[Ombrageux]

Fact of the day: France has less chubsters per capita than any other Western country. (East Asians don't count.) In this respect the Iranians are correct is stressing that U.S. isn't just the Satan, it is the Big Fat Satan. All part of the U.S. agrobusiness and biotech industries' ongoing war against American bodies.

[Smertios]

Fact of the day: France has less chubsters per capita than any other Western country. (East Asians don't count.)

Hmm, Scandinavia doesn't count as 'Western'?

[Preston Cole]

Some Americans resent that we had to go to war and lose so many lives to liberate them. And not only WWI and WWII, but Viet Nam also.

Well, the French gave a fair share of their help with the birth of your nation, so it balances out... I think.

[Zagadka]

Well, the French gave a fair share of their help with the birth of your nation, so it balances out... I think.

Granted, though they were doing that for some pretty selfish reasons.

And we named like 50 million things Lafayette, so debt paid :-p

[Ombrageux]

Smertios - As surprising as it may seem, according to the data all Scandies are on average fatter than the French.

I imagine it's helpful in the winter

[Rugoz]

Some Americans resent that we had to go to war and lose so many lives to liberate them. And not only WWI and WWII, but Viet Nam also.

Like many other european countries, including the british. Then there are germany, italy and japan which you actually had to fight against.

I guess the fact that france didn't want to go down on you and remain autonomous after ww2 is the reason.

[Demosthenes]

The US-French relationship has always been a back and forth one, beginning with the XYZ affair in 1798.

Relations have alternated between closeness and alienation in several waves.

The modern feelings (mostly one-way) from some right wing Americans were very obviously stoked by George Bush and/or his cronies or followers when the French didn't jump and down to support US oil/dollar interests in Iraq.

The rest of it is just silly and is mostly just Americans looking to haze the French or for those that actually take themselves seriously, to take out domestic frustration on anything that seems like an easy target.

I prefer the anti-British sentiment myself, so none of this means much to me.

The US is nearly equal parts (in one way or another) a child nation of Britain, France, and Germany combined, so picking any one of them to love or hate is just like a teenager squabbling with one parent while loving another.

[Baff]

Just watched a documentary about world war 2. It's amazing how the French were completely defeated, they had no will to fight. Any reasons why?

By the way, by pussy I mean weak willed man.

The usual reasons, half the popluation didn't support their government and preferred the enemy and then they got outmanouvered on the battlefield.

I'd say militarily, that they had a weak general. That instead of going on to take Berlin, he retreated to defend Paris.

[Far-Right Sage]

Granted, though they were doing that for some pretty selfish reasons.

Self-interest was the order of the day throughout the invasion of Normandy.

If anyone truly believes France intervened in the American Revolutionary War because it gave a damn about the American colonies as opposed to spiting Englishmen, or the U.S. became engaged in the European theatre because it gave a damn about Frenchmen as opposed to spiting Germans, they are deluded.

[The Immortal Goon]

I'll admit this isn't really my area but...

I think a bit part of the post WWII tension was France, appropriately, didn't want to be a puppet state installed and run after the Americans and British marched through it. If I had been De Gaulle, I would have been a bit of a thorn in the side of the others too. I think the Brits tended to take that as par for the course, and the Americans got all offended.

Realistically the establishment of the Fifth Republic should have been enough to establish France as it's own nation in their own minds, and it may have been, had they not moved to a more American system. Now, over decades, it's just become this stupid rivalry.

[Far-Right Sage]

In reality, the French were granted a great reprieve in an act of political fortune by being granted a zone of occupation in western Germany, as they in reality contributed very little to the German defeat. Had the traitors in Paris not subverted Hitler's orders and demolished Paris block by block before evacuation as was intended, it's unlikely anyone would have been fooled by the triumphant images of Charles De Gaulle in the liberated Parisian streets of 1944. French nationalists should have been left with nothing more than they were left with in Oradour-sur-Glane.

[Rugoz]

Had the traitors in Paris not subverted Hitler's orders and demolished Paris block by block before evacuation as was intended

They deserve highest praise for defending a marvel of civilization in an age of barbarism.

Demo edit: Flame removed. Please don't do that. Rule 2.

[Zagadka]

Oh, one other variable... (modern) Americans really have no fucking clue what being invaded is like. We've had the leisure to sit back and watch wars fought elsewhere and decide to intervene when we choose to, while holding disdain for anyone who loses. This makes us cocky.

[Potemkin]

Oh, one other variable... (modern) Americans really have no fucking clue what being invaded is like. We've had the leisure to sit back and watch wars fought elsewhere and decide to intervene when we choose to, while holding disdain for anyone who loses. This makes us cocky.

American cities have never even been bombed from the air. This, in my view, goes some way to explaining the hysteria which erupted in the US after 9/11. In material terms, 9/11 was a mere pinprick. In Britain, entire cities were virtually demolished by the Luftwaffe in WWII. Al Qaeda was never a serious existential threat to America, unless the Americans allowed themselves to be induced to overreact to the Al Qaeda 'threat' and piss away their strength on useless military adventures. Which is exactly what happened.

[Ombrageux]

Yeah. It's so sad. I mean. the idea of America: the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, it's venerable English liberties. They survived the British Empire, Civil War, the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese together and the U.S.S.R. But they couldn't survive a bunch of sexually frustrated bearded losers with box cutters. That's what scared Americans so much that now the principles expressed in habeas corpus and the Magna Carta have been voided. It's just sad

[Potemkin]

The basic problem is that, so far as I can make out, the current generation of Americans are a bunch of chickenhawks. Their overriding emotion, at all times, seems to be fear. God knows how they would have reacted if they'd had to face down Hitler's Wehrmacht or Tojo's Imperial Japanese Army in the '40s.

[Rancid]

Are most Americans really Chickenhawks? I don't believe that. Pot, what you are missing is the the Chickenhawks are merely the one's that are screaming the loudest. Just look at this thread, should anyone be surprised the the OP started it?

[Texas_Secession]

What rubbish.

The French fought with great elan during the '40 campaign. It was an entire French Army that was sacrificed south of Dunkirk (Montgomery stated as much in his memoirs and he certainly didnt need to do so).

It was the "epic" of Bir Hakeim which turned Koenig's force of 5,000 Legionnaires into heroes overnight and coined the term, "The Fighting Free French." Once Gaullist and Vichy forces were joined (in an unstable relationship), the French won new battle honors in North Africa and Italy - where Juin's French mountain forces were considered the finest soldiers in combat by both Allied and German officers after the war.

The FFI, French SAS, and French infantry fighting on the mainland (1944-45) fought with great courage and morale.

-----> it was not until La Soublie guerre d'indochine where France would show the world her battle worthy troops, bravery and sacrifice when 93,000 French, French Union, Foreign Legion and loyal Vietnamese trooops would die in Indochina fighting the "mechanized hordes of a mondern Ghengis Khan", 1945-54. One Communist officer wrote, after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, "the Americans fought with munitions, the French fought with the bayonet. I've never seen braver men fight, and go down fighting like the French."

Say what you want about the French, bravery is well documented in the thousands of memorials spread around that nation (as it is in the UK and the US).

[Quantum]

The French lost to the best army in Europe, yet the Americans were owned by the Vietnamese, despite the huge technical gulf between the two. France took on Europe on all fronts for 23 years before losing at Waterloo and Napoleon made mincemeat of the Prussians at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806. This French coward myth is just something propagated by neocons in 2003 in response to France voting against the Iraq War.

[Thompson_NCL]

I think any claim of French Realpolitik is deeply flawed. The French and British had been roundly beaten by the Germans and the situation was quite desperate. The decision to seek an armistice had more to do with French political confusion than a desire to actually surrender.

I think if the Anglo-Franco had either passed OR not bee proposed, perhaps the French would not have surrendered.