{"id":70251,"date":"2015-06-30T12:46:08","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T20:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=70251"},"modified":"2015-06-30T12:59:21","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T20:59:21","slug":"the-battle-of-algiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=70251","title":{"rendered":"The Battle Of Algiers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everything you need to know about multiculturalism can be found in this 1966 war film<\/a>, such as:<\/p>\n

* Multiculturalism is never stable for long.
\n* Multiculturalism means an increasingly splintered society.
\n* Extremists tend to win out in racial wars.
\n* Radical Jews are potent enemies of the ruling regime.
\n* Everybody wants to rule the world.
\n* Life is a competition between groups for power and resources.
\n* Morality doesn’t determine who rules and how much power they can project.
\n* Good intentions count for little in resolving racial and religious conflict. <\/p>\n

Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times:<\/p>\n

In North Africa it was no better, in some ways worse. Algeria was
\nin theory run like metropolitan France but in fact it had separate
\nelectoral colleges for French and Arabs. This wrecked Clemenceau’s
\npost-war reforms in 1919 and indeed all subsequent ones. The
\nFrench settlers sent deputies to the parliament in Paris and this gave
\nthem a leverage unknown in the British Empire. In 1936 the colon
\ndeputies killed a Popular Front bill which would have given full
\ncitizenship to 20,000 Muslims. Marshal Lyautey, the great French
\nGovernor-General of Morocco, described the colons as ‘every bit as
\nbad as the Boches, imbued with the same belief in inferior races
\nwhose destiny is to be exploited’. 40 In Morocco he did his best to
\nkeep them out. But this was difficult. In Morocco a French farmer
\ncould enjoy the same living standards as one in the American
\nMid-West. All Europeans there had real incomes a third above that
\nof France, and eight times higher than the Muslims. Moreover,
\nLyautey’s benevolent despotism, which was designed to protect the
\nMuslims from French corruption, in fact exposed them to native
\ncorruption at its worst. He ruled through caids who bought their
\ntax-inspectorates and judgeships, getting into debt thereby and being
\nobliged to squeeze their subjects to pay the interest. The system
\ndegenerated swiftly after Lyautey’s death in 1934. The greatest of the
\ncaids, the notorious El Glawi, Pasha of Marrakesh, ran a
\nmountain-and-desert empire of rackets and monopolies, including
\ncontrol of Marrakesh’s 27,000 prostitutes who catered for the needs
\nof the entire Western Sahara. 41 On the front that mattered most,
\neducation, little progress was made. There were far too many French
\nofficials: 15,000 of them, three times as many as the Indian
\nadministration, all anxious to perpetuate and if possible hereditarize
\ntheir jobs. In 1940, accordingly, there were still only 3 per cent of
\nMoroccans who went to school, and even in 1958 only 1,500
\nreceived a secondary education. In 1952 there were only twenty-five
\nMoroccan doctors, fourteen of them from the Jewish community. <\/p>\n

It was not that the French had colour prejudice. Paris always
\nwelcomed evolues. In 1919 the old-established ‘Four Communes’ of
\nWest Africa sent to the Chambre a black deputy, Blaise Diagne. Two
\nyears later Rene Maran’s Batouala, giving the black man’s view of
\ncolonialism, won the Prix Goncourt. But the book was banned in all
\nFrance’s African territories. Clever blacks learned to write superb
\nFrench; but once they got to Paris they tended to stay there. In the
\n1930s, Leopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, felt so at home in
\nright-wing Catholic circles he became a monarchist. 42 There seemed
\nno future for him in Africa. By 1936 only 2,000 blacks had French
\ncitizenship. Apart from war veterans and government clerks, the
\ngreat majority of black Africans were under the indigenat \u2014 summary
\njustice, collective fines, above all forced labour. Houphouet-Boigny,
\nlater President of the Ivory Coast, described the work-gangs as
\n‘skeletons covered with sores’. The Governor of French Equatorial
\nAfrica, Antonelli, admitted that the building of the Congo-Ocean
\nrailway in 1926 would ‘require 10,000 deaths’; in fact more died
\nduring its construction. 43 Black Africans voted with their feet,
\nrunning into nearby British colonies to escape the round-ups. <\/p>\n

Some Frenchmen with long experience of colonial affairs saw
\nportents. Lyautey warned in 1920: The time has come to make a
\nradical change of course in native policy and Muslim participation in
\npublic affairs.’ 44 Sarraut himself argued that the European ‘civil war’ of 1914\u201418 had weakened the position of the whites. ‘In the minds
\nof other races,’ he wrote in 1931, ‘the war has dealt a terrible blow to the standing of a civilization which Europeans claimed with pride to
\nbe superior, yet in whose name Europeans spent more than four
\nyears savagely killing each other.’ With Japan in mind he added: ‘It
\nhas long been a commonplace to contrast European greatness with
\nAsian decadence. The contrast now seems to be reversed.’ 45 Yet
\nnothing effective was done to broaden the base of French rule. When
\nLeon Blum’s Popular Front government introduced its reform plan to
\ngive 25,000 Algerians citizenship, the leader of the Algerian
\nmoderates, Ferhat Abbas, exulted ‘La France, c’est moiV Maurice
\nViollette, a liberal Governor-General of Algeria and later, as a
\nDeputy, one of the sponsors of the reform, warned the Chambre:
\n‘When the Muslims protest, you are indignant. When they approve,
\nyou are suspicious. When they keep quiet, you are fearful. Messieurs,
\nthese men have no political nation. They do not even demand their
\nreligious nation. All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If. you
\nrefuse this, beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.’
\nBut the reform was killed…<\/p>\n

Algeria was the greatest and in many ways the archetype of all the anti-colonial wars. In the nineteenth century the Europeans won colonial wars because the indigenous peoples had lost the will to resist. In the twentieth century the roles were reversed, and it was Europe which lost the will to hang onto its gains. But
\nbehind this relativity of wills there are demographic facts. A colony is lost once the level of settlement is exceeded by the growth-rate of the indigenous -peoples. Nineteenth-century colonialism reflected the huge upsurge in European numbers. Twentieth-century decolonization reflected European demographic stability and the violent expansion of native populations.<\/p>\n

Algeria was a classic case of this reversal. It was not so much a
\nFrench colony as a Mediterranean settlement. In the 1830s there
\nwere only 1.5 million Arabs there, and their numbers were dwind-
\nling. The Mediterranean people moved from the northern shores to
\nthe southern ones, into what appeared to be a vacuum: to them the
\ngreat inland sea was a unity, and they had as much right to its shores
\nas anyone provided they justified their existence by wealth-creation.
\nAnd they did: they expanded 2,000 square miles of cultivated land in
\n1830 to 27,000 by 1954. 104 These pieds noirs were only 20 per cent
\nFrench in origin (including Corsicans and Alsacians). They were
\npredominantly Spanish in the west, Italian (and Maltese) in the east.
\nBut rising prosperity attracted others: Kabyles, Chaouias, Mzabite,
\nMauritanians, Turks and pure Arabs, from the mountains, the west,
\nthe south, the east. And French medical services virtually eliminated
\nmalaria, typhus and typhoid and effected a prodigious change in the
\nnon-European infant mortality rates. By 1906 the Muslim population had jumped to 4.5 million; by 1954 to 9 million. By the mid-1970s it had more than doubled again. If the French population
\nhad risen at the same rate, it would have been over 300 million by
\n1950. The French policy of ‘assimilation’, therefore, was nonsense,
\nsince by the year 2000 Algerian Muslims would have constituted
\nmore than half the French population, and Algeria would have
\n‘assimilated’ France rather than the reverse. 105 <\/p>\n

By the 1950s there were not enough pieds noirs for long-term
\nsurvival as a dominant class or even an enclave. Only a third of
\nAlgiers’ 900,000 inhabitants were Europeans. Only in Oran were they
\nin a majority. Even in and most heavily settled part, the Mitidja,
\nthe farms were worked by Muslim labour. In 1914 200,000 Euro-
\npeans had lived off the land; by 1954 only 93,000. By the 1950s
\nmost pieds noirs had ordinary, poorly paid city jobs Arabs could do
\njust as well. The social structure was an archaeological layer-cake of
\nrace prejudice: ‘the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises
\nthe Italian, who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in
\nturn despise the Arab.’ 106 There was no pretence at equality of
\nopportunity: in 1945 1,400 primary schools catered for 200,000
\nEuropean children, 699 for 1,250,000 Muslims. Textbooks began:
\n‘Our ancestors, the Gauls . . . .’ <\/p>\n

More serious, however, was the fraudulence of the electoral
\nsystem. Either the reforms passed by the French parliament were not
\napplied at all, or the votes were cooked by the local authorities
\nthemselves. It was this which cut the ground beneath the many
\nwell-educated Muslim moderates who genuinely wanted a fusion of
\nFrench and Muslim culture. As one of the noblest of them, Ahmed
\nBoumendjel, put it: ‘The French Republic has cheated. She has made
\nfools of us.’ He told the Assembly: ‘Why should we feel ourselves
\nbound by the principles of French moral values . . . when France
\nherself refuses to be subject to them?’ 107 The elections of 1948 were
\nfaked; so were those of 1951. In such circumstances, the moderates
\nhad no effective role to play. The men of violence moved forward. <\/p>\n

There was a foretaste in May 1945, when the Arabs massacred
\n103 Europeans. The French reprisals were on a savage scale.
\nDive-bombers blew forty villages to pieces; a cruiser bombarded
\nothers. The Algerian Communist Party journal Liberie called for the
\nrebels to be ‘swiftly and pitilessly punished, the instigators put in
\nfront of the firing-squad’. According to the French official report,
\n1,020 to 1,300 Arabs were killed; the Arabs claimed 45,000. Many
\ndemobilized Arab soldiers returned to find their families dead, their
\nhomes demolished. It was these former ncos who formed the
\nleadership of the future Front de Liberation Nationale (fln). As the
\nmost conspicuous of them, Ahmed Ben Bella, put it: ‘The horrors of
\nthe Constantine area in May 1945 persuaded me of the only path:
\nAlgeria for the Algerians.’ The French commander, General Duval,
\ntold the pieds noirs: ‘I have given you peace for ten years.’ <\/p>\n

That proved to be entirely accurate. On 1 November 1954, the
\nembittered ncos were ready: Ben Bella, by now an experienced
\nurban terrorist, linked forces with Belkacem Krim, to launch a
\nnational rising. It is important to grasp that the object, from start to
\nfinish, was not to defeat the French Army. That would have been
\nimpossible. The aim was to destroy the concept of assimilation and
\nmutli-racialism by eliminating the moderates on both sides. The first
\nFrenchman to be murdered was a liberal, Arabophile schoolteacher,
\nGuy Monnerot. The first Arab casualty was a pro-French local
\ngovernor, Hadj Sakok. Most fln operations were directed against
\nthe loyal Muslim element: employees of the state were murdered,
\ntheir tongues cut off, their eyes gouged out, then a note, ‘fln’, pinned
\nto the mutilated bodies. 108 This was the strategy pioneered by the
\nMufti in Palestine. Indeed many of the rebel leaders had served him.
\nThe ablest, Mohamedi Said, commander of ‘Wilaya 3’ in the Kabyle
\nmountains, had joined the Mufti’s ‘Muslim ss legion’, had para-
\nchuted into Tunisia as an Abwehr agent, and declared: ‘I believed
\nthat Hitler would destroy French tyranny and free the world.’ He still
\nwore his old ss helmet from time to time. His disciples included some
\nof the worst killers of the twentieth century, such as Ait Hamouda,
\nknown as Amirouche, and Ramdane Abane, who had sliced off
\nbreasts and testicles in the 1945 massacres, read Marx and Mein
\nKampf’m jail, and whose dictum was: ‘One corpse in a suit is always
\nworth more than twenty in uniform.’ These men, who had absorbed
\neverything most evil the twentieth century had to offer, imposed their
\nwill on the villages by sheer terror; they never used any other
\nmethod. Krim told a Yugoslav paper that the initiation method for a
\nrecruit was to force him to murder a designated ‘traitor’, mouchard
\n(police spy or informer), French gendarme or colonialist: ‘An assassination marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate.’ A
\npro-FLN American reporter was told: ‘When we’ve shot [the Muslim
\nvictim] his head will be cut off and we’ll clip a tag on his ear to show he was a traitor. Then we’ll leave the head on the main road.’ Ben
\nBella’s written orders included: ‘Liquidate all personalities who want
\nto play the role of interlocuteur valable’ ‘Kill any person attempting
\nto deflect the militants and inculcate in them a bourguibien spirit.’
\nAnother: ‘Kill the caids …. Take their children and kill them. Kill all those who pay taxes and those who collect them. Burn the houses of
\nMuslim ncos away on active service.’ The fln had their own
\ninternal reglements des comptes, too: the man who issued the last
\norder, Bachir Chihani, was accused (like Roehm) of pederasty and
\nsadistic sex-murders, and chopped to pieces along with eight of his
\nlovers. But it was the Muslim men of peace the fln killers really
\nhated. In the first two-and-a-half years of war, they murdered only
\n1,035 Europeans but 6,352 Arabs (authenticated cases; the real
\nfigure was nearer 20,000). 109 By this point the moderates could only
\nsurvive by becoming killers themselves or going into exile. <\/p>\n

The fln strategy was, in fact, to place the mass of the Muslims in a
\nsandwich of terror. On one side, the fln killers replaced the
\nmoderates. On the other, fln atrocities were designed to provoke
\nthe French into savage reprisals, and so drive the Muslim population
\ninto the extremist camp, fln doctrine was spelt out with cold-
\nblooded precision by the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighela: <\/p>\n

It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police …. The government can only intensify its repression, thus making the lives of its citizens harder than ever . . . police terror will become the order of the day …. The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in the physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the
\ncountry will [then have] become a military situation.<\/p>\n

Of course this odious variety of Leninism, if pursued ruthlessly
\nenough, has a certain irresistible force. The French government in
\n1954 was composed, on the whole, of liberal and civilized men,
\nunder the Radical-Socialist Pierre Mendes-France. They shared the
\nillusion – or the vision – that Algeria could become a genuine
\nmulti-racial society, on the principles of liberty, equality and fratern-
\nity. Mendes-France, who had happily freed Indo-China and Tunisia,
\ntold the Assembly: ‘The Algerian departements are part of the French
\nRepublic . . . they are irrevocably French . . . there can be no
\nconceivable secession.’ On Algeria, said his Interior Minister,
\nFranqois Mitterrand, ‘the only possible negotiation is war’. 111 Both
\nmen believed that, if France’s own principles were now at last fully
\nand generously turned into an Algerian reality, the problem would be
\nsolved. They sent out as Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, a
\nbrilliant ethnologist and former resistance-fighter, to create this
\nreality. What they did not realize was that the fln’s object was
\nprecisely to transform French generosity into savagery. <\/p>\n

Soustelle saw the fln as fascists. He thought he could defeat them
\nby giving the Arabs genuine democracy and social justice. He created
\n400 detachments of Kepis bleus (sas) in remote areas to protect
\nloyalists. He brought in dedicated liberals like Germaine Tillion and
\nVincent Monteil to set up networks of centres sociaux and maintain
\ncontacts with Muslim leaders of opinion. 112 He sought desperately
\nto bring Muslims into every level of government. His instructions to
\nthe police and army forbade terror and brutality in any form and
\nespecially collective reprisals. 113 It is unlikely that Soustelle’s policy
\nof genuine integration could have succeeded anyway, once the
\nFrench themselves realized what it involved: France did not want to
\nbecome a half-Arab, half-Muslim nation, any more than most Arabs
\nwanted to become a French one. But in any case the fln systemati-
\ncally murdered the instruments of Soustelle’s liberal policy, French
\nand Arab. They strove hardest to kill those French administrations
\nwho loved the Arabs; and usually succeeded. One such victim was
\nMaurice Dupuy, described by Soustelle as a ‘secular saint’. At his
\nfuneral Soustelle was in tears as he pinned the Legion d’honneur on
\nthe eldest of Dupuy’s eight orphaned children, and it was then he
\nfirst used the word ‘revenge’. 114 <\/p>\n

In the summer of 1955 the fln went a stage further and adopted a
\npolicy of genocide: to kill all French without distinction of age or
\nsex. On 20 August the first massacres began. As always, they
\nembraced many Arabs, such as Allouah Abbas, nephew of the
\nmoderate nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, who had criticized fln
\natrocities. But the main object was to provoke French army reprisals.
\nAt Ain-Abid near Constantine, for instance, thirty-seven Europeans,
\nincluding ten under fifteen, were literally chopped to pieces. Men had
\ntheir arms and legs cut off; children their brains dashed out; women
\nwere disemboweled – one pied-noir mother had her womb opened,
\nher five-day-old baby slashed to death, and then replaced in her
\nwomb. This ‘Philippeville massacre’ succeeded in its object: French
\nparatroopers in the area were given orders to shoot all Arabs and (by
\nSoustelle’s account) killed 1,273 ‘insurgents’, which fln propaganda
\nmagnified to 12,000. It was the 1945 massacre over again. As
\nSoustelle put it, ‘there had been well and truly dug an abyss through
\nwhich flowed a river of blood’. French and Muslim liberals like
\nAlbert Camus and Ferhat Abbas, appearing on platforms together to
\nappeal for reason, were howled down by all sides.<\/p>\n

From this point the Soustelle experiment collapsed. The war
\nbecame a competition in terror. The focus switched to the Algiers
\nCasbah, where every square kilometre housed 100,000 Algerians. It
\nbegan with the execution of a crippled murderer, Ferradj, who had
\nkilled a seven-year-old girl and seven other civilians. The fln
\ncommander, Ramdane Abane, ordered one hundred French civilians
\nto be murdered for every execution of an fln member. On 21-24
\nJune 1956, his chief killer, Saadi Yacef, who controlled a network of
\nbomb-factories and 1,400 ‘operators’, carried out forty-nine murders. The violence grew steadily through the second half of 1956 – parallel with the build up to the Suez adventure. The French Mayor
\nof Algiers was murdered, and a bomb carefully exploded in the
\nmiddle of the funeral ceremony: Yacef secretly ordered all his
\noperators out of the area in advance, to make certain that in the
\nsubsequent wild reprisals only innocent Muslims were killed. 116 <\/p>\n

The Suez debacle was important because it finally convinced the
\narmy that civilian governments could not win the war. Robert
\nLacoste, Soustelle’s socialist successor, conceded the point. On 7
\nJanuary 1957 he gave General Jacques Massu and his 4,600 men
\nabsolute freedom of action to clean the fln out of Algiers. For the
\nfirst time all restraints on the army, including the banning of torture,
\nwere lifted. Torture had been abolished in France on 8 October
\n1789. Article 303 of the Penal Code imposed the death penalty for
\nanyone practising it. In March 1955 a secret report written by a
\nsenior civil servant recommended the use of supervised torture as the
\nonly alternative to prevent much more brutal unauthorized torture.
\nSoustelle had flatly rejected it. Now Massu authorized it, as he later
\nadmitted: Tn answer to the question: “was there really torture?” I
\ncan only reply in the affirmative, although it was never either
\ninstitutionalized or codified.’ 117 The argument was that successful
\ninterrogation saved lives, chiefly of Arabs; that Arabs who gave
\ninformation would be tortured to death, without restraint, by the
\nfln, and it was vital for the French to make themselves feared more.
\nIt was the Arab belief that Massu operated without restraints, as
\nmuch as the torture itself, which caused prisoners to talk. But
\nnon-Muslims were tortured too. One, a Communist Jew called Henri
\nAlleg, wrote a best-selling book which caused an outburst of moral
\nfury throughout France in 1958. 118 Massu claimed that interroga-
\ntions by his men left no permanent damage. On seeing Alleg, looking
\nwhole and well, on the steps of the Palais de Justice in 1970, he
\nexclaimed: <\/p>\n

Do the torments which he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the ritual present of the fellaghas to their recalcitrant ‘brothers’? Everyone knows that these bodily appendages do not grow again! <\/p>\n

But the notion that it was possible to supervise limited torture
\neffectively during a war for survival is absurd. In fact, the liberal
\nSecretary-General of the Algiers Prefecture, Paul Teitgen, testified
\nthat about 3,000 prisoners ‘disappeared’ during the Algiers battle. At
\nall events Massu won it. It was the only time the French fought the
\nfln with its own weapons. Algiers was cleansed of terrorism.
\nModerate Arabs dared to raise their voices again. But the victory was
\nthrown away by a new policy of regroupement of over a million poor
\nfellahs, a piece of crude social engineering calculated to play into fln
\nhands. Besides, the Massu experiment set up intolerable strains
\nwithin the French system. On the one hand, by freeing army units
\nfrom political control and stressing the personalities of commanders,
\nit encouraged private armies: colonels increasingly regarded them-
\nselves as proprietors of their regiments, as under the monarchy, and
\nbegan to manipulate their generals into disobedience. In the moral
\nconfusion, officers began to see their primary obligation as towards
\ntheir own men rather than the state. 120 <\/p>\n

At the same time, news leaking out of what the army had done in
\nAlgiers began to turn French liberal and centre opinion against the
\nwar. From 1957 onwards, many Frenchmen came to regard Algerian
\nindependence, however distasteful, as preferable to the total corrup-
\ntion of the French public conscience. Thus the demand for the
\nrestoration of political control of the war – including negotiations
\nwith the fln \u2014 intensified just as the French army was, as it believed,
\nwinning by asserting its independence. This irreconcilable conflict
\nproduced the explosion of May 1958 which returned General de
\nGaulle to power and created the Fifth Republic. <\/p>\n

De Gaulle was not a colonialist. He thought the age of colonies
\nwas over. His body seemed in the past but his mind was in the future.
\nHe claimed that at Brazzaville in 1944, when marshalling black
\nAfrica behind the Resistance, he had sought ‘to transform the old
\ndependent relationships into preferential links of political, economic
\nand cultural co-operation’. 121 He saw the half-hearted continuation
\nof French colonialism as the direct result of the weakness of the
\nFourth Republic’s constitution, which he despised, and the ‘regime of
\nthe parties’, incapable of ‘the unequivocal decisions decolonization
\ncalled for’. ‘How could it’, he asked, ‘have surmounted and if
\nnecessary broken all the opposition, based on sentiment, habit or
\nself-interest, which such an enterprise was bound to provoke?’ The
\nresult was vacillation and inconsistency, first in Indo-China, then in
\nTunisia and Morocco, finally and above all in Algeria. Naturally, he
\nsaid, the army ‘felt a growing resentment against a political system
\nwhich was the embodiment of irresolution’.<\/p>\n

The coup was detonated, probably deliberately, by the fln
\ndecision on 9 May 1958 to ‘execute’ three French soldiers for
\n‘torture, rape and murder’. Four days later, white students stormed
\nthe government headquarters in Algiers. Massu asked Lacoste, who
\nhad fled to France, whether he had permission to fire on the white
\nmob. He was not given it. That night, at a Brecht play attacking
\ngenerals, a left-wing audience applauded deliriously. 123 But not one
\nwas actually prepared to fight for the Fourth Republic. In Algiers, the
\ngenerals took over, and called for de Gaulle’s return. Some 30,000
\nMuslims went to the government forum to demonstrate their appro-
\nval. They sang the ‘Marseillaise’ and the army song, ‘Chant des
\nAfricains’: a spontaneous demonstration in favour of French civiliza-
\ntion and against the barbarism of the fln. Massu said: ‘Let them
\nknow that France will never abandon them.’ 124 When the generals
\ncalled for de Gaulle they were lying, for they saw him merely as a
\nbattering-ram, to smash the Republic and take power themselves. De
\nGaulle thought Algeria was untenable and would destroy the French
\narmy. Indeed, he feared even worse might happen. On 24 May a
\ndetachment from Algeria landed in Corsica. The local authorities
\nfraternized. Police sent from Marseilles allowed themselves to be
\ndisarmed. De Gaulle took over to avert an invasion of France itself,
\nwhich would probably have succeeded or, alternatively, produced
\ncivil war. He saw ominous parallels with the beginning of the
\nSpanish catastrophe in 1936. It would, he thought, finally destroy
\nFrance as a great civilizing power. If Paris was worth a mass, France
\nherself was worth a few lies. <\/p>\n

So, having taken power, he went to Algiers to deceive. On 4 June
\nhe told the howling colon mob in Algiers: ‘Je vous ai compris’ ‘I
\ntossed them the words,’ he wrote, ‘seemingly spontaneous but in
\nreality carefully calculated, which I hoped would fire their enthusi-
\nasm without committing me further than I was willing to go.’ 125 He
\nhad said the previous year, privately: ‘Of course independence will
\ncome but they are too stupid there to know it.’ ‘Long live French
\nAlgeria!’ he chanted publicly in June 1958; privately: ‘VAfrique est
\nfoutue et VAlgerie avecV He called French Algeria ‘a ruinous
\nUtopia’. Publicly he continued to reassure the colons and the army.
\n‘Independence? In twenty-five years’ (October 1958). ‘The French
\narmy will never quit this country and I will never deal with those
\npeople from Cairo and Tunis’ (March 1959). ‘There will be no Dien
\nBien Phu in Algeria. The insurrection will not throw us out of this
\ncountry.’ ‘How can you listen to the liars and conspirators who tell
\nyou that in granting free choice to the Algerians, France and de
\nGaulle want to abandon you, to pull out of Algeria and hand it over
\nto the rebellion?’ (January 1960). ‘Independence … a folly, a
\nmonstrosity’ (March I960).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he got an ever-tighter grip on the state. On 28
\nSeptember 1958 the French adopted the constitution of the Fifth
\nRepublic, concentrating power in the president. On 21 December he
\nwas elected President. The same referendum which created the new
\nconstitution gave all French overseas territories the right of associa-
\ntion or departure. The notion of consent thus became universal. One
\nby one, de Gaulle broke or removed the men who had hoisted him to
\noffice. In February 1960 he demanded and received ‘special powers’. <\/p>\n

Four months later he opened secret talks with the fln leaders. In
\nJanuary 1961 he held a referendum offering Algeria freedom in
\nassociation with France, and got an overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote. It was
\nthe end of Algerie franqaise and it brought its extremist supporters
\nout into the open, bombs in hand. <\/p>\n

If the army leadership had insisted on taking power in May 1958,
\nit could have done so, with or without de Gaulle. By April 1961,
\nwhen it finally grasped de Gaulle’s deception and sought to over-
\nthrow him, the chance had been missed. French opinion had moved
\non. The conscripts had transistor radios; they could hear the news
\nfrom Paris; they refused to follow their officers. The revolt collapsed;
\nits leaders surrendered or were hunted down and gaoled. That left the
\nway open for a complete scuttle. Captured fln leaders were released
\nfrom prisons to join the talks just as the rebel French generals were
\nbeginning their sentences. <\/p>\n

White terrorism, the oas (Organization de VArmee Secrete), took
\nlonger to deal with. It operated at full blast for over a year, using
\nbombs, machine-guns and bazookas, killing over 12,000 civilians
\n(mainly Muslims) and about 500 police and security men. It illus-
\ntrates the fearful power of political violence to corrupt. Indeed, in
\nmany ways it was the mirror-image of the fln. On 23 February
\n1962, its leader General Salan, who had had a distinguished career as
\nan honourable soldier, issued orders for a generalized offensive …. The systematic opening of fire against crs and gendarmerie units. “Molotov cocktails” will be thrown against their armoured vehicles . . . night and day …. [The objective is] to destroy the best Muslim elements in the liberal professions so as to oblige the Muslim
\npopulation to have recourse to ourselves … to paralyse the powers that be and make it impossible for them to exercise authority. Brutal actions will be generalized over the whole territory … at works of art and all that represents the exercise of authority in a manner to lead towards the maximum of general insecurity and the total paralysis of the country. <\/p>\n

Nor did the corruption stop at the oas. For in order to beat them
\nand to protect de Gaulle himself (twice nearly murdered), the state
\nbuilt up its own official terror units, which murdered and tortured
\nprisoners with impunity, and on a wide scale. 128 In this case, neither
\nliberal France nor the international community raised a whisper of
\nprotest, oas terrorism finally killed the idea of a white settlement. At
\nthe end of 1961 de Gaulle’s closest adviser, Bernard Tricot, reported
\nback from Algiers: ‘The Europeans . . . are so hardened in opposition
\nto everything that is being prepared, and their relations with the
\nmajority of the Muslims are so bad, that . . . the essential thing now
\nis to organize their return.’<\/p>\n

The end came in March 1962, in an orgy of slaughter and
\nintolerance. The Muslim mob, scenting victory, had already sacked
\nthe Great Synagogue in the heart of the Casbah, gutting it, ripping
\nthe Torah scrolls, killing the Jewish officials and chalking on the
\nwalls ‘Death to the Jews’ and other Nazi slogans. On 15 March the
\noas raided Germaine Tillion’s social centre, where handicapped
\nchildren were trained, took out six men and shot them to death,
\nbeginning with the legs. One of them was Mouloud Feraoun, friend
\nof Camus, who had termed him ‘last of the moderates’. He had
\nwritten: ‘There is French in me, there is Kabyle in me. But I have a
\nhorror of those who kill …. Vive la France, such as I have always
\nloved! Vive VAlgerie, such as I hope for! Shame on the criminals!’ 130
\nThe cease-fire with the fln, 19 March 1962, brought a further burst
\nof oas killing: eighteen gendarmes and seven soldiers were mur-
\ndered. The French commander, General Ailleret, retaliated by
\ndestroying the last redoubt of Algerie franqaise, the pied noir
\nworking-class quarter of Bab-el-Oued, with its 60,000 inhabitants.
\nHe attacked it with rocket-firing dive-bombers, tanks firing at
\npoint-blank range and 20,000 infantry. It was the suppression of the
\n1870 Commune all over again; but this episode does not figure in the
\nMarxist textbooks. 131 That was effectively the end of Algeria as a
\nmultiracial community. The exodus to France began. Many hospi-
\ntals, schools, laboratories, oil terminals and other evidence of French
\nculture and enterprise \u2014 including the library of the University of
\nAlgiers \u2014 were deliberately destroyed. About 1,380,000 people
\n(including some Muslims) left in all. By 1963, of a large and historic
\nMediterranean community, only about 30,000 remained. <\/p>\n

The Evian Agreements, under which France agreed to get out,
\ncontained many clauses designed to save France’s face. They were
\nmeaningless. It was a straight surrender. Not even paper protection,
\nhowever, was given to 250,000 Muslim officials, many of a very
\nhumble kind, who had continued to serve France faithfully to the
\nend. De Gaulle was too busy saving France by extricating it from
\nthe horror, to give them a thought. When a Muslim deputy, ten of
\nwhose family had already been murdered by the fln, told de Gaulle
\nthat, with self-determination, ‘we shall suffer’, he replied coldly: ‘Eh,
\nbien – vous souffrirez.’ They did. Only 15,000 had the money and
\nmeans to get out. The rest were shot without trial, used as human
\nmine-detectors to clear the minefields along the Tunisian border,
\ntortured, made to dig their own tombs and swallow their military
\ndecorations before being killed; some were burned alive, castrated,
\ndragged behind trucks, fed to the dogs; there were cases where entire
\nfamilies including tiny children were murdered together. The French
\narmy units that remained, their former comrades-in-arms, stood by,
\nhorrified and powerless, for under the Agreements they had no right
\nto interfere. French soldiers were actually employed to disarm the
\nMuslim harkis, telling them they would be issued with more modern
\nweapons, although in fact they were about to be slaughtered. It was a
\ncrime of betrayal comparable to the British handing over Russian
\npows to Stalin’s wrath; worse, indeed. Estimates of the number put
\nto death vary from 30,000 to 150,000. 133 <\/p>\n

Who knows? A great darkness descended over many aspects of the
\nnew Algeria, a darkness which has never been lifted since. The lies
\ncontinued to the end. ‘France and Algeria’, said de Gaulle on 18
\nMarch 1962, would ‘march together like brothers on the road to
\ncivilization’. 134 The truth is, the new nation owed its existence to the
\nexercise of cruelty without restraint and on the largest possible scale.
\nIts regime, composed mainly of successful gangsters, quickly ousted
\nthose of its members who had been brought up in the Western
\ntradition; all were dead or in exile by the mid-1960s. <\/p>\n

Exactly twenty years after the independence agreement was
\nreached, one of the chief signatories and Algeria’s first President, Ben Bella himself, summed up the country’s first two decades of independent existence. The net result, he said, had been ‘totally negative’. <\/p>\n

The country was ‘a ruin’. Its agriculture had been ‘assassinated’. ‘We
\nhave nothing. No industry \u2014 only scrap iron.’ Everything in Algeria
\nwas ‘corrupt from top to bottom’. 135 No doubt Ben Bella’s bitterness
\nwas increased by the fact that he had spent most of the intervening
\nyears imprisoned by his revolutionary comrades. But the substance
\nof his judgement was true enough. And unfortunately the new
\nAlgeria had not kept its crimes to itself. It became and for many years
\nremained the chief resort of international terrorists of all kinds. A
\ngreat moral corruption had been planted in Africa. It set a pattern of
\npublic crime and disorder which was to be imitated throughout the
\nvast and tragic continent which was now made master of its own
\naffairs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everything you need to know about multiculturalism can be found in this 1966 war film, such as: * Multiculturalism is never stable for long. * Multiculturalism means an increasingly splintered society. * Extremists tend to win out in racial wars. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29744,181,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-algeria","category-france","category-islam"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70251"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70257,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70251\/revisions\/70257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}