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Entry: Learning to Love the French Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/learning_to_love_the_french#12316 Post contents: This is an excellent piece, for a number of reasons. One is that it directs attention to the Francophobia that defines Neocons. Paul Gottfried tends to focus on Neocon bashing of the Nazis and blaming modern Germans as a whole for the Nazi movement. But I have always emphasized that Neocons are more anti-French than anti-German, with the anti-Germna/Nazi being merely the American imperialist version of the English anti-modern German fears of a nation that could defeat it in war. The Francophobia that defines Neocons is, like the anti-modern Germany diatribes, something that is quintessentially English, back to when Normans allowed themselves to lose French as their first language and to embrace Anglo-Saxon Germanic ways of thinking and being. Most important in the article is the brief discussion of the assimilation of various non-English Catholics to an America defined culturally by the acronym WASP. Whether you were French, Irish, Polish, Bavarian, Italian, Spanish, etc., assimilation to Yankee WASP culture, becoming a good American, cost you most of your invaluable ethno-cultural heritage, which being far more conservative – theologically as well as philosophically - than WASP was necessary to maintaining these United States as a halfway decent place to live in terms other than easy wealth acquisition. Though it is harder for most to see because of religion and the way we all have been instructed to understand British and American histories, the same basic pattern of assimilation to Yankee-WASPdom and cultural loss defines the primarily culturally Celtic South. That is a good way to understand that all of us – Scots-Irish Southerners, Irish Catholics, Franco-Americans, Poles, Italians, Russians and Serbs and Greeks (to add the orthodox), etc. – who are not WASP in ethnicity (and/or nor like the Rockefellers: Germanic Protestants who culturally are largely indistinguishable from WASPs) feel deep loss because we are paying the price for a mess of pottage (America’s wealth) that murdered our birthright. We either will recover those heritages and use them to wash ourselves of assimilation to a religiously and philosophically polluted culture (which in its contemporary form has two wings: Neocon and multiculturalist, each of which is decidedly unchristian and self-righteously imperialistic), or we will remain indispensable parts of the problem. Sent at: 2008 11 23