Tony Parsons explains in The Mirror (UK) that he doesn't think "the British have it in them to truly hate the French... but it is different for Americans." As usual, Tony is on to something. Our distrust of France is building with each new revelation of duplicity by our sometime ally. GWB doesn't seem to me to be the kind of man who forgets treachery easily - and that's a good thing.
America has always distrusted France. Americans have found the French arrogant - which is a lot like George Best disapproving of someone because of their drinking habits. After the war with Iraq, that distrust has curdled into something much more vehement. In America today, there is a genuine hatred of France and the French, and it means that the Western alliance will never be the same again.
Americans feel that, only a generation ago, they set France free. This is true, of course - there are 75,000 American men and boys buried in European graves, and they are never given the respect they deserve. The French were also set free by the Russians destroying the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad, and by the British, who faced down Nazism alone.
But the British and the Russians were fighting for their national survival. The liberation of France was a happy by-product of that battle. To Americans, who never had German bombs dropping on their cities, or German troops swaggering through their streets, the liberation of France looks more like a hugely costly act of charity. And are les bastards grateful? Non, monsieur.
"Why should we expect the French to help us get Saddam out of Iraq?" asked one American. "They didn't even help us to get Hitler out of France."
In America there is a massively popular website called Francestinks. com. As you would expect, it contains plenty of French jokes - "the only way the French were going in was if we told them we'd discovered truffles in Iraq" - but the overall tone is deadly serious. Americans died for a country that is ungrateful, decadent and yellow to the core.
Posted by Alan at April 28, 2003 09:12 PM