French whine

Although the epithet “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” actually originated with Groundskeeper Willie of The Simpsons fame, Jonah Goldberg is credited with its popularization.

So it was only appropriate that today he would point up this claim by no less a luminary than the French ambassador to the US.

France's US envoy slams “racist campaign” against French over Iraq war

France's ambassador to the United States denounced what he called a “racist campaign” against the French waged by US media and fueled by the Pentagon since the start of war in Iraq.

Ambassador Jean-David Levitte, told staff, students and diplomats at the University of California at Los Angeles that Fox News and the New York Post, media baron Rupert Murdoch's properties, led the onslaught with a daily barrage of insults.

“It was a racist campaign,” he said in a speech to the university's School of Public Policy and Social Research. “We were insulted just because we were French and it was unfair and dangerous.”

M. Levitte's remarks can only be described as self-fisking. But here's a start: the good ambassador seems to have fallen prey to the misapprehension that the Gauls are a race. And that making fun of them might somehow lead to anti-French pogroms. Or something.

The rest is left as an exercise.

But as M. Levitte seems so very concerned with fairness, perhaps he ought also chide some of his fellow Parisian intellectuals. [via Orrin Judd]

America is “the last empire” in the view of these analysts, and that explains its aggressive policies. Paul-Marie de la Gorce, a leftist author with a Gaullist perspective on foreign affairs, believes that “the American empire is the only empire in the world today, it is an exclusive hegemony, and it is the first time that such a strange phenomenon occurs in human history.” According to Senator Pierre Biarnès, in a 1998 book on geopolitics, it is an “unbearable America,” a country dead-set on “moral and mercantile hegemony,” obsessed with its own “hegemonic design.”

Worse, the United States is a “totalitarian democracy,” writes Alexandre del Valle (the pen-name of Arthur Dupont, a French civil servant). It is a lone superpower intent on preventing any other power from emerging and determined to control Europe.

A totalitarian democracy. Ah, the joys of oxymora. But let's continue:

Washington orchestrated the Asian financial crisis to bring down its dangerous rival Japan, and it uses the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to control Europe against Europe's interests. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the mutuality of geopolitical and ideological interests that united America and Western Europe against the Soviet bloc seems to have become partly obsolete,” del Valle writes in his somewhat convoluted style. In a more straightforward way, he observes that “the United States has launched a war against the Old World. […]

The theme of an American war on Europe has surprisingly wide appeal in elite French circles. François Mitterrand is quoted as saying in private conversation (according to his confidante Georges-Marc Benamou): “France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, a war without casualties, at least apparently.”

That would, of course, be former French President François Mitterrand.

All this sounds a bit racist, don't you think? Okay, so “American” isn't an ethnic category—but pot, kettle, black, &tc.

Foucault has benefited from that curious Anglo-American view that if a Frenchman talks nonsense it must rest on a profundity which is too deep for a speaker of English to understand. (Larry Laudan)

UPDATE: This site runs on Movable Type, which has some nifty anti-spam features. My “comments” e-mail has been remarkably free of junk. Until this morning, that is, when the very first unsolicited advertisement appeared.

It was in French.