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

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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

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The lesson I draw from it is rather different. It is: do not imagine that you are different from everyone else. The rise of America was as much a part of European colonialism as the settling of Algeria, Canada, Siberia, Australia, South Africa and Argentina by immigrants from Europe. The same forces that drove cattle and grain farmers across the Missisippi drove them through Australia and Argentina, and indeed there is very little difference between the image of the horse-riding, cattle-driving pioneer in the three countries - stockman, cowboy, gaucho. The American notion that they somehow had more in common with the anti-colonialist local elites in Africa and Asia than with the European communities were pure delusion (comparable to the similar delusion that led Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, a tiny slice of Britain in the South Atlantic, claiming to be fighting British imperialism when they were imposing Argentian imperialism on a small British community).

There is more, and you are not being nearly forceful enough. Eisenhower did not show "lack of support" in 1956 towards his own NATO allies: he stabbed them in the back, and incidentally allowed the Soviets to get away with their contemporary murder of Hungary. And from Versailles in 1919 to the Suez crisis, the American claim to be an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist power has only one real meaning: to reduce the major European powers to impotence. Like Wilson, Eisenhower wanted Europe to be essentially an American toy. The thrust of the Suez crisis was to make an independent European foreign policy impossible, and, thanks to British cowardice and subjection (the French and Israelis would have gone on), it succeeded for a few decades.

Essentially, however, Eisenhower had bet on the wrong horse. The Arabs were going nowhere - as Israel dramatically demonstrated in 1967 - and, in the long run, Soviet domination over Eastern Europe was untenable. Conversely, the vicious historicistic jargon of "declining powers" and "old Europe" does not allow people to notice the enormous concentration of economic power between Lisbon and Berlin and between Oslo and Palermo, a concentration that has done nothing but grow, and that, with the collapse of Soviet power, has received an extra boost. People are looking at China with wonder, but the real centre of the world's economy remains Europe. London has recently surpassed New York City as a trading centre, for the first time in ninety years. Europe is slowly awakening, confused and bewildered by fifty years of subservience, to its own enormous power. The only tool it is using to extend its reach, for the present, is money; but it has so much of that that its reach is constantly growing. European governments are having to make decisions on a world stage for the first time in fifty years, and no wonder that many of them move stupidly, ignorantly, or like men in a dream. But the legend of "declining" and "rising", "old" and "young" nations, must die once and for all, before people begin to realize what the world really is like.