This is a book of extraordinary stupidity. Like all stupidity, it is revealing, alas. Stupidity is more prevalent in the world than intelligence.
The book dates from 1930. It is one of the first to condense what I would call the average hatred of America. She had been brooding for a long time. That the United States, or rather American policy, is open to criticism is obvious; the curious thing is the way in which criticism has developed in France to generate, in the 21st century, a national unanimity. There is in the depths of our country an anti-American rage founded…
At the end of the 1920s, after a few turbulent years,
Georges Duhamel took a trip of a few weeks whence he brought back this book. We could have the same today, more or less, signed
Marine Le Pen,
Jean-Pierre Chevenement or
Jean-Luc Melenchon. A spirit of superiority towards America which, in fact, is rotten with complexes.
Duhamel plague to start against the forms of entry into the country. It takes pages. After that, everything makes him unworthy. The cinema, a horror! We’re in line! He’s a monster, he uses the word, destined “to the crowds that the soul seems to desert”. As for the music, I quote, “she is slaughtered by niggers, like the piglets of the Middle-West”. Don’t look for reasoning. Duhamel, who thinks he is civilized, advances with magic. He did not move to see otherness: he came to reinforce a prejudice. We always get there. Nothing is easier to convince than a prejudice.
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