I’m disappointed at the tone of recent comments by Amitai Etzioni in his recent debate with Mark Kleiman over France. It all started to go wrong when Etzioni quoted Charles Krauthammer in a post, to the effect that the French had famously accommodated the Germans in 1940. Kleiman gently pointed out that this was, to put it mildly, historically inaccurate; the French had declared war against Nazi Germany at a point when the US had been quite happy to sit on its collective hands. Etzioni’s reply: maybe the French did resist “for five minutes or so,” but the Vichy regime had a lot of collaborators, the Resistance was largely fictional, and Charles De Gaulle was egotistical, and hard for the Allies to work with. Kleiman responds, politely but firmly, that the French took 300,000 casualties (120,000 killed) fighting against the Germans, and that the Resistance wasn’t fictional, even if it was smaller in number than it was later made out to be. People in the Resistance faced the risk of torture and death, and it’s “wrong to deny those who risked much worse than death the honor that is their due.” Which is precisely what Etzioni goes on to do in his final post, where he doesn’t try to answer Kleiman’s point, instead harking to current French hypocrisy and shenanigans in the Ivory Coast. He concludes ‘A good summary of what the French did not do in WWII is found in the following quote, from the book Shibumi by Trevanian, courtesy of Clayton Cramer: “Every French innkeeper who overcharged a German officer, and every French woman who gave the clap to a German soldier, fancies themselves as having been part of the Resistance.”’
Bluntly, I expected a whole lot more of Etzioni. Like Kleiman, I’m not too upset when the Steven Den Bestes and Clayton Cramers of this world spout ahistorical nonsense and prejudice; I am worried when people like Etzioni, who is clearly a very thoughtful guy in other respects, start to do it. I’m even more worried when they’re called on their claims, and they don’t respond with serious arguments, instead resorting to further slurs, exaggerations and cheap shots. Etzioni’s final resort to the authority of a mediocre* writer of James Bond rip-offs is not only offensive; it’s a reiteration of a point that Kleiman has already rebutted. It’s the kind of argument that you’d expect from one of the beerhounds propping up the counter in Moe’s Tavern, not from someone who is undoubtedly one of the most serious social theorists of his generation. As Kleiman says, it’s also symptomatic of something pretty nasty in what passes for political discourse in America today. Why do people have to attribute French behavior to something mean, sneaky and accommodationist in the French (or European) national character, rather than to the standard push and shove of relations among nations? There’s something very weird and unpleasant going on.