Posted on 02/10/2003 9:24:30 AM PST by kattracks
PARIS (Reuters) - It's the diplomatic equivalent of water rolling off a duck's back. Bashing the French does not beat them down -- au contraire, it only makes them more convinced they must be right.
The air has been thick with insult these days, both over the Atlantic and across the Channel, as the United States and Britain pile pressure and scorn on their reluctant ally to support an attack against Iraq.
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "the rat that roared," "the petulant prima donna of realpolitik" -- the epithets flung at France by the U.S. and British media can easily make a reader forget they're talking about America's oldest ally.
U.S. officials have hardly been diplomatic either. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has written off France as part of "old Europe" and said its opposition to emergency NATO measures to boost Turkey's defenses is a disgrace.
If all this was meant to bully France into changing its mind, it's not working.
France's reaction has been to redouble its efforts against a U.S.-led war, blocking NATO war preparations in Turkey and plugging for an extension of United Nations arms inspections that an exasperated Washington insists are now useless.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the easy-going prime minister who rarely speaks about foreign policy, shot back last Friday at President Bush's "the game is over" statement by saying: "It's not a game, it's not over."
FRENCH LOGIC
Paris media report on the anti-French vitriol seething through U.S. and British opinion columns with an air of bemused incomprehension, as if to say: What a faux pas! How could those Anglo-Saxons be so unreasonable?
"The French don't have a very good press in the United States these days," the left-wing daily Liberation wrote with sublime understatement Monday.
The conservative daily Le Figaro echoed pride in France's long tradition of Cartesian logic when it praised Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's plan for reinforced arms inspections in Iraq.
"Even if it worsens French-American relations, the attempt is in any event quite logical," it observed.
Pascal Boniface, a leading French world affairs analyst, said Americans suffered from a Francophobia as bad as the anti-Americanism that's politically correct in France.
"I was in the U.S. last week and couldn't turn on the television without hearing nonsense about France," he said.
Anti-Americanism has such deep roots in French thinking that no less than three serious books on the subject were published last autumn. Bashing from across the Atlantic hardly counts because the French do not take the bashers seriously.
France, as the new books show, believes it is special because the values of liberty, equality and fraternity proclaimed by the 1789 French Revolution have universal appeal.
But the United States, which declared its independence in 1776 with a similarly universal view of human rights, has long since overtaken France on the world stage.
As the Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot put it in an article echoing the anti-French mood in the United States:
"France has been in decline since, oh, about 1815, and it isn't happy about it. What particularly galls the Gauls is that their rightful place in the world has been usurped by the gauche Americans, with their hamburgers and blue jeans."
BOTH SIDES' WORST SIDES
What's worse, both states are led by men seen by the other side as caricatures of all they can't stand in their partner.
Bush's folksy talk, religious piety and unilateral stands go down in France like nails scratching on a blackboard.
"Bush crystallizes all that we hate in America," Pascal Bruckner, a usually pro-American essayist, wrote last year.
President Jacques Chirac and the flamboyant Villepin embody for Americans a haughty arrogance and spineless opportunism they say is the trademark of French diplomacy.
To rub it in, U.S. commentators recall French collaboration with Nazi Germany and the U.S. and British-led liberation of France -- a memory the Gaullist tradition prefers to play down.
In one of the most venomous articles of recent days, the Wall Street Journal ran a comment by author Christopher Hitchens denouncing Chirac as "a positive monster of conceit ... the abject procurer for Saddam ... the rat that tried to roar."
"Let's hope for Jacques Chirac's sake that he doesn't read the Wall Street Journal and the Elysee Palace forgot to include it in its press review yesterday," Liberation wrote in a short report on the broadside from the U.S. business daily.
Wrong on both counts. Saddam is indeed playing a game, and it IS over. ....Speaking of over, how does irrelevance taste, Frogs?
Say's it all, does'nt it?
Well, considering that ya'all just LOVED Clinton, I reckon that's we'll take that as a good sign.
Tastes like chicken. :oD
This isn't new and just for this Iraqi situation.
America has viewed France as "cheese eating surrender monkeys" for generations.
They are.
Not to mention that they are so ugly, one of their national heroes is a bell-ringing hunchback. :)
What? You expected them to get....fighting mad?
Fighting mad to a Frenchman is when he drops his rifle on his foot while putting his arms up.
What has changed, I think, is that in several countries the social class that came to fruition protesting the Vietnam war has come to formal power in government, and its adherents have come to regard the arch anti-Americanism rhetoric that is nearly ubiquitous in campuses and the media as normal. Certainly the Clinton administration was full of such people, similar in ideological bent to Fischer, Shroeder, and Chirac.
The lesson that is being learned the hard way at this point is the one that marginalized the Clinton followers - that everyone in the little world of intellectual pretense and social conformity that is the left feels one way about an issue or set of issues does not mean that such a stance will go unchallenged, and it is being challenged vigorously in a way that is unthinkable on campus. Hence the shock when vicious rhetoric that has become commonplace is answered by equally vicious rhetoric that is not - what it will take for the left to cope with this new environment is some serious soul-searching of which it hasn't recently been capable, that, or a precipitous loss of power and re-marginalization. The U.S. elections of 5 November 2002 should have warned of a significant social countercurrent in this regard, but was dismissed with the left's customary conspiratorial labeling or the assertion that it was restricted to the U.S. I do not think that is the case.
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "the rat that roared," "the petulant prima donna of realpolitik" War mongering unilateralist cowboys -- the epithets flung at France the U.S. by the U.S. French and British media can easily make a reader forget they're talking about America's oldest ally their saviors from Nazi Germany and the USSR.
If all this was meant to bully France the U.S. into changing its mind, it's not working.
There...switch a few things around and it reads just as accurately.
The irrational fear of the French? No, I don't think so.
What would be the suffix for "rational contempt"?
Give credit where credit is due -- this phrase was created by the brilliants folks who gave us "The Simpsons."
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