The Recent Tussle Between France and America, and Why Biden, as Usual, seems Cognitively Challenged
By
David Gottfried
American and France are having one of their periodic tussles. Sometimes they are amusing, as when Marth Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general, said that Julia Child ought to stop cooking fancy French food and should make patriotic Southern Fried Chicken. Sometimes they are dramatic, as when frantic French financiers hysterically demanded that Fort Knox give them gold bullion for dollar bills because they were convinced that the Vietnam War would lead to the imminent ruination of the dollar.
The current spat was sparked by America’s plan to sell Australia submarines. The French are enraged because America has encroached on the French deal to sell subs to Australia. (Of course, Vladimir Lenin told us that the capitalistic nations would eventually drag themselves into the dustbin of history by competing over markets until they scratched each other’s eyes out.)
Apparently, Joe Biden is feeling self-righteously furious about the French, believing that they have no right to get angry at us:
“Mr. Biden is particularly sensitive on the question of American 20th-century sacrifice for France in two world wars and France’s prickliness over its independence within the NATO alliance.”
The New York ti8mes, September 16, 2021.
Biden’s anger is reminiscent of other times when Americans get mad at the French. Americans, utter dunces at world history, have come to the conclusion that the French, with their love of painting and cuisine and fashion, are just a bunch of highly educated sissies who can’t fight, that America has saved their butt every time and that France should just get on its knees and suck off the phallically-shaped state of Florida.
(Needless to say, Biden, like most Americans, don’t know that Napolean’s armies conquered Moscow, streamed into Egypt and constituted the first Western mission to bring the enlightenment to the Levant, and that almost a million Frenchmen were killed at Verdun, in World War One)
Yes, Mr. Slow Poke Joe Biden, it is true, Americans did fight the Germans in World Wars One and Two. But now sit down, Joe, you graying boy with the emotional maturity of a seven-year-old and the incipient senility of a seventy-year-old, and try to learn something beyond the elementary school curriculum of whatever hometown it is that you constantly eulogize in the course of affecting a working-class background and temperament.
Although America fought Germany, it often behaves as if it had wished it had been allied with Germany against France:
A) Toward the close of 1942, American troops landed on Northwest Africa and captured territory that had been under the control of Vichy France. Vichy France was a traitorous nation, a perversion of France that collaborated with the Nazis. It sent troops to the Eastern front, to attack the Soviet Union, and it eagerly put Jews on trains headed for the camps.
In any event, after the United States had taken Northwest Africa from the Vichy French, the Americans decided to let Vichy control and govern French Africa. Obviously, since the Vichy French were French, they were better able than Americans to administer a nation that had been French. However, there were other Frenchmen to choose from. The Americans could have made common cause with either the Communists, and could have let the Communists govern French Africa, or the Americans could have linked arms with non-Communist followers of Charles De Gaulle. Instead, the Americans rejected all of the Free French whether they were communist or non-communist. America implicitly rejected the very terms of its alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
Do my unschooled, silly countrymen really have to wonder why so many Frenchmen have a critical and scathingly jaundiced view of Americans. We Americans claim that we are so brave and strong, and so unlike the wimpy and effete French, but to avoid fighting the Vichy French we decided to let the Vichy French remain in control. If one were to take the US position, in Northwest Africa, to its logical conclusion, one would contend that to avoid fighting the Nazis we should have let the Nazis remain in control of Germany.
B) In 1966, the French leader, Charles De Gaulle, visited Moscow, sounded neutral insofar as America’s feud with the Soviet Union was concerned, and suggested France become more independent of the United States. America, merrily and characteristically oblivious to what had prompted De Gaulle, a fierce anti-communist, to snuggle up to the Soviets, said the sort of junk that Biden spouts: “Dem no good fairy Frenchies don’t appreciate us saving their ass when the Huns were on their back.”
However, De Gaulle went to Moscow because he was furious at America for betraying our World War Two allies, the French, British and Russians. At the time, America was trying to induce Poland and the Soviet Union to return territory to Germany, See The New York Times, June 21, 1966.
America was keen on doing the sort of stuff the West had done between World War One and World War Two, namely the sort of stuff that energized Germany.
Although most uneducated Americans are convinced that World War Two came about because the Treaty of Versailles was, allegedly, far too harsh on the Germans, almost all Americans don’t know how LOCARNO, RAPPALLO AND THE DAWES PLAN completely removed whatever sting Versailles may have inflicted on Germany.
Locarno was a miserable accord that Lyndon Johnson tried to revive from the dead ala Dr. Frankenstein trying to breathe life into a monster.
At Locarno, supposedly vindictive Britain and France agreed that Germany was free to revise her eastern boundaries to obtain territory belonging to Poland, the Baltic States and Russia. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson was trying to do the very same thing that Locarno attempted to do, namely enlarge Germany at the expense of the beleaguered Slavs. Lyndon Johnson, of course, needed more support for his murderous, imperialist war in Vietnam (hundreds of thousands of Indochinese civilians were killed by our napalm, our anti-personnel weapons, our rendezvous with Hitlerism), the British and the French were aghast at our criminal East Asian foreign policy, and America sought help from the most reliable anti communists on the planet: The Nazis. (Yeah, I know that Germans and Nazis are not the same thing, but the overlap is as great as the overlap between the Republican Party and the supporters of Donald Trump)
And so, Mr. Joe Biden, a regular working guy whom his fellow Senators called the Senator from Mastercard, the French are well aware that the Americans fought the Germans. They’re just sick and tired of the American nostalgia for the Nazis. Hell, America was dumb enough to create a situation comedy, known as “Hogan’s Heroes,” which made light of being in a Nazi POW camp. Go tell it to the guys slaughtered at Malmedy.