Sunday, December 12, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Three good books for Christmas

Mark Molesky is an assistant professor of history at Seton Hall. Co-author John J. Miller is a reporter for The National Review. Their new book, "The Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France" (Doubleday), was published during the recent presidential campaign, which John Kerry lost in good measure because of his insistence on a "global test" in foreign policy -- widely interpreted as meaning he'd seek permission from the Elysees Palace before acting in America's interest abroad.

So let's not pretend this book has no political axe to grind. It would also be a mistake to embrace this 260-page volume as your one and only source on the history of French-American relations. (They must have contributed something to Western culture, even if it's only Emmanuelle Beart and the croissant.)

All that said, however, "Our Oldest Enemy" evokes the kind of guilty pleasure you might experience upon hearing the nastiest new gossip about some stuck-up princess who's finally been revealed as the most degraded of guttersluts.

Where this volume mines its most useful material is in its analysis of what is (finally) the most puzzling aspect of the modern French psyche:

We saved their bacon twice in a generation -- in 1918 and again in 1944. To say they weren't much help in World War II would be an understatement. America then proceeded to generously hand the defeated French one of the five precious seats on the United Nations Security Council in 1945, even (foolishly) trying to help them honorably extricate themselves from the vestiges of their overseas empire.

And how have they responded? The post-war French elite eagerly embraced the bloodthirsty Martinique-born Frantz Fanon, author of "The Wretched of the Earth," and along with him the very darkest legacies of Stalinism. Jean-Paul Sartre and the rest of the French university elite busied themselves instructing the likes of Cambodia's Pol Pot in Fanon's doctrine that social change could only be achieved through mass genocide.

(Pol Pot took his hatred of the bourgeoisie so literally that he massacred anyone who wore eyeglasses or a wristwatch. Now there's a fellow who paid attention in class.)

Meantime, as early as the 1930s, the French embraced such masterpieces of economic cartoonery as Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandier's "Le Cancer Americain" and George Duhamel's "America the Menace."

Why? Because they'd lost, the authors submit. The French surrender monkeys threw away their great-power status in 1940, and then proceeded to suffer humiliating defeat in the culture wars as well -- something hard to deny in a continent now immersed in bluejeans, Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse and "le software."

The French Resistance? Mostly a myth. In fact, the Vichy French were quite enthusiastic allies of the Nazis, requiring little German prodding to round up 76,000 French Jews and ship them east for extermination. (Two thousand were children under the age of 6. Only 3 percent would ever return to France.)

The collaborationist Marshal Petain, "a dim-witted, 86-year-old childless womanizer," became the most popular French leader since Napoleon after eagerly surrendering and forming a partnership with the Nazis in June of 1940, refusing even to sell back to the Americans 106 desperately needed carrier aircraft which we'd delivered to them just before the German invasion.

Ten thousand French volunteers fought alongside the Nazis on the Eastern front, and, "Even after Hitler's suicide in May 1945, fanatical French S.S. could be found slugging it out with the Red Army among the ruins of the Reich chancellery."

Some kind of really big myth was needed to keep the fallen nation from having to face up to this record of cowardice and perfidy. The answer? It wasn't Soviet communism, but rather the commercialism of Philistine America, which was the new enemy, the new plague upon the earth!

"Our Oldest Enemy" makes a sprightly companion piece to Jean-Francois Revel's "Anti-Americanism" (Encounter Books).

Revel probes the origins of the aforementioned notion that America is the source of all modern evil: imperialistic, greedy and ruthlessly competitive -- the "hyperpower" whose riches are acquired at the price of Third World impoverishment. He traces these charges to the envy of those who make them, taking on the legions of foreign propagandists and pseudo-intellectuals who make a living "bashing America."

America's dreaded "unilateralism"? Revel contends the United States is forced to act alone because Europe consistently refuses to do anything useful in the cause of collective security. (Anyway, did the French seek our permission before sending troops into the West Africa, last month?)

America's sin of "globalization"? Revel finds the developing nations want more -- not less -- access to rich markets and corporate investment.

Much anti-Americanism, he believes, is simply anti-capitalism on the part of those still committed to "doctrines that are at heart illiberal and even totalitarian."

Finally, history buffs (and anyone interested in the endlessly fascinating character of the One Indispensable Man) should enjoy John Buchanan's colorful and well researched "The Road to Valley Forge: How Washington Built the Army that Won the Revolution" (Wiley.)

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal is author of the forthcoming book "The Black Arrow."