| STEFAN KANFER'S GADFLIGHTS |
FRENCH FRIED
by Stefan Kanfer
Denis Boyles, an American journalist who has lived among the French, appraises that country in his coruscating new book. In a cascade worthy of H. L. Mencken, he writes, “What we mistakenly see as a craven, anti-Semitic, hypocritical, hysterically anti-American, selfish, overtaxed, culturally exhausted country bereft of ideas, fearful of its own capitulation to fundamentalist Islam, headed for a demographic cul de sac, corrupted by lame ideologies, crippled by a spirit-stomping social elite, and up to its neck in a cheesy soufflé of multi-layered bureaucracy, is a actually worse than all that. It’s vile.”
Hence his title: Vile France.
But Boyles is not content merely to call names. All of his assertions are backed up with instances, facts, proofs. Some are historical: In 1803, he points out, the U.S. was able to consummate the Louisiana Purchase, but only France, “despite losing 50,000 soldiers in the effort, failed to suppress the successful uprising of slaves in Santo Domingo, thus depriving France of a rationale for a North American empire.”
In 1862 France invaded Mexico despite the protests of President Lincoln. True, in 1877 the people of France gave the Statue of Liberty to the U.S.
But the statue arrived 10 years later, delayed because Americans agreed to foot the bill. France never did get around to paying its debts to America for the expenditures of World War I, at which time la belle France was rescued by doughboys under General Blackjack Pershing. Asked for compensation, the French called the U.S. “Uncle Shylock” and refused to pay.
The French role in World War II stands as one of the great moral disgraces of human history. Vichy France, a puppet government entirely controlled by Nazi Germany, furnished the Third Reich with all the Jews they could lay their hands on, shipping them to death camps from a sports facility in Paris. The Vichyites went on abetting the genocide until a few days before the City of Light was liberated by Allied troops.
Charles De Gaulle, France’s biggest leader in the 20th century (6’6” and all of it ego), writes Boyles “Could have been France’s Churchill. Instead he was its Tito. Even before Germany was defeated, De Gaulle was busy creating what in effect became a jagged second front in the Cold War, playing the Soviets against the British and the Americans, and playing the Arabs against Israel and the United States.”
But the past is mere prologue.
Today, France extols Michael Moore, who has replaced Jerry Lewis as the great good American.
It celebrates a comedian who dresses up like an Orthodox Jew and struts around the stage imitating a Nazi in the service of the Jewish State.
It caricatures the self-indulgent Cowboy America (meantime losing 15,000 of its citizens two summers ago because a heat wave occurred in August when the doctors were on vacation and wouldn’t come home to treat elderly cardiac patients.)
And it wrings its collective hands over the legal and illegal Islamic population, reproducing in record numbers while the native French can’t be bothered making babies. “Sometime this century,” predicts the author, “France will become a Muslim state, at which France’s war with America will take an interesting turn.”
Is there any hope for matters to turn around? It would be comforting to think so, but Boyles’s pessimistic outlook allows for little sunshine: “France’s punishment for a history of deceit and treachery is to be France, a shrinking power which in this century will be submerged and ultimately defeated by its own history and politics. In fact, if you look closely at France, the European Union and France’s big Arab gamble, you can see that France, true to form, has surrendered already.”
Powerful stuff. Not for fantasists, Francophiles or anti-Semites. That leaves a large field, however. Big enough for the bestseller Vile France deserves to be. At $24 American dollars, this slim volume is cheaper than most Pinot Noirs, and a lot more nourishing. Better still, you don’t get the hangover. The French do.