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Sunday, February 2, 2003

Oh, my! Ping-a-ring-a-ding-ding!

...apart from providing us with fine perfumes, wines and cheeses, the French are incapable of saving Western civilization. Nor do they really want to. That job has been left to us....

You sir are far to kind towards the French.

In all honesty, Eisenhower gave de Gaulle the push. Right after the Second World War, both Britain and France nourished hopes of maintaining their prewar empires. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the French and British moved to retake it, only to be turned back by the 6th Fleet. French military strategy after the Second War was dominated by fantasy. They had the idea that a few elite troops, supported by a handful of aircraft, would compensate with elan, for what they lacked in punch.

The French fought the war in Indochina with a veritable pastiche of weapons, including Japanese and German surplus and castoff USN propdriven aircraft. Fantasy was no match for reality and the French were humiliated both in Indochina and Algeria.

America, more than anyone else, knew that the day of the District Commissioner was over. Deep down, the French knew it too, but they resented America most for not having an overseas empire to lose.

The French riposte to these setbacks was to withdraw entirely into a make-believe world. They acquired a small nuclear arsenal, and pointed it at everybody. They then plotted a return to world power based on the notion of "a French jockey on a German horse", a.k.a. the European Union.

But that world power was based on the flawed premise that they would hold the swing vote in a world finely balanced between two superpowers. That power was to be wielded in the United Nations, which was designed specifically to settle the disputes of several great powers. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, the underpinnings of French strategy and the reason for the UN's existence fell with it.

France is desperately embarked on a strategy to recreate a coalition to check the United States. In this effort, it will find a sympathetic hearing from every other aspirational power. Individually, they are overmatched, but severally, they may present a force. The anti-American coalition must be the most ill-assorted agglomeration in world history, consisting of medieval and modern societies, united only in their desire to stop the USA.

Yet such a coalition will prove unstable, as all alliances founded on the purely negative must become. Thieves part ways once the loot is divvied up. The American effort, by contrast, consists of the core set of societies who share a common set of values.

A history professor once told me that the more he studied history the less sure he felt about when an event started and when it ended. As a history major, I have concurred with this statement many times.

The French are one of the most polluted cultures and societies in history and continue to fall. However, it goes back much further than Algeria. Some specifics that come to my mind right now are Joan of Arc and the French betrayal of her cause, the French Revolution and how barbaric savagery was embraced by the citizens of that country, and my "piece de resistance" The Dreyfuss Affair which brought down the French Government and is a tragedy to this day (see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/january98/rosenblatt_1-13.html).

J'Accuse!!!

European world dominance was killed by the internicine battles of WWI and WWII. All the Europeans - not just the French - lost the financial and military capabilities necessary to defend their possessions.

The empires were probably unsustainable anyway considering the demographics and the unstoppable spread of technology.

Regardless of the superiority of European cultures and their undoubted ability to provide peace and prosperity to previously benighted countries, they were tyrannies from the point of view of the natives because they treated them as subservient inferiors. Human beings never willingly accept that status.

By the way, I find many Frenchmen and much about their culture to be admirable.

As always, your post was well conceived and thought provoking. It makes me recall how the French, erroneously following Rousseau's notion of the "General Will", allowed themselves to plunge into the abyss of "the Terror". Once committed to class struggle and the trap of using terror in their quest for "virtue", they ceded the core values of their revolution to the likes of Monsieur Robespierre. Soon the republic was lost to Imperial Napoleon. And so it has been for France, one betrayal after another: The Maid and the Burgundians; Conde; Henry of Navarre; Robespierre, Marat et al; Dreyfus; Petain and his Vichy; De Gaulle and the Algerians...their history is so pockmarked by the treacherous betrayal of idealism that it will never recover. As a backdrop to this sad scene, we must include an ancient and virulent strain of anti-Semitism that has chronically festered since Louis IX launched his medieval diaspora and which, sadly, continues unabated.

Some recent French history ping, especially some of the posts.

If you want on or off the Western Civilization Military History ping list, let me know.

Is this the SAME Samuel Blumenfeld that writes about the public schools,and has various educational books out?

Froggie bttt

France saw how when the EU did nothing in Bosnia and Kosovo the US Solved it so they will NEVER again come to even aid those countries in their own back yard. Cowards.
Germany will not honor NATO obligations because they don’t believe Iraq is a threat to them. Cowards

See: http://www.theworld.org/latesteditions/20030129.html
January 29, 2003

French / German interview (8:00)

Lisa Mullen of the The World interviews two ruling in France and Germany on their lack of support on Iraq:
Hervy Mariton, a member of the French national assembly in Paris, and Gerd Weisskirchen, a high ranking member Parliament for Germany's ruling SPD party.

Lisa Mullins to Hervy Mariton :

“For those American who recall the major role that the US played in both Bosnia and Kosovo two conflicts in Europe’s own back yard can you assure Americans that Europe is not reluctant now to use force under any circumstances.”

"I mean there may be those who think that Europe is more willing now to sit back and let the US do the toughest part of the job- that being waging the war.”

HervŽ Mariton- “It may the case."