On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 07:04 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 09:54:21PM +0100, Adam Back wrote:
Similar vein is the apparent overnight animosity towards the French who happened to take a different view. It all comes down to this same blind following of leaders, and Bush's inane statements such as "if
I think I'd largely agree with you about the bias in many news outlets.
But as for the French: Well, a lot of Americans just don't like the French, and it has nothing to do with Bush. I took a bottle of French hard apple cider with me to a family gathering over Easter and got a round of boos for it, even though that part of the family is pretty evenly divided between GOP/Dems.
I fully agree. Though I was, and am, against the war on grounds often discussed here, the French have once again behaved in a tacky way. Besides their ulterior motives (loans to Saddam, oil deals, want a piece of the pie), they are now behaving about as they behaved in 1940. "How many men does it take to defend Paris?" "Nobody knows...it's never been tried." "Why are there trees planted along the Champs-Elysee?" "So the Germans can march in the shade." "One million like-new rifles for sale...only been dropped once." The right-wing columnist Jonathan Goldberg dubbed them "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" several years ago, long before this latest matter. Has a great cadence, and it's accurate. Ever wonder why there are virtually no French folks on this list? A few Belgians, and the one guy who broke one of the crypto challenges in the mid-90s, though he was never much of a commentator on the list per se. But essentially zero French input. I was once invited to give a talk to "Imagina," a French-affiliated conference and trade show held in a ritzy (literally) hotel in Monte Carlo. I was on a panel with David Chaum and also gave a separate talk. I had a few days to talk to my French hosts and panel arrangers, and also to some French journalists. They were fascinated with the postmodern, deconstructionist, philosophical implications of crypto anarchy...and they loved throwing around references to Saussure, Foucault, and various other French lit-crit figures, but the thought of actually programming computers or building technology was, apparently, horrifying to them. No wonder there are no longer any well-known French computer companies...Matra has faded, Thompsen CSF is doing most of its real work in its affiliates and owned companies elsewhere. Finally, a personal story. I lived for more than a year on the French Riviera, in the town of Villefranche sur Mer, between Nice and Monte Carlo. A great experience. The beautiful Cap Ferrat, home to Somerset Maugham, David Niven, and, later, the Rolling Stones, was visible from my bedroom window. But the French people were describable with only one word: ingrates. More than a few times we had French people lecture us on what racists the Americans were...this even as their Algerian problem was all around us. And one old French lady said "We should take all of the Americans out in a boat and sink it." This was in 1964, just one generation after the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives to liberate France and the rest of continental Europe. This was after the French had put up only token military resistance when the Germans rolled across their borders in 1940. American soldiers fought and died where the French would not. (Yeah, I know, they were all in "Le Resistance." Fatuous nonsense.) This is probably why so many French hated the Americans so much, in a way the Germans and Austrians and Italians did not. The Americans defeated the Axis fair and square and the Germans knew this. They were occupied by the conquering force for several years and moved on with their lives, restarting their once-impressive economy and returning to the forefront of nations. Except for the Nazi atrocities, with a fair amount of honor left. The French, on the other hand, showed no honor. And so they resented and despised the Americans for doing what they themselves were unwilling to do. Fuck them. Again, I was and still am against "foreign entanglements" and "pre-emptive wars," but if there's one good thing that comes out of this war it's that the French are getting their comeuppance. Not only are their loans to Iraq never likely to be repaid, but they are clearly utterly out in the cold on the "rebuilding of Iraq" and on future oil deals. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys are now wining [SIC] that they should be "included" in the aftermath of the war, that they should at least be allow to send in literary theorists to explain the existential significance of the war for the Iraqi people. --Tim May