France's war in Algeria: telling the story

[davidbfpo]

The actual title for this article is: France may have apologised for atrocities in Algeria, but the war still casts a long shadow.

It starts with:

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, wrestled with the demons of his country's colonial past this week by acknowledging that the country carried out systematic torture during the Algerian war of independence. After six decades of secrecy and denials, it was a historic first for a country that long refused to even admit that the brutal conflict - in which Algeria says 1.5 million died - was indeed a “war”.

Link:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...r-still-casts/ and yesterday on the BBC (slightly different e.g. Harki's mentioned):https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45513842

Professor Andrew Hussey, a UK historian resident in Paris, adds his commentary:https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...onial-history?

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to an excellent War on The Rocks article, which fits here well and has a wider application to fighting 'small wars'. Notably over working with local allies and whether a conflict can be won. I'd never heard of this soldier.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/th...odern-warfare/

[davidbfpo]

Back to the past and distant past, an interesting commentary on the film 'the Battle of Algiers': https://newlinesmag.com/review/a-mov...oss-the-globe/

[davidbfpo]

A summary of the film by a British commentator after a group watched the film:

Pontecorvo's famous, harrowing, and still horribly relevant, "Battle of Algiers" (1966). The speaker contextualised the moral dilemmas and human damage in a major mechanism of modern history: successful and unsuccessful insurgencies , repeatedly unleashed since the mid 20th century. Protracted strategies of provocative escalation have all too clearly succeeded, in a list extending from Palestine, Indochina, Algeria… to, last year, Afghanistan. They certainly do not always win, but confronting them is invariably painful and demanding of resources, patience and organisational restraint. Long lasting ethnic traumas and religious hatreds are quite consciously detonated or exacerbated. Insurgencies learn from each other and so do counter insurgents. Conclusions are not often gentle. There is no reassuring end in sight to these often very deliberately agonising human crises. But moral as well as operational lessons can be learned about how to avoid and mitigate them. The intellectually and emotionally intense discussion, linked to some participants' personal experiences of real life choices in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, made the previously viewing of the film even more instructively memorable in a way that no other medium could have achieved.