Item — HN Reader

De Gaulle was a cool guy. He was afraid of no one.

"After Washington rebuffed his proposal to overhaul the Western alliance and once he ended the war in Algeria, de Gaulle launched a forceful attack on what he called the "American protectorate." The West's nuclear strategy, the structure of NATO, and West German dependence on Washington were only some of the issues that fell subject to Gaullist revisionism"

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4w10...

1 comments

Yeah it was so cool when he oversaw the torture and arbitrary detainment of Algerian civilians in a desperate attempt to crush the revolutionary movement.

He was out of power until '58 when the Algerian war had already been going on for 4 years and within his first term offered a referendum for independence to Algeria, which at that point had been under French rule for over a century, and then honored that independence.

Sure you are right.

But he saved France from the coup generals and was responsible for the withdrawal of the French from Algeria.

In the summer I saw the Algeria memorial on the Seine, in France they still have a problem with the colonial crimes in Algeria.

It was a brutal occupation and while I obviously don't hold some kind of personal resentment to the decedents (whether institutionally or literally) of this colonial state, I think its hard for the well meaning public in these countries to understand the effect of this kind of soft whitewashing (even if unintentional) of the historical record has to those of us who have these conflicts burned in our living memory, and are in all ways still living within the direct repercussions of these conflicts.

Maybe it is easier for some when they can view it from a distance, I see many who grasp the severity of say, the Japanese state's indifference to their imperial war crimes which still causes immense tension with their neighbors, or the denial of the Armenian Genocide by Turks and so on. It's a shame that such indignation rarely is maintained for systems that one may be far more complicit, and consequently far more able to rectify.

To be fair it’s not like the FLN were that much less brutal than the French both during and after the war.

Of course in hindsight (even if we ignore all the mass murder and atrocities, which we can’t..) that was was entirely pointless from the French perspective. What were they even hoping to achieve? Unless they were willing to grant full suffrage and civil rights to the entire Muslim population independence seemed inevitable. Best case was holding onto the majority French/pro-French areas in the north..)

> it’s not like the FLN were that much less brutal than the French both during and after the war

Sure, I'm under no rose-tinted delusions about their methods - nor the methods of any other guerilla movement in a similar position - but the vital distinction is that one side is aimed at enforcing a racist and cruel colonialist regime and the other is a popular nationalist movement aimed at achieving sovereignty from that colonialist regime. There is no equivalence here. The FLN wouldn't have needed to liberate Algeria at gunpoint if it wasn't under occupation in the first place (and if a peaceful or diplomatic resolution was not refused).

>What were they even hoping to achieve?

Yeah, I think there comes a similar point with many reactionary movements where they kind of began a mindless march into self-destruction, where whatever self-interested outcome they originally fought for is no longer even feasible yet they continue fighting for no other reason than institutional momentum and spite.

I’m not defending or denying what France did but in quite a few ways it was a civil war. It’s not like FLN was universally popular, before the French started committing mass atrocities it had quite limited support.

> to liberate

It’s not like they turned it into a democracy or even tried to. It was bit like Castro liberating Cuba just a probably with more atrocities targeting civilians or former Algerian soldiers serving in the French army.

Yeah, liberated. Algeria is no longer an explicit French colony, just an effective one (they now skip the middle man and exploit it directly through trade agreements). It turns out its quite difficult to magically create a prosperous liberal democracy post-revolution when isolated from both international trade and the political sphere of the hegemon, and when the militarized state structure that was necessitated by the war effort can quite easily be co-opted by certain elements in the state savvy enough to purge any opposition that would prevent them from re-establishing trade relations with the same international business interests and neo-colonial enterprises as before, that would happily provide support and funding in exchange for unequal trade agreements and repressive domestic policies that benefit the oligarchs and their foreign partners at the expense of popular support and the goals of the revolution.

>It’s not like they turned it into a democracy or even tried to

How familiar are you with the cold war, and especially the third world movement? Do you know what happened to the democracies?

>more atrocities targeting civilians or former Algerian soldiers serving in the French army

Did you expect them to grant amnesty to a domestic reactionary fifth column, who in the case of both cuba and essentially every other third world country during that century, immediately began programs of terrorism and destabilization with foreign support? I'm not talking about the civilians who should've been securely repatriated, but a lot of those informants and French soldiers where not peaceful bystanders. The french state would not have been able to carry out their programs of torture and terrorism against the civilian population without their help.

I'm not exactly condoning or celebrating reprisals or violence but once again, all of these things become inevitable when a country is colonized and repressed, so I'm not sure why you place the moral condemnation on people that will inevitably resist an occupation rather than the instigator.

In any case, what's your ideal scenario? That a brutal struggle for national sovereignty somehow manages to secure their freedom with limited violence or guerilla tactics against an infinitely more funded and lubricated colonial machine, and immediately institute a parliamentary democracy that will avoid being subject to a purge or military coup (as was the case in Algeria) or outright foreign intervention (in the case of Allende, Sukarno, Park Chung Hee, Goulart, and literally too many others to list).... somehow? Or instead should they have just rolled over and assist the French in violently pacifying the population, or in the case of Cuba help maintain Bautista's dictatorship solely to prevent civil instability at all costs, since national sovereignty clearly cannot be attained in a manner you deem proper.

It's no excuse. But many people just don't know about it.

I read Annie Ernaux's book, Algeria was far away and there is propaganda and misinformation and ruthless suppression of people who care.

Germany right now supports the war crimes in Gaza - there is propaganda and suppression of people who care.

That’s the paradox of the man and probably the reason personal notes will indubitably be checked before being published: for someone who fought so hard against Nazism, he was strangely comfortable with casual racism and silent about the atrocities of the Algerian war.

Churchill is similar and possibly more familiar to the English-speaking public: presented as a lion against Hitler, but don’t dig too much towards what he did with Irish republicans or around India’s independence.

I don’t think FDR was that much different if you read what he privately wrote about Jewish immigrants to the US in the 1940s or the internment camps of Japanese-Americans.

All three are the modern keystones of human-rights-defending countries, but the second best-known thing about them is how much effort they put into planning openly racist policies, up to genocides. You can read Hannah Arendt and re-read after accounts on what happened during the Battle of Algiers, the Bengal Famine, or Manzanar, and it hits differently the second time.

Yep, I agree with all of this. It's pretty jarring to see the disconnect between one's own experience coming from these post-colonial countries with family members who lived through these conflicts, and the "public" attitudes and collective recollection within these centers of power and the discrepancy with their own self-perception as proponents of "liberal values" and "human rights".

> That’s the paradox of the man and probably the reason personal notes will indubitably be checked before being published: for someone who fought so hard against Nazism, he was strangely comfortable with casual racism and silent about the atrocities of the Algerian war

That's why it's hard to judge past personalities with our modern standards. Go read what Jules Ferry or Victor Hugo said about colonies, they both were very engaged and vocal about human/civil rights yet they said the most insanely racist things, I don't think any known public figure alive today said anything remotely as racist as them.

>That's why it's hard to judge past personalities with our modern standards

This couldn't be more naive, you understand that these are not some default cultural norm of the time, shared by all, and we today are simply more empathetic and enlightened than them with each passing decade? These attitudes are a direct reflection of the political sphere and centers of power in which those originating these ideas are embedded within.

People knew racism and colonialism was wrong during WW2. They knew it long before then.

You can take any time and place in history, and if you look you will find someone opposed to colonialism, exploitation, and prejudice, for as long as those concepts have existed. Just maybe not in the military leadership, or political class, since their positions in society constrain the range of beliefs they would've held in order to enter such positions in the first place.