Postwar

404

Though not yet constrained by the American obligation to partner a white male (host) with a black male (sports), a white female (soft news/features) and a weather-person (colour/gender optional).

405

The death and morbid afterlife of Princess Diana may seem an exception to this rule. But even though many other Europeans watched her funeral on television, they lost interest soon enough. The bizarre outpouring of public grief was a strictly British affair.

406

The notorious exception was a tiny but very hard core of German and (especially) English fans who travelled to international games explicitly in search of a fight, to the utter mystification of everyone else.

407

In January 2003, at the initiative of the Spanish and British prime ministers, eight European governments (Britain, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) signed a joint declaration of pro-American solidarity. Within a few months the Hungarians and Czechs were privately expressing their regrets and expressing bitterness at having been ‘bullied’ into signing by the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar. A year later Aznar himself was thrown out of office by Spanish voters, in large measure for having led Spain into the ‘coalition’ to invade Iraq—something to which the nation was overwhelmingly opposed.

408

‘Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading “Love Thy Neighbor”, but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation’. T. R. Reid, The United States of Europe (NY, 2004), p. 218.

409

The new business class in Eastern Europe, it should be noted, ate, dressed, phoned and drove European. To be modern it was no longer necessary to imitate Americans. Quite the contrary: American consumer products were frequently disdained as ‘dowdy’ or ‘bland’.

410

In France in 1960 there were four workers for every pensioner. In 2000 there were two. By 2020, on present trends, there would be just one.

411

In 2004, health costs absorbed 8 percent of GDP in Sweden but 14 percent in the USA. Four-fifths of the cost was borne by the government in Sweden, less than 45 percent by the Federal government in the US. The rest was a direct burden on American businesses and their employees. Forty-five million Americans had no health insurance.

412

Under Delors’ successors the pendulum has shifted: the Commission is still as active as ever, but its efforts are directed to de-regulating markets.

413

In Europe, but not in America. In international surveys at the end of the twentieth century, the number of Americans claiming to be ‘very proud’ of their country exceeded 75 percent. In Europe only the Irish and the Poles exhibited similar patriotic verve; elsewhere the number of ‘very proud’ people ranged from 49 percent (Latvians) to 17 percent (former West Germans).

414

The American prosecutor Telford Taylor was struck by this in retrospect but acknowledges that he did not even notice it at the time—a revealing admission. See Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (NY, 1992), p. 296.

415

In the town of Pithiviers, near Orleans, where Jewish children rounded up in Paris were kept until their shipment east, a monument was actually erected in 1957 bearing the inscription ‘A nos deportes morts pour la France’. Only in 1992 did the local municipality erect a new plaque, more accurate if less reassuring. It reads: ‘To the memory of the 2300 Jewish children interned at the Pithiviers camp from July 19th to September 6th 1942, before being deported and murdered in Auschwitz’.