Search - Charles de Gaulle on DVD

Greatest Man; no subtitles

Goldman | 03/29/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"In French, no subtitles, PAL format will not play on some DVD players despite claim of "all zones". Thus just 4 stars. But I'm faulting more the Amazon writeup than the DVD.

The Greatest Man of the 20th Century, who saved his country not once but three times from disaster and shame; who gave his country its first workable constitution. They say the cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable; the cemetery at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises holds one. An arrogant man, with much to be arrogant about. He was said to have thought of himself as St. Joan of Arc; if so, he wasn't far off the mark. One who had an uncanny prophetic ability. As important for military history and theoretical strategy as for politics.

He knew fully well that Wilsonianism was facade for American hegemony, and so opposed it. He knew also quite well that when push came to shove, the US and the USSR weren't going to risk the nuclear destruction of their cities, and they would use instead Europe for their battlefield; hence his wise opposition to NATO. Saw clearly the danger also of Anglo-Saxon _cultural_ hegemony -- that continental Europe has a better tradition. Saw that one of Huntington's fault lines, the one Huntington omitted, runs along the English Channel: The Brits and Irish don't belong in Europe. And his greatest achievement: the reconciliation with Germany, overcoming the fault line between Mitteleuropa and Atlantic Europe, as old as the Treaty of Verdun, AD 843. Of course it took the 2nd Greatest Man of the 20th Century, Adenauer, to bring this about.

"Unfortunate the country that needs a hero"? -- the view of a hopeless utopian. We're always unfortunate.

And unlike history's earlier Great Men, we have his actions and words on DVD. Lucky us."