Eye contact was my only offense; yet my eye contact gave the man
the only license he needed to insult me, those around me, and my
country. One recent Saturday I was shopping at Johnson Lumber (Ace
Hardware) in Morgan Hill.
Eye contact was my only offense; yet my eye contact gave the man the only license he needed to insult me, those around me, and my country. One recent Saturday I was shopping at Johnson Lumber (Ace Hardware) in Morgan Hill. I was patiently waiting for the store clerk to finish helping another patron – a Frenchman who was old enough to be a child during World War II. I wasn’t listening, nor paying attention. But at some point, I made eye contact with the Frenchman.
As soon as I did, the Frenchman seized the opportunity to engage me in his discussion. He began by telling me that Americans are ignorant of world affairs. He said “you know, Americans are so ignorant of what’s going on in the world. If you pick up a newspaper around the world, you’ll see how sheltered Americans are – how they really don’t know anything – and how they are hated throughout the world.” As he continued, the Frenchman recited a story from National Public Radio (NPR) to prove his point that Americans don’t understand geopolitics and why our current policies are misguided and bad for the world.
He didn’t know it, but I was livid. I wasn’t going to tolerate the audacity of the Frenchman giving me a history lesson and lecturing me about U.S. policy. I thought: “If anybody needed a history lesson, certainly he did.”
In the last century alone, the Europeans started two world wars, divided Europe in a Cold War, and started numerous “ethnic cleansing” disputes. The French started the Vietnam War, before pulling out. During World War II, the French literally surrendered their entire nation to Hitler quicker than it took the Nazis to quash a Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghettos. Ironically, all of these disputes had one thing in common: the Europeans started them, and they called on the Americans to finish them.
We defeated the Kaiser, Hitler and liberated the French twice. We lost tens of thousands of men in the battle of Normandy, alone. Long after the French retreated from Vietnam, we continued to fight against communism – losing 100,000 of our men in the process. We ended the cold war by spending the Soviets into bankruptcy; thus giving 250 million Russians their first taste of freedom from the tyranny of communism. And in each of the “ethnic cleansing” disputes – from Bosnia to Kosovo – the Europeans refused to settle their own disputes. Instead, they called on the Americans to do the fighting for them; and today, our troops are still there keeping the peace.
In retrospect, I understand why the French fought so hard in the UN against using force to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. They were afraid of what we might find. While they were claiming to support Iraqi disarmament, we now know that they were secretly and illegally supplying Saddam Hussein with missiles that flagrantly violated many prior UN resolutions.
Even worse, the French were supplying these missiles only two months before the war began – at the exact time they were blocking our attempts to obtain a 15th UN resolution. In fact, only a few weeks ago, French missiles were used to kill 11 Americans in the al-Rasheed Hotel attack. One hundred years ago, that would have been an act of war; but today everybody shrugs it off because the French are considered “an important ally.”
So let’s imagine a world viewed by the Europeans, and specifically the French. Sixty years ago, they were thankful when we used our military to free them from the tyranny of dictators. But today, they believe that using military force to free others in the world is unnecessary, and that freeing 22 million people in Afghanistan and another 26 million in Iraq could have been achieved another way. Sixty years ago, they decried the Cold War split in Europe. But today, they deride Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan as a hoax – and they ignore that it ended the Cold War and freed 250 million Russians. Sixty years ago, they were repulsed to discover that Hitler had killed 6 million Jews.
But today, they embrace the virulent resurgence of anti-Semitism that is sweeping Europe – with nearly 60 percent of Europeans now believing that Israel is a greater threat to world peace, than militant Islamists and the Palestinians terrorists. And in their ultimate deception, many now believe that Americans are more responsible for September 11th than Osama bin Laden.
When the Frenchman was done, he took a breath. As soon as he did, I gave him a simple retort. I said “they don’t call it National People’s Radio – for nothing.” I doubt he even understood what I meant. Ironically, he was the one calling Americans ignorant.
Robert Collins is an engineering manager in Silicon Valley. He has been involved in Morgan Hill planning, and served on the Morgan Hill General Plan Task Force. He may be reached at [email protected] The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Friday.
