What a difference words make. I wrote yesterday (one can read it on this site) about the power of words.
Today the president of the United States is finding out just how powerful.
President Barack Obama "misspoke" when he called a Nazi facility used to process Jews for execution as a "Polish death camp." The verbal gaffe came as the president was honoring a famous Pole, Jan Karski, posthumously awarding him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award. Obama referred to him being smuggled "into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself."
Apparently "Polish death camp" is what renders the item invalid. The phrasing is considered hugely offensive in Poland, where Nazi Germany murdered Poles, Jews and others in death camps during World War II. In other words, they weren't Polish death camps because they were German death camps being run in Poland. That's a substantial gaffe, actually.
The president's remark had drawn immediate complaints from Poles who said Obama should have called it a "German death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland," to distinguish the perpetrators from the location. Polish Foreign Minister Radek SIkorski called it a matter of "ignorance and incompetence."
During an East Room ceremony honoring 13 Medal of Freedom recipients, Obama said that Karski "served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.
Poles were considered an inferior race by Hitler and had no role in running the camps. Sikorski called Obama's words an "outrageous mistake."
Some one would say it was a different time, a different place. No one today is gassing anyone. One would be wrong, of course. There's always another time, another place, another aggressor versus another peace-lover.
That's our world, folks. That's our world.
We live in a world today that takes exception to being called something so much the ones called names will retaliate with bullets. That's quite a scale, huh? Name-calling on one side of the scale, bullets and guns on the other.
We live in a world today in which you can get an Internet special order of bullets ...purchase 5,000 rounds and receive 1,000 rounds free. (Cannot be mixed bullets).
In my world today, people shoot up birthday parties and kill 5-year-old children.
We live in a world today in which a bullet company exists, dedicated "not only to each other, but to the tens of thousands of good folks that we have had the pleasure of serving for many years. It’s pretty simple. We honor our history by honoring our customers – and all those who support our heritage….America’s Shooting Heritage." America's shooting heritage. I swear we have a shooting heritage. We honor those bullets that keep us free, apparently.
I'm not suggesting in any way that the good people of that bullet company would be the same type of persons who helped build the death camps of the Poles. What I am suggesting is that honoring our past sometimes is a delicate, problematic state to be in. What some people did that is to be honored is another man's horrific deed to be protested.
In other words, what was a wonderful, honorable, celebratory, deed is another man's terrible, cowardly, punishable deed. Flying airplanes into towers is horrific in some worlds. Being a martyr is another person's deed of honor. Whether one is celebrated or cursed for dropping huge "smart" bombs is completely dependent upon where you were at the time of the dropping. The ones in the plane have a completely different viewpoint that the ones in the bunker. That much I can tell you without question or without risk of misspeaking.
Who gets to draw the line? The ones who win the war. It's that simple. That simple indeed.
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