Conservative Europe

French and German children are being taught to hate the American-dominated "free" market, apparently.

Well, perhaps this may be seen as teaching them to value such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation), local variation, historical consciousness, family life, the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, and respect for the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death, all of which "free" market capitalism corrodes to nought, both directly and by driving despairing millions into the arms of equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism?

No wonder the neocons are furious. Shame on that Sarkozy with his "economic patriotism", without which no other kind is remotely meaningful. He was supposed to be part of their vanguard elite owing patriotic allegiance to their idea of the United States rather than to their own respective countries, just as Communist Parties around the world used to owe patriotic allegiance to the official idea of the Soviet Union.

Americans are in fact turning against this idea of their own country and back towards figures like John Edwards (hence the corporate media blackout) and Mike Huckabee (hence the smear campaign), with the likes of Ron Paul (hence the strange combination of the two tactics) back on hand to remind them that the neocons' coercive utopianism and world government are just as repugnant as isolationism and laissez faire.

As for such French and German curricula being "prejudiced and biased", compared to what? The ludicrously inaccurate (and viciously, pathologically anti-British) version of American history universally taught, and almost universally believed, in the United States? The Hollywood writing of Britain out of the Second World War? What?