Having been screened by the special operations department of the Pentagon last August, The Battle of Algiers is now scheduled for a run at the New York Film Forum. Unless I am wrong, this event will lead to a torrent of pseudo-knowing piffle from the armchair guerrillas (well, there ought to be a word for this group). I myself cherished the dream of being something more than an armchair revolutionary when I first saw this electrifying movie. It was at a volunteer work-camp for internationalists, in Cuba in the summer of 1968. Che Guevara had only been dead for a few months, the Tet rising in Vietnam was still a fresh and vivid memory, and in Portuguese Africa the revolution was on the upswing.When I next saw it, in Bleecker Street in the Village in the early 1970s, it didn’t have quite the same shattering effect. Moreover, in the audience (as in that Cuban camp, as I later found out) there were some idiots who fancied the idea of trying “urban guerrilla” warfare inside the West itself. Those making a facile comparison between the Algerian revolution depicted in the film and today’s Iraq draw an equally flawed analogy. Let me mention just the most salient differences. Algeria in 1956 — the “real time” date of the film — was not just a colony of France. It was a department of metropolitan France. The slogan of the French Right was Algerie Francaise. A huge population of French settlers lived in the country, mainly concentrated in the coastal towns. The French had exploited and misgoverned this province for more than a century and were seeking to retain it as an exclusive possession.In 1956, the era of French and British rule in the Middle East had already in effect come to an end. With the refusal by President Eisenhower to countenance the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt at Suez in November of that year, the death-knell of European colonialism had struck. There was no military tactic that could have exempted a near-bankrupt France from this verdict. General Massu in Algiers could have won any military victory he liked and it would have changed nothing. Today, it is Arab nationalism that is in crisis, while the political and economic and military power of the United States is virtually unchallengeable. Excerpted from a column by Christopher Hitchens at www.slate.com
