Hey all, thanks for the dissection/discussion of those topics I raised and giving me the leeway to raise them without offending you all!
However I would point out that this was
not about being unfair by making generalizations about Americans, the topics I raised have all been questions I have heard asked by non-Americans in Australasia and Europe who have not necessarily known the American viewpoint.
I do actually believe that much of the "apparent" ignorance of US citizens is a relatively recent phenomena and that it is linked to the differences in the education system of the various States (I'm thinking particularly of outcomes based education and how much of a penalty it can apply to schools that don't perform)
I also believe that it doesn't just apply to the US because it appears to me and some of my friends (wandering a little off topic here) that the last 30 years or so in the 1st and 2nd World has seen a greater emphasis on trivial information or information of no real import and a revision of various aspects of history to make them "nicer" for modern sensibilities or to overly apologize for past events that none of us were alive to witness let alone control. Particularly in the last two decades there seems to be an emphasis on judging things in the past without any context and sometimes without any actual understanding of the situation or events.
American entertainment dominates the English speaking world so those of us who are not American have a lot of exposure to America whereas the reverse is not so.
It's somewhat startling to be asked by North Americans (yeah you Canadians have been guilty of this too!) about why I speak such good English or do we have natural disasters in Australia or do we have telephones or do we have electricity, (either myself or members of my family have been asked all of these questions).
However, it's not necessarily something that cannot be understood as to why a North American would be asking - in most cases they simply haven't had the exposure to other cultures that we outsiders have had to US culture and that's a function of media/entertainment as much as it is the education system.
As for De Gaulle, I'm not sure I would ever trust the man considering the friendly relations he and other Free French leaders maintained with the leaders of the Vichy French. I get the impression that De Gaulle felt that the French were "entitled" to regain the past glories of Napoleon Bonaparte irrespective of the fact that the end of WW2 pretty much spelt the end of empire building for Western Europe.
As for Webstral's original point, it does appear to some of us outsiders that some modern militias have deliberately misconstrued the concept of the colonial militia to serve their own selfish (and even sometimes paranoid) ends.
The injustices they claim they are trying to protect themselves from seem to happen in any nation with a large population and a large bureaucracy. Unfortunately it appears that the media places such an emphasis on the fringe groups that any legitimate militia movement gets marginalized as not newsworthy.
I would like to ask though, would not the various State National Guards be the legitimate inheritors to the original militias? I know they are heavily "federalized" but weren't they set up as a counter to a federal military trying to enforce federal policy onto the states?