Hi Bart!
I must reply with regard to your hostile exchange yesterday with our friend from England. I know it’s lengthy, but….
I’m an American who has lived abroad in Budapest
for nearly seven years, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet
tons of good people from a number of places.
Naturally, I encounter many people from the U.K., and for the most
part I get on really well with them. But this
usually happens once they get past the fact that I’m an American.
When the ‘ice’ is finally broken, it usually
begins something like this: “Well, you’re actually alright…for an American.”
Or: “I like you because you don’t seem like an
American.” Not exactly compliments.
The fact is that many British resent Americans
truly and deeply, and this something I began to notice, and experience,
long before Monkey Man even took office. Why
this is the case I am not entirely sure, but I think some of the resentment
is based on a lot of really petty arguments and
general ignorance from both sides.
A typical introductory ‘conversation’ between a Brit and a Yank that bores the tits off me is the following:
Yank: We saved your ass from Hitler!
Brit: Took you fucking long enough to get here!
Generalizing, I know, but these sorts of perceptions
pretty much sum up a fair amount of the resentment that’s been
built up since 1945 between ourselves and our
‘coalition partners’. The thing is that both of the above arguments are
stupid, and I don’t like to see you getting sucked
into that line of thinking…even if you’re just having fun with someone
who is clearly a moron. You rightfully pointed
out the hypocrisy of his pinhead leader Blair following our pinhead leader
Bush, and that was really all that was needed.
As for things like, “Ask you grandparents which
language you’d be speaking today…blah, blah, blah.”
That’s just ugly redneck speech. (Nobody in Budapest,
by the way, speaks Russian.)
I see that as more shorthand than redneck.
Please provide me with a one sentence European "reminder" that 300K
Americans died helping Europe.
Brits blame the US for arriving late to WWII because
1) they generally know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how
rough things were economically in the States
in the 1930s, and 2) they don’t adequately consider that we were fighting
in both the Atlantic AND the Pacific. They also
play down our casualty numbers.
On the other hand, Americans are all too willing
to take too much credit for victory in Europe. America delivered the
knockout punch, but Hitler lost his war in Russia.
There is simply no telling what would have happened if Hitler hadn’t
made the tactical blunder of betraying Stalin
in the middle of winter. And another thing that Americans should consider
more seriously is Britain’s work at Bletchley
in cracking the German Enigma code. This was exclusively a British operation,
despite Hollywood’s recent attempt to attribute
much of the credit to America (the film Enigma). If the Enigma
code wasn’t
cracked, German U-Boats would have sank so many
US supply boats and military transports that it is unlikely we would
have even attempted to land at Normandy. I just
think these are fair points to make clear to both sides of the argument.
And it’s not like either of us were knights in
shining armor. Both the US and Britain committed some appalling atrocities
toward the end. In Europe, the bombing of Dresden
was the most notable…carried out in three murderous waves, the first
two delivered by the English...160,000 dead and
utterly pointless. The war was already over. It was blood revenge and
nothing more. (I visited Dresden for the first
time in August, and…well, it was a moving experience.) The US similarly
bombed the crap out of Tokyo with civilian casualty
numbers that rivaled those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Equally pointless and given extremely short shrift
in our history books.
So, what’s MY point? I guess it’s that this sort
of ‘we saved your ass’ strutting is just so arrogant…and so far from a
complete picture. How many American high school
and college students are familiar with America’s WWII lend lease
program? The gist of the deal was that Roosevelt
was truly intent on bleeding dry what remained of the British Empire
for America’s gain after the fighting stopped.
The US forced Britain to pay crippling amounts of money following the
war for ‘services rendered’. We not only helped
to rescue Britain; we charged them up the wazoo to the point of
bankruptcy. More bottom line than altruism. With
the exception of the marvelous Marshall Plan, very few American
federal government undertakings abroad since
then have been about anything other than the bottom line. (If you ever
have the time or inclination, check out the book
Stalin’s Silver John Beasant.)
And I can’t help but write from Budapest that
the Iron Curtain was made possible largely because of the West’s colossal
failure to believe early intelligence that people
were disappearing right, left and center from Stalin’s Russia…something
for
which the people of Berlin, Hungary, Poland,
Romania, Czechoslovakia, etc. were not and are not particularly grateful.
As for those serving in the US armed forces. I
hate seeing young men and women die for any reason. And many young men
and women are, unfortunately, taking orders from
a real simian of a commander in chief. But if you take orders from the
devil,
then you’re doing the devil’s work, aren’t you?
And until Americans can attempt to understand the full ramifications of
their
actions throughout the world, no one’s going
to try very hard to understand us…let alone like us.
I can disagree with you there.
Had the military refused to fight for Clinton, we would've condemned
that, right?
We can't have a debate each time an order is given.
We can't have only GOP soldiers in Iraq and only Democrat soldiers
in Bosnia.
One final point. I know some of your readers get
uppity about some things they shouldn’t get uppity about. Maybe I’m one
of them. But I’m writing because I really appreciate
what you do, and I think you’re above wasting your time writing what
really amounts to a xenophobic response to our
friend in England. If you receive similar e-mails in the future, I would
suggest
instead: “Thank-you for your good work at
Bletchley. Now fuck off.”
ha ha
Sorry to be Columbo here, but one more thing.
I know you play down some of your criticism with the fact that yours
is essentially a ‘humor’ site. That may be the
case, but you’re tackling some pretty bloody serious subject matter.
George Orwell stated in his principles as a writer
that everything we write is politically motivated.
Maybe you don’t agree, but consider that when
someone like Michael Moore treats facts lightly or conducts lazy research
in the name of ‘humor’, he undermines his message
and contributes all too effectively in his own way to a dumbing down of
the left.
Keep hammering. All the best,
NJ in Budapest
NJ, I don't remember if I've ever said this or if I've said it a thousand
times, but like anybody, I have mood swings.
I can't imagine what it's like to be known as a clown and then having
something important to say.
Or being a very, very serious man wanting to just kick back and have
a few laughs.
It takes so many hours to complete a page, I could be angry from noon-4,
then giddy from 4-8, but Monkey mail
is pure manna from Heaven. I might not know much about World
War II, but I can't let some pudding-eating honker
call our brave, dying men "baby-killing wankers" because a blood-thirsty
madman stole our White House
Thanks for the note, and if you can think of a good substitute for,
"You'd be speaking German,"
which still seems to be true even if it displeases the people
who were saved, please send that along.
back to bartcop.com