Let’s See If This Posts

We’ll start this experimentation in Blogger tech revisionism (thanks to Mr. B–you rock!) with selections from the mailbag:

Denny wrote:

ted, ted…….again, you have some wrong information….. 390,000 Frenchmen died during the 1940 invasion? WRONG!!! Several resources I checked bring the total of French casualties during the ENTIRE WAR to 213,324. These are the dead, not wounded. Because you did mention Frenchmen DIED during 1940. I had to check this out because I found you hard to believe. More French soldiers were killed in 1940 then American’s for the last 60 years?? By the way, US casualties between World War II and the current war are about 373,855. Another point I see you are trying to make is that the Allies, basically the British, left the French to defend themselves. Well, I would hope that you would at least agree that defending your own country becomes a larger priority then helping defend someone elses. I think you would have to agree that had the British not evacuated the 300,000 troops from France, that they too would have easily been overrun by the Germans in late 1940. As a side note, about a quarter of those toops were FRENCH! I have to ask, where do you come up with these stats?

So did Russ:

You know, the “cowardly French” meme is so virulent that I had ceased to even consciously think about it. Thanks for the good discussion of it. It is indeed ridiculous that the right (while claiming to support the proud sacrifices of brave troops dying for their country yada yada) would so blithely dismiss the deaths of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers who actually did die defending their country. BTW, where did you get the

490,000 figure? That seems high. As far as I can tell, it seems more like 200,000 – there’s a fair bit of variance in different estimates, e.g. see: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/ww2stats.htm Not that I think it affects the point you’re making – 200,000 or 490,000 or whatever, it’s still a lot of soldiers dead fighting against an invasion.

As did D.:

The ignorance and stupidity of the Limpblob rightards would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic…

How about WWI? At Verdun alone, the French Army lost nearly 400,000 dead and wounded, on a battlefield that was not even 5 square miles…’They Shall Not Pass’, their rallying cry, carried out to a ‘t’ to say the least…total casualties on both sides, 700,000 plus over a period of only 10 months.

France has forgotten more about dying, war and killing than (thankfully) the US as a nation will ever know. Perhaps their reluctance to engage in our idiotic neocon adventures in the Mideast can be explained by this.

The rightards conveniently forget that the French backed our Afghan invasion; I personally watched French AF Mirage 2000s depart Bishkek airport loaded with bombs to hammer Taliban positions…

French soldiers are as brave as any other nations’…to hell with the chickenhawk critics, though ignorance of history is nothing new for them…and now, as we see in Iraq it is coming back to bite them.

What was D. doing in the Kyrgyz Republic? Well, anyway, what we’ve learned today is that estimated casualty figures vary even when they shouldn’t. After all, the French government provided military funerals to their dead; surely someone could have counted them up. But, upon further research, it seems that I posted one of the higher estimates from the 1940 Battle of France. But as one of the writers above points out, 200,000 is still more men than we lost in all of Vietnam in combat, four times over.

It’s war: one side wins, the other loses. Losing isn’t shameful; failing to defend your country is. The French clearly weren’t guilty of that in World War II.

So where does francophobia originate? Partly from the fact that we resent owing our very nationhood to them; French-bashing is a kind of patricide. FDR played a big role, repeatedly telling the American public that France didn’t deserve to be a great power after World War II because it hadn’t fought hard enough in 1940. (What about the US, which didn’t fight AT ALL when the shit hit the fan in 1939-40?) And the French Vichy Government shamed the country by collaborating with the Nazis rather than going into exile as honor demanded.