I remember when I visited the People’s Republic of Poland during the years of Gierek, they took me to Osviecim, the most famous of the concentration camps. I was able to appreciate the horrific crimes committed by the Nazis against Jewish children, women and elderly people. The ideas implemented there were from the book Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler. Previously they had put them into practice by invading the territory of the USSR in search of vital space. On that occasion the governments of London and Paris egged on the Nazi leader against the Soviet state.
The Soviet Army liberated Osviecim and almost all of the Nazi concentration camps, exposed what had been done there, took photos and film footage that toured the world.
Obama spoke at the Buchenwald concentration camp, in German territory, in whose liberation a still living great-uncle of his took part and who accompanied him at the event.
His most important activity in Europe was his participation in the 65th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, where he made a second speech. He undid himself by praising Dwight Eisenhower, who led the landing. He justly highlighted the valiant role of the U.S. soldiers who fought along a few kilometers of coast, supported by the British and U.S. navy and thousands of airplanes that basically emerged from U.S. factories. The parachute divisions were not launched at the most correct positions and for that reason the battle was prolonged unnecessarily.
The bulk of Hitler’s army and its most select divisions had been liquidated by Soviet soldiers on the Russian front after they recovered from the damage of the initial strike. Leningrad’s resistance to its prolonged siege, the combats of the Siberian divisions a few kilometers from Moscow, the battles of Stalingrad and the Kursk salient will pass into the history of wars as among the greatest and most decisive events.
Obama, who spoke at the ceremony for the 65th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, thanks to which, as deduced from his speech, Europe was liberated, dedicated just 15 words to the role of the USSR, barely 1.2 for every two million Soviet citizens who died in that war. That was not fair.
At the end of the bloody battle, Iran which, given its natural resources and its geographical location had played an important role in that war, was converted by the United States into its strongest and best armed gendarme in that strategic region of Asia.
The Iranian people, led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, with unarmed masses prepared for any sacrifice, defeated the powerful Shah of Iran. That event took place during the last two years of the Jimmy Carter administration, which suffered the initial consequences of the erroneous foreign policy of the United States, which cut short his mandate and propitiated Ronald Reagan’s access to power.
The Shah died on July 27, 1980 in Cairo, precisely the city in which Obama gave his speech on last June 4.
The absurd Iraq-Iran war, which began in 1980, lasted for eight years and was not provoked by Khomeini. Reagan took every possible advantage of it. First he sold weapons to Iran. With that and the drug trafficking money he defrayed the dirty war on Nicaragua, thus getting around Congress stipulations that denied him the funds for that cruel adventure which cost the lives of so many young Sandinistas. Reagan supported Iraq’s war on Iran.
The U.S. government authorized the supply of raw materials, technology and gases for the chemical warfare against Iran, which liquidated tens of thousands of soldiers from that country; the civilian population was severely affected; U.S. companies cooperated in the production of the chemical weapons. On the other hand, satellites supplied it with the information necessary for land operations; 600,000 Iranians and 400,000 Iraqis died in that war, hundreds of billions of dollars were spent by the two large oil-producing countries before both sides accepted the peace project drawn up by the United Nations.
It is not an easy task for a president of the United States to give a speech in the Al-Azhar Muslim University of Cairo. Neither is it to be expected that it arouses much enthusiasm among the Iranians and the Arabs.