Criticism of US based mocking of the French

The eXile, a moscow based newspaper is carrying a piece by Gary Brecher where he analyses and critcises much of the 'Frog bashing' that's been carried out by US 'patriots'. This kind of stuff has been led by the President of course in the petty and demeaning name changes of French Fries to 'Freedom Fries'. I would think that the point Bush and the senate were trying to get across was somewhat lost in the stupidity of their methods. Brecher discusses the way that much of the criticism is one sided and ill informed, how it would make more sense for the US people to hate the British for our battles in the War of Independence. He talks about the honour and courage of the French and how in fact they're far more brave and experienced than we give them credit. Plus, it's a great history lesson. It's an interesting piece:

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I’d really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about “surrender monkeys” with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You’d piss your dockers.

Shit, we strut around like we’re so tough and we can’t even handle a few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the French, who said “calf rope.”
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via idleworm