“How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas? Children shoot soldiers at pointblank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.” So proclaimed the flier.
The place: the Pentagon. The time: August 27, 2003. The guests: a professional audience of about 40 officers and civilian experts, along with sundry military wonks. The purpose: study the combatants’ strategies. The film: “The Battle of Algiers.”
Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece, a harrowing depiction of the struggle by Algerian nationalist insurgents against French colonial forces ensconced in their country since 1830, needs no introduction. Since its release in 1965, “The Battle of Algiers” has shown nonstop in art-house theaters and on campuses around the country, never failing to move audiences and arouse their identification with and spontaneous cheers for the Algerian hero, Ali La Pointe, a street tough who knew his Casba and how to go about organizing underground cells of dedicated youngsters, and returned Algerian veterans who had been conscripted against their will to fight with the French Army in Vietnam.
Now refurbished with improved subtitles and a spanking new print, the film was re-released nationally last Friday.
The truth that Pontecorvo vividly illustrates here is that revolutionary violence, pitted against authoritarian counterinsurgency, always triumphs. The film tells us how, by resorting to massive repression, including torture, against the rebels, the French succeeded initially in crushing the uprising, but then within a few years, culminating in 1963, the occupying troops, along with the “pieds noirs” settlers they had brought along with them from the outset, were forced to acknowledge defeat and retreat to France — an outcome that now, seen in the cold light of hindsight, was inevitable, given the historical imperatives at play.
“The Battle of Algiers,” a feature movie presented in the guise of a cinema verite documentary, remains as relevant, compelling, intense, honest and striking today as it was when it was first released, its motif being that people denied freedom become knit by blood and fire, hauled by their will-to-meaning into a shadowy vortex where life is facilely exchanged for death. The director projects, and lets us quietly meditate on, each side’s contradictions — the moral contradictions, for example, inherent in rebel women planting bombs in crowded cafes and French troops torturing the “bicots” and blowing up their homes.
The folks at the Pentagon watched “The Battle of Algiers” to see what lessons they could learn from it about “urban terrorist insurgency” that might be relevant to Iraq. That’s dumb. What is even dumber still is what the Washington Post’s David Ignatius had to say at the time about the screening: “(It) is one hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq.”
The difference between France’s colonial ambitions to keep Algeria a settler colony of France — resorting to a brutal war against the population there in pursuit of those ambitions — and America’s dispensation in Iraq, is glaring. Unlike the French mission in Algeria, whose goal was to prevent Algerians from gaining independence, that of the United States is, conversely, to help Iraqis govern their own country. Different insurgency, different agenda, different rules.
In the film, Lt. Col. Mathieu, commander of the French paratroopers, responds to reporters’ criticism about his soldiers’ brutal practices by saying: “Is France to remain in Algeria? If your answer is yes, you must accept all the consequences.”
The Pentagon flier inviting guests to attend that screening of “The Battle of Algiers” late last summer should have gone out not to an American, but to an Israeli, audience of 40 officers and civilian experts, along with sundry military wonks, who would have learned how the outcome of Israel’s struggle to remain in, and rule over, Palestine is historically inevitable.
