Re: French culture or Russian culture?

Again you use anectodic events as "empirical" evidence. Too long to read
completely, but I'm quite sure that it ends with a tale about how the strong
tribunal of inquisition could have helped setting things straight.



"The Black Monk" <cherniymonakh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1122503346.908091.32800@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Franceski wrote:
> "Musashi Miyamoto" <Samurai@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:gISFe.121$q62.40@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> > Hey durakski,
> >
> > While Tony Blair's ancestors were fighting to free the French faggots,
> they
> > were collaborating with the Nazis.
>
>
> If they knew how the US/UK would have turn out 60 years later, there would
> never have been resistance in France but full cooperation with Germany to
> defeat US/UK, as it would have been the lesser of 2 evil.

French resistence was overrated, and the Nazi regime was not comparable
to the US/UK (which did not "turn out" worse - those guys were if
anything even worse back then). There was a strong French right-wing
prior to W.W.I. (much fascist ideology was stolen from the French) and
the idea of German occupation was to a large extent a myth propogated
by French leftists. How cowardly that the same French masses who were
ambivalent about the Germans during the "occupation" then executed
writers etc. who had been pro-German, humiliated French lovers of
German soldiers and tortured their children.

Here is French leftist bravery at work. They couldn't fight the
Germans effectively, but they did indeed struggle against innocent
kids:

Four years after the end of the war, France was proudly rebuilding
itself,
and its self-image, as a proud and resilient nation.

This meant little to a shy, polite six-year-old boy named Daniel
Rouxel, who
found himself locked inside the icy darkness of the backyard chicken
shed
for long, lonely evenings by his grandmother, the only guardian he had
known, a woman who frequently reminded him that his existence was a
personal
blight and a national tragedy. She was so ashamed of him that she would
lock
him out of sight, in the cold and filth, whenever guests were visiting.


The next day, the children of the village would tell Daniel about their
parents' open mockeries of him: The war ***. The piece of Nazi
excrement. The spawn of the enemy. And, most frequently, the "batard
boches"
-- *** of the Krauts. He felt abandoned, unloved and desperately
alone.

His mother, a poor French woman, had fled when Daniel was an infant,
hiding
in Paris to escape the terrible punishments meted out after the war to
women
like her. His father, a Nazi soldier, had died terribly for his crimes
of
passion.

Little Daniel was abandoned, hated and alone. It would take him five
decades
to learn that there were more than 200,000 others just like him.

"It was not until I was 12 that I received any expression of love, and
I had
to leave France to hear it. I was told almost every day, by the leaders
of
the village and by my friends, that I would be better off if I had not
been
born," Mr. Rouxel said the other day.

Now a stocky, jolly man of 62, he blanches as he flips through his
photographs, spread across the dining-room table of his tiny apartment
in Le
Mans. "For all my life, France has tried to pretend that people like me
do
not exist. Even today, the government will not acknowledge that they
did
something terrible."

For most of those long decades, French society was incapable of even
considering the existence of so many people like Mr. Rouxel. Like other
European nations, it had rebuilt itself on a scaffold of national
mythology
that concealed huge fissures in its collective soul. Into those
fissures,
unseen by anyone, fell an entire community of people who officially
could
not exist. This is how nations construct themselves: By turning the
embarrassing ambiguities of the past into official narratives, and
leaving
out entire casts of characters like little Daniel Rouxel.

In recent months, France has become fascinated by people like Mr.
Rouxel,
who have been labelled "les enfants maudits" (the cursed children) in a
series of books and documentaries.

France has begun to step away from its nationalist myths and
acknowledge
that its modern history is far less orderly and monolithic than
generations
of schoolchildren had been led to believe. The proud image of a
uni-ethnic
and mono-linguistic nation, built on shared notions of democracy, is
beginning to dissolve into something more honest. This reconciliation,
in
the view of victims like Mr. Rouxel, is happening a full lifetime too
late.

His story, like all the others, begins in the murky years of the 1940s.
France was occupied, officially against its will, by Germany. Tens of
thousands of French troops had died trying to stop them, but even more
Wehrmacht troops were now encamped in France. Except that most of them
did
not have camps, or bases. The Nazis, recognizing the warm welcome they
received from both the French right and the Communist left, decided to
billet most of their troops in French villages.

The village of Dinard, in a strategically useful corner of Brittany,
was
home to a great many German soldiers, most of them very young. For
22-year-old Lea Rouxel, as for hundreds of thousands of other French
women,
these soldiers were a source of employment, companionship and
self-esteem.
In Brittany, where Paris itself was seen by some as an occupying force,
the
Germans were far from hated.

One day, as Lea rode to the canteen where she worked serving the German
soldiers, her bicycle blew a tube. She was rescued by a dashing
24-year-old
named Otto Ammon, a lieutenant with the Wehrmacht. They quickly fell in
love, and were inseparable for several months. Soon enough, she was
pregnant.

At this point, in 1943, the Wehrmacht had fallen under the close watch
of
the Gestapo, who worried that Germans were becoming too attached to the
French, and were failing to execute prisoners in sufficient numbers.
Soldiers caught in dalliances with French women were immediately
shipped out
to the Eastern Front, which by that time meant almost certain death.
Mr.
Ammon was discovered and shipped away. He had only a few minutes to
take the
infant Daniel in his arms, and bid his heartbroken mother farewell.

He did not last long. His left arm and his right leg blown off by a
Soviet
shell, he died of infections, in slow agony. He lived long enough to
contact
his mother in Stuttgart, and tell her that he had a son in France. Amid
the
devastation of Germany, nothing could be done.

Within a year, the war had ended in France, and the real ordeal began
for
Lea. French women suspected of collaboration, amorous or otherwise,
were
ordered to have their heads shaved. Thousands of people were summarily
executed. Many others, including Lea, went into hiding, abandoning
their
children to orphanages. Under the stern leadership of Charles de
Gaulle,
France began to construct its myth of solidarity.

"The history of France after the war was written in a mood of
resistance, as
if all French had been resistance heroes, with only a few betrayers and
traitors," said Jean-Paul Picaper, one of the historians who wrote the
recent bestseller Les Enfants Maudits. "France had a complex,
certainly,
because it lost the war in 1940. De Gaulle may have saved our honour,
but we
know now that the resistance was perhaps 2 or 3 per cent of the
population,
and the others were quiet, they didn't do anything, and many of them
had
good contacts with the German occupation."

Some inconvenient facts needed to be brushed aside, such as the
existence of
enough Franco-German children to populate a medium-sized city. These
children were kept apart, either in orphanages or in isolated villages.
They
also became scapegoats for a nation's self-doubt.

Daniel Rouxel stayed in a Paris orphanage and then a foster home until
he
was 4. Then his mother, still in hiding and working as a servant in
Paris,
removed him and shipped him off to live with his grandmother in the
Breton
village of Megrit.

Like many of the children whose lives were documented by Mr. Picaper
and
others, Mr. Rouxel experienced a form of collective punishment that
seems
almost unimaginable today. French villages can be cruel places, and
little
Daniel was often reminded that he was slightly less valuable than an
animal.


"The whole village was in a church one day, when I was six years old,"
he
remembered, his voice rising. "After the sermon, a town secretary
called me
over, stood next to me, and told the whole congregation, 'Do you know
the
difference between a fils de boche like this one here and a swallow?
The
difference is that when a swallow leaves, it takes its offspring. When
a
German leaves the country, it leaves this mess behind.' Everybody
laughed. I
was mortified."

At 12 years of age, he was finally able to escape to boarding school in
the
anonymity of faraway Le Mans, where his mother eventually joined him.
Nobody
knew of his background, and he dared not mention it.

In 1955, there was a brief opening: His German family finally made
contact,
and his mother, who had been scornful and reluctant, finally agreed to
let
him visit them in Stuttgart.

"When I got to Stuttgart," he said, "my German aunt told me the first
loving
words I had ever heard in my life. She said, 'When you come to Germany,
you
are at home, and every day you spend here you will be spending at
home.' It
was at this point that I began contemplating my life and realizing that
I
had one mother and one father and a family. It was marvellous."

But his life in France remained difficult. He married, and had two
children,
and finally decided to tell his wife about his past. She was horrified
and
ashamed. He placed a photo of his youthful father, in his
swastika-emblazoned hat, on the mantel. Whenever she cleaned, she
turned it
around. After 15 years, his marriage collapsed, he said, because she
could
not reconcile herself with his past. Nobody else was to know his
secret.

"During those years, I could not speak about it, but I was constantly
thinking about it. It's something I could never get off my mind -- it
had
poisoned my childhood. I spent my life ashamed of my father, until
1994."

That was when historians chronicling the "shaved women" of France
realized
that there were hundreds of thousands of children like Mr. Rouxel. He,
and
others like him, began to speak to historians. France, freed from its
nationalist mania by the mellowing effects of time and the powerful
anti-nationalist pull of the European Union, began to listen.

"Nobody was talking about it for all those years. It was a taboo. There
were
thousands and thousands of people living with this great depression and
sadness -- I was one of the lucky ones, since I knew my German family.
They
don't know anything about their fathers. Their mothers were publicly
humiliated right after the war, and my mother escaped. I am probably
among
the happiest of these people."

Mr. Rouxel became a leader of the "war children," as the Franco-Germans
call
themselves, and these sixtysomething scapegoats held their first
gathering
last month -- in Berlin. They are pressing the German and French
governments
to recognize their status, grant them dual citizenship, and apologize.

"The French government has not acknowledged that it did something
terrible,"
Mr. Rouxel said. "That is what I am fighting for. French society, at
least,
is now admitting that something unfair was done, even if there is no
legal
or formal agreement to acknowledge this."

But, more important, groups like the "enfants maudits" are part of a
larger
European trend of recognizing, after a terrible century, that their
countries are not what they seem.

For decades after the war, European nations built myths of themselves
as
unified, homogenous places built around distinct cultures, languages
and
peoples. Nowhere was this process more extreme than in France. As
recently
as 1900, almost half the people living in France neither spoke French
nor
likely considered themselves ethnically "French." The two world wars
and
their aftermaths led France to unify its population aggressively,
sometimes
brutally, outlawing contradictory languages, religious expressions and
cultures.

It is only during the past 15 years, as many French citizens have begun
to
see themselves as more European than strictly French, that this
homogeneity
has begun to fracture, Mr. Picaper noted in an interview.

"Some parts of French society, because they have contacts with Germany
and
other European countries now through business and government, they see
the
history more objectively, and there is a tendency in France to deal
with
history somewhat more neutrally than before. There are inquiries about
torture in Algeria and so on.

"Many people know now that it's not a question of one nation being
totally
guilty and another being fully innocent -- they know now that all
nations
are at least a little bit guilty and all are somewhat innocent. There
is not
black and white, but grey."

Mr. Rouxel now lives the quiet life of a retired municipal official in
Le
Mans with his second wife. His mother, who does not discuss her past,
lives
in a nearby nursing home, and his two children visit frequently.

He is not the sort of man who goes in for sweeping historical analyses.
But
he is fully aware that his identity and his existence, like those of
thousand of other ambiguous children of the war, are emblems of the new
European self-recognition.

He turns to the first page of his photo album: "Here are my symbols,"
he
says. On the top of the page are photos of his mother and his father,
both
younger than his own children are today, side by side. On the bottom of
the
page is a photo of former French president François Mitterrand and
former
German chancellor Helmut Kohl holding hands and smiling. He looks up
and
grins.

"I am very European, aren't I? This Europe is not just a symbol for me.
It
is the meaning of my life."

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/rad-green/2005-May/018459.html

"All she knows is that her father, whose name was Werner, was then sent
to the Eastern front to what was then the Soviet Union. Sevestre
suspects he died there. After the war, she was raised as an orphan. At
first she was placed with a nanny. From ages six to nine she lived in
an orphanage before being taken in by an uncle and then by her maternal
grandfather. Her grandfather had participated in World War I and took
out his anger at the Germans on the little girl.

'I was beaten, I was insulted,' she said. 'I didn't know why he
treated me in this way. I didn't know why my grandfather was so mean
to me when my little cousins who lived in the same house, were well
treated, whereas I was always beaten and insulted.'"

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1240954,00.html


etc. etc.

> Franco-German wars are a momentary mistake,

You underestimate the intense hatred for Germany within France that
existed prior to World War I, caused by Germany grabbing back some of
its own ethnic lands.

> franco-english wars are the permanent fight of
> dozen centuries, almost since the fall of Rome.

??? Remember die Wacht am Rhein? Germany was the victim of French
predation since the middle ages. The French even made a deal with
infidel Muslim Turks against the Christian Holy Roman Empire.

England was once as Germanic as Saxony, but was taken over by
French-speaking vikings from Normandy. The Franco-English conflicts
were thus sort of a civil war as England's rulers were slowly pushed
off of their ancestral territories by the French who stayed behind.

>
>
>
> > That's French culture.
> >
> >
> > "Franceski" <lucr@xxxxx> wrote in message
> > news:soRFe.27476$hu6.1288845@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > :
> > : "The Black Monk" <cherniymonakh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> > : news:1122488006.903698.182010@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > : > Definitely French. They've given Roman Polansky citizenship, and
> > : > continue to shield him from justice, have they not? In Quebec
> > : > recently, Karla Homolka, involved in the abduction, rape and murder
of
> > : > two teenage girls, has been given a warm home. The local anglo
> > : > newspaper mentioned how, unlike other Canadians, Quebecouis were
> > : > forgiving of her sins. One local Frenchman even said that he found
> her
> > : > French language "charming".
> > :
> > : Bwahaha! Ontarians just are scared to death by a little woman. It is
so
> > : ridiculous to watch all those fat men, not little girls, confessing
> about
> > : how they fear for their safety because of Homolka and how they would
> love
> > to
> > : see her dead so they can sleep at night. That's just plain generalized
> > : psychose.
> > :
> > : This is not forgiving. She has served her full time in jail. If you
have
> > : some respect for the legal system, you have to let her go. She
obviously
> > : felt that she would find such respect for laws and be safer in a
french
> > : environment with all the weirdos, who have nothing to do with the
case,
> > who
> > : gave her death threats. Quebec is certainly her only chance to simply
> stay
> > : alive. Would she be stupid enough to do the same crimes again? I don't
> > think
> > : so. And she is so well-known that she would be immediatly recognized
by
> > any
> > : potential victim. Imagine: a woman living in an almost french only
area,
> > : with an english accent, with a face shown ad nauseam in every media,
> > trying
> > : to convince a teenage girl to come in her probably shitty appartment,
> > since
> > : she has no revenue other than welfare. She is obviously smarter than
> that.
> > : She cannot leave her appartment without creating a commotion, has
almost
> > no
> > : opportunity to find a job, have no possibility of a private life. She
is
> > : broken forever. The only worst thing would be death penalty or
torture.
> > But
> > : heh, not in my country!
> > :
> > : Last rumors said that she settled in my area. I'm soooo scared. :((
> > :
> > :
> > :
> > : > This is not surprising - since the French revolution the French have
> > : > been at the forefront of Western culture's slide into degeneracy.
> > : >
> > : > I don't see what this has in common with Russian culture though...
> > : >
> > :
> > : Neither do I.
> > :
> > :
> > : > BM
> > : >
> > : >
> > : > Musashi Miyamoto wrote:
> > : > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4697747.stm
> > : >
> > :
> > :
> >
> >


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