25 Comments

1. Barbara Skolaut:

“like the Arabs, [the French] have a deep sense of grievance at “history gone wrong.”"

Brother, that is the most succinct summation of both the Phrench and the Arabs I’ve ever seen.

I think I’ll steal it. ;-p

Mar 24, 2006 - 9:34 pm 2. Charlie (Colorado):

I dunno about the fried moles, though.

Still, I like snails.

Mar 24, 2006 - 9:34 pm 3. Kevin Peters:

Roger:

The governments of Europe have been telling their citizens for decades that if you give us your money we will provide everything for you. They have been saying that it is the right of every citizen to have a job and that the state will guarantee you that the right will be carried out. So when the model begins to break down they should not be suprised when the riots break out when that right is threatened in any fashion. I am sure that old Vil is shaking his head and saying “But this will improve your employment posssibilities, it will be a benifit to you.” He is missing the point. These kids have been spoonfed since birth that the reponsibility for giving them work that they like is the states responsibility and that it is a human right for everyone, not an individual reponsibility. You can’t preach one thing for decades and then expect the students to adjust to the notion that there is a level of job performance required and if it is not met one might get canned. “Screw that. I have a right to that job and if you try to adjust my bennies one penny there will be hell to pay” If you grow up with a nanny the thought of wiping your own butt is scary. Our country has some major bills to pay down the road and there is plenty of head in the sand activity going on in our government halls but I will take my chances here.

Mar 24, 2006 - 11:49 pm 4. Former CNN Watcher:

The French ‘desperately need to recognize a) how badly they behaved before and during WW II, b) how much their current prosperity depended on American sacrifice and generosity, and c) how they may just be making the same mistakes all over again.

Instead, I was haunted by the remark of an French friend, ìThe French cannot forgive America for saving them twice.î It is in the world of lost honor and bitter shame, of envy and wounded pride that no good turn goes unpunished.’

Brilliant.

Mar 25, 2006 - 4:39 am 5. triticale:

Louis L’Amour, scribe of the American mindset, put it very succinctly.

You can’t grind grain with water that’s run down the hill.

Mar 25, 2006 - 5:17 am 6. Sandy P:

I don’t think it’s Americans, per se.

I think it’s Anglo-Saxons.

They’ve been fighting us for 1000 years and we beat them.

We just don’t happen to be across the channel anymore.

Mar 25, 2006 - 8:28 am 7. Pooh:

“Les enfants aussi”

French should be reserved for matters of national importance such as giving orders to French policeman to round up Jewish children and ship them to Auschwitz.

Mar 25, 2006 - 8:50 am 8. Buddy Larsen:

Pooh, don’t forget tho, that a lot of Frenchmen fought back against “the boxcars” — they deserve a word.

I swear, I’ve read some bleak writings in my life, but the “Augean Stables” selection purty near takes the cake. It certainly reflects on excessive national self-regard, something about the haughty, they have nowhere to go, no fallback position.

Charlie, re “I like snails”, didja hear about the snail who got mugged by the turtle? When the cops questioned him, he said “Well, it all happened so fast….”

Mar 25, 2006 - 9:49 am 9. Cynic:

I believe that the French still have not paid their World War One debt of money borrowed from America.
That memory is enough I suppose to make them hate you. Just to increase the hatred just think of the interest owing. Do the French use Pepto-B….?

” they have a deep sense of grievance at “history gone wrong.” ”

Unfortunately for the French history has been going wrong for a long time and, davka – that Jewish word to denote the sense of fate rubbing it in – they had to have those “culturally lacking” upstarts across the Atlantic to constantly remind them of their failures.
So much that they created the European Arab dialogue to create a pole of power to confront the US.
All they succeeded in was increasing dislike and hatred for those across the “pond” while screwing themselves, yet again.

Mar 25, 2006 - 10:02 am 10. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

“I believe that the French still have not paid their World War One debt of money borrowed from America”…I don’t know if they did or not, but they paid for WWI in other ways, including the loss of a substantial part of a generation. 1.3 million men were killed, and 4.2 million wounded, of whom many were permanantly disabled.

I don’t want to make any excuses for the Chirac’s of the world, but the truth about France’s tremendous losses in WWI should be respected.

Mar 25, 2006 - 11:13 am 11. Buddy Larsen:

Photon, there is a mention of that on today’s WSJ.

Mar 25, 2006 - 11:21 am 12. Yehudit:

“Pooh, don’t forget tho, that a lot of Frenchmen fought back against “the boxcars” — they deserve a word.”

Not as many as they like to believe or imply to others. And even the gentile partisans (French, Polish, ewhatever) refused to work with Jewish partisan groups. The Jewish groups had a much higher percentage of Nazis killed and trains derailed and factories blown up.

Mar 25, 2006 - 11:21 am 13. Yehudit:

The link to the whole series of essays on France is here.

If you thought that one was depressing . . . .

Mar 25, 2006 - 11:22 am 14. Buddy Larsen:

Yehudit, thanks (!). Did you ever see the French film “The Sorrow and the Pity” ? It’s from the 70s (if not the 60s) and augments what you said above about the numbers of anti-Nazis.

But my comment was toward those few anti-Nazis, that they must be remembered. Like, Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, names that Wretchard brought up about a month ago (scroll down two inches to “The Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew”). Wretchard’s post will bring you near tears, and Leo Marx’ code-poem to Szabo — who was executed by the Gestapo, by two men whose names exist in the links in the post — will finish the job.

Mar 25, 2006 - 11:45 am 15. Pooh:

“Pooh, don’t forget tho, that a lot of Frenchmen fought back against “the boxcars” — they deserve a word.”

The numbers fighting in the resistance were minimal. The numbers helping to save Jews were even fewer, for, as in much of the rest of occupied Europe, Jews were hated even more than the Nazis. It was the Jewish community which was largely responsible for the 75% of Jews living in France at the time of the invasion who were ultimately saved.

Jews in France (like Belgium, Holland and Norway) were: betrayed by French neighbours, rounded up on French orders by French policemen, taken to a French-run concentration camp, dispatched to Auschwitz on French trains (sealed cattle trucks with no food and water for up to six days) driven by French drivers.

Jews escaping France for Italy invariably received a warm embrace from the Italian police who did much to help them evade capture. This in Fascist Italy.

After the war many of the very worst French war criminals were protected at the highest levels of the French government for many decades.

Drancy

“More than 12800 (3031 men, 5802 women and 4051 children aged between 2 and 12) were transferred to the Velodrome d’Hiver. The children were kept there for 5 miserable days without any food or medical care and then they were transferred to Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande or Pithiviers. The children were separated from their parents by the French police immediately after their arrival in Drancy. The parents were transported to Auschwitz and gassed. The children stayed sometimes weeks in Drancy, without any proper care or adequate food. Several babies and very young children died in Drancy due to the lack of care and the brutality of the French guards. Finally, they were all transported to Auschwitz and gassed upon their arrival. More than 6000 Jewish children from all the regions of France were arrested and transported to their deaths between July 17th and September 30th, 1942.

There were several other camps like Drancy in France: Noe, Gurs, Recebedou, …

During more than 40 years, the French Government refused to admit the responsibility of the regime of Petain and the French police in the deportation of the French Jews. In 1995, the president Chirac has finally admitted the responsibility of the Vichy regime during a speech in memory of the victims of the “Grande Rafle”.”

More here:

Drancy Transit Camp

They talk about French honour. What honour can be left after the events outlined above?

Caught between the complete perfidy of the British and the real wickedness of nations like France, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Holland and the rest what chance did the Jews of Europe have?

Mar 25, 2006 - 1:18 pm 16. beautifulatrocities:

The French-Arab connection goes back over a century, to France’s Arab colonies. Post WWII, de Galle sought to build a French-Arab axis to rival the British – US alliance (a move supported by many ex-Vichy antisemites). And France led the way in truckling to the Arab regimes’ demonizing of Israel & fawning over Yassir Arafat to secure cheap sources of oil, workers, & to triangulate against the US.

And Paris has always been very anti-semitic; there’s no difference between Nazi ideology that Jews were the source of the world’s problems, & the current depraved intellectual current that Israel is the source of all the world’s problems, a position fomented by Arabs & eagerly promulgated by European elites.

Now, however, the tail is wagging the dog, & France’s kowtowing to Islam looks more like dhimmitude in exchange for (temporary) exemption from Muslim terror.

All this chronicled in Eurabia by Bat Ye’or

Mar 25, 2006 - 1:23 pm 17. Buddy Larsen:

It’s literally impossible to hold in mind the thought of European culture and the mid 20th century expression of it.

Mar 25, 2006 - 2:34 pm 18. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

Buddy Larsen, glad you mentioned Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan: two women who very definitely deserve to be remembered. One minor clarification: Leo Marks originally wrote the poem for his then-girlfriend, who was killed in a plane crash. He gave it to Violette after she was having trouble memorizing her original poem-code.

Mar 25, 2006 - 4:09 pm 19. Kevin Peters:

Roger:
Ah, poor pathetic Chirac. Instead of taking the actions that are required to earn respect and admiration from the world community he picks puny and childish symbolic protests to give the impression of strength. Did he threaten to hold his breath too?

Mar 25, 2006 - 4:15 pm 20. beautifulatrocities:

Noor Khan aka Madeleine was actually born in the Kremlin in 1914, her father a Sufi mystic invited to Russia by Rasputin. They wisely fled to England before the revolution, & later moved to Paris. When the Nazis overran France, she escaped on the last boat evacuating British subjects, then returned to France secretly in 1943 as a RAF spy. She was very brave, altho she was so exotic she was probably not a great choice for a spy

Mar 25, 2006 - 4:39 pm 21. Buddy Larsen:

She was certainly a great choice for at least the one spy attribute — not talking:

The princess was taken to Germany and imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement (she was considered dangerous and uncooperative). Inayat Khan continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives.

On 11 September 1944, Noor Inayat Khan, along with three other SOE agents, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment, were moved to Dachau Concentration Camp. The other three women were lined up and forced to kneel, after which each was executed by a single shot to the head. Noor was shackled in chains for months and beaten until she was a bloody mess and then shot. Her last word was “LibertÈ.”

Brave, brave women.

Mar 25, 2006 - 6:04 pm 22. Cynic:

photoncourier.blogspot.com

“… but the truth about France’s tremendous losses in WWI should be respected. ”

One respects the sacrifice of the individuals but not French haughtiness, arrogance that resulted in those terrible losses.
The total stupidity on the part of the Officer Corps is a reflection of the attitude of the French “Elite” which has led to the morass they find themselves in.
I don’t know if there was a French attempt to understand what really happened in the Great War but “The Donkeys” was a British attempt at explaining.

Roger’s Apropos reminds me of a discussion some 30 odd years ago about research papers and why some French research was simply “reinventing the wheel”.
The answer was revealed by showing that the French demanded that the foreign research be submitted in French whereas in other countries papers in all languages were received and appropriately translated for faculty members.

Mar 26, 2006 - 2:48 am 23. ganzo azul:

I saw Michael Haneke’s Cache yesterday afternoon. It’s an unnerving portrait of France’s bien-pensants, you see their fear, guilt, denial, obstinacy, rationalizations, passiveness. Like the overt racism portrayed in Crash, I’d like to believe that Cache reflects an introspection and cultural shift that is well underway in France.

Mar 26, 2006 - 8:35 am 24. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

cynic…but wasn’t arrogance and stupidity characteristic of *all* the WWI high commands? (with the possible exception of the American, who had had the opportunity of observing the others for several years)

Mar 26, 2006 - 9:38 am 25. david72:

Sad for the Jews of France but nothing new. The Jewish communityóeven here in America in more traditional corners–is the only place where passing reference to flight capital and such doesnít raise eyebrows. Too bad Churchill isnít alive to intone that the lights are going out all over Europe.

I do not mean to belittle the troubles of my brothers and sisters in France, a community that long predates many of those who call themselves Gaulois. (French scholars turn to the writings of the ancient rabbis of Provence to read descriptions of how their beloved French language was pronounced a thousand years ago.) But Iím not one for gívaltism. My grandparents uncles and cousinsóthose who survivedóhad no opportunity to make arrangements. They left everything behind.

That the Gaulois are more than happy to see their Hebrew neighbors depart is more a tragedy for them than for the departing Hebrews. These are, after all, the last of their kind in France. Their more realistic, less Francophile brethren have been leaving for years. The Hebrews who remain are the fools who truly love France. As that fool in French uniform Dryfus once loved her.

But when these Jews will be settling into new lives in Montreal, and elsewhere where freedomís light yet burns, the Gaulois will be studying Sharia 101 in madrassa reeducation camps.

The debate over immigration now roiling congress may soon take an ominous turn. Any day now, Frenchmen in their millions will notice that the disgusting albeit not uninteresting stench wafting up from the wine cellar appears to have left the canary cold and stiff at the bottom of its cage. Can the United States handle the human tsunami that follows? Mass migration from Europe?

Strategically speaking, can we Americans allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by a huge, reflexively dependent, enterprise and entrepreneurship averse refugee horde brought to our shores only for lack of courage and commitment to democracy?

Our best bet is to work out an agreement with Canada and Australia to immediately suspend immigration from Europe. If Muslim bombs, fires, torture and murder canít rouse the Europeans, maybe pulling in the welcome mat will.

We bore the cost of Europeís defense for the entire twentieth century. To have civilized Europeans cave to Twelfth Century primitives without a fight on the assumption they can eventually jump ship for America and Australia is not acceptable. We have no shortage of socially and morally corrosive weaklings of our own and our workers donít need competition from a spineless, unambitious socialist mob of riot-prone foreigners.

Mar 26, 2006 - 2:00 pm

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