Is it going to make any difference to the French when the chemical/biological weapons are uncovered, or possibly used, as the U.S. government seems to be quite confident will happen? One suspects not—though maybe the French will change their tune if these weapons end up killing mainly large numbers of *Iraqi civilians*. How, then, are France (and Germany?) going to continue along the path to political union with Britain and the pro-U.S. European states? Doesn’t this spell imminent disaster for the European Union?

That would seem to be the case. The French are so carried away by hubris in their political war against the “Anglo-Saxons” that they don’t notice they’re trashing their own European agenda. As the subtitle of Paul Johnson’s recent article at the Wall Street Journal put it, “In one blow, Chirac shattered the U.N., NATO and the EU.” http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003235

In thus hurting their own interests, the French are evidencing the same pneumopathology (to use Eric Voegelin’s term) as the antiwar left and antiwar right in America are evidencing. These groups have effectively abandoned the belief in objective morality in favor of a relativistic, left-liberal morality that equates evil with power (or rather with whatever the PC fashion of the moment designates as power) and goodness with lack of power. To use Matt’s analysis of liberalism, America, as the dominant power, becomes the evil Untermensch against whom everything is permitted, while those opposing America become the virtuous Übermenschen for whom everything is permitted. Once people get caught up in this dynamic, the thrill of being identified with pure goodness against pure evil destroys not only determinations of objective morality but even calculations of enlightened self-interest. Thus the antiwar right and antiwar left in America have discredited and marginalized themselves, harming their own political prospects, while the French in their hubris have severely damaged the very institutions they most favor, the EU and the UN.

The psychology I’ve described here is reflected in the parody of La Marseillaise. In this song, the French boast of their supreme gifts of servility to tyrants while expressing superior contempt for America. This is not, as it may seem, a contradiction. Today’s tyrants, identified with the Third-World and Muslims and hence conveniently with the oppressed, represent the complete virtue to whom one abases oneself, while America is the power-holder toward whom one expresses utmost disdain. The fact that the Third-World tyrants’ powerlessness is only symbolic and that in the real world they possess real power, and the further fact that the French are appeasing that power out of venal self-interest, is also not a contradiction but a logical and predictible result of the leftist psychology, which begins, let us remember, with the rejection of objective morality.

St Joan of Arc has always been one of my top ten faveourite Christian heroes. I wonder what she would think of what has become of her country? I suspect she is weeping at what socialism and postmodernism have done to the French.