Unfortunately for Delawareans we are stuck with a lousy paper, the Delaware NewsJournal. The DNJ is filled with lazy post-modern liberalism. This translates to: Conservatives are nuts, the administration is always wrong, and everyone’s opinion is just as valuable as everyone else’s - unless you happen to be conservative or disagree with the paper’s party line. I wouldn’t care if the writing happened to be good - but it’s not. It’s lazy reporting with little research.

Nothing annoys me more than when someone tries to correct a popular misconception in a patronizing manner using bad information. Norman Lockman, a local columnist who always seems to be on the wrong side of issues, took on American enmity towards France in his posting “The French Deserve Better Than They Get. Lockman asks Americans to revere your own national history” and recognize there would be no United States without France”. Unfortunately in his support of the French, Mr. Lockman falls prey to the myth of ever-lasting Franco-American friendship.

Mr. Lockman ignores the fact that the French government waged war against the early American colonists in the French and Indian Wars that lasted from 1689–1763. As for support of the American Revolution 13 years later, historian Barbara Tuchman noted “It was a power struggle of the Old World [against the British], not a concern with America, that brought about the French intervention.” At the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the French secretly urged Britain to deny American claims west of the Alleghenies. Years later the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand demanded a large bribe from the US before he would meet American diplomats in the scandal known as the XYZ Affair. This led to the first American military action after independence – against the French. In 1801 Napoleon sent 50,000 troops to Haiti in order to quell a rebellion on that island and further his aim to eventually rollback the expansion of the United States. Yellow Fever decimated this force and ended his North American ambitions – leading to the sale of the Louisiana Territory in 1804.

President Andrew Jackson declared war on France in the 1830s after the French failed to pay reparations for its assaults against American shipping. During the Civil War, Napoleon III supported the Confederacy and installed a puppet emperor in Mexico to keep the US from extending its influence over Central America and the Caribbean.

French enmity towards the USA continued into the 20th century. At the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, the trouble was not between the victorious allied powers and the defeated axis, but between the USA and France: the former supported token reparations from the Germans, the latter onerous ones. Unfortunately France prevailed. Modern historians view these reparations as necessary for Hitler’s success in the 1920s and 1930s. Even during World War 2, the French seemed more concerned with the threat posed by distant America than occupying Germany. The founder of Le Monde wrote, “The Americans constitute a real danger for France,” days before thousands of Americans died to liberate his nation on D-Day.

During the Cold War, France continued it’s anti-American policies. It pulled out of NATO in 1966. It prevented our use of French airspace on an attack on Libya in 1986 in retaliation for a Libyan-sponsored terrorist attack in Germany. Two years later, Libya downed Pan Am Flt 103 killing 270 people.

Instead of writing about why the French do not deserve our enmity, Mr. Lockman might consider what our nation has done to deserve theirs.

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