A Battle of Algiers

by Theodore Dalrymple (March 2015)

When asked about the effects of the French Revolution, the late Chou En-Lai, as charming and sophisticated as he was without scruple, is alleged to have said, ‘It is too soon to tell.’ He probably never said it, however, which is rather a pity because it is so witty and, in a sense, true. The effects of any historical event stretch indefinitely into the future and therefore achieve no finality, which is why history constantly requires and undergoes revision even without the need of a totalitarian dictator, such as Stalin or Mao, to write people into or out of it according to the latest pattern of favour and disfavour. History will come to an end only with the extinction of the human race, and not with the triumph everywhere of liberal democracy, or of anything else for that matter.

Nowhere has the whirligig of time brought in its revenges with a more acute sense of irony than in this case. The first fruit of a war fought in the name of a struggle against racial injustice and discrimination was de facto ethnic cleansing, that is to say of the million French residents of Algeria, 11 per cent of the population, including Jews, practically all of whom left Algeria in the few months after the signing of the Evian Accords in 1962. And, as the subsequent history of the country has proved, the so-called freedom fighters turned out to have been fighting not so much for freedom as for power. They were power-fighters rather than freedom-fighters, for once they were installed in power they instituted nothing that any political philosopher would recognise as a regime of freedom. The only sense in which the new regime was freer than the old had been was freedom from the old oppressor. The new oppressor (who immediately killed 15-30 thousand of his fellow countrymen who had fought on the old oppressor’s side) was, however, of the same ethnic, cultural and religious origin as the population it oppressed. How much of an advance was this, and was it worth the lives of half a million people to make it?

When President Chirac visited Algeria, he was greeted by crowds of young men chanting ‘Visas! Visas!’ Nationalist indoctrination and propaganda had not blinded them to their own personal interests, which was to find work in ex-colonial France (I very much doubt, contrary to what some demagogues say, that they dreamed of a life on social security.) Meanwhile, in France, young men of Algerian descent express contempt and even hatred for their country of adoption, for example by booing and whistling at the national anthem in a stadium when France play Algeria at a football match. (Admittedly, the Marseillaise has the bloodthirstiest and most morally reprehensible lyrics of all national anthems, including the wish that our furrows may be swamped by the impure blood of our ferocious aristocratic enemies. But these were not the grounds on which the Marseillaise was shown such disrespect, a disrespect that caused considerable anxiety in France.)

Stora seems genuinely even-handed in his treatment of the war, which the French won militarily but lost politically (happily for them). He extenuates no one and does not excuse the atrocities of anyone, including those of the FLN – though he suggests that the French army’s use of torture during the Battle of Algiers, when it took control of the city from the infiltrating guerrillas of the FLN, may have been militarily useful, and uncomfortable conclusion for those who would like to believe that torture is not only morally wrong but useless in practice.

Stora wonders how Mitterand could have undergone such a change. I do not think there is any real need to wonder, or to waste much time on such wondering. Mitterand did not so much change his mind – not like General de Bollardière, who resigned his post rather than continue to serve while torture was being carried out on a large scale by his men – as see on which side his political bread was buttered. By 1981 it was politically more profitable to him to be an abolitionist, just as in 1956 it had been politically more profitable for him to have been a willing executioner. Neither truth nor morality ever meant much to Mitterand in his pursuit of power, and even in a profession remarkable for its cynicism he stood out as outstandingly lacking in principle. I suspect that he thought that principles were strictly for the naïve.

Was this stupidity or sangfroid on a magnificent scale? Within weeks those sunbathers would be refugees in France, probably deprived of all that they owned. But perhaps they simply accepted that they were in a hopeless and powerless situation, as eventually we all are, and therefore that they might as well continue with their normal pleasures. They would thus have one day more of sensual pleasure than if they sat lamenting: sufficient unto the day being the evil thereof. By sunbathing they were taking seriously at least one of the injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount.

The other photograph showed a gravely injured woman, Mme Monnerot, being lifted on a stretcher from a helicopter towards an ambulance, on November 1, 1954. That was the date on which the nationalist movement in effect declared war on the colonial regime, suddenly carrying out thirty simultaneous explosions in Algeria, its existence as an armed force having previously been unsuspected. (Mme Monnerot’s husband, a teacher, who was killed in the explosion that injured her, the first fatality of the war.)

The photograph reminded me of my time in Rhodesia, as it then was (Zimbabwe now). There were two hospitals in the city of Bulawayo at the time, one for blacks and one for whites and the very few blacks who could afford to be treated there. (The treatment in both was of a very high standard.)

A friend of mine, a doctor, had a house in the grounds of the hospital for whites and I happened to be visiting when the first casualty of what was soon to be the guerrilla war arrived by helicopter. Until then security had seemed to be absolute but, young as I was, I knew this to be an historic moment, and that Rhodesia would not long survive as Rhodesia. Most of the Rhodesians, however, did not take the sign very seriously, indeed they took it almost lightly, as if the whole thing were an amusing distraction rather than a harbinger of a complete change. How could they be so blind to the obvious? The answer is clear: we can blind ourselves to anything we do not want to see. The writing on the wall is always written in ink that is invisible to someone or other.

Moreover, there is none of us who has never failed to see some or other writing on the wall. Our clairvoyance, if we possess any at all, is always limited both in time and place. However clear-sighted we are about some things, we are always blind about others. And as if wilful blindness were not enough, there is the inherent unpredictability of things. We imagine that a corollary of free will and the absence of fatality means that can control the future, but this does not follow at all. The glass through which we see things is always dark.

Yet if foresight is impossible, it is also necessary. I do not find this depressing, on the contrary I am thankful for it. How dull an existence it would be if all that were necessary were also possible!

 

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