Miquelon.org – The Fighting French

According to a leaked diplomatic cable, UMP leader Bernard Accoyer raised the issue of Anti-French sentiment in the United States with American Embassy personnel in February 2005.

Accoyer indicated to his American counterparts that he continued to receive complaints from French constituents who live in the U.S. that instances of gratuitous rudeness motivated by Anti-French prejudice continue, as does dismissive public commentary and jokes. Accoyer insisted that the problem was not all that serious, but still unpleasant because unnecessary and unjustified. Accoyer accused his own fellow-citizens of not appropriately sympathizing with Americans.

A little movie by Cédric Villain. Available in English and in French. The most obvious of stereotypes we’ve been battling here for years is regrettably absent from this animation.

Lewis Black nailed it two weeks ago when he exclaimed emphatically that “Glenn Beck has Nazi Tourettes!”. Beck however, is not the only one who suffers such political maladies. Many of America’s right wing columnists also suffer from what I call OFSAS.

Obsessive French Surrender Analogy Syndrome (OFSAS) is what happens when your knowledge of world history stems from a select anti-French Jay Leno monologues, anti-French jokes from the Simpsons combined with the analytical refinement of a cement brick.

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“Defeated by the Nazis, but not disgraced – The German victory remains a victory, and the French loss, a loss. But what has happened over the past 70 years, particularly over the past 30, has amounted to a slow and meticulous reappraisal of what actually happened in May-June 1940. Today, current scholarship is in the process of dismantling the allegations that have so long supplied the comic with his bag of satirical jibes at France and the French. Slowly, the image of 100,000 Frenchmen with hands in the air is being replaced by the image of 123,000 gravestones” – Robert Young, professor emeritus of history, University of Winnipeg. Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 22, 2010