Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Ungrateful French repay American kindness with More Officious Condescension

From PBS "American Experience: The Great War"





Original Wharton text from Wharton, Edith. “FIGHTING FRANCE FROM DUNKERQUE TO BELPORT.” Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg, 8 Aug. 2009, www.gutenberg.org/files/4550/4550-h/4550-h.htm.



Blythe Danner as Edith Wharton : At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. But Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse. 




Wharton: Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce....

Wharton: with a little church so stripped and wounded and dishonoured that it lies there by the roadside like a human victim.


Narrator: In the Spring of 1915, one of America's most famous novelists embarked on a tour of the Western Front. Edith Wharton had come on her own initiative to deliver medical supplies, take photographs, and write letters and articles for publication back home about what she called 'the dreadful realities of war.' 


Narrator: For seven months, Wharton followed the track of the German invasion describing 'the huge tiger scratches that the German beast flung over the land.' She stopped to visit French troops who wrote <>in chalk on her car and got close enough to the front lines to peer out at a dead German soldier sprawled across No-Man's-Land. 








Narrator: 'I had the sense of an all pervading, invisible power of evil,' she remembered.   'A saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate.' 



Dude: Edith Wharton, she's symbolic of a lot of Americans who were living in France, already had a deep passionate interest in France, a deep love of France.  They'll able to make clear exactly what's happening.  And the important thing about this is it's coming from an American voice.  



Narrator: At the outset of the war, Wharton had organized a series of  American hostels to shelter the wave of dislocated families pouring into Paris.  In little more than a year, her relief had provided clothing and jobs for more than 9,000 refugees and served nearly a quarter of a million meals.   She also begged Americans at home to help finance her efforts.  'For heaven's sake,' she wrote to a friend, 'proclaim everywhere  and as publicly as possible what it will mean to all that we Americans cherish in England and France go under.' In June, Wharton arrived in Dunkirk immediately after the town had been shelled   by the Germans.  'The freshness of the havoc seemed to accentuate its cruelty,' she wrote.   The hospitals in Dunkirk were struggling to absorb  the casualties from artillery but they were also confronting the effects of a shocking new weapon that had just been introduced [gas warfare]. 




So, after the USA spent blood and treasure defending French borders in both World War I and World War II, the French now try to guilt trip the USA into completely surrendering our national sovereignty by adopting open borders.

From Byerly, Ross, et al. “The Great Humanitarian: Herbert Hoover's Food Relief Efforts.” Metamorphoses Project:Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA , 20 Nov. 2006, www.cornellcollege.edu/history/courses/stewart/his260-3-2006/01 one/befr.htm. Special thanks to Craig Wright, Maureen Harding, and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum




The French mooched food from the United States during World War I, and instead of either paying the USA back, or even paying our charity forward to other countries in need, the only thing the snotty cheapskate loan defaulting French know how to do is try to guilt trip the USA into spending even more of our own money on other random ungrateful foreigners:

Through these extensive undertakings, 3 billion dollars were spent delivering 11 million metric tons of supplies to the countries in need. The United States funded most of the money, though some others, like Britain, did help out a bit. Belgium and France tried to cover the cost of the food relief efforts by taking out loans. However, during the Great Depression, the loans were deserted.





From “Vive L'Amérique: Les Écoles Françaises Accueillent Les Américains.” Mission Centenaire 14-18, centenaire.org/fr/tresors-darchives/archives/vive-lamerique-les-ecoles-francaises-accueillent-les-americains.


Posted by adagioforstrings at 2:40:00 PM
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