Total number of comments: 18 (since 2010-12-04 06:20:57)
Froggy
I'm an English-speaking Bretonne. Bretons are a minority people in France. We are French Celts who speak a language related to Welsh. My work requires that I live part-time in the UK, and that I travel through Europe, Ireland, the ME, and the US. I deeply care about peace and justice as I know that the damage done to my family, neighbours, and friends from trauma inflicted two generations ago continues today in places like the ME.
I thought Phil Weiss was an American.
Collaborators betrayed everyone, Jew and gentile alike. Collaborators were traitors, which is why after cities and town in France were liberated the French rooted out known collaborators and shot them.
Now I know they don't teach history in schools, but the Netherlands was under a brutal occupation. It was a time of terror. Many people were murdered in occupied countries, not just Jews.
It doesn't matter to them if Israel disappears, as they've planned their escape. They're planning to move over here.
link to ynetnews.com
link to haaretz.com
That simply isn't true. There is no mention of enthic background or race in the process.
I know this because I went through the process finally qualifying for naturalisation as a citizen of the UK last year. I saw the questions that were asked - I filled in the same forms as everyone else - and I saw the requirements and restrictions.
You don't make yourselves look better by spreading lies about other people and countries.
That depends where one is. Now here in Glasgow (where I am now), there is an impressive statue of La Passionara standing, arms outstretched to the sky, on Custom House Quay off Clyde Street. Many Glaswegians went to fight in Spain.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Europeans haven't forgotten.
Notice please the faces of these modern Glaswegians at Barrowland, Glasgow:
link to youtube.com
My mother's oldest brother (who was French) was at Cambridge when he left to go off to Spain with the Irish Volunteers. Somehow, he ended up with the Mac-Paps, and was fighting with them when he was killed.
I can add nothing to the essential truths that Bandolero wrote, other than to add we all learnt a great deal from 1938.
"¡No pasarán!"
Ok. I get it now. We goyim are second string human beings.
Beautiful!
Bonne année.
As bad as WW2 was, and is (in the form of unexploded ordnance that keep turning up under our houses and city streets), we never had to contend with anything like this. Not even close.
If God exists, the judgement on all of us who did less than our best to prevent/end these atrocities will be terrible, and deservedly so.
Woody, that is exactly what my son said. (He was 13 at the time.) Real war is your own dead children.
Every year we get visitors from the US. This isn't a tousism thing. They stay with us. As I work, they have to entertain themselves. So they go to the beach, take walks, walk to the shops. I watch their faces. After ten days or so they mutter something like 'I had no idea'.
On their walks they have come upon the small plaques on the many cairns on the spots along the paths where the teenagers who assisted the Résistance were shot. We go to a concert at the local church, and there's the 2+ storey high war memorial where all the names don't fit. Around the corner on the way to the butcher are the immaculately-kept and decorated graves of the young British fliers whose plane crashed off our beach, now tended by the people in this small Breton village. We go to the medieval city to buy some shoes for the kids, and there is the memorial to the headmaster of the city's Catholic academy who was taken away and tortured to death by the Gestapo for his work with the Résistance, his last words smuggled out to his pupils praised the beauty that is life.
The point is this: This could happen anywhere in France, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the Baltics, The Balkans, Greece, or a similar story in Asia, anywhere the war went through, like the murderous whirlwind it was.
One strange memory I have from childhood. An American Jewish woman was standing on the street in Paris shrieking at my mother and her close friend, a French woman from Normandy, for the French 'doing nothing' (her words) to 'save the Jews'. My mother's brothers were shot for hiding Jews, and my mother's friend was a child freezing in a basement in a house with the roof blown off and snow drifting in, half-starved. I have no idea what this woman expected these children, as they were at that time, or their parents, to do. Oddly enough, 76% of France's Jews survived the war (mostly due to French bloody-mindedness). I wish it had been more. I have often thought of this humiliating scene and wondered what attempts that American woman's family made to assist the Jews of Europe. Or anyone in Europe, for that matter.
Entirely different sets of values. A woman I know has a newly-built house worth about a million (mostly due to its location). Nobody thinks about that one way or another. What impresses them? Two things: her art collection (not very valuable, mostly by local artists, and one spectacular Dovbenko), and that she is an accomplished musician, an artist.
It's not that the French are always so knowledgeable, but that we deplore calculated ignorance.
I never heard that statement by Cain. Incredible. Why do so many Americans prize ignorance?
Anyway, leading the French would be like herding cats. The French tend to be more well-rounded. Also, we care more about society. We are individualistic, but we also see ourselves as part of a whole. (I'm not sure any of this makes sense.)
-LOL- Love it!
Kathleen, I can't imagine anyone over there listening to me. I'd be told 'we saved yer butts in WW2'. -lol-
I lived in the US for many years. I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. I don't understand where this adoration of war comes from. Do Americans feel they missed out on something? Does it come from watching too many war films? Does it come from watching Guts and Glory specials on the History Channel?
Americans need a bit more real-world experience. -smile- Here's one. Several years ago I was tidying up after breakfast. It was a beautiful summer day, and the kids were down on the beach collecting moules for dinner. The house was quiet for once. Suddenly there was banging at the door. Through the glass I saw the faces of my two nearest neighbours, distressed, gesticulating, telling me bombs had been found on the beach and they were evacuating the lower village. Just then I saw two gendarmes striding up the path. They nodded, and informed me that I had to leave at once. No, I could NOT go to the beach. The village children had already been evacuated by boat and taken to the city across the bay. I grabbed my sandals, and dressed in a washed-out pinafore, without bothering to lock the doors took off barefoot down the drive to the village, as the men went to warn other neighbours. I went from house to house, looking in on the elderly, and decided to organise a lunch at the restaurant so they would all be together at the detonation. By now helicopters were flying all around.
My genial English husband was in the upper village getting bread when they detonated the THREE 75mm American bombs. (I was in the restaurant with the old people when the bombs went off. I had never heard anything so loud in my life.) My husband who had been doing errands, and who had no idea what was going on, remarked to the old lady that sells the bread that it sounds like they were bombing the lower village. She looked at him and replied, 'They are.' He tried to get home but found the lower village was cordoned off, and he couldn't get through. My eldest son rang him from Paris, close to hysterical. He'd heard the new on the radio, rang the house, and there was no response from me. (I'd only taken my sandals, remember.) Now my husband couldn't get through.
The concussion brought down a wall that had stood since the Middle Ages, and put a crack in a load-bearing house wall. Just stuff. Stuff can be repaired.
European children are routinely warned about touching metal objects. Tides come in, tides go out, water moves rocks, and a boy walking his dog sees the bombs uncovered after sixty years, and reports them to the police.
They found a live bomb on the site of the Olympic games in London. They find them several times a year in the coastal cities of Caen, Brest, Lorient, with the evacuation and detonation. Standard stuff over here. They even find unexploded WW1 ordinance in Belgium. It's called The Iron Harvest. Sometimes they go off and kill people.
They shot my teenage uncles and other boys on the village beach, right where the fishing boats come in, and where we go to celebrate Bastille Day.
The village war memorial is over 2-stories high, and even then it can't accommodate all the names. I once lived in a town of similar size on Long Island. There were five names on its war memorial.
My English husband's family were bombed out in London.
War isn't a film. It doesn't end after 72 minutes. You can't buy popcorn. They don't have intermissions.
More French civilians were killed in the D-Day operations than were Allied soldiers. It couldn't be helped, but that too is war.
War is children burning to death in their beds. War is teenagers shot on the beach. War is a housewife asking 'why... why...?' War is eating rats. War is famine.
Americans think they're immune. They're not. Determination will always find a way.
Fiona, from the Land of Cheese-Eating Surrender-Monkeys
It's not as bad as that in Europe, yet. However, it could get to that point.
We rely on government for our most important services, but not for our values or our answers. The French wouldn't allow the food and water supplies to be tainted, the way the American food and water supplies are. I own a lovely manoir on the sea where my family has lived since the 5th century. But you know what? The beach doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the people of France. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Education is free, with a few expenses for the rich. Entry to the best schools is by merit. Admittedly, we have the same class problems common to all countries, where the children from the reading families do better than the children from the TV-watching families.
Medical care is amongst the best in the world.
Culture is everywhere, some really great stuff. Much of it free, and the rest inexpensive.
Religion. Ah well, by law France is a secular country. My daughter removes her cross before going to school. I tell her that if she wants people to know she's Catholic, she will have to BEHAVE like a good Catholic at all times. When she whinges about it I point out that in the pictures you don't see Sainte Anne d'Auray wearing a cross, do you? (Gets her every time. -lol-)
If any of this were to erode, the French would strike and close the country down. If that didn't stop the erosion, there would be a revolution.
There is a lot that people can do. Disrupt the economy, for one.
You must understand that we the people control our governments, not the other way round. There are more of us than there are of them.
The real danger is when the people of a country stop seeing themselves as they really are, the good the bad, the eccentric, their true present and historic selves, and replace reality with an ersatz version created from their own mythology.
Fiona, in France
The view from Brittany, the very Catholic, very conservative, extremely remote, rural province in the far west of France is that the Americans have totally lost the plot. Santorum. Gingrich. Romney. Scant difference.
How can anyone take seriously any nation that ran Sarah Palin as VP?
This is the prevailing view throughout Europe. So sad. We are sicked at the thought that the US is going to start another needless war. The drums are beating and there seems no way to stop it.
The British had Obama taped. From the beginning they said he was another Tony Blair, a slick smiling sell-out, and so he is.
Any of your Republicans make Sarkozy look good. And that's bad.
Fiona, in France
Like Captain Israel, but with a keffiyeh.
Philip, Thank YOU for your blog.
Crazy thought for the day:
I have no idea what uniform they made my grandfather wear when he was in Dachau. It has never occurred to me to think about it. It wasn't a Star of David. It wouldn't have been, because my grandfather was a devout French Catholic.
I can't ask him. He's dead.
So I rang his sister, my great-aunt, Tante Lolo up in Landivisiau. She's ninety. 'What kind of crazy question is THAT?' she shrieked, not in French, but in Breton (so I knew she was really, really irritated at my question). 'Go make dinner for your children, AND DON'T THINK SO MUCH.' ~SLAM~
Nobody can trivialise the atrocities of WW2. Dignity lies with the victims. We can only make fools of ourselves.
You Tube won't show it in France.