The Battle of Algiers

[MosesPresley]

I just saw this movie on PBS. This is certainly an interesting movie right now. I was especially intrigued by some of the disturbing parallels with our recent occupation in Iraq.

Has anyone else seen this? Do you think this is our future with the Iraqis?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058946/

[BlackCat]

Are you seriously comparing french colony catastropes with Iraq ?

[VetLegion]

I've seen it mentioned in a documentary that tried to connect French instructors and doctrines developed for Algiers with torture in South America and Vietnam. Supposedly both US personell and Chileans and Brazilians had French instructors in "anti insurgency" tactics and interrogation.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by BlackCat


Are you seriously comparing french colony catastropes with Iraq ?

Yuh, huh, huh, huh....seriously.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by VetLegion
I've seen it mentioned in a documentary that tried to connect French instructors and doctrines developed for Algiers with torture in South America and Vietnam. Supposedly both US personell and Chileans and Brazilians had French instructors in "anti insurgency" tactics and interrogation.

The French general rationalizing the torture of the Muslims to gain information was disturbing bit of deja vu.

[VetLegion]

This documentary did establish links - tracked down the French intelligence officers in question. But it didn't strike me as a big thing. Find people and torture them, fight insurgency -- doesn't strike me as something you can't invent yourself.

I agree with you though, there are resemblances between Algiers and Iraq, BlackCat is wrong for laughing it away.

[Odin]

Originally posted by MosesPresley


The French general rationalizing the torture of the Muslims to gain information was disturbing bit of deja vu.

[MosesPresley]

Originally posted by Odin

[Mr. Harley]

The Pentagon had a screening of it in 2003.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/

However, if you will notice in the film, all of the armored military vehicles are Soviet built, which immediately made me suspicious. Since the filmmaker had been given that sort of access, I seriously wondered what the director's personal leanings were.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,4135,345300,00.html

Its stance is as fair as any such film could be, despite the fact that Pontecorvo was a member of the Italian communist party at the time and thus was implicitly on the side of the independence movement. There is, though, no caricature and no glamorisation of either side - just a feeling of palpable horror evoked by urgent images and Ennio Morricone's dramatic but never melodramatic score. Pontecorvo sees the colonialists as victims of their own system, and the rebels as taking on some of the excesses used against them.

I disagree with the conclusions, but I quote the entire paragraph out of fairness. The fact is that he was a communist, and that the government of Algeria helped him. In fact, to quote an article on the context of the government of Algeria at the time.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2501/is_2_21/ai_55683885/pg_4

The Kennedy Administrations difficulty to win the friendship of the new state, was soon confirmed by the Algerian leaders' explicit criticism of all the Western powers for their hostile policies toward Algeria's cause of independence, and this as opposed to the expressed gratitude to the socialist countries for both their moral support and material assistance along the road to independence.(77) It was against this background that Adlai Stevenson, while welcoming Algeria's adhesion to the U.N., called upon the leadership of the nascent republic to abandon extremists and reject fanatical counsel, in reference to the F.L.N.'s leaning toward Nasser's Egypt and the Eastern bloc.(78)

None of this changes the fact that the French occupation of Algeria was brutal, it's response to the insurgency even more so, and the fact that the French military was so out of control that they even tried to stage a military coup against the French government over issues related to the war. The insurgents, however, were also pretty brutal, though find a case of an insurgency where the rebels fought a nice war and I'll show you some rebels who were executed.

I am making a point just like a press release from Karl Rove or a study by the Heritage foundation, or anything by Michael Moore, that I would view The Battle for Algiers as a docudrama with both strong propaganda elements and enough facts to make it credible. The balance between propaganda and facts is always subject ot interpretation, and viewpoint.

There are disturbing parallels between Iraq and the French-Algerian conflict. In an interview with a French diplomat (on BBC I believe) I found it interesting that he stated that it was not that his government was per se opposed to the US intervention in Iraq, but that after the lessons in Algeria the French knew that we were going to fail and that is why they were opposing Iraq II. Any attempt to impose western values in a Muslim state was not going to work. He said we tried, and that it had been very costly for France.

[:) Smiley]

[Mr. Harley]

To summarize - the director of The Battle for Algiers was a member of the Italian Communist party, he was given free access in Algeria to Soviet military hardware, at a time when Algeria was friendly to the Soviet Union, and the film itself is biased. However, the bias does not necessarily mean that the film is full of lies, just that it is going to biased, probably strongly so. The Algerian conflict was nasty and bloody, and there are some strong parallels between it and the current conflict in Iraq. And if I had posted that without cites and info to back that up, I would have had people all over me like fleas on a mutt. So I posted all the facts first. Short enough summary?

[DAVOUT]

There is an important difference between the Algeria war and the Iraq war : one million civil european French were living in Algeria, most of them from several generations. This made the situation extremely dramatic : many people in the nation could not imagine that they would be abandonned, and particularly in the army where many soldiers (even among the professional) were Français d'Algérie. Politically, anti-colonialists where fighting people only showing solidarity to their fellows citizens.
It is obvious that soldiers of Français d'Algérie origin felt fighting for survival, which was finally proven true, and that largely explains la Bataille d'Alger and other excesses.

[MosesPresley]

Nice post shawnmmcc.

I was trying to view the movie as objectively as possible. What caught my notice, besides the obvious Muslim angle, the insurgents constant and desperate acts of defiance, terrorism against the French. It reminded me of the endless waves of suicide bombers in Iraq. These people were willing to kill themselves to oust the French.

The thing I am wondering about, is that in the film, the Algerians finally rallied and banded together to force the French out. In Iraq, I don't see that kind of solidarity of the people yet. Maybe in the long run the US presence there might force this kind of unity on them. This would in turn give the insurgency a legitimacy in the world community's eyes and put pressure on us to get out eventually.

I say in the long run, because I don't think we will be willingly pulling out of Iraq for at least a generation or two and maybe not even then.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by DAVOUT
There is an important difference between the Algeria war and the Iraq war : one million civil european French were living in Algeria, most of them from several generations. This made the situation extremely dramatic : many people in the nation could not imagine that they would be abandonned, and particularly in the army where many soldiers (even among the professional) were Fran�ais d'Alg�rie. Politically, anti-colonialists where fighting people only showing solidarity to their fellows citizens.
It is obvious that soldiers of Fran�ais d'Alg�rie origin felt fighting for survival, which was finally proven true, and that largely explains la Bataille d'Alger and other excesses.

That is also true. In fact many French people considered Algeria as an actual part of France proper and not as a colony.

[Mr. Harley]

However, Algeria was still colonial, in that the native peoples still outnumbered those of French extraction by a significant majority. Therein was a major difference, granted, between Iraq II and Algeria and in fact between most of the so-called colonial conflicts with European powers as compared to American post-WW2 conflicts.

The colonial conflicts include expatriots of that occupying power, and expectations that they should be supported by the home country, and that the property rights gained by these individuals, at the expense of the native populations (and often at gunpoint) should be preserved. Plus the expatriot individuals often ran the occupied territory, had connections with the oligarchy in the home country, thus making it even harder for the colonial power to simply cut and run.

The insurgents, as in most wars of liberation, were hardly a monolithic group and in fact fought among themselves at times. Part of that conflict continues to this day, with the conflict between those who want a Muslim Algerian state versus those who want a secular one. Both groups wanted the French out, but they had very different views of what they wanted afterwards.

The situation in Iraq is more of a long-simmering ethnic/religious war. Great Britian deliberately created boundaries that exascerbated those tensions when they first manufactered a country that had never existed (within those boundaries) as a way to keep their installed ruler in power, and keep control of the oil wealth of Iraq. Saddam with his brutality kept a lid on it, which Bush Sr. understood when the decision was made to leave him in power.

Bush Jr. and his administration, with their ideology, had absolutely no understanding of the tensions in that country, and thus were not prepared for what happened. IMHO the Civil War is already happening, it is going to kill as a minimum tens of thousands, and might well exceed one hundred thousand by the time it is over. I'm guessing that will take over a decade. I honestly believe, as either with or without continued US involvement it ends up becoming quasi-religious Shia state, that we should let them fight it out without US troops. I gave my own summary of that in a thread from just a few days ago.

http://www.apolyton.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=136106