Why is there no Hitlerplatz in Berlin? Why is there no monument (I assume) to the rise of the National Socialist Party? Simple: they are understood to have been moral monstrosities, unworthy of commemoration by sober, well meaning people.
Yet what is the Arc de Triomphe? It is a commemoration of what we in modern terms would term fascist wars of aggression, in which millions of innocent people died.
Napoleon used his wars in no small measure to fill a depleted treasury. He encouraged his men to very literally rape and pillage. They would burst into a home in a conquered nation, shoot the men, rape the women, and carry them with them on the campaign, until they got tired of them, and left them to starve. No doubt many were killed. Certainly, Napoleon didn’t care.
And yet this monstrosity, and the Terror which proceded, is fundamental to modern French culture. It is no wonder they cultivate so assiduously the inability to think, which I would term “unilateral intellectual disarmament”: it is necessary to continue to believe that Hitler and Napoleon were different at all.
Yet, Hitler had “scientific” views, based on Darwinian notions of the survival of the fittest, which Napoleon did not have. But who could argue that their fundamental self-seeking and need for blood and conquest were any different?
So much of history is bullshit. The same people who continue to see Napoleon as somehow great continue to see our successful efforts to bring peace to a continent– then support it globally–as somehow iniquitous.
If you think about it, the Germans were the very last ones to wage wars of aggression on their neighbors. Yet, those are the only ones we remember.
Why do they speak French in France? Because of us.
The foundational moral problem with the French is they have a shithole at the very center of the city, and they light it up with spotlights every night, as if millions of uselessly dead corpses and countless ruined, miserable lives was somehow a success, and that more of the same would be anything but a waste of human life and energy.
And the stink radiates. One can only hope reason descends for the first time on the City of Night some day.