A Sad Tale
Posted on June 30th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
During the First World War, France fought on against the German invaders for four long years, despite having more of its soldiers killed than all the American soldiers killed in all the wars in the history of the United States, put together.
But during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. ~Thomas Sowell
One of the more depressing features of the Bush Era has been the declination of Thomas Sowell from a serious public intellectual to whatever he has now become. Reciting the tale of post-WWI French demoralisation sixty years after the fact and blissful ignorance of the 100,000 dead and 200,000 wounded Frenchmen in 1940 alone, who outnumber American casualty figures for most of our wars, are what remains for someone who once made interesting and worthwhile observations about the world.
Filed under: politics
Say…weren’t we promised that the re-direct from http://www.larison.org would be set up sometime in Feb?
You were. I got sidetracked by many things. I’ll see what I can do.
Something about these people is more than a little sad, it’s pathological. The worship of “sacrifice” becomes a desire to see our own countrymen die in greater and greater numbers just to acheive some sense of “significane”. If other countries lead more of their soldiers into pointless and preventable deaths than we do, this somehow makes them greater than us, and we somehow have to compete at sarificing even more of our own for some cause or other. Anyone who doesn’t go along with this plan is a wuss, a softie, a coward. Whereas charging mindlessly in to machine gun nests is a sign of patriotic bravery. I’d certainly like to see more neocons like Sowell participate in such charges, rather than cheer on from the sidelines at the sight of so much blood.
Of course, I’m not even mentioning the sheer stupidity of not realizing that in 1940 France was completely outflanked by the German panzer divisions, and unprepared for such a battle, having invested themselves instead in the antiquainted Maiginot Line defense. It wasn’t a lack of bravery that led to their collapse and surrender, but utter military defeat.
This is one element of recent conservative “thought” that really gets under my skin. Whatever you think about France, she gave up a greater number of troops (out of a smaller population) in 6 weeks than the US did in the entirety of the Vietnam War.
“The worship of “sacrifice†becomes a desire to see our own countrymen die in greater and greater numbers just to acheive some sense of “significaneâ€.
One wonders if such witless supporters envision military sacrifice as some type of Olympic contest, where the US must always win the gold…
@Conradg:
It’s a tangent, I freely admit, but your 12:57 post certainly gives [me] the impression that you think the French expected the the Germans to bash themselves senseless on the Maginot line, rather than the reality that the French expected the major clash to be on the Belgian plain (note of course that the Maginot line was built before Belgium’s turn to neutrality in 1936, which changed the French strategic environment rather substantially). Note that some of the early German plans (i.e. Halder’s OKW plans) would have given the French what they expected (in terms of the meeting engagement somewhere aroundthe Dyle or Escaut).
I certainly hope and assume that you know better.
You’re quite correct about the French surrendering in 1940 because they had been beaten beyond any hope of recovery (just like they were beaten beyond hope of recovery in 1870, but after Sedan there was at least some basis for hope of a balance of power intervention from Austria or the UK, so one can understand the national govt fighting on for a few months).
Bayesian,
Yes, I’m aware of those factors, but wanted to simplify for the sake of argument. The point is that the French were unprepared for the German’s blitzkrieg tactics, which overwhelmed them before they had any chance of effectively fighting back, and this had nothing to do with any lack of will power or bravery as Sowell is suggesting. The notion that the French are somehow cowards when it comes to fighting is one of the silliest military myths of our age. It’s an attempt to reinforce the theme of “moral decline” in Europe, as if the French lost their fighting spirit after WWI. It’s sheer nonsense.