Guest Post by Morbo
Recently I read a review of Our Oldest Enemies: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France, a new book that claims the French have worked for centuries to undermine America’s interests. Browsing at my local book store last week, I saw a different book making a similar argument.
Although I haven’t read it, Our Oldest Enemies by John J. Miller of the National Review and Mark Molesky, a history professor at Seton Hall University, sounds like a right-wing jeremiad that distorts history to buttress current conservative beliefs.
Asserting that history backs up your argument and then distorting the history to make it fit is a tiresome game played by many. A selective reading of U.S. history can be employed to prop up any number of positions that have very little merit.
Everyone knows the right-wingers hate the French. Their line of attack goes something like this: Those arrogant frogs refused to back our war in Iraq after we saved them from Hitler. The ingrates!
It’s a simplistic argument, but it has great emotional appeal for those who don’t regularly employ reason. In America, that’s a lot of people.
What makes it worse, although the right-wing won’t admit it, is that the French committed the ultimate offense: They had the temerity to be right about Iraq. The “weapons of mass destruction” did not exist, and now we’re bogged down in a costly quagmire that features an escalating body count. This has only further infuriated the right, and ironically, spurred not an apology to the French but more attacks on them. How frustrating this must be for the right! It’s like losing a bar bet to the most arrogant SOB in the joint.
Rather than accept that the French might have had a point, it’s easier for right wingers to pursue a policy of demonization. This is where the bad history comes in. The right must prove that the French have always been against us. It must be shown that they’ve continually sought to thwart our goals and labored to keep America from assuming its proper place in geo-politics. This legitimizes today’s hatred of them.
The right wing starts at the beginning with the American Revolution. This seems tricky at first, because the French helped us gain our independence from Great Britain. Were it not for Lafayette and the French Navy, most likely we’d all be watching the telly and eating steak and kidney pie right now.
According to the right’s version of it, the French helped us out only because they hated the British. The problem is, this is no stunning revelation. Any student of history knows the French and British were bitter rivals at this point in history. Of course helping out the rebels was a way for the French to poke John Bull in the eye. So what? The end result was still American independence. In war there’s an old maxim: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The fact is, France, England and Spain had territorial claims in North America at the time of the Revolutionary War. With three major world powers jockeying for position on an entire continent, a tension-free post-revolutionary period would have been not only remarkable but impossible.
Of course U.S.-French relations were rocky at the beginning. Things got so bad that France and America fought an undeclared naval war from 1798-1800.
American relations with all of the major powers were difficult. The problem with the right-wing line is that it fails to note that other nations were provoking the United States as well. America was a new nation with a tenuous toehold in international affairs. American relations with Britain were equally bad. The British impressed our seamen and harassed our shipping.
Even minor countries got in on the fun. The Muslim states of North Africa captured our ships, held sailors for ransom and then said they would stop — once they were given a huge payoff.
The big kids on the block were pushing around the new, weak, kid. No surprise there.
During the War of 1812, the British resumed control of parts of northern New England and announced that this portion of America had rejoined the British Empire. In 1814, the British engaged in perhaps the ultimate insult — they burned Washington, D.C.
U.S.-British conflict continued well into the 19th century. In 1844, presidential candidate James Polk vowed to go to war with Britain over the northwest boundary between the U.S. and British Canada. Polk’s slogan — the memorable “54-40 or fight!” — referred to the parallel Polk favored, well into what is today Canadian territory. (After the election, Polk accepted a compromise setting the boundary at the 49th parallel.)
Great Britain was no help to the legitimate U.S. government, the Union, during the Civil War. Worried about losing access to cheap cotton, Britain’s sympathies lay with the Confederacy.
In 1895, the British decided to test the Monroe Doctrine by intervening in a long-running border dispute between Venezuela and the country then know as British Guiana. Although tensions eventually cooled, for a time it looked as if America and Great Britain would go to war over the matter. Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World ran a cartoon of a grotesque-looking pig grasping the world, a Union Jack sticking out of its curly tail. It was captioned, “The real British lion.”
Today, few know much about these disputes. Even fewer consider them relevant to contemporary geopolitics and for a good reason — they aren’t.
The “France has always been against us” books are merely an extension of the Iraq War-spawned French bashing spearheaded by the right. It’s an attempt to bestow historical cred on bigotry against a nation that a lot of right wingers just don’t like.
After all, isn’t it ironic that Germany, which also opposed the Iraq War, has not been the subject of similar right-wing wrath? No one tried to rename sauerkraut or boycott German beers. Yet if past hostility is the standard for determining which countries are really our pals, then Germany must be marked down as a foe. Germany presented a dire threat to the United States and the entire free world not just once but twice in the past century.
During World War I, the Germans launched unrestricted submarine warfare against U.S. shipping — before America was officially in the war. German agents sent a secret telegram to Mexico, promising that nation the return of certain lands near the border if Mexico would wage war against the United States. To my knowledge, the French at no time in the 20th century urged one of our neighbors to attack us. So why no books about what duplicitous bastards the Germans have always been?
My point here is not to slam the Germans or the British and say they can’t be trusted today. I’m merely pointing out how easy it is to twist history to make today’s allies look sinister to buttress current propaganda. Anyone can do it.
Not all conservatives play the game. Robert O. Paxton, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, reviewed Our Oldest Enemies for Pat Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative. The tome under whelmed Paxton.
Miller/Molesky portray French malevolence toward Americans as so uniform and unchanging over the centuries as to seem virtually genetic. Their French are, with occasional exceptions like Lafayette and Raymond Aron, cowardly, cynical, duplicitous, and overfed, bullies when strong and craven when weak. Their Americans are nearly always fair and well meaning. […]
[T]hey have constructed a wilfully one-track image of the complex history of Franco-American relations. Readers looking for reasons to hate the French, who tolerate selective and slanted scholarship, will applaud.
Obviously Germany, France and Great Britain are today U.S. allies — but that does not mean they are obligated to rubber stamp everything we do on the world stage. Their past actions, especially events that happened more than 200 years ago, are not evidence that today those countries seek to stab us in the back at the first opportunity.
People in the Balkans nurse grudges for 500 years. Americans don’t. Most people don’t even know that Talleyrand’s ministers insulted American envoys two centuries ago. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t care.