Saturday, March 08, 2003

Here's Tony Judt, writing in the current New York Review of Books:

In World War I, which the French fought from start to finish, France lost three times as many fighting men as America has lost in all its wars combined. In World War II, the French armies holding off the Germans in May–June 1940 suffered 124,000 dead and 200,000 wounded in six weeks, more than America did in Korea and Vietnam combined. Until Hitler brought the US into the war against him in December 1941, Washington maintained correct diplomatic relations with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile the Einsatzgruppen had been at work for six months slaughtering Jews on the Eastern Front, and the Resistance was active in occupied France.

Judt then makes a rather chilling point:

Fortunately we shall never know how middle America would have responded if instructed by an occupying power to persecute racial minorities in its midst.

Read Judt's article for its defense of an internationalism bratty neocons want to destroy, as well as for a devastating statistical debunking of the neocons' notion that America and the "new Europe" have now cornered the market on enlightenment (surely you didn't believe that the French are more anti-Semitic than the Poles -- did you?).

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