Obama and the Malleability of History by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online: "President Obama has given a number of major speeches touching on world affairs since he announced his bid for the presidency. All have invoked historical examples — usually for moral purposes, but often at the expense of both literal and figurative truth.
THE VICTORY COLUMN SPEECH
1) Candidate Barack Obama had supposedly made a presumptuous request to speak at the Berlin Wall and been denied (the Germans might later have regretted that turndown, since a year later Obama, tit-for-tat, declined an invitation to speak there on the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall), and so he chose the Victory Column as his backdrop instead.
It was an ironic setting for a historic speech on global peace, since the monument is formed of gun barrels taken from conquered enemies, and it commemorates defeats of the Danish, Austrians, and French — as well as Nazi chest-thumping over the annexation of Austria. The monument is an icon to aggressive nationalism, which is why the French wished to destroy it after World War II.
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