So why is French President Emmanuel Macron looking to start the Third World War? It’s a good question because that’s exactly what would happen if France – as a member of NATO – sends ground troops to fight Russia in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been clear and emphatic about his resolve to use nuclear weapons if NATO becomes directly involved in this war.
Macron has been just as clear that he wasn’t speaking out of turn, wasn’t drunk or temporarily insane when he urged Western intervention.
He actually goaded his detractors by suggesting it would be unseemly to act like “cowards” and that he “fully stood behind” his idiotic remarks.
“We are surely approaching a moment for Europe in which it will be necessary not to be cowards,” the French president declared during a recent trip to the Czech republic.
What can account for this exaggerated and bizarre machismo from the French president? Can it have something to do with all those nasty rumors that his much older wife, Brigitte Macron, is transgender and was a biological male at birth? Or how about the snickering about the age difference? He is 46 and she is 70.
Whatever is bothering Macron, his desire to ignite a nuclear war with Russia makes him a primary political nutjob who clearly has a death wish for both himself and the world.
If Macron has scared the hell out of many, his words have inspired France’s chief of the army staff. Gen. Pierre Schill recently assured everyone in an op ed that appeared in Le Monde that “the French Army is ready.”
Ready for what? To be evaporated on the European battlefield.
Historian William Manchester noted in his biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, that “the last great French general lies in Les Invalides,” speaking of the mausoleum of Napoleon Bonapart.
That judgment would apparently still be valid.
The irony of France badgering for World War III is that other countries – largely the United States – had to bail France out of two other world wars.
In the First World War, French generals personified every aspect of ineptitude, massing their armies against entrenched German positions and throwing them against a barrage of machine gun fire and artillery attacks that obliterated their manpower. That was the only French strategy, attack repeatedly and the casualty lists be damned. It is true that Great Britain exercised the same degree of military insanity at the Battle of the Somme where almost 20,000 British Empire forces died on just the opening day of this exercise in futility, but the U.K. at least seemed to be trying to think things through by introducing the tank as a means of breaking the stalemate of trench warfare.
During the Battle of the Frontiers, the French high command watched 27,000 French soldiers die in a single day of fighting on Aug. 22, 1914.
France never learned and by 1917 the French Army was in open mutiny, understandably, the soldiers began to wonder if they were being led by people who were just knot-headed marionettes.
Had the United States not entered the war in 1917 and sent troops to the Western Front in 1918, France would undoubtedly have lost the war to Germany.
France fought fruitlessly for four years in the Great War but in the Second World War it was all over in six weeks. Germany ignored the vaunted Maginot Line, plowed through the Ardennes forest and were in Paris before the latest generation of incompetent generals really knew what had happened. France’s capitulation led to half of the country being occupied and the other half becoming the Vichy puppet state that was just as keen on dictatorship and persecuting Jews as the Nazis were.
Only the invasion of Normandy by the combined forces of the U.S., Britain and Canada could liberate a French people who grew accustomed to thinking they spent the occupation in resistance but actually were more inclined to collaborate with the Germans.
So, no thank you France. I don’t think the French Army is prepared for any war with Russia anymore than any NATO country is – especially when that war will inevitably culminate in a nuclear exchange that will begin in Europe and spread to North America.
But the real question is just how did this tactical and strategic rot enter into Western military planning? Is the belief that we can win a nuclear war with Russia something that accompanied the ludicrous and dangerous expansion of NATO to virtually every country in Europe – after America promised the old Soviet Union that the alliance would not move one inch eastward? Is the delusion of nuclear victory a product of NATO not knowing what it’s mission or a way of distracting from the reality that pumping billions of dollars into the black hole of Kyiv is only enriching corrupt politicians and has nothing to do with making the world safe for democracy because Ukraine isn’t one?
We used to watch films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe that warned of how the military required elected civilian oversight because the generals just might think we could surprise the Soviets with a preemptive nuclear attack and survive because our tens of millions in dead would be less than their hundreds of millions.
Free people everywhere staunchly opposed the Soviet Union and communism but there used to be a realization that we had to do this in ways that would not trigger a nuclear war because that would mean the end of not only communism but our own world. President John F. Kennedy came to office in 1961 a more determined Cold Warrior than his opponent in the 1960 presidential election, then-Vice President Richard Nixon. Kennedy wailed about the supposed “missile gap” with the Soviets and demanded more defense spending.
But he realized during his presidency that life and the world are fragile. He deftly managed the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the process transformed from a guy anxious to appear tough to a mature man committed to maintaining the peace.
As Kennedy said on June 10, 1963, shortly before his tragic death, during a commencement address to American University in Washington, D.C.:
“So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”
The consequences of a nuclear war in 2024 will be no less onerous, destructive and catastrophic as they would have been in 1962 but could certainly be even worse. Why some Western leaders are determined to bomb Russia off of the map today when their predecessors were prepared to negotiate with a communist system that was far worse than the current Russian polity is beyond reason or comprehension.
Or as Kennedy also said in that 1963 speech:
“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements--in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.”
We must end the madness and tell Macron to find other ways to employ his testosterone.
