Sorry, but I Gotta de-lurk for this. I don't useually respond to OT posts,
but this one deserves special attention.
It is very simple Harry.
The French kids hate us because their parents hated us, because their
grandparents hated us for saving their asses 3 times this century. They are
taught by French Schools to hate US(A) and everything about Americans.
Kids are blank sheets. you can teach 1+1=2 or I Hate You, with equal ease.
Adolph Hitler was a master of imprinting youth. Any he didn't or couldn't
imprint, such as the strongly cultured jews, he exterminated.
When my Dad was over there saving their butts from Hitler, they hated us
just a little less then the Germans. You see, the French are failed
conquerers. They have tried several times in history to rule the world and
failed. This gives them a complex. Also, they are mad because they still owe
a few trillion to US loans, which they have defaulted on. Nothing like
someone oweing you a ton of money to make them mad.
The French military govonor(s) massacered tens of thousands in Guyana.
They placed the world's most infamous concentration camp in history thee
too. Devil's Island. Shipping in thousands of prisoners from all over the
world, 2,000 prisoners a month died there for nearly 100 years.
Try this: Ask the French schoolchildren about the suffering Vietnamise
under French rule. I bet a dead shrimp they can't tell you a thing. Why?
Because that chapter was edited out of French history.
As far as Rall and his UPS cronies, I don't pay any attention to sloped
reporting.
UPS has always been anti-american, and I am surprised you would quote them
as a source.
It isn't the schoolchild's fault he or she hates Americans, its those who
teach them to hate Americans, like UPS, and other anti-american media.
Capt. Frank
"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
SUFFER THE FRENCH SCHOOLCHILDREN:
The Hatred Bush Hath Wrought
By Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate
Tues. Jan 20th, 2004
CARQUEFOU, FRANCE--Why do they hate us? And where do they get their
hatred from?
These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we
studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren
assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after
grisly panel depicted the United States, George Bush and those
ubiquitous symbols of American commercial culture--McDonald's and
Coke--as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious. Obese Uncle Sams
chopping up Iraqi children with a knife, their blood gushing across
construction paper. A leering Statue of Liberty holding a hamburger in
one hand while firing missiles at dying Afghan civilians across the
ocean. The American flag, its bars transformed into prisons for the
child inmates of Guantànamo. A baseball bat painted red, white and
blue poised to smash a ball--which is a globe. The juxtaposition
between the artwork's ferociously angry imagery and the childish
drawing styles of the third graders would disturb the most jaded
reader.
I didn't see a single positive portrayal of the U.S.
Organizers of Carquefou's annual cartoon art festival had invited four
American artists--Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic, David Horsey
ofThe Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Kal of The Baltimore Sun and yours
truly--to this industrial town in conservative western France to
discuss the deteriorated state of Franco-American relations. We've all
used our cartoons to convey our dim opinion of the Bush
Administration's domestic and foreign policy agenda. We oppose the war
in Iraq. We despise the French bashing ("freedom fries," wine
boycotts, high schools that have stopped teaching French) that has
arisen since the Chirac government threatened to veto Bush's Iraq war
resolution in the U.N. I even have dual French-American citizenship.
We're a pretty liberal group; that's probably why they chose us.
We don't take issue with most of the cartoons' messages. They see Bush
as a vicious, thoughtless warmonger with fascist tendencies, Americans
as arrogant brutes who don't give a passing thought to the innocent
people who die at the hands of their government and rapacious
corporations as hegemonic steamrollers that crush cultural
distinctiveness and independence in their ceaseless quest for the
almighty dollar. They can't believe that we feel more entitled to use
military force than Luxembourg or Monaco.
What must Palestinian kids think of us?
It would be nice to see these opinions expressed with more subtlety
and nuance. But their opinions are more right than wrong. Americans
believe they're exceptional. A Republican is someone who believes that
we were right to invade Iraq. A Democrat is one who thinks we should
have gone into Rwanda.
Still, walking past those drawings these past few days felt like
getting slugged in the stomach. Part of it was the sheer scale--there
were more than 700 pieces on display. But the level of rage and
vitriol against America and everything related to it (one kid even
trashed Tropicana orange juice) surpassed prewar propaganda in
Saddam's Iraqi press. And these are kids. What a difference a hundred
years makes: the Statue of Liberty, France's second great gift to
America after freeing it from England, was funded by millions of
centimes collected by French schoolchildren.
We repeatedly explained that there's more to the United States than
George Bush. We pointed out that most voters supported Gore in the
last election, that hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against
the war. We argued that Americans are kind, big-hearted people. French
attendees listened politely, and we were treated with the utmost
kindness and hospitality, but their kids' cartoons screamed: we hate
you. That hurt.
Children get their politics from their parents and teachers, who form
their impressions from the media. The European media has covered a
different war than the one you've seen on CNN and Fox News. A
14-year-old Iraqi boy, shot by U.S. troops in Baghdad, was interviewed
for five minutes on the evening news. "They did it on purpose," he
said. "They were laughing." The bloody corpses of Iraqi civilians are
standard TV fare here. The Bush Administration is routinely portrayed
as greedy, stupid and mean.
Americans can find the truth about our nasty, unwinnable oil war, but
they have to dig a little deeper. "The United States is using
excessive power," Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, a moderate, pro-American member
of the Iraqi Governing Council, told The New York Times Magazine on
January 11. "They round up people in a very humiliating way, by
putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our
society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective
punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam?
They are demolishing houses [of insurgents' family members] now. They
say they want to teach a lesson to the people. But when Timothy
McVeigh was convicted in the bombing in Oklahoma City, was his
family's home destroyed?"
It's striking that al-Yawar knows McVeigh's name. How many Americans
can identify any Iraqi other than Saddam Hussein ?
Most foreigners know more about us than we know about them. Hell, they
know more about what we're doing in Iraq than we do ourselves.
Of course, many of us don't give a damn whether French schoolchildren
or anyone else think Bush's United States is a land of butchers and
thugs. Whether or not we care, however, it matters
--
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