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French
fried
By Jim Lobe
 WASHINGTON -
You can't get French fries in the congressional
cafeterias any more; you have to order freedom fries.
Similarly, French toast is becoming hard to find, with
freedom toast catching on.
Some wags and
cartoonists are even suggesting that the French kiss may
also have to be renamed.
Bashing the French, a
favorite pastime for generations of red-blooded US
citizens, is back, and with a vengeance, provoked by
France's opposition to the President George W Bush's
eagerness to invade Iraq as the second step (Afghanistan
was first) toward establishing a unipolar world
dominated by a Lone Ranger Washington and his Anglo
Tontos, Britain and Australia.
This
French-flogging is not a new fad by any means. Despite
the fact that the country provided crucial military
backing for the American colonists in their war against
Britain for independence and then even emulated the new
country with a revolution of its own in 1789, the
relationship has always been a testy one.
Now it
appears just about as ornery as it has ever been, and
while there are amusing elements to the outrage of US
right-wingers, there is also growing concern that the
conflict between France and the Bush administration over
Iraq is doing permanent damage to the North
Atlantic-dominated multilateral system created after
World War II.
Right-wingers in Congress are
already preparing legislation designed to handicap
favored French wines in the US market, while Republican
lawmakers sputter about French arrogance and perfidy in
the face of good old American humility and honesty.
"They remind me of an aging movie actress in the
1940s who's still trying to dine out on her looks,"
Senator John McCain, a national hero as the leader of US
prisoners-of-war in Vietnam, said recently. "The cynical
role France is playing proves that you cannot be a great
nation unless you have great purpose, and they've lost
their purpose."
Meanwhile, the editorial and
opinion pages of US newspapers, especially the Wall
Street Journal and increasingly the Washington Post,
bristle with contempt for the French with almost daily
reminders of French failures of the past, notably its
appeasement of Nazi Germany over Czechoslovakia in 1938
and its subsequent surrender to and cooperation with the
Nazis under the Vichy government.
"France
pretends to great-power status but hasn't had it in 50
years," wrote Charles Krauthammer, the Post's
nationally-syndicated neo-conservative-in-chief, whose
views generally reflect those of the Pentagon hawks led
by deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
"It
was given its permanent seat on the Security Council to
preserve the fiction that heroic France was part of the
great anti-Nazi alliance rather than a country that
surrendered and collaborated," Krauthammer noted in a
column that called for Washington not only to create a
new UN Security Council that would marginalize the
French, but also to bar Paris from any role in a
post-war Iraq.
"We need to demonstrate that
there is a price to be paid for undermining the United
States on a matter of supreme national interest,"
declared the columnist in a typical assertion of
anti-Gallic self-righteousness.
The themes of
lost glory and Nazi collaboration, which actually began
last spring when US commentators began accusing Paris of
anti-Semitism due to mainly Muslim attacks on Jewish
targets in France and President Jacques Chirac's
criticism of the reoccupation of the West Bank by
Israeli defense forces - have become a staple of the
right, as has the theme of French hypocrisy, another
favorite topic of the Francophobes.
"Before we
move on to the war, let's pause to honor the grandeur of
French hypocrisy on the 'unilateral' use of military
force," the Journal urged in an editorial entitled
"Those Unilateral French".
"The French, after
all, don't worry much about international opinion when
they want to dispatch their own troops to quell violence
in one of their colonies," another Journal editorial
noted about France's intervention in Cote d'Ivoire (in
part to evacuate stranded US citizens). "Or when they
want to sink a Greenpeace ship, as [former president]
Francois Mitterand did in the early 1980s." Ouch.
Needless to say, Chirac's visit last week to
Algeria was treated as a timely opportunity for the US
press to revisit French brutality in its colonial past.
Popular culture has also embraced the latest fad
with gusto, and not just with respect to everyday items
like French fries. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" was
a little mysterious when first voiced on "The Simpsons"
cartoon show on the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox TV network,
but is now an universally understood moniker for you
know who.
None of this is particularly new, and
many of the same themes were voiced during the reign of
former president Charles de Gaulle, especially after he
withdrew France form the military arm of NATO and shut
down US bases on French territory.
Both moves,
as well as his annoying but ultimately wise advice to US
presidents in the 1960s to withdraw from Indochina,
infuriated policymakers in Washington who considered it
the height of arrogance, cynicism, impudence and
impertinence, coming from what was even then called in
the US press a fading colonial power.
The notion
of decadence, cynicism and arrogance as typically French
dates back to the US's own birth, despite France's role
as midwife. "On the whole, the French appear in no
favorable light," found a 1964 study of the worldview
conveyed in US grammar school texts during the 19th
century.
"Where sobriety [in the texts] is
admired, the French are gay; where stability is admired,
the French are fickle; where Protestantism is admired,
the French are Catholic; where religion is a prime
virtue, the French are infidels," said the study. "Their
accomplishments in the arts, the intellectual life, and
in military exploits are great [a reference to
Napoleon's achievements], but devoid of moral meaning,"
it concluded.
(Inter Press Service)
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