Fareed Zakaria in the January/February, 1920, issue of Foreign Affairs has an
article entitled “The New China Scare,” subtitled “Why America Shouldn’t Panic
About the Latest Challenger.”
Zakaria writes, “In February 1947, U.S. President Harry Truman huddled with his
most senior foreign policy advisers, George Marshall and Dean Acheson, and a
handful of congressional leaders. The topic was the administration’s plan to
aid the Greek government in its fight against a communist insurgency. Marshall
and Acheson presented their case for the plan. Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, listened closely and then offered his
support with a caveat. ‘The only way you are going to get what you want,’ he
reportedly told the president, ‘is to make a speech and scare the hell out of
the country.’”
It seems as though there is often something being described in such a way as to
“scare the hell out of our country.” I worked at Douglas/McDonnell
Douglas/Boeing for 39 years and on several occasions waited on tenterhooks to
see if a proposal or program I was working on would be included in the current
budget. It always helped if the President or important congressmen were
“scaring the hell out of the public” in such a way as to convince it there was
a vital need for programs I worked on. I recall the military panics during the
Cold War and then economic panics later on. The USSR, Mao’s China, Britain,
Saudi Arabia, Japan, and now modern China have all taken their turn in
inspiring panic. Fareed Zakaria is worried that the current panic might give
rise to a Cold War with China . . . there have been so many however. Some
elderly readers are yawning over this scare I’m sure . . . not too wide a yawn,
I would caution. There are Corona Viruses floating in the air nowadays and we
wouldn’t want to catch one.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Omar Kusturica
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2020 7:43 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The French and Lit-Ideas
Why not to Cantonese or Sichuanese ? The domination of Mandarin in China is
rather artificial.
On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 3:15 AM John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Isn’t this relighting an old battle? The future most likely belongs to
Mandarin.
John
Sent from my iPad
On Apr 17, 2020, at 0:46, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From a review by R. W. Johnson of Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with
Britain and America, 1945-2016 by R. T. Howard:
Johnson writes, “In De Gaulle’s view of history – a European history – England
and France had struggled for supremacy for the best part of a thousand years.
For most of that time France had been the dominant power, but now its great
empire wasn’t just overshadowed but outmatched by the even greater British
Empire. For De Gaulle France was not itself if it was not the leading power in
Europe. By 1941, however, the opponent was no longer Britain” it was ‘les
Anglo-Saxons’. Asked what was the most important international development of
recent times, De Gaulle replied: ‘The fact that the Americans speak English.’”
We did have one French fellow in Lit Ideas a long time ago. He owned a books
store, can’t remember where, and can’t remember his name, but we used to argue
about the relative merits of France and the U.S. He knew English and was on
Lit Ideas, but he despised the U.S. and perhaps England as well, I don’t
recall. I had read an interesting article in Foreign Affairs and recommended
it to him, implying that it would provide a more accurate view of the U.S. than
he seemed to have. He rejected the idea. He had no wish to understand the
U.S. more than he did. He didn’t quite challenge me to learn more about France
because I was reading quite a lot at the time, but at some point he became
disgusted with Lit-Ideas and perhaps especially me and disappeared.
The referenced review appears in the March 16, 2017 issue of the London Review
of Books. Johnson entitles his review, “Danger: English Lessons” and draws
attention to De Gaulle’s and other’s interest in advancing French over English
in the modern world. “Howard quotes Gerard Prunier, an adviser to the French
Government, who claimed that ‘the Anglo-Saxons want our death – that is, our
cultural death. They threaten our language and our way of life, and they plan
our ultimate Anglo-Saxonisation.”
“When De Gaulle ordered US bases out of France, Lyndon Johnson angrily demanded
to know if that meant digging up the graves of American soldiers who had died
in the liberation.” My impression is that many of the French at the time
wouldn’t mind digging up the graves and sending the bones back to us. Many
French saw the second front that Stalin had been pleading for, Operation
Overlord, as merely the occupation of France by a new set of oppressors.
In reading of these events, we perhaps don’t want to spend much time dwelling
upon Churchill’s sadness over the loss of the British Empire, but De Gaulle was
even more committed to reacquiring the French Empire. I read histories of
France’s pitiful efforts at Dien Bien Phu and in Algeria. Many Americans,
probably, would lose all sympathy for the French upon learning that Algeria
after WWII would have been delighted to be considered part of France as equal
citizens, but the Colons would not hear of it and so there was a war. The
Colons were driven out and Algeria eventually became independent.
Perhaps here the French book seller would take offense at Americans who
blithely assumed that democracy and equality ought to prevail throughout the
world and that Britain and France ought to willingly give up their former
colonies. What right did the U.S. have to insist upon such a thing, especially
when Eisenhower took up in Indo-China where the French left off not to preserve
it as a colony, but to “prevent its becoming a Communist puppet.” “As if,” the
French scoffed and saw only hypocrisy.
There is plenty of room to build a variety of arguments to support a variety of
opinions. After reading the above article in the LRB, I checked back through
the recent editions of Foreign Affairs to see if there were any recent
Gaullist-type efforts to advance French supremacy in Europe, but couldn’t find
any. And yet, I suspect, many of the French, even today are hostile toward
Britain and the U.S. for reasons much like De Gaulle’s. They don’t see the
Vichy period in the same way we do. De Gaulle, who spent the bulk of the War
in Britain wanted to get past the Vichy period as quickly as possible. Most
Frenchmen, it seemed to be implied, were really in the resistance. . . but not
so much anymore, becoming with Germany the “big two” in the EU – the EU whose
capital is in French-speaking Belgium.
Lawrence
