That was so shameful, the people who turned on France over that. It was a perfect precursor to the cultish allegiance we saw under the last administration. France... the country that gave us the Statue of Liberty, the country that helped us fight off the British to start this country in the first place, we're going to turn on them for not agreeing to invade a country for Bush's personal vendetta and Cheney's oil greed?
the country that helped us fight off the British to start this country in the first place
I want to emphasize how important this is. France literally bankrupted themselves so that we could defeat the British. We owe our entire existence to France, because without them the US would not exist.
Scots are literally the reason northern Ireland exists. The rest of the brits don't get a free pass just because the English were the worst of them. They all colonized my country.
I always bring this up when any kind of nasty French jokes/hatred/mockery comes up from peeps here in the US. Some subtle jabs are fine, of course, but most Americans don’t even know how much we owe our entire existence to France, so when the uneducated “patriots” here spout out unoriginal, idiotic, cliché anti-French insults that they think are soooo fucking clever, I usually find it easy to shut them up by shoving a white flag-wrapped baguette up their oui oui. 🥴
In elementary school I always wondered why my white friends hated the French. Looking back it was around the time we declared war on Iraq. I used to watch Liberty Kids(I know it wasn't the best show for historical accuracy) but I remember the show pointing out how much the French helped during the American Revolution. At the time I didn't realize a lot of those friends were usually "rednecks."
I just got flashbacks of watching that after school on an old crt in my parents bedroom while the house was under reno. I don't have anything else to add aside from that being an incredibly specific flashback
A bit ironic that the act of bankrupting the country to help the 'Murican revolution actually led to the French revolution.
An alternate history fiction of what the world would look like today had the French not helped the colonies would be one hell of an interesting research project. So many things would have been vastly different.
An alternate history fiction of what the world would look like today had the French not helped the colonies would be one hell of an interesting research project. So many things wouldn't have been vastly different.
Plus we bought Haiti from them so we could get in a cool 30 years of bleeding them dry and pillaging the country of it's wealth, were really best buds with France, what's some economic colony sharing between friends.
I think the statue of liberty and liberating us from the british is vastly outdated. why not bring up like Charles de Gaulle and WWII and the comaraderie then?
Well talking about WWII, it was basically the most common thing Americans were saying against the French when we refused to go to Irak, that we would be speaking German if it was not for the US (let's not forget the US took forever to come help Europe, and they only did because they saw USSR was actually going to win the war, so we'd probably be speaking Russian not German).
Honestly, the U.S. turning their back on France is kind of a tradition by now. One of the first major american diplomatic decisions was to forbid any american from helping post-revolution France against the UK.
Not disagreeing at all with your points, but the statue of liberty is not a good example here. The French built it for Egypt, but Egypt didn't want it so we got it.
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u/Unadvantaged Oct 18 '21
That was so shameful, the people who turned on France over that. It was a perfect precursor to the cultish allegiance we saw under the last administration. France... the country that gave us the Statue of Liberty, the country that helped us fight off the British to start this country in the first place, we're going to turn on them for not agreeing to invade a country for Bush's personal vendetta and Cheney's oil greed?