It amazes me the isolated bubble in which right wingers envelope themselves. To them all reality is subject to their ideology and anything that DOESN'T fit has to be discounted or revised to fit.
A BBC News article highlights this.
Talk to a teabagger (if you dare) and you are bound to hear the claim that JFK called himself a jelly donut to the laughter of the Berlin crowd in his famous 1963 speech. That is if they even know where Berlin is.
But reality has almost no resemblance to the teabagger ideology based fantasies. Yet you will hear it over and over again that JFK was laughed at. But he wasn't. The teabagger fantasy, like almost all their ideology, is a lie that they perpetuate not because they have evidence, but their belief in it supports their ideology which in turn supports their belief in an every descending spiral of self-delusion and self-satisfaction.
It is ideological masturbation when you get right down to it.
What was the reality? Something MUCH more impressive and MUCH more interesting.
Here is the speech. Details below the break:
JFK fought in WWII. He fought with great distinction.
Before JFK went to Germany, many Germans, based on JFK's war record in WWII, felt he was anti-German. SO a potentially ANTI-German President of the US of A came to Germany at a time of MAXIMAL tension. A point where Berlin felt that the horrors of 1945 may return in a conflict between West and East.
From the BBC article:
The newspapers had reported that Kennedy didn't like Germany - he had fought in the war and was uneasy about the economic progress the loser of that war was making. Spiegel had a headline: "John F Kennedy doesn't like the Germans".
But Berlin changed that. He was greeted by hundreds of thousands of people.
When JFK visited Berlin, it was a key turning point geographically and historically. The people who saw him were VERY aware, and quite frightened, about how they were the center of history. JFK moved Germany from the enemy of the past to the ally of the future.
It's hard to imagine those pressured times now, but 50 years ago the world was divided into two blocs of East and West, each with an arsenal of nuclear rockets pointed at the other.
The atomic battleground would be Europe, and Berlin was its centre...
And just eight months before the speech, Kennedy had faced down the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, over Soviet missiles in Cuba. There was a real possibility of nuclear war. Fear really was in the air...
Kennedy was well aware of ALL of these dynamics. Whatever his flaws, JFK was SMART and charismatic. He knew what he was doing and he THOUGHT about it.
Into these tense and dangerous times stepped the charismatic Kennedy, young for a leader at 46. He spent four days in Germany but it's the visit to the island of West Berlin on 24 June 1963 which captivated the eyes of the world.
This magnetic leader seemed so different from the dour Konrad Adenauer of Germany or the prim, old-world, patrician Macmillan of Britain or the gracelessness of the brutish Khrushchev.
As the New York Times described it at the time: "Along the route from Tegel airport to the United States mission headquarters in the southwest corner of Berlin, waving, cheering crowds lined every foot of the way.
"The crowds must have nearly equalled the population of the city, but many persons waved once and then sped ahead to greet Mr Kennedy again."
So this is the REALITY. You know, the FACTS. Kennedy, because he had an impressive war record in WWII, was viewed with suspicion by Germany. Germany had evolved since WWII into a focal point of all the world's tensions including the tensions surrounding nuclear war, something that Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed was a very real and current thing. ANY city was a target at that point for a nuclear weapon. Berlin was THE potential Hiroshima of 1963 and was VERY well aware of it. If there was a nuclear ware at that moment, Germany, and Berlin in particular, would be THE target.
JFK's visit was WILDLY popular in Berlin, unlike the teabagger revisionism. And the famous line "Ich bin ein Berliner" was VERY carefully planned and the intention of emphasis (using "ein") was very well conveyed. In Berlin, JFK's message was very clearly understood and VERY well received.
And they erupted at the line which resonated round the world. He had been toying with the phrase for some weeks before. He had discussed it with his main speech writer and with people drafted in to help him with his Boston-drawl German pronunciation, which, it is generally agreed, was pretty poor.
But it was not in the typed transcript of the speech to be delivered - he added it in his own hand. He does seem to have extemporised, going beyond what his advisers had suggested...
Did he, by inserting the word "ein" into "Ich bin Berliner" - the normal, conversational way of saying "I am a Berliner" - unintentionally say he was a jam donut?
This claim has often been made, but Berliners of the human variety will tell you that a jam donut in Berlin is not called a Berliner (though it is in the south of the country), so on the day nobody laughed. And anyway, the added word "ein" can be used here to add emphasis.
The misconception goes
back at least to 1983 when it appeared in a Len Deighton novel. Not sure if that is the origin of it.
A more detailed explanation can be found here: (h/t to serendipityisabitch for inspiring me to look up more details)
Laying decades of misinformation to rest, linguist Jürgen Eichhoff undertook a concise grammatical analysis of Kennedy's statement for the academic journal Monatshefte in 1993. "'Ich bin ein Berliner' is not only correct," Eichhoff concluded, "but the one and only correct way of expressing in German what the President intended to say."
An actual Berliner would say, in proper German, "Ich bin Berliner." But that wouldn't have been the right phrase for Kennedy to use. The addition of the indefinite article "ein" is required, explains Eichhoff, to express a metaphorical identification between subject and predicate, otherwise the speaker could be taken to say he is literally a citizen of Berlin, which was obviously not Kennedy's intention.
So he had carefully crafted his speech to EMPHASIZE his sympathy to Berliners, he said it in a way in which Berliners would understand and reacted to with HUGE enthusiasm.
JFK's speech in Berlin was, according to ANYONE present at the time, an amazing, encouraging, and historic speech. The whole "jelly donut" crap spouted by rabid teabaggers has no historical significance and requires that you assume that all Berliners in attendance were actually from much further South in Germany, something that was NOT the case.
But you will never convince a teabagger. He will insist that he knows German better than any German person.