The French Aren't So Bad, After All

In his Wednesday, August 20 post titled "Speaking Francly" on his blog-site (http://penigma.blogspot.com/), my friend Penigma addresses the tragedy of the ten French soldiers who were killed in the violence in Afghanistan this past week in a unique and, I think, important manner. I am not going to reproduce what he wrote here because I want folks to visit his site in order to read it for themselves in its entirety. (It's not long, so it can be read in a few short minutes.)

What I do intend to reproduce in this post is an extended version of the comment I posted after reading Penigma's post--which, for contextual purposes, also deals with the proclivity on the part of some Americans to over-generalize and misrepresent "The French," by which they apparently mean just about all 63 million of them, as "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys" and the like.

Prior to doing so, I would like to point-out two things: 1.) France is certainly not perfect; like all countries, it features its own unique form of ugly societal racism and xenophobia, with which it struggles to deal effectively (yet, like the U.S. and Britain, it's a positive indication that France is trying to deal with it in more proactive manners than it has utilized in the past); and 2.) Penigma's blog-site is always interesting because his viewpoint is always unique and thought-provoking; I read it often, and I recommend it to my readership, as well.

At any rate, the following is an extended version of what I wrote (today) regarding the fad, alarmingly popular in the U.S. between 2002 and 2004 or thereabouts, to label the French "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys":

I wonder just how many of those folks who suggest now, or have suggested often in the past, that the French are "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys" have actually been to France.... If they have been there, I wonder how many of them have visited people who live outside of Paris, and I wonder how many of them have spent extensive time in that fine country, in order to give their viewpoints authenticity and the weight of actual substantive evidence?

I am only one person, and can speak only for myself, but I have spent considerable time in France and have found the majority of the French people to be broadly supportive of the United States (if not necessarily of the present Bush Administration). Mrs. Hasslington has spent more time than I have there--she lived and worked in both Paris and Reunion Island (a French department in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar) for an extended period of time--and her observations on this topic are very similar to mine.

When the majority of the French people do disagree with us, which does happen from time to time, they let it be known vocally, which sounds an awful lot like us when we disagree with them.

Look in the mirror, folks. The Americans, British, and French often get fed-up with one another because we're often annoyingly similar to one another. The big difference is that we Americans have more international geopolitical leverage, given our superpower status. But leverage means increasingly little, even for a superpower, when our strongest allies decide to take vocal issue with our policies.

Given the realities of current geopolitics, the French and British have to listen to us closely, and they do. (Whether or not they agree with us, they listen closely to what we say.) They're also older countries who have been through a lot more historically than has the United States (though, given the relative youth of the U.S., we've gone through an impressive amount of history, both internal and external in nature, in the time we've existed as a country). Given this fact and given that history tends to repeat itself--particularly when people are paying little or no attention to the historical ramifications of foreign policy decisions--it might benefit us to listen to what they have to say a little more closely than we tend to do.

We needn't always agree with our allies, of course--in fact, we shouldn't always agree--but we should always listen closely. (As it is, we tend to pay too little attention to what our allies suggest too often.) Doing this would not make us weaker than we are now, and it might just make us smarter, which is a good thought when one takes into account the fact that, in a world filled increasingly with more and more geopolitical competition, smarter folks will have a tendency to stay on top of the heap longer than they otherwise would.