EFFORTPOST [Ramblepost because apparently this a genre now] The Algerian war for independence and its effects on France

Began as a reply to this.

[Disclaimer: This is I'm sure inaccurate in a lot of places. It's based off of stuff that I watched and read over my entire much too long life , so don't assume all the details are right. But I'm very confident that it's more a accurate depiction of these events than what you'll ever hear in the Anglosphere, which is absolutely nothing.

If you are French and offended by something, please speak up. One of my purposes here is to provoke because I am a francophile and I'm saddened by our lack of representation. If there's a frog lurker out there, please correct me about something. I'll probably call you an r-slur and tell you keep yourself safe but those are terms of endearment here.]

"One could call Algeria France's Vietnam were it not for the fact that France's Vietnam is also Vietnam."

-- World's Most Dangerous Places, it has multiple authors and I can't remember who wrote that chapter

Sick burn.]

Yeah, the eurotrash love to whine about the US role in coups in Guatemala, Iran, etc. back then but are extremely extremely reticent about ever mentioning what happened in France in that era. I wouldn't even know about half this stuff if not for my dad being alive at the time and explaining how serious it really was.

The army officers in Algeria were butthurt as they felt the civilian government wasn't backing them up enough and were probably going to kitty out and surrender. These guys had just come back from losing in Vietnam and they really did not want to lose again. Especially in Algeria, which had a large French population and was officially not a colony but an integral part of France. They're led by the paratroopers. If you remember the French chad character from Battle of Algiers, he's a composite of a few of them. Like Jacques Massu, who admitted that they tortured people, and that this is a really horrible thing to do, but electrocuted his own nards on live TV or something to prove that he doesn't dish out anything he can't take himself. (Critics would point out (rightly, trust me on this one) that the worst thing about torture isn't your nards getting electrocuted, it's the terror of having no idea how long your nards are gonna continue to be electrocuted, because the torturer can keep it up forever if they want.) And Roger Trinquier, best known for writing Modern Warfare, which goes into the theory behind the French counterinsurgency campaign including why it's okay to torture people. It's not too long and (pdf link) worth a read. I'm not pro-torture in general but these guys make a lot of really good points that I think we have to take seriously when we think about the subject.

They're also total fricking psychos. Like Trinquier wanted to protect France from communism by... having a totalitarian police state with neighbors spying on each other like East Germany. One justification they pointed out is that many of them had been tortured by the Nazis so that makes it okay. But one of the long term effects of torture (trust me on this one) is that it's been normalized for them. There's a kind of subconscious attitude that "I got it really bad so I'll just hurt this person a little bit. It's not so bad. I got through it just fine without it having any lasting effect on me, I swear. I've been through it so I know how to not hurt them too bad. The guy who tortured me was a bad person, but I'm going to torture my victim in good faith." Torture victims have a lot to tell us and we definitely need to learn the facts of it from them, but their judgement about it is skewed so I don't think they should making policy.

People who are making policy, which in a democracy should include all voters, can learn some things without actually getting electrodes attached to your nipples. I mentioned the movie Battle of Algiers earlier. A lot of us are getting to an age where, if you're not a complete frickup like me you have kids by now. (Which again is oddly enough something that I know a lot about but I'm not going to explain other than saying trust me bro.) So how do you teach your kids about torture? My chad dad did this exactly the right way. He had me watch Battle of Algiers when I was, I dunno maybe 12. I see the scene where they take a kid about my age and push his head underwater until he talks. That scarred me for life. I will never forget that. Because you're not supposed to forget things like that. Sometimes scar tissue is good. My scar tissue from seeing that was that I'm always going to tend to be anti-torture for the rest of my life. And I didn't have to actually get tortured to learn that on a deep level. You gotta be really careful about exactly when, but you should be showing your kids some of these images when they're old enough to handle it. Also my dad had a policy of making me watch lots of foreign movies from a young age, which everyone should do. Much of my ability to shitpost about 50 different countries now I owe to that. (Just for God's sake, nothing Soviet, that shit literally (I mean literally literally) bored me to tears. )

Anyway, it's one of the most important movies of all time and I would say literally everyone needs to see. Made by Italian commie Gillo Pontecorvo. Now I'm not a fan of commies, but he was more a commie in the sense that he disagrees with me about certain economic issues that we should be debating about, not that he wants the NKVD to put a bullet in my head because I called a Star Trek character "gay" once when I was 13 years old. He once slapped down some whiny f-slur (note how much more sophisticated my language has become ) who was calling everyone he didn't like fascists. And he was like "Bro, calm down, don't just throw that around. I unironically fought against fascists in WW2 alongside all kinds of people." So I imagine him to be a leftoid who is actually intellectually honest, or at the very least someone like Prince Kropotkin who you could have a conversation with. (Pinknames maybe I'll explain this if you ask. ) But I hope he's not like Costa-Gavras who made Z one of my favorite movies of all time but then went on to make absolutely insane shit that would make Leni Reifenshtal blush. (Greeks please fight with me because I lost a real friend over this, so even if I don't win I'll at least feel nostalgia .)

It was filmed in Algeria (Z was too btw). Pontecorvo's partner is Saadi Yacef, a major player in the FLN and a bombmaker (This cameo is him playing himself He doesn't try to hide what he did. He sent women to blow up kids. So this is a rare case where the veterans of both sides actually own up to what they did and how bad it was. They just say that they were justified. Which makes it extremely valuable from a historical perspective. There's more gossip that comes out after the movie, all kinds of drama, but I'm running out of energy tbqh.

So it's 1958. You got these French guys who are highly motivated for a number of reasons. They think the civilian government are a bunch of kitties who are too busy listening to Sartre or something to win the war. So they decide they'll overthrow it and replace it with DeGaulle. The paratroopers fly out to Corsica. I'm guessing the critical moment here is when the military in Corsica makes no attempt to stop them. This makes it clear that if they fly on and land in Paris the troops around there won't oppose a coup. So the government resigns and DeGaulle becomes dictator. And very soon he's like "Oh, you thought I was an extremist on the Algeria issue? LOL." He negotiates with the FLN to grant independence.

The paratroopers go apeshit. They did a coup for this guy and he stabbed them in the back. But it's not so easy to just go back and do it again. Most of the officers in the army had served under DeGaulle in WW2 and a lot would back him. (Again I cannot emphasize to zoomers enough that the shadow of WW2 still hung over everybody. It was (and is to this day) the biggest thing that has ever happened on Earth by far.) So the extremists among the paratroopers can't just do another coup. So they form a terrorist organization, the OAS. They figure that if the FLN got what they wanted through terrorism, they'll just do the same thing.

That's as much as I can do right now but if you zoomers want I can continue later. Modern people have come up with the hilariously r-slurred idea of "reimagining" The Day of the Jackal (a really good movie into you're into more serious spy stuff) into a contemporary setting. Oh yeah, and gender swapped. I can give you some talking points to absolutely fricking destroy your IRL friends who like it by explaining that actually stuff happened back then that's a heck of a lot more interesting than any screenwriter in 2024 could come up with.

[Again: If you actually care about this, don't take my word for it. Look it up in your local library.

And if you're French or Algerian and offended in any way, please let your hatred flow and tell me how stupid I am and in what ways.]