June 12, 2007
More Normandy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:35 AM EST Alex Burns wrote, in response to my post on a visit to Normandy in June of 2004, that this year’s anniversary saw so many fewer comparisons between the U.S. and the Third Reich, and so much less notice of the anniversary in every respect, for a straightforward reason, which is that decennial anniversaries make for a bigger splash. He also suggests “two other explanations, both related to the use and abuse of historical memory. The first is that, while critics of American policy are apparently less willing, this week, to twist the stories of World War II in order to assail the United States, so are boosters of American policy more timid in their creative employment of the same stories. In 2004, Le Monde editorialists were not the only ones misusing the history of the Second World War. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani likened George Bush to Winston Churchill, and in an interview with ‘Good Morning America,’ Dick Cheney seemed to liken himself to FDR while answering a question about the relationship between military service and presidential leadership. What’s more, at least as early as 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was likening the Bush administration’s global attitude to that of Churchill in 1938 and implying, less than subtly, that its liberal critics had more in common with the hapless Neville Chamberlain.” This is a very logical and initially persuasive speculation, but thinking it over, I am not sure that I agree with it. The implication seems to be that the analogy-mongering on both sides meant that absurd levels of anti-Americanism were provoked by absurd levels of Francophobia (and Europhobia). However, in the case of France, where the ludicrous Hitler analogy I quoted had surfaced, anti-Americanism did not actually increase in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the burst of American France-baiting in the run-up to the war. France was the only Western European country where anti-Americanism did not increase in 2003-2004—it had reached its natural (and pretty high) limit under President Clinton (a man the French did not particularly dislike). French anti-Americanism does not seem to track egregiously bad behavior by the United States, for its modern form dates to 1927, which was not a date of peculiarly vicious American misbehavior, but did see the publication of a striking cluster of anti-American books, starting a very durable tendency in French intellectual fashion (as reported by Phillipe Roger in The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism). A modern low in the sentiment was hit in the mid-1980s, when President Reagan made us loathed over much of Western Europe, but not in France, which had recently discovered the Soviet gulag. Oddly enough, now that the war in Iraq is going as badly as both Chirac and the French Left had predicted, the Fifth Republic’s most pro-American French President has just been elected. How can we account for this? Here’s one guess: In June of 2004, it was not so clear that Iraq would go so badly, so the perceived danger of American hegemony (to French amour propre, at any rate) looked very real. That is also what happened in 1927—we looked like we were going to leave Europe in the dust. It didn’t help that we hadn’t done anything for France lately, nor that we did not look like a reliable partner against a resurgent Germany. On Roger’s theory, it is mostly increasing U.S. power and apparent hyper-modernity that provokes apprehension and animosity, and my guess is that comparisons to the Nazis are simply the ultimate expression of those sentiments. When the threat of American hegemony looks most acute, any rival of America’s may look good, and Chirac sought to bring in the Chinese as French allies against the U.S. When the Americans began to falter, a second look at the prospect of Chinese hegemony may have made that alternative seem less appealing. There are various other possibilities, of which the most Francophile is a notion I once saw asserted by Ralph Peters, interviewed a couple of years back in American Heritage, although that is not where I came across the remark. Peters observed that the French are actually foul weather friends—they are only there when we really need them. We did not think we needed them in 2003-2004, and they didn’t turn up. We need them more now, and here they seem to be. Alex Burns offers a second theory about the decline of the U.S.-in-Iraq-as-Hitler analogy, which is that “a more apt historical analogy has developed for the Iraq war: Vietnam. These days, when people talk about Iraq, they are far more likely to refer to the Tet Offensive than the Normandy invasion.” Mr. Burns is skeptical about the perfection of this analogy, and I agree with him. Some people did make the Vietnam analogy in 2004, although I have the impression that this was more common in the U.S. and the Third World than in Europe. My guess is that the Vietnam analogy was less impressive in 2004 because the memory of the apparently effortless American victory of 2003 was too recent, and in France it may even have looked a bit like the German victory of 1940, although with fewer casualties to either civilians or invaders. It is in any case worth remembering that the U.S. war in Vietnam in its own day itself provoked a fair amount of the very hardy U.S.-as-the-Nazis analogy. The only other people to be as frequently compared to the Nazis are the Israelis, while in the most recent books on the strategic bombing of the Second World War and the forced transfer of populations in 1945, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Nazis have become the Jews. It’s a lively world out there in analogy land.
|
