Ditto.
Well said Lawrence.
I never touched him, ref, honest!
I can’t help adding this one: The French cops just busted two of the most important ETA leaders in a small town in southwestern France. ETA, in case you don’t know, is a hard-core Marxist Basque terrorist organization that has killed more than 900 people in Spain in the last 20 years.
So where were these guys arrested? In the local McDonald’s, where they had gone to have lunch. I quiver at the irony.
–Lawrence, your Barcelona correspondent
Nice attitude fella. What about those of us who joined the military to GO TO COLLEGE? Ever heard of the GI Bill? About 85% of the guys in my unit joined for that reason - not to get drunk and annoy the locals.
I spent 3 years in Europe (2/3 FA, 3rd Armored) and never had any kind of problem with anyone in any country I visited.
Hey, Matt - I’ve been to Germany, courtesy of Uncle Sam, for 5 years.
What you say is ~ 95% true.
Unfortunately, what Tom said is ~ 5% true.
Guess who is more memorable?
I made the bad mistake of taking a bus tour to an NFL preseason game in Berlin. The average age of the other passengers was ~20. The tour guide’s idea of crowd control was to keep selling beer until the jerks passed out. I thought I was going to have to do CPR on one of America’s fine representatives.
Is does not take many bad actors to create a bad impression.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Thanks, Sue.
Matt, did you happen to notice this sentence in the passage you quoted?
The point is that the few rotten apples are the ones who get remembered. I can show you similar attitudes toward military personnel among the “townies” near any large base in the States. The difference, there, is that the hostility is directed toward “the military” instead of being directed against “those Americans.” And, as I pointed out in my next sentence that you quoted, in some countries there are a lot of U.S. military personnel–increasing the odds of finding a number of jerks. I would expect that the largest number of U.S. servicepeople are good citizens of the world and good representatives of this country. They are still going to be accompanied by some jerks. (And while 85% of your armored unit may have enlisted for the college money, I’m pretty sure that you will not find the same high percentage among the infantry–of whom there are relatively larger numbers. And before someone with blue stripes on their slacks gets defensive, I don’t think that most infantrymen are drunks or boors. I am only pointing out that the ratio of college-bound to lifers is probably lower among the infantry than among units with a different MOS.)
Tom~
Hey, Tom, I have to differ with you over a couple points you just made.
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First of all, matt said his unit was FA (Field Artillery), not Armor. Not that it really matters. Generally, the combat arms units pull from the same pool of enlistees; differences between infantry, armor, FA & ADA (Air Defense Artillery) won’t be all that great.
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Secondly, matt’s main point, I think was dead on. His main issue with what you said, I think, was with the stereotype of the uneducated redneck joining the Army to see interesting places, meet interesting people and kill them, whether that’s what you meant to convey or not. It’s a sore point with a lot of service members, and justifyably so. If you define lifers as people staying on Active Duty for 20+ years & retiring, this requires promotion to E-6 (Staff Sergeant) or higher. In technical fields, promotion to E-6 is highly unlikely without a bachelor’s degree. In combat arms, promotion to E-6 without a baccalaureate degree is still possible - just. These degrees may not be from Harvard or Stanford, but they represent countless hours of personal time & are hard-won and well-earned. Today’s American military is the best educated, most professional force in the world.
But a weekend on call in an Emergency Room near a military base shows the other side of the coin. A few make a long-lasting, if not favorable impression.
I freely acknowledge that I was unaware that one had to attain an E-6 in order to stay in the military (or the level of education required to achieve that rank). The various 20-year vets I have encountered at work in the last 18 years have included bright guys and idiots (much like the college graduates I have encountered), but they never discussed their backgrounds in terms of education.
Similarly, in my neighborhood, (where 90% of the high school graduates go directly to college on their parents’ money), the percentage of kids I have known who entered the military just to have something to do with no intention of going to college and no intention of making a military career was around 70%.
Obviously, in places with other demographics, those numbers are probably different.
I have never felt that the military was primarily redneck and I certainly don’t think kids join up to “meet people and kill them.” If I left that impression, I apologize.
Tom~
I was pretty sure that you did not mean that, Tom, but it is a common misconception & a touchy subject that produces a knee-jerk reaction from a lot of soldiers.
Although many recruits are lured into the Armed Forces by promises of cash for college, and quite a few do go on to exit the service after their first enlistment to become full-time students, I would hazard a guess that a higher percentage of those that stay in ultimately get 4-year degrees than those who get out after one term.
Now if you want to talk about the Marines… 
Tom:
Missed the qualification there - sorry. Have a cup of coffee on may.
I will say this - when I read about some of the things that have been happening in the military lately, I’m aghast - what are they putting in the food in Okinawa, anyway?
With regard to the larger issue of “dislike of Americans”, I wonder if the dislike (which probably rarely occurs at the personal level, more at the abstract) exists because we’re basically a close “neighbor” of many countries, in a way.
Just like the Cubs want to beat the Cardinals, and the Bears want to beat the Packers, maybe every other country wants to either “one-up” the US or take it down a peg. I’d suspect that the stronger the ties to the US, the higher the desire. No unimpeachabe evidence for this, but it seems to make sense.
With regard to the British posters, let me say this.
Thanks, Cousins.
Your institutions and culture gave this country a foundation to build upon, and are a key element in making it what it is today. Thanks again, as well, for standing alone in 1940-41. I’m half Irish and half German, but 100% American, and must confess that the foreign country I feel closest to is Great Britain.
It seems to me that the British do not exactly have clean hands either.
***No apology from the Queen for 200 years of British colonial oppression and robbery
The Queen’s visit to India and Pakistan in October 1997 was more of a rocky road than a success. Before she went, British Government spokesmen said she would not be making any apologies. Despite this, she made a few half-hearted remarks expressing regret for the past, which met with a mixed reaction from India. Evidently many have not forgotten the two hundred years of British colonialism marked by intense robbery and exploitation of India’s people.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were on a six-day state visit which coincided with India’s 50th year of independence. A significant moment came when she laid a wreath at the Jallinwala Bagh memorial, site of the Amritsar massacre in 1919. But nothing could make up for that slaughter by British forces of unarmed protesting civilians walking in peaceful procession. Amritsar was the tip of an iceberg of imperialist exploitation. The official tally of killed was 379, with wounded between 1200 and 1300. It has always been the practice of imperialists to understate the extent of their crimes against colonial peoples. We don’t doubt this was the case in Amritsar. An official signboard in the compound stated that ‘it was saturated with the blood of 2000 Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims’. Prince Philip took issue with this, saying that the notice was exaggerated, and that the figure must have included the wounded. But how many wounded that day would have survived, given the undernourished state of most and the complete lack of medical care? After all, who cared if they succumbed to their wounds? They were only Indians. The notice would have been much closer to the truth than official estimates.
India in its days of being a direct colonial possession of British imperialism was an immense source of wealth to colonialists of Britain. It was by far the biggest and richest of all colonies, overwhelmingly outnumbering in population and size all the other colonial possessions.
Conquest and plunder
Beyond the trading settlements which were the initial outposts of conquest, British rule traditionally began with the Battle of Plassey in 1759.
Great amounts of wealth were seized directly. The value of the annual tribute drawn from India to Britain in one form or another has been estimated at 150 million pounds.1 The Associated Chambers of Commerce in India in 1933 estimated British capital holdings in India at 1,000 million pounds, or one quarter of the total of British overseas capital investments. This was a vast sum in 1933; in today’s currency value it would be far greater. This amount was a source of huge superprofits to British capitalists. Although India was (and is today) a land of great natural resources, these stood in ever-growing contradiction to the extreme, indescribable poverty of the mass of the population. All that was done in India, in the way of building railways, electric telegraphs, ports and entrep^ts was done, not to meet the needs of the people but to meet the demands of commercial and financial penetration.
Poverty still extreme
It might be thought that since independence in 1947 extreme poverty and hardship have been done away with. Not so. What was already building up before 1947 was a rich upper layer of Indian capitalists under the aegis of British neo-colonialism, the system that at the end of World War II replaced direct colonial exploitation with indirect.
A favourite tactic of imperialism whether in slave society of ancient times or in monopoly-capitalist society today has been pursuit of the principle of divide and rule. Never has this principle produced a bloodier result than the division of India into India and Pakistan in 1947. The Oxford History of India, 1919 by Vincent A. Smith declared that, ‘India beyond all doubt possesses a deep underlying fundamental unity far more profound than that produced either by geographical isolation or by political suzerainty. That unity transcends the innumerable diversities of blood, colour, language, dress, manners and sect’. However, as the world colonial revolution built up in the 20th century and was manifested in India by a growing independence movement in the whole country, British imperialism intensified its divide-and-rule tactics by encouraging and inflaming religious differences, particularly those between Hindus and Muslims.
Moslem separatism
The organisation of the separatist Moslem League dates from December, 1906. Moslems were given certain privileged representation in electorates, these of course being firmly under British control. The effect of this policy was to give the sharpest possible stimulus to communal antagonism. But the drive towards Hindu-Moslem unity grew rapidly after World War I, a source of mortification to the Government. In answer, the Government backed reactionary Moslem elements in the League to play a more and more disruptive role, to block any democratic advance and inflame antagonism against the National Congress, the main representative of the bourgeois national movement in the country.
World War II saw a big development in mass political consciousness. At the outset a war dictatorship was imposed. With no consultation whatever, the Viceroy proclaimed India a belligerent and the British Parliament quickly endorsed legislation to enable the Government to rule by decree, abolishing the little democracy that existed and establishing rule by fascist repression, with extreme penalties for non-compliance.
Gandhism - apology for imperialism
The imperialists had their instruments within the Congress, a major one being Gandhi. Nothing could have suited imperialism better than his advocacy of non-violence and his economic policy of ‘back to the spinning wheel and handicrafts’, instead of modern industry. The only way India could liberate itself was by way of violent revolution, which eventually triumphed.
It was the regular practice of colonialist Britain to establish armed forces drawn from the local population but officered by the British as a means of economic rule over the vast population of its colonies. Mass hostility towards oppressive British rule grew rapidly during the war until Britain was forced to relinquish outright possession of India. The British Government put about a new myth that they were doing a noble, democratic thing by granting India independence.
Mutiny!
What forced them to accept this climbdown was not Gandhism but a mutiny in the Royal Indian navy, which deprived Britain of a decisive means of colonialist rule. By 1947 Britain had suffered a severe battering as a colonial power. It was forced to recognise it was unable to rule in the old way. But to sabotage the formalisation of independence, the imperialists organised a mass separatist movement by Moslems. The Moslem League leader Jinnah was exalted by the Viceroy and given equal status to the Congress. The stage was set for the division of India and the founding of Pakistan as a separate Moslem state.
A period of tremendous communal violence between Hindu and Moslem ensued, while Britain established the system of neo-colonialism, in which it gave up direct political possession of India as a colony but in return was able to secure economic control through its ownership of most decisive industrial enterprises.
Today, although a native Indian capitalist ruling class has burgeoned, Britain still has large investments in India and a correspondingly large influence on Indian policy.
Naxalbari
It might be asked, surely the Indian masses did not accept the neo-colonial system tamely? Indeed, they did not. Indian capitalism had enriched a top layer of the owning class, but the masses still existed on or below the borderline of starvation. In the 1960s the example of the Chinese revolution and its successes in building a new democracy drew hundreds of thousands towards following the teachings of Mao Tse-tung and organising armed resistance to the exploiters. This began
Rainbowcsr, Your last post really might just as well have said “I am an idiot”. It would have saved you a lot of typing.
Actually, I really agree with Rainbowscr; now that the scales have fallen from my eyes, I too can see that because Britain’s history has included a lot of shameful events I’m not fit to criticise another country’s failings.
I never touched him, ref, honest!
matt, only when you realise that Britain’s failings mean that the USA is a faultless paradise on earth will you truly have seen the light.
I don’t think that any country has clean hands. What is noticeable to me as an American citizen is that at this point in our history, we’re contstantly trying to dig up our own sordid past. Some examples:
My Lai
Japanese-American Internments
Tulsa Race Riots
Mistreatment of the Indians
…just to name a few. Now, when I was younger, I got kind of resentful about this - “How dare they criticize us, we’re America! Our failings are a whole lot less glaring than a lot of countries - much less the Soviet Union! If you don’t like it here, get the hell out!” A pretty typical reaction, and occasionally the right one, when the rhetoric got too hot.
However, over the past few years, I’ve taken a different perspective. We’re right to be proud of our accomplishments, but we’re also right to be ashamed for the dark parts of our history. The value in that shame, and in examining our past failings is that we, and any country for that matter, hold ourselves up to the harsh light of our ideals, and gain a chance at redeeming ourselves for past “sins”, and attaining “a more perfect union” in the future.
When I think of My Lai, I and others feel such deep, deep shame for my country, and can only thank God for the heroism of the Huey pilot and his crew that rescued several Vietnamese that day. On that day, those were the only men on the battlefield that acted like Real Americans. We are ashamed, because we fell short of our ideals on that day. And someday, somewhere, an Infantry Lieutenant won’t let another My Lai happen, because of the memory of that shame.
America has done wrong. Americans will do wrong, now and in the future. But we will always remain committed to TRYING to do the right thing, and making amends when we fail.
That said, when I’m in Paris, I’m going to Burger King for lunch.
Lawrence, great post (posted 01-30-2000 12:10 AM). But if you can’t give us the url, can you at least give us the name of the article?
APB9999, Joffe’s commentary (as TRB From Washington) is at
http://www.tnr.com/011700/trb011700.html
It is called (sorry, TomH), Envy. (I don’t know who set the title, and I suspect, based on Joffe’s comments, that he did not.)
Tom~
The British have not had clean hands either. In the late 1800s, when diamonds were discovered in a non-British ruled section of Africa, they promptly went and grabbed up the entire ‘province’ without so much as an ‘excuse me’ and promptly established companies which virtually monopolized the diamond production of the world. Then they hired natives to work in the mines under inhumane and dangerous conditions for ages.
Their treatment of the natives of India is legendary because they never considered the people there as equals but barbarians.
America was founded because they wanted to get rid of the criminal element, plus get as many natural riches from the land at as low a price as possible. They did the same with Australia.
WW2 could possibly have been won sooner but General Patton had to stop his advance for some time to let the showy British general Montgomery get ahead of him for ‘political harmony.’ (But then, we had MacAuthor, who could barely take a shit without having it filmed for posterity.)
Currently, various forms of racism run wild in the United Kingdom and they have not been all that just in dealing with the Irish problem. For ages, the British held the opinion that THEY were the only civilized nation in the world and held a stuffy attitude when dealing with other peoples. Their popularity among various nations was on the level of America today, if not worse because Americans donate generously to international causes and back then, Britain did not do all that much.
During WW2, Churchill knew in advance when air attacks were coming because they had cracked the Nazi codes, but, to protect this secret, the inhabitants of the target cities were not informed that they were about to be bombed nearly into pieces.
Their squabble with France has gone on for generations and even the great underwater tunnel they both developed is ‘protected’ against the possibility of an invasion force coming through it. It’s construction was delayed for years while they debated the potential for attack through it.
Get arrested in England and forget about anything along the lines of civil rights because you have none. The detectives may mercilessly and violently interrogate you for hours or days before allowing you to see a lawyer. The prison system there is not so hot either, in many cases being much harsher than American prisons.
Now, those very Britons who profess to dislike Americans readily buy up the mass of American products imported by the British government. I found American products and product clones all across England when I was there, yet here in the States, it is hard to find actual British products except in specialty stores or on condiment shelves in grocery markets.
Neither did I notice the Brits rushing to help out America when we had the great stock market meltdown in the 1970s, partially caused by the Arabs jacking up the price of oil enormously in an attempt to screw the entire world. (Now, the Japanese, taking advantage of the economic slump in the States, promptly rushed in and bought up huge chunks of property at dirt cheap prices.)
Princess Diana got creamed in France and not much seems to have been done about it, aside from a weak effort to prosecute the French Paparazzi who probably caused it, but the French told the Brits to fuck off and declined to file charges against the parasites and blamed everything on the driver. The Brits said ‘ah, fine, fine. Good day chaps.’ and dropped it. (I really should not be so harsh here because the French tell everyone to fuck off, including themselves.)
Shheeeesh, Sentinel, have you paid any attention to the responses to your previous posts?
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Running down another country (e.g., the U.K.) does not make your country (presumably the U.S.) look better;
it makes you look like an intelligence-impoverished heckler. -
Some of your attacks in this post have been made before in this thread and have already been disproven–specifically, the idea that accused criminals have no rights in Britain. A number of your other allegations may not have been disproven yet, but they are still false: North America was never used as a dumping ground for criminals (although a few criminals were exiled, here, it was never official policy or practice); Montgomery made a number of errors in his trek across Belgium and the Netherlands (but it was Ike and Bradley who decided to invest the energy to lay siege to the Bay of Biscay ports when Patton and Monty were urging them to ignore those sideshows and head east); the chunnel was delayed because it was not a particularly profitable thing to do–as it remains, today. Your whining about Princess Di and the buying practices of Britons are equally inaccurate and irrelevant.
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Posting irrelevant inaccuracies while in high dudgeon simply makes it harder for the reasonable Yanks on this thread to get a fair hearing because a truly anti-American poster can simply demand that we justify why we let you run around loose.
Tom~
Is anybody else beginning to suspect that Sentinel, Rainbowcsr and possibly NightGirl are the same intellectually-challenged individual?
Thanks for that link, Tom. Joffe’s piece is interesting, though the only reference to “envy” is, as you say, in the title. There’s a link below the article to a piece about French anti-Americanism and McDonald’s, which is also worth reading and goes some way to answering the OP (Anybody remember that?)
They may not be the same human being, but they certainly “share” a number of characteristics:
NightGirl44:
Date Registered: 12-15-1999
Status: Member
Total Posts: 35
Current Email: nightgirl44@aol.com
Homepage: http://
Occupation: research
Location: USA
Interests: dancing,clubbing, men, reading, hiking, collecting, cooking, and more.
Rainbowcsr:
Date Registered: 12-03-1999
Status: Member
Total Posts: 100
Current Email: rainbowcsr@aol.com
Homepage: http://
Occupation: self employed
Location: USA
Interests: camping, walking, reading, swimming, fishing, ladies, shooting, ancient history, some antiques, music
Sentinel:
Date Registered: 12-16-1999
Status: Member
Total Posts: 66
Current Email: sentinel002@aol.com
Homepage: http://
Occupation: A couple.
Location: USA
Interests: Camping, boating, fishing, shooting, ect., ect.,
They all arrived from AOL on close dates with complementary interests. Rather than a multiple personality, I’d guess chauvinistic buddies.
Tom~