The french are cowards

==== PRO CONTENTIONS ==== C1: Civil "cowardice" He writes, "I state this because it is true. The French in general have a rather annoying attitude towards things. They tend to act like small children in the wake of troubles, cause a lot of noise, start a riot and think they are playing french revolution 21st century. " I agree. It is true, which is why I argue that their motions against oppression and towards equality demonstrate immense courage, the opposite of cowardice. If the French were NOT to start a riot and instead accepted their perceived injustice, then they would be demonstrating the ULTIMATE cowardice; so the impacts coming from my opponents first contention are purely CON. He outlines that the French do not accept defeat in social situations, thus they demonstrate courage. C2: Military Prowess. The brunt of the debate is done here, and his argument is laced with fallacies, assertions and just plain untrue statements. I'll go through them. "In ww1 it is argued that they fought bravely. Okay, I will not dispute that to an extent" Thanks for agreeing. "May i also remind you the reason why they held up for around 9 months was because of many reasons , number one was because if they ran away , there own country would kill them , number 2 is probably the main reason , ww1 may i remind you was fought in trenches , it was a slow and dirty war . Number 3 is that no doubt the germans were prolonging the invasion for many reasons like , preparing for a proper attack etc , or they underestimated the french defense etc or jsut because it was trench warfare and took weeks to move a mile. " R1: haha, no. R2: That doesn't mean they couldn't have left. .. trenches prevent lots of troop mobilization into enemy lines, not back towards base camp; if it was impossible to retreat then reinforcements would've been impossible, but obviously that's not case. Moving in controlled territory is easy, retreat would've been easy - but they didn't retreat, did they? R3: The Germans weren't prolonging the invasion, they had up to 5x as many soldiers (as I point out in my speech) as the french and still held their lines. As for WWII. .. what? "french soilders fought agaisnt and in a lot of cases killed allie soilders by the hundreds working for the nazis. " They killed allied soldiers working for the nazis? The french BECAME Nazis and then killed allied soldiers? Make some sense, please. He ignores the fact that Operation Overlord (the Normandy Invasions, think D-Day) which was the MOST IMPORTANT strategic Operation IN THE ENTIRE WAR could not have been completed without the French recon and revolutionaries within the nation. "The idea that they were taken by surprise is not true , they prepared defences years in advance , they knew this was coming , they did nothing . .. " Wrong. As I outline in the previous round, they knew an assault by Hitler was coming but they didn't know it would be through the Ardennes. As a result, they weren't prepared on that front (read: their defense was ELSEWHERE) so the assault easily cut through their lines. They realized it would be futile to engage in a full military operation at that point, and instead fought the war from the inside. These are courageous acts by their very nature. ==== CON CONTENTIONS ==== K, so he ignores my Moral Obligation point, and I'll outline this further: C1: By labeling a group my opponent offers the kind of reasoning characteristic of supremacist societies. His logic is flawed, and it is inherently bigoted and can be classified with the logic that justified racism, the Holocaust, slavery, and numerous other accounts of egregious violations of human rights. We now live in a technological society that embraces human rights and individual spirit, to classify a specific group of people outside of their one shared characteristic (The French can be classified as The French) is to engage in prejudice in the extreme, especially when one is using a characteristic such as where you were fortunate / unfortunate enough to be born. He doesn't even use a relevant characteristic to group and classify these people. To affirm the resolution is to perpetuate this kind of reasoning. C2: IMPACT OF DEHUMANIZATION: To perpetuate this kind of reasoning is to continue to justify mass atrocities. David Berube elaborates, "The dehumanization of humanity's destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. .. . Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents. .. in the cuckoo's next of society, lies a dehumanized image of man. "