we can note one usual and funny contradiction, I cannot prevent myselfl from underlining it: see “It would be a French military hero (insert joke here) who would come up with the first step toward modern fighter planes.”
and that “By the end of the year, Immelmann had scored seven kills in his Fokker, his friend Oswald Boelcke had six kills in his, and both were awarded the Pour le Mérite, the highest German honor for bravery (known familiarly as the “Blue Max”)"
why is it very funny? are germans considered as stupid with respect to war affairs? I don’t think so, please just think about it?
well the contradiction is allways the same concerning French bashing about military topics, I remember this famous “joke” supposed to be funny around 2003 about the French military history (because Irak was not a consensual subject at this time :-)), a russian guy had answered in a very smart way by saying, among other things, that all armies in the world were using French words regards to military vocabulary and there were reasons for that. Here it is the same, the name of the highest award for Germans at this time was made of French words. and by the way the moto of your country dynasty is in French too, but there is no aggressivity from myself, I just find all that very funny to notice each time
All nationalities seem to have jokes (usually stereotyping) other nationalities. Since France lost three (or more, depends on how you count) wars against Germany since about 1880, we tend to make jokes about French military prowess (conveniently forgetting that France clobbered Germany in the Napoleonic Era.) There’s no logic behind such things, they just emerge as stereotypes.
My guess is that French persists in various odd places because, for many centuries, it was the language of international commerce, diplomacy, etc. until supplanted by English in the last century or so.
Yeah, I don’t know if national stereotyping is more common /acceptable in the USA than elsewhere, but I do find myself noticing it more - French are cowards, English have bad teeth, etc.
Maybe I’m only noticing it because it’s different to whatever casual racism we have here, but it certainly is tiresome.
And you have to take into account that this is mainly an English-speaking board and many of the Anglophone countries are heirs to a centuries-old tradition of French-baiting, baiting which has always been a two-way street BTW. Angleterre perfide! (See Perfidious Albion.
And you should see what we used to say about the Dutch!
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but th’ off-scouring of the British sand;
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heav’d the lead;
Or what by th’ ocean’s slow alluvion fell,
Of shipwrack’d cockle and the mussel-shell;
This indigested vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Probably not coincidental that this poem was written in the middle of the first Dutch-English war. But as insults go, I have a hard time believing this got to those 17th century Dutchies very much.
“Probably not coincidental that this poem was written in the middle of the first Dutch-English war”
that’s exactly what I meant, the “monkey surrenders”, which I would not qualify as a concept, has been made up during the tension between France and the USA about Irak war, it was not the case before.
If you read what Bismarck said about his will to avoid having the French soldiers united again behind a chief, and what germans officers reproted about WWI bravery in the tranchees, you would see how stereotypes can be made up sometimes to serve some politcal purpose. The French di the same about german “genuine barbary” in order to motivate the frontline and the civil populations during WWI. I just wished to underline this, History hates simplification
Frankly, it’s hard to read a history of medieval warfare without concluding that the single most important factor in European history since the fall of Rome has been the abysmal stupidity of French generals.
So was the Franco-Prussian War which was fought in 1870-1871. Maybe Dex was using a really loose definition of “since about 1880” that would go back to 1815.
Personal insults (and specifically calling another post “troll”) is not permitted here. We try to run civil boards, where we’re reasonably polite to each other. So, you’ll please learn from this error, and not do it again, OK?
If you seriously think someone is trolling, then REPORT their post (click on the little ! in the red triangle in upper right corner of post) and let the Moderators deal with it.
NOTE FROM PLAYER:
I had in mind WWI as the third war; I deliberate mentioned the Napoleonic Wars as the war where France trompled everyone else. I guess technically that’s not “Germany” per se, but then neither was the Franco-Prussian War.
And I’m not trolling. Over and over again, at least since the First Hundred Years War, the attitude of the French high command was, “Well, that strategy failed completely—so obviously we weren’t trying it hard enough.” The generations-long refusal to accept that disciplined pikemen (even when they’re mere commoners) can stop a cavalry charge (no matter how many noblemen take part) is probably the most poignant instance. (I don’t mean to suggest that all nations didn’t have a part in that foolishness. But the French just couldn’t seem to learn.)