MY FRENCH DINNER PARTY

As you will see from the link below, anti-Americanism is rife in France, particularly among the more intellectual strata of French society, and all sorts of batty things are eagerly believed there about Britain and America. I will never attend a dinner party in France but here are the some of the things that I would probably say if I did:

"Europe invented both Communism and Fascism and it took the Anglo-Saxons to rescue them from both -- so it is the Europeans who are the moral cripples, not the Anglo-Saxons"

"France originated both Communism and Fascism. The revolution led to Communism and Napoleon was the first Fascist. He ran a police State, he waged great wars of conquest. He preached the national glory of his country and all he achieved in the end was the death of millions of his people -- all of which is exactly what Hitler and Mussolini later did"

I would no doubt at some point be accused of ignorance of the profundities of French philosophy so I would say: "French philosophers think that creating confusion is clever. Anglo-Saxon philosophy aims to clarify things. Confusion is childish. Getting things clear is what you do as you grow up.

Wouldn't that be rude of me? But Australians are in general a blunt lot. I would probably get tossed out before I got my dinner, though.

French thinker Jean-Francois Revel says that French and other European anti-Americans are out of it mentally. Excerpt:

"Revel, for example, doubts that anti-Americanism seriously can be challenged by rational thought and a careful mustering of facts. Overwhelming the anti-Americans with reason, he believes, would be a formidable and perhaps impossible task "doomed to failure, since the disinformation in question is not the result of pardonable, correctable mistakes, but rather of a profound psychological need" ... "The mechanism of the Great Lie that fences in America on every front, and the rejection of everything that might refute it," Revel says, "evokes the equivalent lie that surrounded the Soviet Union ever since 1917 - not to the detriment, but to the advantage of the Communist empire. Here again, among those who fed from the idealized and falsified images of 'existing socialism,' a sort of mental flyswatter swiped away at facts that were too threateningly real."

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