I need help finding a poem. It may (or may not) be by Alexander Pope. It speaks of going to church where people
". . . learn with little labor
The way to love their fellow man
And hate their next door neighbour."

The villa's and the chapel's where
I learned with little labor
The way to love my fellow man
And hate my next-door neighbor."
[C. K. Chesterton]

The World State

Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that's nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens -

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labor
The way to love my fellow man
And hate my next-door neighbor.

- G. K. Chesterton

Thanks, ilza. I have know idea where I came across the fragment I quoted. I'm glad to have the whole poem and the authror.

>And how I hate the horrid French,

Who never will be English!

The current world-view of some Americans right now. Sigh.

pam

did you watch Andy Rooney the other day ? ...

Nice to find it/read it again ...

No, I tend to avoid television. Was it good or bad?

pam

I like France a lot ...
but it was quite fair, to say the least :

[www.wwjtv.com];

I don't agree. It seems to me a bit well, childish, to say: we helped you once, so now you are in our debt and have to do as we say. You don't need to earn the right to have an opinion on something that could end up in world war three (in the worst case scenario) and defending that opinion.

Besides, in that case Europe owes a lot more to the russians, who did a lot more in the second world war than the Americans (dying mostly), and if you look at how the united states expected Europe to behave towards Russia after the war, with hostility mostly, they can hardly come up with that argument now!


"Americans have a right to protest going to war with Iraq. The French do not. They owe us the independence they flaunt in our face at the U.N. "

So in fact it is not, eh, independence what we've got? Because independence as long as it is in line with what the united states wants us to do is not independence at all! This is the most stupid reasoning I have heard in ages from someone older than 10!

(no offence to you ilza)

I don't think you can "owe" someone the right to censor your opinions or your statements, so the whole argument sickens me. I could owe someone my LIFE and it wouldn't give that person the right to prevent me from taking a position on the taking of someone ELSE'S life!

HOWEVER, since there's so much history being taken WAY out of context, I want to respond to the notion that France "owes the U.S." its liberation from the Nazis during WWII.

It could be said with MORE truth that the United States owes it's very existence to France, because we would certainly have lost our Revolution without French support. This was very much on the minds of the President and the Generals when the decision was made to sent a U.S. force, led by Douglas McArthur, to chase the Nazis out of France--and they wanted everyone to know it, too. McArthur's carefully chosen words, at the moment he stepped on French soil, were these:

"Lafayette, we are here."

====================

And while we're at it, Stanley Karnow (author of that humongous book on Vietnam) believes that ONE of the roots of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was American guilt about our LATE ARRIVAL in France during WWII. Far from feeling that they owed anything to the U.S., Truman felt that the French might harbor long-term ill will towards the U.S. because we waited so long to join the war--we certainly could have PREVENTED the occupation instead of ending it, and that would have saved countless lives.

====================

So the whole idea that, because we "liberated Paris," the French somehow OWE anything to the U.S. ... that's not just false, it's a really disgusting exploitation of the general level of ignorance about modern history.

But -- to close where I opened -- SO WHAT IF THEY DID? We have a President who says (and I quote): "They [terrorists] hate us for our freedoms... our freedom to assemble and to disagree with each other" -- and then wages a hate campaign against those who disagree with him. Makes me sick.

MARIAN BOCK
NYC

Marian, I am really so relieved and happy that you wrote that. More clearly than ever I could make my feelings clear. Everything I hear about france in the US news seems to me nothing more than propaganda, and I honestly thought the world had gone mad.

You won't believe how much this article that seems to be so well received in the US has bothered me yesterday. Not only me, but a lot of people here at work. (I work with a lot of different nationalities: from norwegian to portuguese and nearly everything in between).

I have noticed one amazing thing: the rest of Europe was never a fan of France (the dutch e.g. thought them to be too arrogant), but I have never ever seen so many "common people" (so no matter what line the governments take) of all European countries been so much in favor of france. The government of France is doing exactly what their population wants. The news they give to their population is facts, not propaganda. Isn't that what a democracy is all about? Isn't that what Bush claims to want to defend?

I have been pondering for a couple of weeks now (ever since a discussion on the other forum) about one fundamental question: how much is freedom of speech worth if the information the population gets is not neutral? The population has to be inhumanly smart as a whole (a complete impossibility) not to be influenced by that information. As you can see is now happening with the general opinion of the american people on France. This is very, very dangerous.

From Osama bin Laden's "Letter to the American People", as published in
The Guardian, 24 Nov 2001, in which among other things he states the
conditions Americans must meet in order to avoid further acts of
terrorism like that on the World Trade Center:


What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam....

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression,
lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and
purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality,
intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which
you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive
lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst
you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization
witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah
in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you
will and desire. You separate religion from your policies,
contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the
Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to
you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation,
grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the
amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need
of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden
by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on
Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the
Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then
taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life
making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense;
precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage
of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of
them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider
them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down
this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in
the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the
official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account,
other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with
no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will
go down in history and remembered by nations?

(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The
companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming
active and the criminals becoming rich.

(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or
advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use
women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your
profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.

(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its
forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments
are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism
and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.

(viii) And because of all this, you have been described in history as a
nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go
ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a
Satanic American Invention.

(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases
more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign
the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy
companies and industries.

(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway
in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with
their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies,
media and economy....

If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight
with the Islamic Nation....

If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness,
guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you
will lose this Crusade.... If the Americans do not respond, then their
fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal
with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall,
and economic bankruptcy.

This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they
now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the
permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?

I don't quite agree with Bin Laden. Not at all actually. But what exactly is relationship of this with the war on Iraq according to you?

Oops, wrong date, s.b. 2002.

[www.observer.co.uk] />
My point?


The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Desi and Marian-NYC,

Yes, I agree with you also. The current opinion that many Americans seem to be holding is that of the playground- "If you're MY friend, you can't be friends with that person over there." Sigh.

Hugh, I too think that this is where things may be going. (Duck and cover, anyone?)

pam

Desi raised an enormous question: "How much is freedom of speech worth if the information the population gets is not neutral?"

Desi, the best "answer" I can give you is: LIVE WITH THE QUESTION.

I think we must start by assuming that there is NO SUCH THING as "neutral" news about current events, history--anything having to do with the behavior of human beings.

However, we can make an EFFORT to gather information from various perspectives and to use our brains to arrive at responsible decisions, and TRY not to get into a rut where we let one particular organ of news dictate our thinking.

I agree with you that it is impossible to have completely neutral coverage. Choosing a subject already unneutralizes it. But I have been comparing American news with French and dutch news, and came to the shocking conclusion that the american news doesn't even try to be neutral.

I am not afraid for people that have the training to gather information, but on the whole population, how many people got this? If you look at this forum for example: how many people even think to look a bit further? (e.g. the search button). It is a very basic example, but I really think that searching for information, and filtering the facts out of it is something that needs to be learned. For a lot of people the theory: it was on television/in the newspaper so it must be true, is still something they live by!

american news doesn't even try to be neutral.

Reality check time. That is like saying all the French are cowards. There is no such single entity as 'american news'. There are lots of different news reporting companies - radio, television, newspaper, weekly journals, etc.

Yes, it is our individual responsibility as citizens to weed out the lies, and discover the truth, be it from Bin Laden or whomever.

Ok, I don't get all the news. Reality is checked ;-)
I just read the New York times and Washington post occasionaly, and some websites, and sometimes some news on Sky news. Not too often though.

So see my comments in this perspective please.

I do. Personally, I would believe the Washington Post a lot more often than the NY Times, though!

Having read a great deal of the Middle East history, I think we Americans should be deeply ashamed of our previous and current position on Palestine and Isreal. Again, in our Republican form of government, the Jews have a lot more votes (and money) than the Palestinians, and they end up calling the shots.

Still, Saddam Hussein cannot be said NOT to be one of the 'bad guys', what with his repressive dictatorship, invasion of Kuwait, gassing the minority elements in the population, torture, treatment of women, and the like.

Is that any reason for the U.S. to go to war and steal all his oil? Nope.

Hi!
Back on the site after a vacation weekand glad to read your opinions about France in this thread.
Well, to tell you the truth, we were a little puzzled here to see all those violent reactions against us by some of the U.S. press and politics as well as the comparison with WWII.(for which we are still very grateful but whose situation had nothong to do with today).
Anyway, happy to know not everybody hates us!!

And if you allow me a pacifist an American little poem:Earth

"A planet doesn't explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air --
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."

-- John Hall Wheelock

Welcome to the forum, Mia!


I do see ONE valid connection between WW2 and France's "right" to take a position against the Bush War--if you want to make one. And that is:

There are people living in France who remember what it's like to have your home bombed from the sky, and those people may be more hesitant than the average American to cause that kind of suffering for the civilian people of Iraq.

With regard to the bias in U.S. news ... I wish I could say that "we get the kind of news we deserve" or something like that. I wonder if, historically, the thug nations have always had thug press, and I really don't know. The citizens of imperial Rome were certainly not reading weekly newsletters from the opposition groups in the occupied countries ... ? Yet the Romans did NOT have a reputation for extinguishing other cultures; in fact, they were more likely to provide infrastructure for them (cp. the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" scene in LIFE OF BRIAN).

Maybe all I'm saying is that AVAILABILITY of information is meaningless without a cultural value on ABSORBING that information, which we seem to lack.

Hmm..... I see exactly what you mean about the bombings: only yesterday there was a 250KG WWII bomb that had to be defused. It was discovered on a construction site in the middle of a city; more than 6000 people had to be evacuated. It may be difficult to imagine but this happens quite often in the North of France, almost 60 years after. Food for thought.....

An unexploded WW2 bomb found YESTERDAY ??? !!!

I had no idea! There was a TV series (BBC import) called "Danger: UXB" a few years ago about diffusing Un-Exploded Bombs in England right after the war. But I thought the only unexploded bomb threats these days were in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, which are still littered with landmines.

What an eye-opener!

They turn up in the UK quite regularly still, often enough not to make national headlines, as they aren't in highly populated areas or would have been found before. A few people will be evacuated for a few hours while the bomb squad sort it out.

Marion-NYC...not to take history out of context but it was Gen Pershing in World War I that purportedly made the statement, "Lafayette, we are here" upon his arrival in France leading the First American Expeditionary Force. In World War II, Macarthur never left the Pacific Theater of operations. As far as the Revolutionary War, Ambassador to France Benjamin Franklin could not coax the French into leaving France until we had the British bottled-up at Yorktown, Lafayette not withstanding.

It's stretching the truth more than a little to say that Macarthur did not leave "the Pacific Theater of Operations". He left the Phillipines and went to Australia, maybe in the same "theater", but certainly a few aisles away from the war.
tj

Shunyam - THANK YOU! I knew the "We are here" story because my father told it to me long ago; I never verified it in a history book. PERSHING IT IS!

Re "coaxing the French" -- fair enough. But mind you, we didn't pay our debt to them without a hell of a lot of "coaxing" when the Revolution was over. Jefferson agonized over that.

Now, what has this to do with Alexander Pope? I can't recall...

So can we imagine how long it will take to pick up the litter from this next war?

pam

Well, I don't think we're here yet, but maybe we should keep in mind what Einstein said:
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"

Well, I don't think we're here yet, but maybe we should keep in mind what Einstein said:
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"

Thanks, Mia. Wonderful quotation.

Can anyone help me with critics on Alex Pope's poem "The Rape of the lock"??? Pleeaazz... I can't find anything! (((