One of the few forms of bigotry that is still socially acceptable is Francophobia (well, anti-black and anti-gay bigotry are also considered socially acceptable, if you are a Bush judicial nominee). Right now, the government in France is not allowing President Bush to use it as his bitch, so demagogues of all stripes are piling on. When they are not being attacked for being pretentious snobs (btw, how is it that it's ok to ridicule the French for liking Jerry Lewis back in the 60's, but not praise them for being ahead of the curve on John Ford or Clint Eastwood), they are ripped for lacking courage. Some of the kinder terms now being used are "weasels" and "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". I think it's safe to say that if those same generalizations were to be used describing Israel, there would be a firestorm of criticism.

The notion that the French are cowards, frankly, is bullshit. France basically carried the load for the Allies in World War I; almost the entire war was fought on their soil, and a large part of a generation was killed on its battlefields defending it. Napoleon came this close to conquering all of Europe; although he was a despot, his rule would have almost certainly been preferable to the other petty tyrants of Central and Eastern Europe at the time. And of course, without the French, we don't win the Revolutionary War. But of course, to the Francophobes all of that gets trumped by the fact that the French stupidly relied on the Maginot Line to defend it before WWII, and were unprepared for the German tank divisions invading through Holland and Belgium.

To put French "cowardice" into perspective, consider this passage from a recent Molly Ivins column:

George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been tried."

That was certainly amusing.

One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Adolf Hitler.

On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny.

In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.

Relying on the Maginot Line was one of the great military follies of modern history, but it does not reflect on the courage of those who died for France in 1940. For 18 months after that execrable defeat, the United States of America continued to have cordial diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany.

France was burned once in the last century following a policy of appeasement in response to an aggressive bully. Perhaps Chirac's position on Bush's little war is to not let such a thing happen again. [link via Doc Searls.]