I recently read a
political discussion thread where the old
horse chesnut of
French surrender came up. It seems that every right-wing
wackjob,
syncophant,
lickspittle, and
apologist hauls out the old "the
French are cowards" line every time French opposition to our (P)resident's desert excursion comes up. I just want to state for the record:
1) When you ask an American about discrimination and civil rights, they say that the past is dead, yet they always bring up WWII and how we saved France's ass.
2) France was overrun due to strategic error, not tactical cowardice. The Germans bypassed the Maginot Line, rendering all of France's defenses moot. The French then made a bargain with the devil to retain as much as they could. A similar event occurred in WWI, when the Germans flanked the French lines by going through Belgium. They still managed to fight off the Germans for years, and America wasn't even involved for the first several years in both conflicts, while French soldiers continued to die.
The French (actually, all Europeans) realize that war is not just a game played on someone else's shore. Real people with real families die. We may not count the Iraqis as human beings, but they damn sure do.
French cowardice is the biggest fiction since Santa Claus.