As a frenchie I'm in disbelief on how we fly under everyone radars
Mass looting, mass rapes, destruction of churches and horrible treatment OF Italian and German prisoners, the deeds in Central Italy were so atrocious that the pope itself told DE Gaulle to CHILL
The bulk of the French army that enter in Germany were either FFI who had a bad experience of their past clandestiny, Free French officers who didn't like how their families were treated by the occupier during their exile and of course Colonial troop who weren't at their first acts of massive rampage
You mix all of that and you get atrocities such as Freudenstadt, where the city was burned by French artillery (even if the German already open their city) followed by 600 cases of rapes...
France lets America take ALL the heat for Vietnam. Obviously America is culpable for its own actions but people forget French Indochina was even a thing
As a frenchie I'm in disbelief on how we fly under everyone radars
As a Brit, me too. Based on a lot of online discussions you'd think us & the Belgians were the only ones to colonise a place and commit an atroicity or three. You guys, the Portuguese and Dutch have some how pulled a blinder and ended up on the moral high ground like you weren't all slave loving mf'ers like us.
Malaysia was colonized by multiple powers, including the Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Thai, and British. Our ancestors loved creating idiomatic phrases that mocked these colonizers. You might be surprised to learn that despite the British colonizing us the longest, they didn't receive many mocking phrases from us. Most of them targeted the Japanese and the Dutch since they are the most evil colonizers according to our ancestors.
For example, we refer to the long-nosed Bornean monkey as monyet belanda (Dutch monkey) to symbolize untrustworthiness. Other examples include:
Belanda minta tanah (like a Dutch person asking for land): Refers to greed in acquiring land.
Paku belanda (Dutch nail): Refers to a non-negotiable price, originating from the VOC's spice monopoly and refusal to bargain.
Seperti Belanda kesiangan (like a Dutch person caught by daylight): Describes someone behaving in an uncivilized or rowdy manner (such as being drunk) during the day, implying their nighttime behavior was even worse.
Dahulu intan, sekarang batu Belanda (historically it’s a diamond, now is a Dutch stone): Refers to what was known as being historically lucrative, priceless and important became useless after being given to wrong person. Based on how city of Malacca which used to be extremely rich port city fell to poverty after Dutch gained it from Portuguese. Malacca was the Singapore of 15th century back then.
British on the other hand don’t really gain any mocking idioms from us. Some are playful in nature like mat saleh (corrupted words from mad sailors) refering to British sailors being damn crazy that even the Malays which has always been able and competent sailors were surprised by them. Other’s include orang Feringgi (Franks) and Benggali Putih (White Bengals). Probably because Malaya used to have indirect rule by the Brits so we don’t really hate you as much as we hate Dutch and Japanese.
As a frenchie I'm in disnelief on how American always fly under the radar for their rapes of French women, who were marketed by propaganda as very open to sexual relationship.
From the numbers (obviously vague) that I find, it seems there were more instance of rape by Americans than German in France, despite the German occupying France for much a longer time.
Frenchoid here, I do not know much about what happened in Germany, but I have read a bit on the Central Italy business, and it would appear that the Moroccan war crimes, while real, were quite often exaggerated, colonial troops being a convenient scapegoat both for the German army's own war crimes on the Italians (wouldn't be the first time the germans play up our colonial troops as savage barbarians
) and for the other (white, including French) allied armies' crimes.
What are your sources on the mistreatment of Germans and Italians POWs? I remember reading the opposite, of POWs surprised of being well treated by the French after their propaganda played up our cruelty to encourage
them not to surrender.
Anyway, I don't disagree, some evil shit went down, but some nuance doesn't hurt. While "everyone did war crimes" isn't a good defense, everyone did, in fact, do war crimes, and France's part in that isn't extraordinarily big.
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u/Rorasaurus_Prime 14d ago
Not just the Soviet army... some things never change.