Fuck the French

[igloo]

LIBERATION FORGOTTEN

By KENNETH R. TIMMERMAN

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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June 5, 2004 -- PRESIDENT Bush travels to France today for the 60th anniversary commemoration ceremony of the allied D-Day landing in Normandy after an extraordinarily emotive commemoration in Washington, D.C., of the long-awaited World War II memorial.

A very different reception awaits Bush in France this weekend, where the French are gearing up for their own 60th anniversary celebration. In Basse-Normandie, where the allied landings occurred, two vice presidents of the regional council announced they were refusing to take part in any ceremonies where Bush or Russian President Vladimir Putin were present. "What image will we send of Normandy to Arab and Islamic countries by receiving Bush and Putin with pomp and circumstance?" one of them asked the French daily, Le Monde.

What image will France send to Arab and Islamic countries? How about the message France sends to its own citizens, or to its former allies across the Atlantic, who left 66,000 of their fellow citizens behind while liberating France twice from tyranny in the 20th century?

"The paradox of June 6," opinined former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, a Socialist, is that Bush "is the exact opposite of the values that make us love America." Le Monde apparently agreed: "Should we even offer this podium to Bush, since he never hesitates to compare the struggle for freedom in Europe that was the battle of Normandy to today's war in Iraq?" a reporter editorialized.

While the U.S. press has been full of personal accounts of veterans of the D-Day landings over the past week, the only eye-witness report in Le Monde recounts the horrifying tale of the forgotten casualties of D-Day — the French civilians who perished in the saturation bombing of strategic towns in Normandy such as Lisieux and St. Lo. When the head of the local resistance cell met the first American soldiers, Le Monde's correspondent writes, it was by raising his "clenched fist."

A French Web site dedicated to the civilian victims of the Battle of Normandy (unicaen.fr/victimes_civiles/), notes that 13,900 French men, women and children perished in Normandy between April 1 and Sept. 30, 1944. It makes no mention of the 6,000 American soldiers who died on June 6, 1944, at Omaha Beach alone.

I first traveled to Normandy on June 6, 1974 — exactly 30 years after D-Day. I stayed in the homes of families who lost loves ones during the Allied bombings. Their memories were still raw, but reasoned. War is hell, France was occupied and the bombings were the price of freedom, they said. If Bush were able to talk to ordinary Frenchmen and women this weekend, I am convinced he would hear similar down-to-earth stories and common sense.

Instead, the French government officials who feed the French media are filling columns with bitter invective. Le Monde's Washington correspondent, Patrick Jarreau, told readers matter-of-factly that Bush was going to France for one purpose only, "to show Kerry is a liar" when he claims that Bush cannot talk to European leaders.

In a separate article, Le Monde noted that the Chirac government has "formed its own resistance group" at the United Nations to fight U.S. plans for Iraq. The French still are hoping that the U.S. and U.N.-sponsored interim government in Iraq will fail so they can return to their old ways of corrupt rule.

Despite these rumblings, a senior White House adviser engaged in preparing the summit meetings told me he was "cautiously optimistic" that the French might actually be helpful on Iraq.

"If we do reach an agreement with the French on how to move forward in Iraq, it will be because we've set the stage," he said. "If we don't, it's not because we haven't tried. A lot depends on our friend Jacques Chirac."

In recent weeks, this adviser says, the French have been making positive noises, "although we've been down that road before." The real test will be whether Chirac is willing to set aside his notion of "multi-polarity," that singular neo-Gaullist vision of France leading an anti-American bloc of European nations toward a historic break with America.

Fat chance.

President Chirac continues to huff and puff about American "domination" in Iraq. He talks about the need for "full Iraqi sovereignty," and demands that U.S. forces be placed under multinational or Iraqi control — a nonstarter for any American president, or so one would hope.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice sounded an optimistic note when she briefed reporters on the upcoming talks with Chirac on Tuesday. "Whatever differences we had in the past, that a free and prosperous and stable Iraq is a linchpin and a key to a stable Middle East is understood, and that people are looking for ways that they can help to get that done."

We Americans are such interminable optimists. The French know better, and they are biding their time, sharpening their knives and keeping their rifles oiled. President, en garde.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer at Insight and the author of "The French Betrayal of America."

[trigger55]

I don't like the French but that's just dumb propaganda.. according to everywhere else the French welcomed America.

[igloo]

June 04, 2004, 11:40 a.m.

Jour J

Were Germans the real victims of Germany?

Americans, as NRO's Cliff May told a skeptical BBC World Service presenter last week, are persistently forward-looking. Shrinks and analysts could give you reasons, but my hunch is that we look forward as a nation because we're driving the big global bus, and if we don't keep our eye on where we're going, we all take the big plunge.

Europeans, on the other hand, are passengers — and lousy ones. Think of a coachload of belligerent drunks, and you get the idea. Not only are they clueless about what lies ahead, but their preoccupations are entirely about what they think they've just seen. They forget that there are good reasons why they're not driving: most of which are scattered all over the road behind them.

Today, the president of the United States arrived in Rome, where, as the BBC reports, some 10,000 police and soldiers — four times the number of Italians serving in Iraq — are on duty to protect him from protestors who hate him, mostly because of Iraq, but also just because. The purpose of Bush's visit? To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Allied liberation of Rome from the Nazis — who had occupied the place after the Fascists elected by the Italians had been toppled.

His next stop? Europe's heart o' darkness — France, where it will take 42,000 soldiers and gendarmes to protect the president and other foreign leaders gathered to commemorate the D-Day landings at Normandy, which lead to the Allied liberation of France from the Nazis, who had occupied the place after the French capitulated. While the importance of the June 6 invasion of France is given a great deal of lip service in the local media, the truth is the French press has long been very conflicted over the significance of "Jour J." Acknowledging the debt to America and Britain has been a difficult process here for quite some time.

So maybe it's not surprising that the French have devised a number of ways of upholstering the harder truths of recent history. For TF1, and for many others, Normandy is nothing more than fodder for an American-made celluloid "myth" in which the central event may have taken place, but the heroics in which it is decorated by American movie-makers should be accepted with an indulgent smile. Le Monde took advantage of an arte television documentary showing D-Day from the German perspective to explain that the Allies in Normandy were slipshod and mismanaged because their leaders were inept, a point of view that suggests to the French a certain similarity to Iraq. For Libération, D-Day is just another metaphor: the front-page story is "Jour J pour les gays" — an item about gay marriage. When Saving Private Ryan was released in France, Le Monde dismissed it with a savagely contemptuous review.

Why all this angst about something so triumphant? As a report in l'Humanité — the Communist daily that has become a monument to the moral flexibility of the Left by being the only paper in France to have been published before, during, and after the occupation — suggests, for France, that the real war began with the Normandy invasion. It's the battle against American influence.

The French war with America is perhaps the only passive-aggressive war in human history; in the immediate aftermath of Normandy, it was fought with equal and allied fervor by both the Gaullists and the Communists, and it continues now as the animating principle behind French foreign policy and colors the way the French see Americans. It isn't accidental that Michael Moore and Jerry Lewis are France's two favorite American comics. And of course even a casual glance at the front page of Le Monde demonstrates the new moral math of modern Europe at work: Abu Ghraib=Buchenwald. Iraq=Vietnam. Bush=Hitler. Seeing a handful of bad American soldiers as symbols of American culture is the way racists think whenever they see a black gang terrorize a subway train in the south Bronx. In France, it's the way history is written, redacted, and then written again.

But rewriting history has its limits. When Gerhard Schroeder, the German chancellor and the architect of Berlin's economic failure, was invited to share the podium at the D-Day events, nobody in Europe thought much of it. In fact, it was hard to imagine Jacques Chirac hosting an international event without bringing along his Herr.

But last weekend, as the day approached, Schroeder and others began inflating the kind of idea that can only gain buoyancy in the artificial air of the new, improved Europe: The significance of D-Day for the Germans, he told RTL and others, was the liberation of all of Europe, including Germany, from totalitarianism. It's an idea that has been growing in popularity in Europe for some time. As this report in the Guardian shows, when you can adjust history to fit, you can even make Germans the victims of Germany, if you want.

So seeing D-Day as the beginning of German "liberation" had a certain excitement to it. The bizarre notion wafted like a mylar trinket above the heads of the press in Europe and America for day or two, as preparations unfolded for what is seen here as Bush's begging for European help in waging what he has successfully been able to characterize as an apologetic war. So, yes! Of course! Not only France, but Germany too had been liberated, according to this report in Libération, by the French resistance — and, okay, maybe with help from all those gum-chewing barbarians from America that l'Humanité was talking about. As I called around Paris on Monday, the idea seemed to have been greeted with a kind of awe. To a dark planet filled with the gloom of having to celebrate an American triumph, Liberated Germany was God's own light bulb. Why does war always have to have winners and losers? Can't we all be winners? "You must admit, it is a mature way of seeing things," one magazine writer told me.

But the shared wisdom of the press is always on the roll, like loose marbles in a big box, and by the next day, the constantly contorting, morphing understanding of those with whom I talked had begun to change: Maybe it was going a little overboard to give Germans the status of war victims, after all. The difference seemed to be John Vinocur's "Politicus" column that ran in Tuesday's International Herald Tribune, and which quickly became a topic of conversation in Paris, and, I'm sure, elsewhere. Vinocur politely suggested that when it came to Germany, maybe "liberation" was a concept that had been dragged into a rhetorical alley and mugged:

Specifically, there is basic evidence that it is historically inaccurate....If the idea of Germany's liberation, or its start, is superimposed on the period from June 6, 1944, to the Nazi capitulation, then it involves 11 months when German armies fought the Allies with what military historians have described as extraordinary fury, when American, British and Soviet forces suffered scores of thousands of casualties, when no trace of a broad German uprising against Hitler occurred, and when hundreds of thousands of Jews all over Europe continued to be sent to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps — a last convoy leaving Paris on Aug. 17, eight days before the city's occupiers were defeated...

Clearly, this is not a movement consciously aimed at minimalizing Nazi crimes as the mark of ultimate bestiality. But it does involve an inroad into history, in which a modern generation seems to be finding comfort in a positive word — "liberation" — that effectively raises the status of the great mass of Germans in 1944 and '45 to that of the few German Social Democrats, resistance fighters and gays actually freed from concentration camps like Dachau near Munich.

It's certainly not the first time Vinocur has taken aim at this kind of Franco-German goofiness and the IHT may carry a follow-up Vinocur column to coincide with the D-Day events; check over the weekend or on Monday to see.

Tuesday night, I went to dinner with friends. Of the four of them, three were carrying that day's IHT and the conversation centered on Vinocur's column. And the next day, at dinner at Chez Georges with a French publishing executive, the observations in Vinocur's column were the main course: "I was so glad to see it," said the publisher. "He took an idea that had been just sitting there, ignored by everyone, ran right over it and killed it."

ITEMS

If Bush is going to the U.N., it must be election day in France. It's weird how the timing always works out with this, but the only reliable electioneering tactic available to either Chirac or Schroeder is playing the anti-U.S. card at the U.N. Hence, the current round of negotiations concerning the American-backed Security Council resolution on Iraq will be made much more difficult by the proximity of the June elections for the European parliament. The EuroPress is as obsessed with these elections as the bureaucracy builders in Brussels are. Average Europeans, according to the IHT, just don't care. This flabbergasts Polly Toynbee, who writes in the Guardian that she cannot comprehend why the disgusting unwashed are, for some mystifying reason, unmoved by elections that may well result in the huge, vaporous, cloud of fat-filled gas emanating from Brussels congealing and descending on them like yet another layer of lard-like "government." She thinks they should rush out and embrace the glutinous mass of statutes, taxes, and scams that represent the very best of modern European political thought. It isn't as though voters are being given much to vote for, though: Most of the political parties vying for seats in the European parliament are on the run from the proposed EU constitution.

Kyoto, mon amour. The bizarre fascination many Europeans have with the Kyoto protocol every now and then comes head-first against the bridge abutment of reality. As the EU Observer sadly notes, neither European companies nor European governments are even close to hitting their much-sanctified Kyoto targets. Like the stability pact and much else that ornaments European posturing, the Kyoto accord is just another slogan, this one used to bash around American environmental policies. I was thinking this, by the way, as I walked along a quiet French country lane where the septics and manure pits of the nearby farms emptied into a smelly roadside ditch that drained into the River Lys — near which was posted "Poison." Maybe it was a road walked previously by Vladimir Putin. After negotiating some concessions from the EU for itself, Putin took a look at France and decided to ratify Kyoto, too.

Another invasion. Normandy, be damned. A recent state visit and a swarm of related exhibits, TV shows, department-store sales, joint military exercises, and street decorations all celebrated France's love of all things Chinoise — including, reports Eursoc, an ardent desire to make sure China has more weapons than it has now.

[normalnoises]

Ambroise Paré (1510-1590): surgical instruments

Blaise Pascal: mechanical calculator (1642)

Metric system, proposed by Gabriel Mouton in 1670, worked out by the French Academy of Sciences in 1790

Nicolas Joseph Cugnot: steam-driven car (1769)

George Louis Lesage used a single wire system to telegraph a message (1774)

Joseph M.Jacquard - first industrially applicable automatic loom (late 18th century)

Montgolfier (Joseph and Etienne): the hot-air balloon (1783)

Louis Lenormand: the parachute (1783)

Jean Baptiste Meusnier: lighter-than-air dirigible developed (1785)

Claude Chappe: optical system telegraph (1791)

Nicolas Appert - invented our canning process involving bactericide by boiling (1810)

René T.H. Laennec - invented the stethoscope (1816)

Joseph L. Gay-Lussac (1778-1850), chemist: the hydrometer and alcoholometer

Jean-François Champollion - first deciphered the Rosetta Stone(1822)

Louis Braille: printed language for the blind (1829)

Joseph N.Niepce: the principle of the photographic process (1826)

Xavier Progin (1833): a machine that used separate type bars for each letter or symbol that were activated by separate lever keys (forerunner of typewriter)

Daguerre, Louis J. improved and patented photographic process (1839)

French physicist Jean Foucault: the gyroscope (1852)

Henri Deville: invented electrolysis to refine aluminum from bauxite (1852)

Henri Giffard, engineer: first successful steam-powered steerable airship (1852)

Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville: Phonautographe:1st machine to record sound (1857), with no playback

Raymond Gaston Planté: the lead-acid battery (1860)

Rouquayrol and Denayrouse: hard-hat deep-sea diving (1865)

Pierre Lallement: rotary-pedal bicycle (1865)

Frères Michaux: steam-driven bicycle (1868)

Chemist Mège Mouriés: margarine (1869)

Charles Cros (& Edison) simultaneously invented the phonograph (1877)

Lumière brothers: first movie camera (1895)

René Panhard & Emile Levassor: prototype for modern car (front engine, pedal clutch, 4 wheels, etc. - 1895)

Jean J.E. Lenoir (1822-1900): the first practical internal combustion engine

French engineer and chemist Georges Claude: the neon lamp (1902)

Paul Cornu (1907): short flight of first helicopter prototype

Edouard Benedictus: the process for making laminated safety glass (1909)

Henri-M. Coanda: turbine engine airplane (1910)

George de Mestral: the hook and loop fabric fastener system, Velcro (1941)

Emile Gagnan and Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau: "Aqua Lung" for scuba diving (1943)

Arthur Granjean: Etch-A-Sketch [toy] in 1958

François Gernelle: the first non-kit computer based on a microprocessor (1973)

Philippe Kahn: the software or operating system for the above microcomputer

Roland Moreno: the concept of installing silicon chip computer memory on a plastic card (1974)

French launch Minitel (1980), first major public interactive computer network

Robert Cailliau and Jean-François Groff, Swiss francophone co-inventors of the WWW with Tim Berners-Lee (1992)

ATM asynchronous transfer mode - high-speed internet (not sure of details)

[xpyrate]

I don't even need to read this bullshit ... i smelled it a mile away ...

anywaY ... hmmm ... it's entitled "LIBERATION FORGOTTEN" ... igloo .... remember reading in your history books about a "little skirmish" called the "Revolutionary War"? lmao ... didn't think so

[normalnoises]

Really... If it wasn't for the French we'd be flying the Union Jack.

[daprofessional]

Really... If it wasn't for the French we'd be flying the Union Jack.

and if it wasn't for the Russians and the Americans, the French would be speaking German.

[normalnoises]

And if it wasn't for the french inventors, the US would not have an armored division, jeeps, helicopters, planes, parachutes, etc... Because if it wasn't for these french inventions we most certainly would be speaking german..... japanese.... korean.... vietnamese.... Arabic.....

And if it wasn't for the french invention of the WWW (world wide web) you would not have been able to post your usual moronic vomit on clubplanet.com

Think before you open your racially motivated cunt wide. You only stuck your own dick in it this time moron.

[daprofessional]

Think before you open your racially motivated cunt wide. You only stuck your own dick in it this time moron.

make all the stupid claims you want but refrain from calling anybody a racist you antisemetic hippie fuck.

and no country that speaks or spoke arabic, korean, or vietnamese ever posed a serious threat of invading us.

[normalnoises]

make all the stupid claims you want but refrain from calling anybody a racist you antisemetic hippie fuck.

Then don't call me a hippie fuck and I won't call you a racist moron.

and no country that speaks or spoke arabic, korean, or vietnamese ever posed a serious threat of invading us.

Absolutely. But still, imagine what could've happened if the US military did not have what they have now if it wasn't for the french? Just imagine what would become of us in Iraq without these inventions. SOmething to think about.

[howardstone]

FUCK THE FRENCH!

Those smelly no deodorant wearing; cheese eating; slimey no good for nothing pastry eating, funny looking hat wearing cowards. Now if you can excuse me I have to eat my hamburger and FREEDOM fries, thank you for your kind ear.

AMERICAN

[normalnoises]

FUCK THE FRENCH!

Those smelly no deodorant wearing; cheese eating; slimey no good for nothing pastry eating, funny looking hat wearing cowards. Now if you can excuse me I have to eat my hamburger and FREEDOM fries, thank you for your kind ear.

AMERICAN

Choke on your "freedom" fries and die.......... hopefully. RACIST PIG!

[daprofessional]

Choke on your "freedom" fries and die.......... hopefully. RACIST PIG!

stop calling people racist you antisemitic hypocrite.

[normalnoises]

stop calling people racist you antisemitic hypocrite.

Spoken like a true nazi.

RACIST

[daprofessional]

honestly, all insults and shit aside, what type of sense does that make?

you call him a racist, i call you on your own racist beliefs and you call me a nazi?! You hate jews, so how can you call out others for their alleged prejudice if you exhibit yours so freely?

[mrmatas2277]

you call him a racist, i call you on your own racist beliefs and you call me a nazi?! You hate jews, so how can you call out others for their alleged prejudice if you exhibit yours so freely?

bro dont sweat it...normalnoises is our "special" member...he prob. forgot to take his zoloft today...

[igloo]

bro dont sweat it...normalnoises is our "special" member...he prob. forgot to take his zoloft today...

Exactly...just ignore this genetic defect

[mrmatas2277]

back to the subject "Fuck the French"...Chirac now will NOT be showing up to the national funeral of Reagan...i tell ya, these French politicians are class acts...

[clintron]

ya man... let fuck the french.... i ana bag a french chick and give her the houdini.....

[howardstone]

Choke on your "freedom" fries and die.......... hopefully. RACIST PIG!

YOUR MOTHER!

NOW GO BACK TO THE DIRT HOLE YOU CAME FROM

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

ps: FUCK THE FRENCH!

[howardstone]

the french

[durrrty]

FUCK THE FRENCH!

GOD BLESS THE U.S.A!!

If you don't like it here, then move to another Country!!!

[pattbateman]

Ambroise Paré (1510-1590): surgical instruments

Blaise Pascal: mechanical calculator (1642)

Metric system, proposed by Gabriel Mouton in 1670, worked out by the French Academy of Sciences in 1790

Nicolas Joseph Cugnot: steam-driven car (1769)

George Louis Lesage used a single wire system to telegraph a message (1774)

Joseph M.Jacquard - first industrially applicable automatic loom (late 18th century)

Montgolfier (Joseph and Etienne): the hot-air balloon (1783)

Louis Lenormand: the parachute (1783)

Jean Baptiste Meusnier: lighter-than-air dirigible developed (1785)

Claude Chappe: optical system telegraph (1791)

Nicolas Appert - invented our canning process involving bactericide by boiling (1810)

René T.H. Laennec - invented the stethoscope (1816)

Joseph L. Gay-Lussac (1778-1850), chemist: the hydrometer and alcoholometer

Jean-François Champollion - first deciphered the Rosetta Stone(1822)

Louis Braille: printed language for the blind (1829)

Joseph N.Niepce: the principle of the photographic process (1826)

Xavier Progin (1833): a machine that used separate type bars for each letter or symbol that were activated by separate lever keys (forerunner of typewriter)

Daguerre, Louis J. improved and patented photographic process (1839)

French physicist Jean Foucault: the gyroscope (1852)

Henri Deville: invented electrolysis to refine aluminum from bauxite (1852)

Henri Giffard, engineer: first successful steam-powered steerable airship (1852)

Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville: Phonautographe:1st machine to record sound (1857), with no playback

Raymond Gaston Planté: the lead-acid battery (1860)

Rouquayrol and Denayrouse: hard-hat deep-sea diving (1865)

Pierre Lallement: rotary-pedal bicycle (1865)

Frères Michaux: steam-driven bicycle (1868)

Chemist Mège Mouriés: margarine (1869)

Charles Cros (& Edison) simultaneously invented the phonograph (1877)

Lumière brothers: first movie camera (1895)

René Panhard & Emile Levassor: prototype for modern car (front engine, pedal clutch, 4 wheels, etc. - 1895)

Jean J.E. Lenoir (1822-1900): the first practical internal combustion engine

French engineer and chemist Georges Claude: the neon lamp (1902)

Paul Cornu (1907): short flight of first helicopter prototype

Edouard Benedictus: the process for making laminated safety glass (1909)

Henri-M. Coanda: turbine engine airplane (1910)

George de Mestral: the hook and loop fabric fastener system, Velcro (1941)

Emile Gagnan and Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau: "Aqua Lung" for scuba diving (1943)

Arthur Granjean: Etch-A-Sketch [toy] in 1958

François Gernelle: the first non-kit computer based on a microprocessor (1973)

Philippe Kahn: the software or operating system for the above microcomputer

Roland Moreno: the concept of installing silicon chip computer memory on a plastic card (1974)

French launch Minitel (1980), first major public interactive computer network

Robert Cailliau and Jean-François Groff, Swiss francophone co-inventors of the WWW with Tim Berners-Lee (1992)

ATM asynchronous transfer mode - high-speed internet (not sure of details)

fuck the french we would of figured all this out anyways!

if they were so smart they should of built the nuclear bomb before we did

[jtk4]

yeah if it wasn't for the french helping us become free from england we would all be speaking .........ahh english.

lETS NOT HATE ALL THE FRENCH ONLY THE ONES THAT HATE US, WAIT THATS ALL THE FRENCH

[pattbateman]

im down with that