Posted on 04/24/2002 1:18:49 PM PDT by JasonC
And a very big thank you for your insightful comments.
The conclusion that I personally draw is that colonialism carries in itself the seeds of its defeat. Either the Algerians were going to turn the tables on the French by becoming the majority and voting themselves to power, or they would bomb them out of Africa, which is what actually happened.
The only way that the French could have prolonged their rule was through unrelenting iron-fisted crackdowns on the natives, which was impossible for a country founded on the principles of the French revolution.
In fact, any colonizing power faces that same dilemma. For centuries, the Arabs managed to maintain and expand their colonial empire because they had no moral qualms and did not have to contend with Human Rights Watch or Peter Jennings. But eventually, the colonized turned the tables on them too and wrested power from them (Moguls, Ottomans, etc.)
The solution, if there is one, will have to involve elements such as a crushing defeat of Saddam Hussein, deposition of the House of Saud, and doing on a larger scale in the Arab world what you recommend with a single population, i.e. identify and promote "cooperative" countries and punish the enemies.
For Israel, I believe the only chance of survival is to annex the entire West Bank and expel all Arabs from there. Yet I do not see how this can be done unless the U.S. at least stands clear, and this is currently out of the question. Even then, there would still be the one million Israeli Arab citizens to contend with. They have been curiously quiet during this intifada, despite a relentless incitement campaign from Arafat, his agents, and the Palestinian broadcast media. (Several months ago, I read that only a single suicide bombing was committed by an Israeli Arab.)
If the Israeli Arabs can be co-opted into Israeli society more than they are today, then long-term survival for Israel is possible.
The truth is, the new nation owed its existence to the exercise of cruelty without restraint and on the largest possible scale. Its regime, composed mainly of successful gangsters, quickly ousted those of its members who had been brought up in the western tradition; all were dead or in exile by the mid 1960s.
I look at it somewhat differently. The truth is what you say is that a nation committed to democratic principles could not avoid a transition of power to Alergian Arabs as Arabs became the dominant ethnic group in the country. (I note in passing that the pied noirs were also "Algerians", born there). But it was not inevitable that the Arabs that took power would be murdering bastards, nor that they would use that power without restraint to kill all moderates, and drive all whites from the country at the point of a gun.
Two obvious alternative end-states were available. The best would be a democratic state with something like dominion status, self-governed by a local legislature, but bicameral. With the upper house representing ethnicities and using a super-majority voting rule, that would effectively block extreme measures for or against any particular minority. The Arab majority would then rule the country as their numbers grew, yes. But with the consent and subject to a limited veto by minorities, whether European or tribal.
A second possible end-state would be partition and enclaves of local self-government in particular areas, especially towns (Oran e.g.), where white majorities remained, while the rest of the country attained independence, and with it Arab rule. The French government could continue to provide security in either end state. In the second case, that might be as difficult as the British have found Northern Ireland, but it need not have resulted in outright abandonment, nor the deaths of half a million to a million people.
Instead the French conducted the conflict between only two possibilities. Continued white rule based on faked election results, led by governors appointed directly from France and enforced by the French army - or outright capitulation to the FLN, if in some cases thinly masked by empty referenda on continued "association" with France. Soustelle's interim attempt at real democracy lacked any sustainable basis, because it was based on preserving Algeria's status as a department of France. Which as Johnson rightly notes, was not something either the majority of the French nation, or the Arabs, actually wanted. Even the pied noirs only wanted it "tactically", in order to have 50 million white metropolitan Frenchmen outvote 15 million Algerian Arabs.
The violent repression of 1945 laid the seeds of future conflict, certainly. But it also bought time. The general who conducted it told the pied noirs they had 10 years. He did not give this warning with the idea that they would sit still, faking elections and maintaining a society based on the "layer cake of race prejudice", until the situation blew up in their face again. They should have used the immediate aftermath to begin a transition to something like dominion status, before the FLN got going. They did not. They instead ignored the warning and pretended that French military repression would always be there to maintain their status as the dominant race in Algeria.
When the situation finally blew up again, the 4th Republic tried Soustelle's liberal policy. Which, with a better political end-state than continued department status, and especially if attempted right after 1945, might have worked out. If tried back then it could be presented as a legitimate reward for Algeria's support for Free France in the second half of WW II. The US gave the Philipines independence for the same sort of reason at the same time. By doing so, we kept their friendship, our presence, and our military bases. There was not the same colonial white minority as in Algeria, to be sure, so our job was much easier.
But there remains an enourmous difference between granting something generously when its future necessity is noticed, but not under pressure, and grudgingly moving half-way towards it only in response to a vicious campaign of terrorism. Here, I entirely agree with de Gaulle's assessment, that the irresolution of the 4th Republic, unable to cut through any determined opposition to tackle problems before they grew acute, was disasterous for France. I would only add that the pied noirs made their own mistakes here, too. Faking the elections between 1945 and 1954 was incredibly arrogant and stupid. It meant throwing away legitimate claims on metropolitan France for aid and defense, on liberal democratic principles. It left the pied noirs with only a race appeal - "save us whites" - which was bound to prove politically marginal in democratic metropolitan France.
Even in the time of Soustelle, the campaign was not yet lost. No question it was bad, but not irrecoverable. The French did not have to react to the FLN assassination campaigns by giving way to a passion for revenge. They did not have to react to the FLN's artistic savagery by ordering the paras to shoot all Arabs on sight. They could have conducted sweeps in which they arrested large numbers of Arabs, detained them for questioning without mistreating them, and released those who were not named by the others or otherwise implicated. Instead they gave way to rage and race-hatred, which gave the FLN exactly what it required to complete its "sandwich of terror".
Once the French began competing in terror, the war was grim and any future settlement distinctly unlikely. But the war was not lost outright even then, or at least the outcome could have been better even in the event of loss. The torturers could have been put back in their box, or better yet drummed out of the army. The coup attempt was an arrogant act of folly. The pied noirs had by then lost contact with political realities in France, and refused to face the basic problem of their situation. Which was that only France could defend them, but France would only defend actions and institutions defensible from the standpoint of liberal democracy, and in particular that it would never defend a race-based authoritarianism enforced by torture.
In passing, the refusal to give the army authority to contain the colon mob by force during the coup was another error. Later it came to fighter bombers and tanks blasting OAS supporting pied noir neighborhoods. It would have been better to nip the matter in the bud, than to have let the colons think (falsely) that the army would never touch them.
That the situation was still retrievable even after de Gaulle came back may be seen by a few indicators. Hundreds of thousands of Algerian Arabs still supported the French. The moderates began to speak again in the aftermath of Massu's campaign. The army was still willing to follow de Gaulle, and so were the pied noirs, as long as they did not suspect outright abandonment was the goal. De Gaulle knew that some form of independence was inevitable. But that need not have meant military abandonment, nor FLN rule.
The French army was still winning the war in conventional terms at that time. The pied noirs had not yet embraced terrorism themselves. The Harkis (loaylist Algerian Arabs) were still willing to fight to defend the moderates (indeed, they were the *last* to give up, long after the French and even after the OAS), and FLN extremism was still hated by many, in Algeria as well as in France. But to de Gaulle, the whole affair and any honor France had in the matter were less important than repairing the rift in the French army, and political divisions in metropolitan France caused by those rifts. So he told them, "you shall suffer", and sold them out. That may have been realistic, but it was not a forced course of action.
Even if the French knew they were going to leave, they did not have to abandon the harkis, or disarm them. They did not have to legitimize the FLN as the only possible leaders of the country after they left. They did not have to use the army to blast colon neighborhoods to pieces while sparing the FLN even in the middle of its rampages. The OAS was of course insane to think resorting to terrorism would help their own cause. They thought the situation would be symmetrical, that the authorities made concessions to the FLN out of simple weakness, and so the authorities would make concessions to them if they proved more frightful themselves. They utterly failed to understand the political basis of the FLN strategy. They reduced it to "violence pays". It brought them nothing, and made it politically easy for de Gaulle to abandon them as rapidly as possible.
This mass of unforced errors does not strike me as an inevitable sequence. Better decisions could have changed the outcome significantly right up to the end, when the loyalist harkis could have at least been evacuated along with the French. Would any of the alternative decisions have resulted in continued white rule of a democratic Algeria? No, of course not. Numbers alone were going to prevent that. But there was a wide range of possible outcomes between that pied noir fantasy and the abyss the FLN actually plunged the country into.
"Aim and Discrimination" does not rule out "total annihilation", philosophically. It makes it difficult, but it is the ideal accomplishment, so it is worth the effort.
We certainly agree on that! Your previous post (#28) also provided good perspective regarding whether what happened really was a fait accompli. Much appreciated.
"It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police... The government can only intensify its repression, thus making the lives of its civilians harder than ever... police terror will become the order of the day... The population will refuse to collaberate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in the physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will then have become a military situation."
This is our enemy. We need to recognize him or her and the dogma masquerading as a religion and deal with them accordingly. Harshly and punitively. I don't think we're yet ready to handle the truth. I thought 9-11 would have done it but we are soft as putty.
That should be chiseled in granite!
And we won't until we lose entire cites, unfortunately.
There is no living peacefully with them. They must be wiped out or pushed out.
Remember, Mohammed Atta was a model "moderate muslim" until 9-11.
FR is a better place to get a good education about history than the media...or from many schools.
Very useful. Thanks.
It is exceedingly difficult to fight guerrillas. Particularly ones made deranged by fanatical religious doctrine. But Ariel Sharon has had experience doing just this. In the 1950's he commanded the primo anti- terror unit of IDF...... He is no dope.
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