Posted on 03/31/2002 9:58:53 AM PST by knighthawk
There were no other passengers in my car on the Eurostar except for an American couple and their precocious little girl. Bored by the drab London suburbs, she announced that she was going to tell her parents all the facts she had amassed about France. Though they were many and varied in number, as the train emerged from the Channel Tunnel and onto the soil of the Fifth Republic itself, she began to falter. ''I don't know a whole lot about World War II. I know we were the good people. So the French would be, like, the bad people?''
''No, sweetie,'' said Daddy, patiently. ''The French were the good people, too.''
Hmm. I'd have given a more nuanced answer myself, but let it go. The moppet wanted to keep things straightforward. ''So who were the bad people?'' she asked.
''Well, there aren't really bad people, sweetie. Not whole countries of them.''
I gave an involuntary snort behind my copy of Le Monde. Daddy and Mommy glanced over in my direction, but I hastily exuded a passing imitation of Gallic charm. Though Daddy's characterization of the Second World War--no bad people were involved in the making of this global conflict--is not yet received opinion, the same disinclination to take sides colors our view of almost all contemporary disputes. Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side and no bad side, just two parties ''trapped'' in a ''mindless'' ''cycle of violence'' that ''threatens the peace process.''
The ''peace process'' tends to be no peace and lotsa process, in which Western panjandrums have invested considerable amounts of their prestige. That's why in Paris this week most of my dining companions were outraged not by the deaths of Palestinians or Israelis but by the shelling of Palestinian Authority buildings. ''These buildings,'' one indignant Frenchman told me, ''were built with money direct from the Union!''--i.e., the European Union. ''We have given billions, and now it is rubble.''
''Oh, your money's perfectly safe,'' I said. ''It's sitting in the Hamas bigshots' numbered bank accounts in Zurich.''
Fortunately, the World Trade Center was not an EU aid project, so the French are far less mad at Osama. ''Your Mister Bush,'' a chic lady lawyer said to me, ''he sees always the B-movie Western: America is the good guy so her enemies must be the bad guys.''
''Well, in the case of al-Qaida, he's not actually wrong, is he?''
Pitying looks from around the table. ''Bush is crippled,'' said someone else, ''by his Rambo view of the world.''
''I very much doubt Bush reads Rimbaud,'' I said.
And on and on, round the clock. The following point was made to me twice within the space of 24 hours, so I assume it's the current sophistry doing the rounds. ''Ah, Mark,'' said the first, with a wry self-congratulatory twinkle, ''the British and Americans, they go on all the time about democracy. But you do realize there are 6 billion people in this world and that, if you gave them the opportunity to vote for Mr. Bush or Mr. bin Laden, why, 1 billion would vote for Bush and 5 billion for bin Laden.'' Pause for stunned reaction from boneheaded North American, and then, with a sardonic courtly nod: ''I myself would, of course, vote for Bush.''
The second time I heard this observation the speaker gave a slightly different tag: ''I myself would, of course, probably vote for Bush.'' Take Two sounds about right.
Leaving aside the precision of the math, this droll jest neatly encapsulates the French world view: Naive Washington thinks all will be well if you liberate the will of the people; the European elite knows that civilization depends on restraining it. At heart, they believe the opposite of the American tourist on the train: There are no good peoples, just different groups of bad peoples whose baser urges have to be adroitly managed--as Western Europe failed to do between the wars but which it has done with some success since. That's why the EU likes the emirs and the ayatollahs, old Arafat and Boy Assad. They feel those fellows are engaged in the same project as theirs: holding the excesses of the people in check.
This worldly cynicism would have more to commend it if it weren't for the overwhelming evidence that the opposite is, in fact, the case--that these regimes preserve themselves by actively encouraging their people's worst instincts. The other day, the Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh ran a column headlined ''The Jewish Holiday Of Purim'': ''For this holiday the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries,'' wrote Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University. ''The victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew.'' Wow. That's some recipe, I thought. But, of course, the average Arab reader just yawns and sighs, ''Big deal. So the Jews use gentile blood in their cookies. What else is new?''
John Derbyshire, in National Review, argues that we shouldn't be sending peace negotiators to the Middle East, but teams of psychiatrists. The majority of its 300 million inhabitants are, he says, ''nuts.'' And he has a point. It's possible to believe in ''the plight of the Palestinians.'' It's even possible to believe that Mossad are so ingenious that they pulled off the Sept. 11 attacks and framed a bunch of innocent Arabs. But no rational person can seriously believe that your average Jew cookery show begins ''First, take your gentile victim and drain his blood.''
Yet such an assertion passes without comment in the Saudi press. Do the majority of Saudis go along with this stuff? We don't know. But we do know that their government's mouthpiece thinks it useful to propagate the old blood libels.
Whether or not you can make rational human beings of the Middle Eastern peoples is unclear, but there's no question that you're never going to do it as long as the present gang's in charge.
Forget the ''cycle of violence'' and the ''peace process.'' History teaches us that the most lasting peace is achieved when one side-- preferably the worst side--is decisively defeated and the regime's diseased organs are comprehensively cleansed. That's why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese militarism have not troubled us of late. One can imagine how World War II would have played out had, say, Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights poseur, been sitting in Downing Street instead of Winston Churchill. Her crowd should not be running World War IV.
Mark Steyn is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
One of the requirements of a modern European progressive is that you be selectively blind.
Steyn bump.
The raghead immigrants in Europe will eventually teach their hosts some fear before the lesson starts to run the other way.
I was just thinking about France the other day. OK, you're done with colonialism, the Algerians are too much trouble, give them independence. But why on earth would you give them an easy immigration policy? Similarly for England vis a vis Pakistan. Any member of a Commonwealth country can just move right on in and make himself at home. And we in the US seem to be trying hard to copy these policies.
The French have always been immoral Frogs.
They have adopted immoral appeasment as the solution to all of their problems. It does not matter what American or U.K. foreign policy is at the time, the Frogs will take a different road and march to their own drummer.
Now they are infatiated by the European Union and dedicated to the proposition that immoral appeasement with Arab Muslims might actually prevent terrorist attacks on France.
It is only a matter of time before Osama bin Laden's followers set off a bomb to topple the Effnnn Tower or attempt to blow up another Frog symbol of past world domination. Then the lazy, greedy, and immoral Frogs will awaken and demand the Foreign Legion go to war overseas.
In the meantime, the Euro Currency Time Bomb is ticking. Only a matter of time before all of the bad investments made by the Frogs will implode. The Euro will fall dramatically.
[Insert here my voulntary snort ... imitating a Frog] The Frogs deserve to inherit the wind. Hope their sacred Frog icons are destroyed by bin Laden wannabes and their idiotic faggy currency collapses, Frog fortunes are wiped out beause of stupid Middle Eastern investments, and the Frogs are forced to fight in the Middle East.
'Frogs, Fff-nnn Frogs' snorted the writer.
Then, having got it started, sat it out. The French are
like an old woman who votes and town dry, then moves.
Well actually that IS the "point." But I'm not so sure even armies of psych docs would do -- we're better off bringing in genetic engineers. Therein lies the real problem.
You may have a point. Seems to me that the majority of people with any initiative and brains departed the Old World for the New World between 1492 and the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. This was a truly huge "brain drain", leaving the stupid, the terminally lazy, the helpless, the weak, and the evil behind.
The process continues, at a slower pace- we are siphoning off the most productive members of many societies even today.
This is the REAL explanation for American dominance in practically every sphere of life. The Europeans achievements are behind them.
Nations as well as people in order to survive in spirit, as well as form, must estsblish what is, and climb to the MORAL high ground, then defend it and NEVER give up or give in. A Nation that does this will not succumb to the rot of constant appeasment of terrorists, and will inspire others to climb to her level rather than sink into chaos. Moral policies and actions rather than immoral one are the key.
Ha! What's 'brilliant', about this lap dance for American xenophobics? Take out the erudition and you could post it on Stormfront.
I wonder if he has an ancestor like my greatGranpa DuTemple. That Gallic gene which compels one to deliberately annoy another person to distraction is impossible to suppress. Believe me, I know. ;-)
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