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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

I always had the impression, the US citizens and french citizen where buddies. Because of the independence war and the statue and everything.

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I had plenty of gripes about my brother when I was growing up. Those gripes were trivial but real and talking about them is far healthier than not.

I miss him terribly now.

France and the United States could not be more alike in national spirit (as elusive a concept as that is). Born of a similar era in revolution with practically the same slogans. Their constitutions paraphrase each other. Both deem themselves the birthplace of the modern republic and democracy, perhaps modern civilization itself.

With all that in mind, I wouldn't say buddies. More like siblings... with a serious rivalry going on.

One of the 'gripes' is:

"One Frenchman told me the French practically gave us the statue of liberty. How do you like that?"

Not sure if you are joking?

> France is the country with the deepest, most sedimented reservoir of anti-American arguments. Its long genealogy has been well documented over the years, most recently by Philippe Roger, who argues that French anti- Americanism is older than the United States (Roger 2002).

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/meunierces...

> Surprisingly, polling data reveals that France is not drastically more anti-American than other European countries – even less so on a variety of dimensions.

ibid

I'm going to suggest to you that when trying to get the most out of a research paper, you might want to read beyond the second sentence of the abstract.

It balances and talks about the paradoxes - such as the French obsession with McDonalds.

France is well know as being the little Russia and certainly a deep reserve of anti American sentiment. Mostly due to media and education brainwashing.

When the USSR broke up, I had a school teacher at the time who said Russia will cease to be an enemy and become like France, an ally that opposes us a lot and causes headaches just out of national pride.

Spoken like a true American who only heard about those places from TV shows, movies, and mass media "coverage"...

"media and education brainwashing" LOL

I think you both need to read the book this submission is based on and try to apply some of its lessons in this thread.

Beyond common ground and "we're all human" triteness, there are also deep cultural faults...

The book is right in addressing the ones it does.

But not every aspect of a culture is valid.

I was trying to say: stop doing this US/EU stereotype insult exchange stuff. It's boring and it's been done to death on basically every platform where people have been able to (pseudo)anonymously communicate.

Funny because, actually, I'm not American. You might want to avoid ad hominem attacks when you want to make a point.

Admittedly I'm not clicking on the link (2002 is peak antipathy both ways due to Iraq war build-up), but I've seen similar stuff that doesn't account for French people have a negative attitude towards everything compared to other countries. If you ask French people in a poll whether they approve of something they are much more likely to disapprove

And I would add that includes many French things and France as well.

The French love insulting Americans nearly as much as the Brits enjoy insulting the French (it's like a sport there).

Allies, not buddies.

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