim mythology and no sympathy for extreme nationalism. And I can see what he means: it would be like calling the foibe where Tito's Yugoslav executioners disposed of the bodies of tens of thousands of Italians "Italian death caves". Not smart, Mr.President. And a word of warning: apologize without ifs or buts. Some of your supporters have shown a disposition to try and minimize the impact of your words or question their national significance. Don't. Just don't.
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Poland rules the waves
Date: 2012-06-05 09:49 am (UTC)A: To see the old Polish navy.
A Polak from Michigan told me this about a year after the Warsaw Pact folded.
Yeah this was a major Obama gaffe. The Poles fought harder than anyone else in WWII, and for the full 6 years of the war. They also resisted communism more creatively and effectively than the other subject peoples.