Posted on 04/27/2003 11:22:49 PM PDT by Pokey78
I DON'T think the British have it in them to truly hate the French.
Despite our jocular outpourings of hop-off-you-Frogs banter, despite being frequently messed around by their surly air traffic controllers, despite having often seen their bullying unions intimidate British lorry drivers and burn British products, and despite having fought numerous wars against them, I think the British quite like the French.
Maybe "like" is putting it too highly. But the British admire a certain je ne sais quoi about French life.
If a Brit is in any part of France from Paris to Provence, he or she is likely to think - ah, this is the way life should be lived.
It's not the food. It's not the sun sinking over the Med. It's not the more-wine-my-dear sophistication, or the Brigitte Bardot/Sacha Distel sexiness. It's not the art, the architecture or the sound of that beautiful language. It is all of these things.
But it is different for Americans.
America has always distrusted France. Americans have found the French arrogant - which is a lot like George Best disapproving of someone because of their drinking habits.
After the war with Iraq, that distrust has curdled into something much more vehement. In America today, there is a genuine hatred of France and the French, and it means that the Western alliance will never be the same again.
Americans feel that, only a generation ago, they set France free. This is true, of course - there are 75,000 American men and boys buried in European graves, and they are never given the respect they deserve. The French were also set free by the Russians destroying the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad, and by the British, who faced down Nazism alone.
But the British and the Russians were fighting for their national survival. The liberation of France was a happy by-product of that battle. To Americans, who never had German bombs dropping on their cities, or German troops swaggering through their streets, the liberation of France looks more like a hugely costly act of charity. And are les bastards grateful? Non, monsieur.
"Why should we expect the French to help us get Saddam out of Iraq?" asked one American. "They didn't even help us to get Hitler out of France."
In America there is a massively popular website called Francestinks. com. As you would expect, it contains plenty of French jokes - "the only way the French were going in was if we told them we'd discovered truffles in Iraq" - but the overall tone is deadly serious.
AMERICANS died for a country that is ungrateful, decadent and yellow to the core.
"Going to war without the French is like going hunting without your accordion," says one commentator. "How many Frenchman does it take to defend Paris?" asks another. "Nobody knows - it's never been tried." Then there's the one about the ad for the French rifle - "never used, dropped only once."
The French joke industry only advertises how profound the anger is against the French in the USA. When George Bush says of Jacques Chirac, "I doubt he'll be coming to the ranch any time soon," he is basically stating that he hopes Chirac falls under a carriage on the Paris Metro.
It goes to show how the world has changed since 9/11, a day that resulted in Afghanistan having the crap bombed out of it. But it was our allies in Saudi Arabia who provided the suicide squad for September 11.
Just as France, by consistently blocking action against Saddam, unquestionably propped up one of the vilest regimes on the planet.
In the world today, it is not our enemies that we fear and loathe.
It is our friends.
Again, I am not sure that I heard this correctly, so please let me know if I'm wrong.
But if this is proven, that will be the end of US/Franco relations as we know them.
Mark
These guys are not our friends.
I'll be happy to see Tariq Aziz enscounced in a mansion with a pension if he gives us the goods on the payoffs made to Chiraq and Americans like McDermott.
These are just the British Grave sites in France. It was the same pretty much at the American graves. Yeah they are our friends. Freaking frogs and why should they "clean" up these monuments and headstones, we cannot even expect them to take a bath. Purfume and cologne yes, but soap NO.
That "je ne sais quoi" is also called a total and complete lack of morality. Also I don't think the British admire it. Rather, they are astonished by it.
The British have been bitch-slapping the French for hundreds of years. They don't have it in their heart to hate perhaps because they almost pity them.
However,
"France, by consistently blocking action against Saddam, unquestionably propped up one of the vilest regimes on the planet"And it was far worse than that. France covertly and in stunning treachery allied itself with and supported a quasi-Nazi enemy that had attacked the United States.
American contempt for Chirac, Villepin, and the French people who support them is the same contempt they have for Adolf Hitler, Klaus Barbie, the French collaborators, and the rest of the Nazi thugs.
French betrayal of America is deeply resented, but the real contempt is for the 21st-century version of Naziism that has taken control of France.
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