Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

[fpb]

Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see under "sovereign state").

(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)

The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".

I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.

No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.

Comments

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Evidently it is to me that you refer by this violent and ignorant caricature. I do not claim, nor do I know of anyone (‘neocon’ or not) who claims, that France has been the enemy of the United States for centuries. What I do claim, and on strong evidence, is that the ostensible alliance between the two countries has masked an increasing and fundamental conflict in recent years, and that by the time Jacques Chirac made himself the vocal (though only verbal) defender of the Hussein regime, France was no more an ally of the U.S. than Russia or China. The U.S. has not claimed to be in alliance with either of those powers at any time since 1949, and it seems clear to me that its pretence of continued alliance with France is kept up chiefly to avoid the diplomatic consequences of an open rupture.

The idea that I believe in some kind of ‘Protocols of the Elders of Paris’, or find some sinister and age-old conspiracy in the acts of the various French governments since the American war of independence, is your own fabrication entirely.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That remains crap. For France's behaviour to be comparable with China's. the country ought to have riddled the United States with industrial spies intending to steal American secrets; to have paid cash down to at least one American president (Clinton); to have systematically ignored copyright laws across the world in order to develop its industry; to have engaged in smuggling on a hitherto unimagined scale; to have recently threatened an American ally (Italy) when, er, "French" immigrants rioted in the streets of its main industrial city at the behest of the "French" mafia; to have ignored and indeed supported the behaviour of North Korea; and to have concluded a strategic alliance with Iran. If France's behaviour were comparable with Russia, it ought to have bullied all its close neighbours with sudden deprivations of badly-needed gas and oil in order to force prices up (France, by the way, could do something of the kind, since it is a massive net exporter of energy because of its huge nuclear apparatus); to have sent government hit-men to murder opposition refugees in Britain, without even bothering to cover up their tracks; to have butchered opposition figures by the dozens at home; to have invaded Algeria (Chechnya) in one of the most savage wars seen in centuries; and at the same time, to have merrily co-operated with the main sponsor of "Algerian" terrorists in setting up a nuclear reactor; and to have passed classified information about American moves to Saddam Hussein. "No more an ally of the US than Russia or China"? Don't be ridiculous.

As for "protocols of the elders of Paris", it so happens that I know that such publications have been made, sold, and believed. And you do not help your cause by delivering ill-informed and ill-meaning diatribes about events that took place sixty years ago. It was because of the trash you spoke about World War Two, which I notice you do not try to defend here, that I assumed that you had read one of the tracts in question.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

As for "protocols of the elders of Paris", it so happens that I know that such publications have been made, sold, and believed.

I did not know this. Can you tell me more about this claim that the French have been prosecuting a long-standing conspiracy against America (which strikes me as hilarious, given that the French have shown an inability to prosecute a long-standing anything regarding anything, at least since the fall of the monarchy in the first French Revolution).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Oldest-Enemy-Disastrous-Relationship/dp/0385512198/ref=pd_sim_b_3/102-4460705-3775365