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Posted on 09/01/2004 9:41:49 PM PDT by quidnunc
"People hate you. Everyone hates you. The whole world hates you." The pretty middle-aged woman, a Swiss mother and scholar, at the dinner table in Geneva earnestly wants to make that perfectly clear.
She isn't angry with me. She thinks the American people are totally ignorant, misled by the media and a criminal president. She also thinks the United States invaded Afghanistan in order to grab an oil pipeline.
This is my test of whether conversation is possible. I can understand how Europeans can believe the war in Iraq was about oil. After all, European nations like France and Russia had been benefiting from sweetheart oil deals in Iraq for years. But Afghanistan?
That small, rocky, undeveloped, desperately poor nation dominated by tribal warlords? Yeah, sure the war on terror is just an excuse. We've been lusting to take over Afghanistan for years. As if America needs a warm-water port.
But I persevere, trying to "achieve disagreement," to understand (even if I can't make her understand) why the world looks so different to her than to me and most other Americans (Michael Moore fans excepted). Sixty percent of Americans support the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war, according to a Pew Research Center poll last month reported in USA Today. Even John Kerry says he will unilaterally use force to protect the United States, if necessary.
This is exactly what makes my sweet Swiss friend lapse into hate speech. "What right have you to go into Iraq?" she asks. "Where does the U.N. get that right?" I counter.
For me it is a serious question. The United Nations has its uses, but how can the majority vote of bureaucrats representing dictatorships make a war right or wrong?
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Translation: We're doing right.
Oh yeah? Well your cheese has holes in it!
My reply has been to those over there that have said this to me is; "I thought hate was a crime in europe..Oh thats right! Its OK to hate your kinfolk who have immigrated to the USA but it isnt alright to hate EU retards." "So its a family matter then isnt it?"
Same tired Euro-jealousy. They haven't figured out yet, that their Socialist governments don't work well...so America is the bad, evil black sheep...:-)
If they want to play in the World Sandbox, they can build up their own armies again. But as long as we're the only ones bothering to bring a shovel and pail in the first place, we're going to decide what to do with them.
This is interesting...
I was thinking that it is odd how we can be the ones misled, but we only have a dislike of the Europeans who hate us.
If we were really ignorant and misled, wouldn't that mean we should be highly emotional in our beliefs? Isn't that the major characteristic of an ignorant sucker? That they emotionally defend or attack something they don't understand or know much about?
Just who is misled here?
"She thinks the American people are totally ignorant, misled by the media and a criminal president. She also thinks the United States invaded Afghanistan in order to grab an oil pipeline."
And they think we are ignorant?
The UN doesn't represent peace. More often then not, it represents maintaining the status quo, which can often be pretty crummy.
If the UN is peace, why did they allow genocide to rage unchecked in Rwanda? Funny how Europe never thinks of that.
MGY
Yeah, no kidding. I don't even *care* if they hate us, as long as they fear us. I'm not going to any soirees or cocktail parties with them - and frankly, that's the whole problem that squids like Kerry have got with the Euroscum hating us: they feel uncomfortable when Dining In Europe.
Hey! Careful with slinging the squid like it's a bad thing. I'm proud of my 5 active/6 reserve tentacles thank you very much. (yes - i know that's 11, but hey I'm special ;)
You are exactly right. A couple of weeks ago, when the Kerry camp announced that pathetically small number of CEOs who were endorsing Kerry (something like 1/4 as many as had already endorsed Bush), CNBC had a few of them on the air to plug the press release. And what you said was precisely one of the reasons they all gave for supporting Kerry: "Well, we spend a lot of time making deals overseas, and Bush's policies have made it harder for us to have cordial relationships with those people...."
I have lived in Europe for 20 years now and noone has ever said that to me.
Yeah, right after I posted that, I had a feeling I should have picked a better insult.
But the damn guy *reminds* me of a squid, somehow - and not in the military sense - slimy, rubbery, gangly, and constantly muddying the water with black slime...
Swiss? Mumsy sent J. effin Kerry went to boarding school in Switzerland.
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.
O'Rourke, P.J. (1989), Holidays in hell. London (Picador), 199
You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does... The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.
The Japanese take snapshots of everything, not just everything famous but *everything*. Back in Tokyo there must be a billion colour slides of street corners, phone booths, fire hydrants and overhead electrical wires. What are the Japanese doing with all these pictures? Its probably a question we should have asked before Pearl Harbour.
The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language.
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know
Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.
- PJ O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell"
The Swiss have gone downhill since my great-grandfather left Switzerland in 1866 at age 16. He had to leave, because he kicked the sh** out of a schoolteacher who belittled him. The Swiss were once feared for their citizen army, but I think they have been polluted by the surrounding Eurotrash. I have met some of my male Swiss relatives, and they were metrosexual girlymen.
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