The only statement in your mostly incorrect narrative with which I would agree concerns the snobbish, arrogant attitude of the otherwise cowardly French who deem themselves somehow above those born within other borders...I take that single agreement from my personal experience...However, I realize that Shirer had not only the gift of gab, but a higher tolerance for speaking to those with their own bias...Otherwise he would not have been able to gain so much information from belligerent foreigners, reducing his effectiveness as a correspondent...To indicate otherwise reveals your lack of objectivity in your obviously limited reading...ljadw wrote: ↑12 Dec 2018, 17:18This is not correct :Shirer did not live and work in Europe for decades : he arrived in Paris in 1925 and left Germany in 1940 .He was also correspondent in the ME and India !
He was a tourist,with the biased behaviour of a tourist;he had no contact with the natives, but only with a small group of intellectual snobs who despised him : for the average European before WWII, Americans were only rich people without culture .
He had also no understanding of Europe, as Europe does not exist : Europe was only a collective noun for almost 30 countries who differed enormously from each other , besides ,Shirer did visit only a few of these countries. Prewar Europe was as prewar India or prewar Middle East or prewar Latin America : a collective noun .
Shirer lived mostly in France, limiting himself to the Paris region, as all correspondents do ,and had no contact with the average Frenchman : you don't think,I hope, that a Frenchman would speak with a foreigner, an American ? People in France avoided as most as possible all contacts with foreigners , and a foreigner was someone from an other village : thus, some one from Illinois was avoided like the plague, especially a journalist .And it was so in all European countries .
Rather that participate in the further degradation of this thread away from its original topic, I will allow you the final word as I realize it will hold no value to the discussion... ...Ben