Cheney at Auschwitz: an insult to the memory of Nazism’s victims

[RBHam]

By Bill Van Auken
28 January 2005

Auschwitz “reminds us that evil is real,” US Vice President Dick Cheney declared in addressing a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the Nazi death camp’s liberation by troops of the Soviet Red Army.

“Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine,” the US vice president said at the commemoration. “And in every generation, free nations must maintain the will, the foresight and the strength to fight tyranny and spread the freedom that leads to peace.”

It is not necessary to invoke the horrors of Auschwitz to remind us that “evil is real.” But Cheney’s presence at the site of the greatest crime of the 20th century gave this platitude a chilling significance.

In Europe in general, and Poland in particular, Bush’s failure to attend the commemoration himself was taken as a significant slight. An even more glaring expression of Washington’s indifference apparently went unnoticed—at least by the pliant media. Sections of Cheney’s speech were lifted virtually unchanged from an address given by Bush when the US president and his wife made a quick tour of the camp a year-and-a-half ago (see: “A presidential visit to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and the Bush family fortune”).

Cheney, like Bush before him, came to Auschwitz with one purpose in mind: to twist and exploit the atrocities of Hitlerite fascism to justify Washington’s own acts of aggression and inhumanity.

more...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/ausc-j28.shtml

[fertilizeonarbusto]

1. Cheney

"reminds us that evil is very real."

[gollygee]

2. At least he's an authority on evil and cruelty

sick sick sick

[Pirate Smile]

3. Everyone else dressed for the somber occasion. Find Dick in the picture.

[spanone]

4. Cheney and wife Lynne were there to go snowboarding.

An insult to the memory of those who died there.

[Darknyte7]

7. Hey! Where's Waldo?!?! eom

[RobertSeattle]

8. You can take the RWer out Wyoming

...But you can't take the Wyoming out of the RWer.

[beam me up scottie]

9. He thought he was going to visit Eskimos I guess.

I think it's a military-issue field-jacket/parka. (Playing dress-up like * now?)
What a dumbass.

[Pirate Smile]

12. Atrios had that on his site. Here is what it said along with the photo

"Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.

It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?"
http://atrios.blogspot.com/

I now see it came from a Washington Post article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43247-2005Jan27.html
"Dick Cheney, Dressing Down
Parka, Ski Cap at Odds With Solemnity of Auschwitz Ceremony"

[beam me up scottie]

15. Can it get more obvious that this administration doesn't give a

shit?
I said yesterday, amerika would have been better served by sending no one.
I am so horribly ashamed. This insult will not be forgotten.

[signmike]

10. Haha - Khruschev in the rumpled suit

[jdj]

14. "What? I thought this was a target shoot."

"Bush told me I was coming to pick off the survivors. Pull!"

He really looks bored. I'd rather he just stayed home. Take heart Cheney, the heat in hell far surpasses the cold there.

[RBHam]

5. biting excerpt:

Cheney did not have to deliver a speech to remind his audience that those in power are capable of unspeakable cruelty; his mere presence sufficed. He is identified, perhaps more than any other world figure, with such evils.

Who is Cheney to represent the American people at Auschwitz? The US vice president is identified with the most right-wing political forces in America. In the 1980s, as a Republican congressman from Wyoming, he acted as a defender of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, voting against a resolution calling for an end to the quarter-century imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Currying favor with homegrown racists, he likewise voted against the decision to make Martin Luther King’s birthday an official holiday.

[Ian David]

6. More from the article

Who is Cheney to represent the American people at Auschwitz? The US vice president is identified with the most right-wing political forces in America. In the 1980s, as a Republican congressman from Wyoming, he acted as a defender of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, voting against a resolution calling for an end to the quarter-century imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Currying favor with homegrown racists, he likewise voted against the decision to make Martin Luther King’s birthday an official holiday.

As defense secretary in the administration of Bush the elder and in his current role as vice president, he has been the most vociferous proponent of the use of military force to achieve Washington’s global aims. He oversaw the first Persian Gulf War and acted as a principal organizer of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, orchestrating a campaign of public deception and propaganda that had no precedent since the days of the Hitlerite “big lie.”

In between, he enriched himself as the chief executive officer of the oil industry giant Halliburton, a principal Pentagon contractor from whose war profiteering the vice president stands to reap future dividends.

Cheney’s entire political and business career strongly suggests that if, by a twist of fate, he had grown to maturity in pre-war Germany rather than in the post-war United States, he would have found his way either into the Nazi regime or among the corporate criminals who financed the Nazis and profited off of the slave labor of concentration camp inmates.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/ausc-j28.shtml

[aden_nak]

11. Let him dress in different clothes. Makes him easier to spot in a crowd.

[beam me up scottie]

13. A Whitehouse spokesman had said that * already went to

Poland LAST year. I couldn't believe it, well actually, I can.
It's wonderful that our government officials can go to another country and blab about freedom while we illegally imprison hundreds, maybe thousands of foreigners without affording them POW status, charging them with crimes, giving them access to counsel or even allowing them to contact their families.
Can you say beacon of hypocrisy?

[catmandu57]

16. Crashcart just flipped the bird to the entire Jewish Population

His manner of dress, his attitude at what was in essence a funeral, is a disgrace. he in effect just told the entire Jewish population that the holocaust didn't mean a thing to him or this entire evil administration.
I keep hearing that Israel is involved with the Planning for the Iranian war, I wonder how this will play with them?

[deutsey]

17. Reagan dressed appropriately when he laid a wreath for SS troops

I guess it all depends on who it is that is being memorialized.

:eyes:

[RBHam]

18. "Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty ..."

Mr. Cheney, you and your PNAC cohorts are living proof of this...