French animals

Let us have another look at the “French = surrender” theme, which has become obsessional in today’s America.

I had written before that there was a moral dimension in the association of French = surrender = coward = inferior = despicable.

We must push forward this succession of analogies:

The translation of the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkey” reveals parts and pieces of colonial racism’s most abject arsenal.

First, “cheese-eater”: we already know of the strict restrictions enforced by the U.S. concerning cheese imported from France. It’s unhealthy and a potential vector for diseases. One must therefore be French, and thus little concerned by hygiene, in order to eat raw-milk cheese. This is just the beginning.

 “Surrender”: Real men never surrender; here we are practically entering the realms of Untermenschen. Not animals quite yet (although the French eat cheese, a food which might well be better meant for animals than humans.)

“Monkey”: there we are, the step to bring the French to the level of animals has been taken. And this is repeated out loud over and over by millions and through millions of media channels in the US.

I had long ago made the comparison, which some contested, with Radio Berlin talking about the Jews in 1943. I must stand by it.

The fact that an association between the anti-French discourse and Nazi rhetorics may be unacceptable to the American conscience is understandable. Nevertheless it happens to be the same mental process, which consists of lowering a certain category of humans to the point of suggesting that said category is unworthy of being part of humanity. Are we not speaking of animals, after all? 

And then you add the fact that the French are hairy (like animals), that they stink (like animals), etc…

One might find surprising that the clearest evidence might be invisible to even the best-trained eyes, as in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. Yet in the end, we know that the more indignant the defence, the more impossible to admit, to assume and to bear is the truth. But there is no need of acquiescence from the other party to validate what is in fact an unveilment of the mind.

Or this: Jon Stewart is the host of a satirical comedy show. He uses tropes, stereotypes and has no real intention of doing any harm. Yeah, right! Sorry, but there are stereotypes with which one can’t play and not expect to be perpetuating and validating them.

Let’s imagine that, in France, we should systematically associate blackness with “So, you likes dem fried chickens?” Oh, but it’s just a stereotype, a trope …

Or let’s say constantly talking to a black man this way: “Yessum, you’s a good nigga, you ain’t no happy here in France?” Haha, giggle, it’s just a stereotype, a trope… “You’s not happy? You’s susceptible. You’s hafta learn real men know how to laugh at jokes. You not real man yet.”

To a Jew, who would be regularly asked, “Why does it always smell like Zyklon B when you enter a room?” haha, giggle, just a trope, just a stereotype. It’s a satirical show with no intention of doing harm. “Are you still lacking a little bit somewhere?” Laugh, laugh…

To an Arab: “Are you gonna behead me? Have you had your jihad juice? Where’s your camel?” Haha, giggle, it’s just a stereotype, a trope…

Now try to imagine a black, a Jew, or an Arab who, for several years, would have been sys-te-ma-ti-ca-lly associated with this kind of stereotypes; yeah, they’d enjoy it, no doubt.

“Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives.” Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” - Jean-Paul Sartre, 1961 

Apparently with good conscience, modern America reproduces, identically, all the racist dynamics which the French colonists used with Africans and Arabs of the gilded colonial age, when it was important to make local populations assume that their “different” status would always keep them out of reach from pure humanity, represented by whites.

The black is a person (Hegel), a freed slave (Marx), he has not yet been recognized as a man. That is why he remains immutable in his being for the other, that other, the white man, in which “the meaning of his life is condensed”. - F. Fanon

The target has been displaced from black American towards another, the French. But it’s basically the still fundamentally racist and supremacist rhetoric which inspires its authors; the difference with Nazi ideology is nowhere to be seen. It is, by the way, remarkable that every time the 1940 defeat is mentioned, those who seem to delight most in it, seem to feel closer to the assassins (the Nazis) than of their victims.

All this is very revealing for a certain American trend of thought, and, as always in these cases, we learn more about the abuser than the abused.

We are indeed in the realms of the unspeakable, but they want to make us believe, probably in good faith, that it’s just meaningless jokes. Yeah, right…

In my opinion, we haven’t paid enough attention to the Pepe Le Pew character, a skunk, an animal which main attribute is its smell.

First appearance in January of 1945. Weren’t we already in this theme of the French’s inferiority via the questioning of his humanity and his “true” identity? In a humorous, meaningless way, of course…

But would the cartoonists even of 50 years ago dare representing blacks as a smelly animal?

Only comparison that comes to mind: the Nazi propaganda making movies in which the Jews were rats.

Once again, I don’t see the difference.