Posted on 08/12/2005 1:39:29 AM PDT by Jeff Chandler
Ah, you've French ancestors? Well, according to most FR posters they'd have surrendered immediately to those stalwart British yeomen...
If you have a French name, you find it more congenial in Europe instead. Better food, MUCH better beer, nicer weather, and nobody criticises if you don't have gleaming white and unnatural plastic-looking teeth. I myself always look in women for the yellowish teeth that indicate a fellow excessive tea-drinker...
There was a computer video game a couple of years ago called Armed and Dangerous. It was a shooter but also pretty funny. You have three goofy teammates who follow you around fighting with you. At one point in the game you are surrounded by bad guys with no way out. At that point the goofiest member of your squad says, "Don't worry I'll handle it." The guy then starts doing the Obi Wan Kenobi Jedi mind tricks and tells all of the bad guys they are french. The bad guys surrounding you immediately surrender and go fleeing in panic, allowing you to advance to the next level. It was hilarious, a great moment in PC gaming.
ROFLOL
This is sort of funny. But a bit misleading.
A bunch of Italians called the Romans kicked the butts of just about everybody in Europe and adjoining Asia and Africa for several hundred years.
Charlemagne was not really a Frenchman - he was a German - a Frank. And he kicked the Islamic butts, beat the pagan Saxons in several campaigns - forcibly making them Christians and wiped out the Magyars - a not inconsiderable feat. He was referred to as "Iron Charles"
for good reason. And if you called him Charles instead of Karl, he probably would have laughed his silent laugh and cut your head off with his own sword.
At one time the Gauls of France were a much feared enemy and kicked Roman and German butts. But they wound up wasting too much time changing their minds and fighting among themselves. But then, again, they were not really "French".
During the Thirty Years War, the French, led by a Catholic Cardinal no less, pumped money into the Holy Roman Empire (modern Germany and Central Europe) which was really fighting a civil war between the Catholics and Protestants. When it looked like the Catholics were winning, the French paid money to the Protestants, and vice-versa. The reason? To keep a united Germany from potentially threatening them and to keep Germans killing each other. The result? Horrific civilian casualties and a disunited Germany until Bismarck came along in the mid 1800s and kicked the French butts, taking back Alsace Lorraine - a German Territory - which the French had stolen a couple of centuries earlier. MOst unfortunately, we gave Alsace Lorraine back to the French after WW1 and again after WW2.
This would have been funnier were it more accurate historically.
The French are not really the laughing stock we try to make them out to be. Their history has been a mixed one, and under another Italian, a Corsican, Napoleone Buonaparte (his real name), they produced the first modern megalomanical dictaroship which threatened the stability and security of all of Europe, and even were a threat to us.
Read "France's War Against America" a new book which covers the entire sordid history of Frnech prefidy and violence against America from the French and Indian Wars (1689-1763) up to the present. It is most revealing.
Charles the Hammer was a Frank, not a Frenchman. Like most Franks he spoke a Germanic language as the Franks, like the Anglo-Saxons were a Germanic people.
Yeah, but the Franks became the French.
Well, the Franks degenerated into Frenchmen when they intermarried with the mixed Romano-Gallic population there, along with other Germanic tribes that moved through like the Burgundians and Visigoths.
The ruling classes - the nobility of the sword - were descended for the most part from these warlike Germanic invaders. Later on, there was some degree of upward social mobility as a merchant class developed and titles of nobility were eventually sold for cash instead of earned through birth and/or merit (nobility of the pen).
The pathetic passive behavior of western Europeans today, I believe, is grounded in four phenonmena: the removal of power to the lower classes from the more warlike aristocracy, the degeneration of the aristocracy from a warrior class by intermarriage with lower classes, the emigration of the more industrious and aggressive elements of the lower and middle classes to America, Australia, etc., and the high attrition rate over time among the more warlike and aggressive elements of society in the many wars fought in Europe and elsewhere.
Todays Italians, French, Swedes, Hungarians, and English for instance bear little resemblance to their respective Roman, Frankish, Viking, Magyar, or Anglo-Saxon forebearers. I believe the capacity for aggression and violence is a hereditary trait, altough it can be modified to one degree or other by culture and society.
As many wars are fought by a people, those individuals with these aggressive genetic markers tend to die at a higher rate than other people simply because they fight harder and are subject to a greater mortality rate.
Eventually the aggression is sort of "bred out" by a higher survival rate among the less aggressive individuals.
A comparable example is found among animals with formidable fighting equipment. In battles between males for a mate, there is a tendency for ritual behavior involving display to replace actual physical confrontation. Real battle is too costly from a genetic perpsective in such cases as it results in a higher death rate, thus selecting for those individuals who appear larger and more formidable, but are not necessarily more physically aggressive. The latter are more succeessful at passing on their genes than creatures which have a greater tendency to fight and kill their oponents. Not an exact analogy, but close enough to give the picture of what I'm thinking.
At any rate, those are my thoughts and that's something I've wondered about for a long time.
Ask the average American guy today to pick up a rifled musket and advance across an open field into a hail of minie balls and he'll look at you like you have two heads.
Yet thousands and thousands of American boys did just that for five long years a few centuries ago.
I think British women are most attractive, certainly more so than the French. Spanish, Italian, German, Irish and Scandinavian women are right up there with British women. But French women - ugh!
On the other hand, there is a strong connection between the British ruling classes and the French - or rather the Norman-French which are a special breed anyway.
When the Muslims spoke in terror of the Crusading "Franks" they were speaking as much of the warrior class of Britain at the time as of the Normans and other Frenchmen.
Perhaps, but he gave the rest of Europe a run for their money.
Jeez, don't be so sensitive. I just hate it when you foreigners get your historical facts wrong. Next thing you'll be telling me is that the Brits had something to do with the Atomic Bomb, or developing Aircraft Carrier Technology, when everyone knows that the same country which exported Morris Minors could not possibly have been involved with stuff like that.
Say, now that Americans have improved international communications so much, with our satellites and all, maybe we could drop the UK a line before we get involved in another world war. You know, get you in early next time.
I would argue that it is a nationalist website as well. American conservatives tend to be nationalists by definition ("loyalty and devotion to one's country"; though not necessarily exalting America above other countries, there is some of that on this site too).
I have to say, apparently the only people who have looked at this anti-French thread so far must be the ones with a sense of humor. I was expecting a bit more of a flame war.
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Wait, wait!
You forgot one. This war is one the US did (and won) without foreign assistance...
The 1956 Suez Canal War.
The United Kingdom, France and Israel decided to contest Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal through military action by invading Egypt. You know, aircraft carriers, sea-borne landings, helicopter landings, etc against the military superpower of Egypt by the Anglo-Franco-Israeli forces.
The United States under "Ike" said "Get out".
Y'all skeddaddled right pronto. The US won without a single casuality. Another happy result, the Empire ended and the delusion that Britain was in the ranks of the leading powers of the day was terminated.
dvwjr
I can't help but notice that the unit of the French army best known for tenacity and skill in combat has no Frenchmen.
There are pretty and ugly, fat and thin, nice and nasty in all countries. I have known English girls with good teeth, fat French girls, dumpy Scandinavians and the other way round too. All generalisations are incorrect (including this one)...
The hovercraft, jump jet and TV are also British inventions. However we're arguing still whether the Germans beat us to the TV (they certainly had earlier broadcasting). However, the Germas invented the car, no disputing that. Your're right, aircraft carriers were a British idea (in WWI).
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