It's worse than that, actually, as ASCII from the start¹ included provisions for variants for non-English latin characters and alternate currency symbols, and ASCII was essentially the same project as ECMA-6² (ECMA being the European Computer Manufacturers' Association³, a standardization group founded in 1961).

ASCII as we know it (which is essentially the 1967 version⁴) like the corresponding ECMA standard⁵ provided for overloading punctuation characters as diacritics ("/¨ ^/ˆ ~/˜ '/´ ‘/` ,/¸) to be overstruck in typewriter fashion; ECMA-35⁶ (1971⁷) defines further extension techniques using control and/or escape sequences.

So, yes, it's just a failed attempt at an anti-American cheap shot from someone who isn't familiar with the development of character set encodings.

¹ American Standard Code for Information Interchange, http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/X3.4-1963/index.html

² 7-bit Coded Character Set, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

³ http://www.ecma-international.org/default.htm

⁴ http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html

⁵ 7-bit Input/Output Coded Character Set, 4th Edition is unfortunately the oldest available online; http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

⁶ Character Code Structure and Extension Techniques, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

⁷ Extension of the 7-bit Coded Character Set, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...