Obama: Historical Revisionist

This was posted today by Grant Jones at IBA. I re-post it in full here because I wish I had written it.

Interestingly, immediately before I went to IBA and discovered the article, I had finished this comment to a recent previous entry.

This coming June, President Mountebank is planning yet another apology tour. This time he will include those victims of World War II, the Germans:

But he will be aware of the sensibilities of his German hosts before the D-Day commemoration and by travelling to Dresden — a city destroyed by ferocious Allied bombing in February 1945 — Mr Obama will also acknowledge how Germany suffered during the Second World War.

In 2003, Anne Applebaum wrote an article on how the Germans now think of themselves as victims (if not the victims) of the Second World War, seriously. The centerpiece of the Kraut pity-patter is the bombing of Dresden. She notes that on a visit to Germany, there was not one, but two books on the best-seller list with this thesis. As she states in "Germans as Victims":

One of the authors used the word "crematoria" to describe the burning buildings, described the Allied bomber pilots as the equivalents of Nazi police units that murdered Jews and concluded by wondering whether Winston Churchill, who ordered the bombings, ought to have been condemned as a war criminal.

It is my guess that these things are related: It cannot be an accident that a wave of unusually virulent, even irrational anti-Americanism has peaked just as Germans have begun, for the first time since the war, to talk about their past in a new way. Germany is reassessing its place in Europe, its role in the world, its postwar subordination to the United States. Some of the recalcitrance we've seen in Germany during the past year has been genuine opposition to the war in Iraq and genuine dislike of President Bush and what he is thought to stand for. But some reflects a deeper change. Germans, or at least some of them, no longer want to apologize for the 20th century. Germans, or at least some of them, no longer want to accept the political leadership of the United States.
Just look at the bestseller lists for proof.

"Virulent, even irrational anti-Americanism," There's a band-wagon President Mountebank will happily climb aboard. It is not a coincidence that the Age of Obama is also the age of militant, self-righteous evil. In his latest column in Commentary, Mark Steyn reports on how Holocaust Memorial Day 2008 was observed in what had once been the civilized city of London:

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2008, a group of just under 100 people—Londoners and a few visitors —took a guided tour of the old Jewish East End ... Those few dozen London Jews considered themselves at ’ome. But they weren’t. Not any more. The tour was abruptly terminated when the group was pelted with stones, thrown by “youths”—or to be slightly less evasive, in the current euphemism of Fleet Street, “Asian” youths. “If you go any further, you’ll die,” they shouted, in between the flying rubble.

As Steyn further reports, according to polls 62% of Germans “are sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews.”

Next week, President Mountebank will be groveling in Egypt. There is no mention in the press release (I can't call this a "news" story) on whether our president will also be visiting Israel. While the Zero has the time for his ongoing campaign of groveling, there just is not any time to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister. President Mountebank's chronic apologizing for America should be no surprise. This is because he is a tiermondist. From Dreams from My Father:

I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

The typical response to this Portrait of the Future Messiah as Marxist Poseur is that he has since grown-up. I don't think so. His so-called values have not changed one iota. President Mountebank is obviously still alienated from American society and very, very angry. Meanwhile, the Jew-haters are uniting and marching. With President Mountebank, they have found an enabler. All they have to do is play the "neo-colonialism" victim card. As Mark Steyn noted, after Israel and Europe, we're next on the menu.

Crossposted at The Dougout