Friday 22 February 2013

Laziness and Xenophobia

If you can afford to visit one of your neighbouring countries at least once, but you don't, that's downright lazy. For instance, if you've been living in the south of England with more than enough financial means to hop on a ferry to France, you're just lazy. If you live in Seattle, in the northern United States, and it's never even crossed your mind that it might be a good idea to make the short two hour drive to Vancouver, which is barely even in Canada, you're lazy. Don't even try saying "France/Canada's shit, though." because you don't know shit because you've never fucking been there. Seriously, though, how could someone rant about how shit a particular nation is if they haven't made the effort to visit it themselves? I know people who've said "America's such a shit-hole." Really? Have you ever been? No? Then how the hell could you possibly know that? Your knowledge of America consists of what Manhattan looks like, and the orange morons on Jersey Shore.

Xenophobia still seems to run wild amongst otherwise perfectly normal people, who aren't racist or sexist, but are xenophobic because as far as society's concerned, as long as it's nothing negative about black or Asian people, calling the entire nation of France "pussies" because they pulled out of the Second World War, because all you know about the Second World War is that a German man called Hitler tried to invade England or something, so all the countries started fighting and America was late because they're fat. What you don't know is that France have won more military battles than we have, and surrendered to the Nazis because they wanted to preserve French sovereignty, so they unleashed the Free French who played a pretty big part in kicking the arses of the oppressive Nazis. As for the Americans, they were formally neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and (with Britain) invaded north Africa and Italy in 1942-43. Saying they were "late to the war" would be implying they should have been fighting a war which, to begin with, wasn't theirs to fight. What irks me about America, though, is that they seem to take personal responsibility for the allied victory, and they keep reminding us of this: "We saved your ass in WWII." "You know, if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German." To which I have to reply, "Well that's not strictly true, because actually, shut the fuck up." And then a Frenchman comes and says "If it wasn't for us, you'd still be under British rule."

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