The greatest accomplishments of the French...

There's this old diplomat's jokeⁱ which points out that the chief accomplishments of Austrian diplomacy to date have been convincing the world that Hitler was German and Mozart Austrian. This is perhaps true.

Repackaging that, we might observe that the chief accomplishments of French diplomacy to date consist of pretty much trolling everyone from a safe distance.

Most recently, the French have managed to somehow magically make everyone forget that the only reason Helmut Kohl's Germany even went into the (entirely French hatched, sponsored and pushed) Euro nonsense to the detriment of their own Deutsche Mark was (socialist) Francois Mitterrand's insistence, presented in the most efficacious form : he refused to agree with German reunification otherwise. Kohl didn't even consult anyone at the time (including among "anyone" for example people like Pohl, then president of the Bundesbank).

So yes the monetary union among the industrious and the lazy is dysfunctional, doomed and a pointless exercise. This dysfunctional, doomed, pointless exercise was however neither invented by the Germans nor willingly entered into by them. It was invented by the ever-hostile to the human race socialists, and pushed by their prostatic first and hopefully only ever socialist president de la Republique Francaise. (That hope is, of course, misplaced - we are after all discussing France here).

Yet somehow nobody manages to remember any of this today - in spite of it happening less than thirty years ago and therefore within the lifetimes of most everyone able to write. Isn't this strange ?

Most notably, the French have managed to create an untenable and nonsensical state in the middle of the Middle East, ie Israel. Anyone with any sense whatsoever plainly saw - at the time and ever since then - that this is no sort of solution to a certainly present problem. That the Americans fell for the French trap comes of course as no surprise whatsoever, this is what they do since about 1766. That the Jews did, however, beggars belief. The only possible explanation might be that Hitler gassed all the clever Jews, and whatever left were more American than Jewish in the first place. This could certainly explain a thing or two.

At this point the only sane measure anyone could take would seem to be the immediate and permanent exclusion of the French from any sort of forum where any kind of international problem is being discussed.ⁱⁱ Sort of like a large troll ban applied on a global scale. I suspect it's the only way in which the world may see a year where international efforts solve more problems than they create for twelve months straight, a miracle which has not actually occurred at any point during the 20th century.

One can, of course, only hope. Except if one is French, in which case that one can only troll.

1. Good diplomacy has a lot in common with good insult comedy, in the sense that in both lines of business the chief and most valuable ability is that of saying the always offensive truth without repercussion - and indeed they're seldom distinguishable in the field. [↩]
2. It would be perhaps instructive to note for our younger and less well informed readership that indeed this was the very solution the NATO participating signals and intelligence corps found and applied all through the cold war. Granted the implementation was a lot more discreet than what is contemplated here. [↩]