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CounterPunch
January
11, 2003
Gallic Nukes:
The Real and Present Danger
By GARY LEUPP
During the last fifty years, the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea (North Korea) has never gone to war or threatened
its neighbors. Ok, its agents kidnapped a handful of Japanese
nationals in the 1970s. This was a reprehensible action, but
dwarfed by the hijacking of the entire Korean nation following
the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the kidnapping by the Japanese
military of tens of thousands of Korean sex-slaves during the
Second World War. Under the iron-fisted rule of Great Leader
Kim Il-sung, continued by his son and successor Dear Leader Kim
Jong-il, North Korea has maintained an extraordinarily stable
if highly weird socio-political order. So I am not losing any
sleep over North Korea's putative, paltry arsenal of nukes. I
worry, though, about another power, and I'm sure there are others
out there who share my concern.
I refer, of course, to France.
France, unlike the DPRK, has maintained a consistently aggressive
posture during the last half-century. It has fought two colonial
wars, in Indochina and Algeria, slaughtering over a million in
the latter war alone. It intervened alongside Britain and Israel
in an attempt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal
in 1956. It has deployed troops in Chad and is now killing rebels
in the Ivory Coast. It has bombed Iraq and Yugoslavia in concert
with U.S. forces. And to think, this country has had nuclear
weapons since 1960! The Dear Leader in Pyongyang has maybe
three. They can hit the Aleutians. The leaders in Paris have
over 460 nukes, and they can easily hit me, ici à tout
moment, here in Boston. Who should I be worried about?
That's a no-brainer.
We are told that the North Korean leadership
is unstable and unpredictable. But does it rival the French?
Il n'y a pas de comparaison, à mon avis. Consider
the record of Charles DeGaulle, first president of the Fifth
Republic. He withdrew French troops from the NATO command structure
in 1966. Who expected that? And then he shocked the Anglo-American
world by barking "Vive le Quebec Libre!" to
a crazed mob in Canada the next year. The French continue to
revere this man, whose government was nearly toppled in 1968
when France was one of the most unstable countries in the world.
It remains unpredictable, its leadership giving conflicting signals
on its support for U.S. foreign policy. Its foreign ministry
calls the U.S. a hyperpuissance and accuses it of simplisme.
People so unhinged and so prone to vilify the U.S. might very
well decide to lob nukes at the East Coast. I have firm evidence
(which for security reasons I cannot reveal) that the French
plan to provide an independent Quebec with the land-based Hades
and SSBS S3D missiles President Jacques Chirac claimed he eliminated
several years ago. Quebec is very close to Boston, and so I worry.
The North Koreans are xenophobic, we're
informed. But if you're talking xenophobia, you're talking French.
I mean, they have a government board specifically designed to
keep out English-word borrowings in their language (that they
think is so hot). They tried to keep out Disneyland and McDonalds,
because they just weren't good enough and sophisticated
enough for their elite selves. And when you're talking barbarism
and brutality, the Pyongyang folks have nothing on the French.
Koreans kill dogs humanely before they eat them. The French eat
snails (and anything), and actually force-feed geese with
alcohol, and kill them when their livers are swollen with alcoholic
hepatitis, so they and their wives, mistresses and children can
eat those livers mashed up with onions and spices. That's
why the French are so sexually promiscuous. I repeat: the
French have 460 nukes, most of them, probably, in terrorist hands
in Quebec.
The French overthrew their monarchy in
1789, invented the guillotine, beheaded countless aristocrats,
including Marie Antoinette, and paraded their heads on pitchforks
around the streets of Paris. The French common people really
liked that. Their national anthem, La Marseillaise,
was composed soon afterwards. Just listen to its refrain:
Aux armes, citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, Marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons
(My translation): "To arms, citizens!
Form your battalions! Onward! Onward! Let's drench our fields
with [the enemy's] tainted blood!" They make schoolchildren
sing this!
Tell me that's not terrorism. The French
have never renounced terrorism or that terrorist anthem. Again
I repeat: 460 nukes dans les mains de terroristes, wrapped
in l'étendard sanglant brazenly celebrated in the
Marseillaise. Will the world, including North Korea and
Iraq, stand idly by, as France and its allies threaten humanity
avec leurs armes de destruction de masse?
(J'ai parlé faussement des
armes nucléaires dans le Québec. Ceci est, après
tout, une satire.)
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
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