--- Jean-Marc Chaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Gautam Mukunda [Sat, 15/03/2003 at 20:12 -0800] > You forgot to mention that Germans had 1.5 Millions > French hostages held > in captivity in Germany.
Well, sure. Shit happened to a lot of people in the Second World War. That doesn't change a moral obligation to _do_ something. Denmark managed. The Serbs were oppressed by the Croatian Ustasi, a secret police so nasty that they frightened Hitler - but they still ran the most effective partisan campaign of the war. The Russians had _20 million_ of their own civilians killed as Hitler ran, essentially, a war of extermination against the Russian population, and they still ran a fabled partisan campaign as well. Poland lost _one-third of its population_ during the war, and the Polish resistance was clearly more effective than France's as well. Of all of the countries that Hitler conquered, France probably had the weakest internal resistance. > That said the Vichy government was the disgusting > reunion of a bunch of > far rightists and catholics, catholics whose > official stance at the time > was Jews were guilty of having killed Jesus. That > said it's completely > true that the government at that time could have > saved a lot more of > people. It's also true that that part of history has > been downplayed for > decades, but that's true that the current society > had had the courage to > review the period and even tried a former Vichy > prefect. Yeah, but it also elected Francois Mitterand, a former Vichy official, so that's kind of a mixed bag, isn't it? I'm not denying the (tremendous) courage of individual Frenchmen who resisted, or the remarkable feats of Charles de Gaulle - who, among other things, might have bee the best armor officer of the war, if he'd only ever gotten a chance to prove it - but French society, as a whole, didn't seem to care. You can't just dismiss Vichy as "right-wing cows" - Marshall Petain was a national hero. The closest equivalent would be, I don't know, Colin Powell or something like that. > Jean-Marc Nick had the example of what if the US was conquered and the Aryan nations started butchering Jews. That's exactly wrong. It's, what if the US was conquered and the Council of Foreign Relations started butchering Jews? That would be different. Even more would be - what if that happened, and there was no significant resistance to it in the US? No one did anything important to stop it? And neighboring, similarly conquered countries (like Denmark), _did_ manage to save their Jews, and did fight to stop it? That would be an accurate analogy. From that, I don't think it's unfair to draw a judgment, and my judgment is that, overall, the population of France at the time wasn't going to get too worked up over killing Jews. Did individual Frenchmen do something? Yes. But across the society this was a moral failure on a catastrophic scale. What this has to do with Iraq, I have no idea. Does anti-semitism play a role in French policy in the Middle East? Surely. More important is fear of unassimilated Arab immigrants in France - the strategy of "Let's let millions of people in and then treat them like shit" apparently not working out too well. But France's opposition to the war has been carried to a point where it seems clearly motivated largely by a desire to (secondarily) wound the US as much as possible and (primarily) break British influence in the EU to transform it into a Franco-German Co-Dominion. Neither of these is the act of a _friend_, to put it mildly. Or how would you feel if your friend threatened other friends of yours to prevent them from helping you out? That wasn't just Chirac snapping, that's clearly the policy of the French government. Gautam __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online http://webhosting.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
