Miquelon.org – The Fighting French

New rule: no more whining about the French. At least they're standing up to the Bush administration, which is more than I can say for the Democrats.

Of course, many Frenchmen did stand up to the Nazis. Over 100,000 of them died before the U.S. ever got into the war. And speaking of forgetting things, why have the tales of the heroic French resistance gone down the memory hole?

"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is much in vogue in neo- conservative circles. This amusing jape will seem especially risible to those who remember the 1.4 million French soldiers who died defending their nation in World War I.

No other national or ethnic group appears to get the same continually negative treatment in print media reserved for France and the French, with the possible exception of Arabs or Palestinians, and even there, the treatment is not so much cultural as political, linked to a specific context or event.If one were to substitute, for example, "Mexican" or "Japanese" or "Indian" for "French", what would reader reaction be?".

One reason why journalists single out the French is just because they can: the French happen to be one of the few European nationalities who don't have an American constituency to look out for their interests.

In 1944, as a reprisal for a Resistance attack, SS troops murdered 642 residents of tiny Oradour-sur-Glane, including 190 children and several Jews the villagers were sheltering. Only two residents survived, a woman and an eight-year-old boy. No American, not even a war veteran like Rooney, has the right to make easy judgments about what happened in occupied France.

To be sure, France owed America a nice thank-you card for D-Day. But we owe them a more. Without France, the United States wouldn't even exist--it would still be a British colony.

I surely hope that those Americans who renamed French fries into freedom fries, and those Americans who poured perfectly good French wines down American drains, I hope that they realise what foolishness that was.

We didn't come to Europe to save the the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to to Europe to do anyone any favors. We came to Europe because we in America were threatened by a hostile, aggressive and very dangerous power.

France helped us out of one of the greatest jams we were ever in. During the American revolution, when almost the entire world stood by in "non intervention" or was against us, it was France who was our greatest ally and benefactor.

Don't they realize that what we did in World War II makes them indebted to us forever? This is similar to the mother who has a perpetual trump card: I went through labor for you, and this is the way you repay me?

Effective realiation can only be to French pride, by a great, successful military/diplomatic operation. And French pride is huge, and vulnerable.

In the years since our decision to go to war in Iraq, resisted by our old allies, there’s been a chauvinistic stupidity about the value of other countries.You know, the French fries, the freedom fries, the attacks on old Europe

You remember France, it's the country that financed the American Revolution...OK, it was in their self-interest, but still, they made it happen. Let's face it: without the French there would be no America...in other words, without them, there is no us. Sorry, but c'est la vie...

They say this other guy is unpatriotic, or this guy likes French people. That’s what they said about Kerry (…) They try to make it out like Democrats aren’t tough enough, aren’t macho enough. It’s the same strategy.

Miquelon.org, France's Maginot Line on the web.