Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 911 by Paul Street

Author:Paul Street [Street, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317260578
Google: ZGnvCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27891123
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

“Ungrateful”? America, France, Hitler, and Debts of History

February 20, 2003

“We Saved Their Butts”

It is difficult to imagine the bitter irony with which many French people must be receiving the American charge of “ingratitude.” For the last two weeks at least, leading members of the US Congress, editorialists, and others have been bashing the French for their supposed failure to support international “law and order” by joining America’s reckless and dangerous campaign to needlessly massacre Iraqis. There is even talk of an American boycott of French goods. Much of the criticism has focused on the charge that France is “ungrateful” for America’s heroic efforts to save them during the “Good War”—the great Allied struggle against German and Japanese fascism between 1941 and 1945.

Listen, for example, to Fred Barnes, executive director of the reactionary Weekly Standard. Last Thursday, he expressed his outrage that France would “actively try to undermine President Bush” on Iraq “after all we’ve done for them”—including “saving their butts” in World War II.

Behold the outraged former New York City Mayor Ed Koch. “I encourage everybody in America: do not go to France,” Koch said last week. “These people were Nazi [collaborators] in large part. We saved them—and they turned on us.” “Most of us,” chimed in “war” enthusiast Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens, New York), “believe [the French] would all be speaking German if it were not for US military intervention.”

Nearly three weeks ago, US Senator John Kyl asserted that America “liberated” France from “Hitler’s grip” in a statement denouncing “old Europe’s” (France and Germany’s) supposedly irrelevant opposition to American “war” (massacre) plans in the Middle East.

Deleting America’s Fascist Accommodation and Emulation

History holds a less than exalted position in the nation that Michael Eric Dyson once aptly called “The United States of Amnesia.” Still, it is interesting to note how consistently elite would-be architects of American opinion feel driven to construct fundamentally, albeit bad, historical arguments on behalf of their various projects at home and abroad.

A funny thing forgotten by practitioners of the new American sport of French-bashing is that US policymakers helped enable the rise of European fascism that culminated in Hitler’s march of terror. As is apparent from the relevant historical literature, the US watched with approval as fascist darkness set over Europe during the interwar years. American policymakers saw Italian, Spanish, German, and other strains of the European fascist disease as a welcome counter to the Soviet threat—essentially the demonstration Russia made of the possibilities for modernization (industrialization, urbanization, and nation-building) outside the capitalist world system—and anticapitalist social democracy within Western European states.

In 1937, the US State Department’s European Division argued that European fascism was compatible with America’s economic interests. This key diplomatic agency reported that fascism’s rise was a natural response of the “rich and middle classes” to the threat posed by “dissatisfied masses,” who, with the “example of the Russian Revolution before them,” might “swing to the left.” Fascism, the State Department argued, “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle class, will again turn to the left.

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