Algeria Quotes

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

حبُّ الوطنِ شُعورٌ رَاسخٌ في النفسْ، لا يشوبُهُ عكرٌ أو دنسْ، هو شيئٌ من ذَاتي، وجزءٌ من حَياتي، وسيظلُّ حاضِرا في كتابَتي، في غُرْبتي، حتى مَمَاتي.

If Algeria introduced a resolution that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

May you never face them, little one. But her prayed went unanswered. Frankie is a man now. Private Frank Mason Jr. of the Suffolk Regiment. Stationed in Algeria, bravely fighting the Nazis, just as his father fought the Germans before him.

You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you'll understand quite a lot.

It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions.

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing. All in vain. All wasted. The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker. More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

Researchers at the University of Missouri had found a “gender equality paradox” when they studied 475,000 teenagers across the globe. They noted that hyperegalitarian countries such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a smaller percentage of female STEM graduates than countries such as Albania and Algeria, which are considered less advanced

the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.

peoples who have been waiting for their independence for a century, fighting for it for a generation, can afford to sit out a presidential term, or a year or two in the life of an old man in a hurry;

Few things in war can be as costly as doctrinal rigidity.

D’Avray, her father, and I had met before in Algeria. He was dying now. He left the child on his death-bed to me.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam Well I have and in fact more than one and I'll tell you this too I wrote one against Algeria that nightmare and another against Korea and another against the one I was in and I don't remember how many against the three when I was a boy Abyssinia Spain and Harlan county and not one breath was restored to one shattered throat mans womans or childs not one not one but death went on and on never looking aside except now and then like a child with a furtive half-smile to make sure I was noticing.

Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos.

You think about bathing in the sea – thick as velvet, supple and smooth as a wild animal. You think about swimming naked, and at night, with the stars, and a friend. Swim till you’re far from the world, and breathing together in the same rhythm, and free of absolutely everything.

As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

The carnivals gave me my names, Edward. Sometimes I was the Blue Man of the North Pole, or the Blue Man of Algeria, or the Blue Man of New Zealand. I had never been to any of these places, of course, but it was pleasant to be considered exotic, if only on a painted sign. The 'show' was simple. I would sit on the stage, half undressed, as people walked past and the barker told them how pathetic I was. For this, I was able to put a few coins in my pocket. The manager once called me the 'best freak' in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished. One winter, I came to this pier. Ruby Pier. They were starting a sideshow called the Curious Citizens. I liked the idea of being in one place, escaping the bumpy horse carts of carnival life. This became my home. I lived in a room above a sausage shop. I played cards at night with the other sideshow walkers, with the tinsmiths, sometimes even with your father. In the early mornings, if I wore long shirts and draped my head in a towel, I could walk along the beach without scaring people. It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely know.' He stopped. He looked at Eddie. Do you understand? Why we're here? This is not your heaven. It's mine.

[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity. […] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Not one of our political spokespeople—the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time—ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go. In the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it.Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

ALBERT CAMUS Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His father was killed a year later in World War I, and Camus was brought up by his mother in extreme poverty.

It's like I'm leaving a part of myself in Algeria, but every time I tell myself I won't be going back.

Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don’t love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he’s horrible to her, and that’s what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille’s ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you’re writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don’t typically get with the ‘whore’ or the ‘slut’ or the sexual girl.

Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill—and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.

I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave,

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan! No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria. We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader. Islamism is your livelihood Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands. But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other. No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship. You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature. You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans. Humanity will not remember you with good deeds Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions. In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies. We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue. You are an illusion You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it. You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do

France is much more colonized than it ever colonized itself, France has not really colonized the world, it conquered, it was an imperial power, but accept in Canada in the 17th and 18th century, and in Algeria, it didn't have a very strong transfer of population, it was more like conquest, an imperial conquest, for instance in black Africa there where very few French people, there where no French cities or things like that, there was no large transfer of population, and of course transfer of population, is the very essence, since the Greeks of what colonization really was, the word colonization when it first appeared in western civilization, means the transfer of Greek people to Sicily for instance, and so France is much more deeply colonized because it's a demographic colonization.

The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18

In his Discourse on Colonialism (1951), Aimé Césaire wrote that a Hitler slumbers within “the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the Twentieth century,” and yet the European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for “the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.” “Not so long ago,” recalled Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.

there could hardly have been very good Anglo-French relations after 3 July 1940, when Churchill permitted the Royal Navy to bombard the Vichy fleet at Oran in Algeria, in order to try to prevent it sailing for French ports and thence possible incorporation into the Kriegsmarine.

She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria: Demain le noir matin, Je fermerai la porte Au nez des années mortes; J’irai par les chemins. Je mendierai ma vie Sur la terre et sur l’onde, Du vieux au nouveau monde . . . He had been short and built like the island of Malta itself: rock, an inscrutable heart. She’d had only one night with him. Then he was off to the Piraeus. Tomorrow, the black morning, I close the door in the face of the dead years. I will go on the road, bum my way over land and sea, from the old to the new world. . . .

The French Empire was more stubborn. Its collapse involved bloody rearguard actions in Vietnam and Algeria that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet the French, too, retreated from the rest of their dominions quickly and peacefully, leaving behind orderly states rather than a chaotic free-for-all.

Before 1969 came to an end, Palestinian terrorists trained at the KGB’s Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow had hijacked their first “Zionist” El Al plane and landed it in Algeria, where its thirty-two Jewish passengers were held hostage for five weeks. The hijacking had been planned and coordinated by the KGB’s Thirteenth Department, known in Soviet bloc intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs (wet being a KGB euphemism for bloody). To conceal the KGB’s hand, Andropov had the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (created and financed by the KGB) take credit for the hijacking. The

downslopes in the curve show that at various times Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Romania, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia have pursued nuclear weapons but then thought the better of it—occasionally through the persuasion of an Israeli air strike, but more often by choice.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'. Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just. The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.

The First World War; the Russian revolution of 1917; Hitler's revolution of 1933; the second World War; the further development of revolutionary wars since 1944 in China, Indochina, and Algeria, as well as the Cold War—each was a step in the development of modern propaganda. With each of these events propaganda developed further, increased in depth, discovered new methods. At the same time it conquered new nations and new territories: To reach the enemy, one must use his weapons; this undeniable argument is the key to the systematic development of propaganda. And in this way propaganda has become a permanent feature in nations that actually despise it, such as the United States and France.

I have never seen sheep kill sheep, but wolves? We have civil unrest in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Algeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt, Occupied Judea…everywhere. Where the creed of the wolf thrives, everyone dies. The sheep are not the only ones dying—the wolves eat the sheep, but they are also killing each other without mercy.

Once Palestinian voices began to reach wider audiences in the West, the story was quickly cast as a war of two opposing narratives, rather than a holistic and variegated history of European racism and empire and the ensuing and ongoing history of American empire, and the concomitant struggles for self-determination by colonised peoples, from Haiti to Algeria to Vietnam.

In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.

So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.

Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: "In reality, who am I?" The defensive attitudes created by this violent bringing together of the colonised man and the colonial system form themselves into a structures which then reveals the colonised personality. This 'sensitivity' is easily understood if we simply study and are alive to the number and depth of the injuries inflicted upon a native during a single day spent amidst the colonial regime. It must in any case be remembered that a colonised people is not only simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation, the Germans remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land.

One problem, McChrystal believed, was that Special Operations units lacked a common understanding of how to fight without making the insurgencies worse. Again and again, he heard, “We have got to take the gloves off.” McChrystal asked, “What are you talking about? What do we mean here?” He wanted his officers to reflect on experiences like those the French had endured in Vietnam and Algeria, where they had already documented “what works and what doesn’t work.”14 David Barno, McChrystal’s

The Hand of Fatima, shown painted on a house wall in Algeria, is a powerful charm and sacred symbol used in Arab and Muslim lands to protect the innocent from evil jinn or demons and from the effects of the ‘evil eye’. It symbolises generosity, hospitality, power and divine providence. As a whole, the hand represents the Muslim Holy Family: the thumb stands for the Prophet Muhammad, the index finger his daughter Fatima, the second finger her husband Ali, and the third and fourth fingers their sons Hassan and Hussein respectively.

People here talked about the pre-1967 borders. To tell you the truth this is astonishing. Whatever happened to the (Palestinian) cause we had before 1967? Were we lying to ourselves or to the world? Thousands of martyrs fell before 1967. What for? How can you say that Palestine was occupied only in 1967, and that (Israel) must return to the pre-1967 borders? Does Palestine consist of only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? If so, it means that the Israelis did not occupy it in 1948. They left it to you for twenty years, so why didn't you establish a Palestinian state? Wasn't the Gaza strip part of Egypt, and the West Bank part of Jordan? The Jews left them to you for twenty years - from 1948 to 1967. If that is Palestine, why didn't you establish a state there? What is the justification for all the wars, the sacrifices, and the economic embargo on Israel before 1967? The Israelis can sue the Arabs now, and demand billions or even trillions in compensation for the damage caused them in 1948-1967. You Arabs admitted that the (Palestinian) cause began after 1967. So the Israelis can ask: "Why did you fight us before that?" They will demand Arab compensation for the so-called embargo on Israel, and for the economic damage caused to the Israelis. If the Israelis sue you, they will win. They will say: We suffered an injustice. We are like an innocent lamb surrounded by wolves. We've been saying this since 1948. Now the Arabs themselves have admitted that Palestine was occupied in 1967. Now they demand that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders, saying this will resolve the problem, and they will recognise Israel. Why didn't you recognise Israel before 1967? There is no God but Allah. By Allah, this is unacceptable. It doesn't make sense. You say that you will recognise Israel within the pre-1967 borders?! Maybe Israel will occupy more Arab land in, say, 2008, and a few years later, you will demand that it return to the pre-2008 borders, in exchange for recognizing Israel. This is exactly what's going on now. We gave negotiations a serious try. The Jews used to say: "Meet with us only once for direct negotiations, and we will resolve this issue." This is what they used to say in the 1950s and 1960s. They used to say: "Please, Arabs, sit down with us just one time, and our problem will be over." But you saw what happened. We met with them a thousand times - from the stables of (camp) David to Annapolis. We've been through all these negotiations - the stables of (camp) David, the Oslo negotiations of our brother Abu Mazen... He was, of course, the hero of Oslo - just like Sadat was the hero of the stables of (camp) David. When Algeria was fighting, donations and volunteers were coming in broad daylight - from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. From here, from Syria, Dr. IIbrahim Makhous came with a group of volunteers, and fought alongside the Algerian Liberation Front. They were not considered terrorists, and no measures were taken against Syria.

Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, appointed his monk Antoninus in the 410s to be bishop of a subordinate diocese at Fussala, one of Africa’s relatively few villages, in the hills of what is now eastern Algeria. Antoninus turned out to be a bad man - he was young and from a poor family, he was promoted too fast - and he terrorized his village, extorting money, clothing, produce and building materials. He was also accused of sexual assault. Augustine removed him, but did not depose him, and tried to transfer him to the nearby estate of Thogonoetum. Here, the tenants told Augustine and their landowner that they would leave if he came.

The states of birth, suffering, love and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. It is for this reason that all societies have battled with that incorrigible disturber of peace – the artist. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better. The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, that the people, in general will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions which have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is suggested that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the world today, from the streets of our own New Orleans to the grisly battleground of Algeria. And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing the human damage.

Regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare operated in the interstices of traditional doctrines of linear operations against an enemy’s territory. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, could concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. In this sense, technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.

Limpid water lapped at her legs, and Georgia wriggled her tocsin the silky sand beneath her feet. If she squinted hard enough, she swore she could make out the African coast shimmering in the distance- Tunisia? Algeria? She swished her hands through the water, startling a school of yellow fish who darted past her knee. A cerulean sky loomed above her, a blanket of white-sand beach stretched behind her. The scene had all the trappings of a Harlequin novel: the exotic Sicilian locale, the deserted beach, the bikini-clad heroine. All that was missing was the hunky stud who would stride out of the water Fabio-style, pecs rippling, long hair cascading down his back.

Stones, similar to the black stone of the Ka'ba, were worshiped by Arabs in most parts and by the Semitic races generally. The Kabyles of Kabylia in Northern Algeria say their first Great Mother goddess was turned to stone. Other names of the goddess are Kububa, Kuba, Kube and the Latin Cybele. Other scholars say that this meteorite was brought to Makkah by the Sabeans or the Ethiopians and state that the goddess who dwelt in the sacred black stone was given the title Shayba (see Beni Shaybah - the Sons of the Old Woman, above) who represented the Moon in its threefold existence - waxing, (maiden), full (pregnant mother) and waning (old wise woman). Although the word Ka'ba itself means 'cube', it is very close to the word ku'b meaning 'woman's breast.

Malcolm was such a spellbinding orator that the fact that he was also a political theoretician is little appreciated, but he was. He advocated, for example, that instead of pursuing the diversionary goal of integration, Black people ought to control their own communities economically and politically and fight to exercise their Fifteenth Amendment right to vote nationwide. Then they could extricate themselves from the hypocritical grasp of the two-party system and be an independent political power in their own right. But if America was unwilling to “do the right thing,” voting-wise and otherwise, Malcolm advised Blacks to emulate the revolutionary struggles of Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, et al. and fight for their liberation too, i.e., “the Ballot or the Bullet.” Accordingly,

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

The sun beams down on Algiers — but the inhabitants do not smile back. It is a surly city, harrowed by the stresses of over-population and under-employment; with the architecture of Cannes, but the atmosphere of Aberdeen. During the day the cafés are thronged with all-male, typically Arab society. At night the city, responsive to President Boumedienne’s own personal brand of puritanism, closes down like wartime Toronto on a Sunday.

But empires of old kept their colonies at a distance: Rome conquered the Gauls across the Alps. France ruled Algeria from across the Mediterranean. King George III dispatched troops across the Atlantic to administer the new world. In the United States in 2016 such distance does not exist: the “rough” part of Ferguson is maybe a thousand yards from the “nice” neighborhoods. And so the maintenance of the Nation’s integrity requires constant vigilance. The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class. The math of large numbers means that with enough of these interactions and enough fear and suspicion on the part of the officers who wield the gun, hundreds of those who’ve been marked for monitoring will die.

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!

Movement is key to dissipating negativity in community relations. Typically, dominant powers will attempt to ghettoize their opponents during periods of open conflict, in an attempt to better monitor and control them. We have found that these are the ideal conditions for the intensification of malignancy in conflict; hostilities are more likely to fester and grow when groups are constrained in one location. This is exactly what occurred during the independence struggle in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, when the French limited the movement of non-French Algerians to the Kasbah. This constraint led to the festering of resentments and the organization of insurgents. Alternatively, systems where negativity is relatively unconstrained, and where members of groups are allowed to travel and disperse, will tend to show a dissipation of negativity over time. This is a counterintuitive finding with substantial implications for policy and practice.

But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell’s mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people’s self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I’ve seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I’ll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice.

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. The "liberals" remain stunned: they admit we had not been polite enough to the "natives," that it would have been wiser and fairer to grant them certain rights, wherever possible; they would have been only too happy to admit them in batches without a sponsor to that exclusive club -- the human species; and now this barbaric explosion of madness is putting them in the same boat as the wretched colonists. The metropolitan Left is in a quandary: it is well aware of the true fate of the "natives," the pitiless oppression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did everything to provoke it. But even so, it thinks, there are limits: these guerrillas should make every effort to show some chivalry; this would be the best way of proving they are men. Sometimes the Left berates them: "You're going too far; we cannot support you any longer." They don't care a shit for its support; it can shove it up its ass for what it's worth. As soon as the war began, they realized the harsh truth: we are all equally as good as each other. We have all taken advantage of them, they have nothing to prove, they won't give anyone preferential treatment. A single duty, a single objective: drive out colonialism by every means. And the most liberal among us would be prepared to accept this, at a pinch, but they cannot help seeing in this trial of strength a perfectly inhuman method used by subhumans to claim for themselves a charter for humanity: let them acquire it as quickly as possible, but in order to merit it, let them use nonviolent methods. Our noble souls are racist.

Mad, you must see me mad; your opinion is awash to me as long as I am crazed by love. I welcome this folly that you give to me with great estate. Thief? Rascal? I did what others did and what others had me do and we are all doomed, but I do not regret for one instant the coming of events of this most splendid night. You should have seen how carefully I proceeded and how I found love in the most dreadful of streets, during my most mourning of states and on the most propitious of nights. Play samartian to the fool, champion to the underdog. So to speak, I am a hubris acolyte of love.

The real rivalry between Britain and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was about commercial and political power. They sought to achieve their aims, however, in very different ways. The British were mostly interested in money and therefore mainly indifferent to the cultures of the ‘natives’ they colonized, subjugating them by force of arms when and if necessary. The French, in contrast, controlled their colonies by pursuing the ‘civilizing mission’, effectively seeking to make their subjects culturally French. Of course the French plundered where they could, but there was an added strategic urge to extend the concept of ‘Frenchness’ across the world. Furthermore, under the rigidities of the French educational system, there could be no argument about what this identity meant. The absurd end-point of this policy was Berber Muslim students in the hills of Algeria, who had never been to France, reading about their ‘Gaulish ancestors’. The comedy soon turns tragic when this cultural cosh splinters individual identity; as we shall see, such psychic trauma is the key to understanding not just the killing-jar of Algeria but the entire French sphere of influence in the Arab world.

In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings. Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amīr ‘Abd al-Qādirs and Imām Shāmils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses. Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership – or like the French in Algeria.

If the State says to him, “I take your money to pay the gendarme, who saves you the trouble of providing for your own personal safety; for paving the street that you are passing through every day; for paying the magistrate who causes your property and your liberty to be respected; to maintain the soldier who maintains our frontiers,” John Q. Citizen, unless I am much mistaken, will pay for all this without hesitation. But if the State were to say to him, “I take this money that I may give you a little prize in case you cultivate your field well; or that I may teach your son something that you have no wish that he should learn; or that the Minister may add another to his score of dishes at dinner; I take it to build a cottage in Algeria, in which case I must take more money every year to keep an emigrant in it, and another to maintain a soldier to guard this emigrant, and yet more to maintain a general to guard this soldier,” etc., etc., I think I hear poor James exclaim, “This system of law is very much like a system of cheat!” The State foresees the objection, and what does it do? It jumbles all things together, and brings forward just that provoking reason which ought to have nothing whatever to do with the question. It talks of the effect of this money upon labor; it points to the cook and purveyor of the Minister; it shows an emigrant, a soldier, and a general, living upon the money; it shows, in fact, what is seen, and if John Q. Citizen has not learned to take into the account what is not seen, John Q. Citizen will be duped.

My oral tradition has gradually been overlaid and is in danger of vanishing: at the age of eleven or twelve I was abruptly ejected from this theatre of feminine confidences - was I thereby spared from having to silence my humbled pride? In writing of my childhood memories I am taken back to those bodies bereft of voices. To attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to the vivisector's scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh flakes off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood. Wounds arc reopened, veins weep, one's own blood flows and that of others, which has never dried. As the words pour out, inexhaustible, maybe distorting, our ancestral night lengthens. Conceal the body and its ephemeral grace. Prohibit gestures - they arc too specific. Only let sounds remain. Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it, never to return. Such incidental unveiling is tantamount to stripping oneself naked, as the demotic Arabic dialect emphasizes. But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conquerer (who for more than a century could lay his hands on everything save women's bodies), this stripping naked takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century. When the body is not embalmed by ritual lamentations, it is like a scarecrow decked in rags and tatters. The battle-cries of our ancestors, unhorsed in long-forgotten combats, re-echo across the years; accompanied by the dirges of the mourning-women who watched them die.

I beg your pardon, sir, said the Frenchman. I am not a coloniser. Well, let’s talk Algeria then. Let’s talk about your culture and your celebrated writers.

The White House espionage group was responsible for killing 28 Black Panthers and other minority leaders. They also were determined to exterminate leaders inside the prison. Eldridge Cleaver, writer and Panther, fled to Algeria to avoid a prison sentence. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents were making a deal with Sonny Barger, Hell’s Angels leader, to “bring Cleaver home dead in a box.” Larry Shears, the agent who exposed this arrangement, also revealed the plans of ATF to kill Cesar Chavez.47 This was at a time when John Caulfield and G. Gordon Liddy worked for the Treasury Department’s ATF. Tackwood stated at his 1971 press conference that the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Section, with links to the CIA and FBI, had foreknowledge of the Judge Haley murder, Marin Courthouse shootout and the San Quentin killing of George Jackson. In line with murdering political leaders, writers and Black Panthers, George Jackson had been marked for death several years in advance of the shootout. Many prisoners were offered parole to kill or frame him. Refusal to comply brought more charges and punishments. Ronald Reagan, Governor of California, had information on the San Quentin killings on his desk four months in advance. But like other staged riots and acts of violence, this was meant to take place.

With the decline of the United States as the world’s leader, I find it important to look around our globe for intelligent people who have the depth of understanding that could perhaps chart a way to the future. One such person is Bernard-Henri Lévy a French philosopher who was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria on November 5, 1948. . The Boston Globe has said that he is "perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today." Although his published work and political activism has fueled controversies, he invokes thought provoking insight into today’s controversial world and national views. As a young man and Zionist he was a war correspondent for “Combat” newspaper for the French Underground. Following the war Bernard attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and in 1968; he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the famous École Normale Supérieure. This was followed by him traveling to India where he joined the International Brigade to aid Bangladeshi freedom fighters. Returning to Paris, Bernard founded the ‘New Philosophers School.’ At that time he wrote books bringing to light the dark side of French history. Although some of his books were criticized for their journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history, but most respected French academics took a serious look at his position that Marxism was inherently corrupt. Some of his musings include the predicament of the Kurds and the Shame of Aleppo, referring to the plight of the children in Aleppo during the bloody Syrian civil war. Not everyone agrees with Bernard, as pointed out by an article “Why Does Everyone Hate Bernard-Henri Lévy?” However he is credited with nearly single handedly toppling Muammar Gaddafi. His reward was that in 2008 he was targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group. Looking like a rock star and ladies man, with his signature dark suits and unbuttoned white shirt, he said that “democracies are not run by the truth,” and notes that the American president is not the author of the anti-intellectual movement it, but rather its product. He added that the anti-intellectualism movement that has swept the United States and Europe in the last 12 months has been a long time coming. The responsibility to support verified information and not publicize fake news as equal has been ignored. He said that the president may be the heart of the anti-intellectual movement, but social media is the mechanism! Not everyone agrees with Bernard; however his views require our attention. If we are to preserve our democracy we have to look at the big picture and let go of some of our partisan thinking. We can still save our democracy, but only if we become patriots instead of partisans!

Chad [...] The Sudan [...] Algeria and Libya [...] Ethiopia [...] All of them drawing venom from the lethal inheritance of the last century, a staggering tonnage of outdated armaments passed from government to government at knock-down prices. From America to Pakistan to mujahedeen to a Somalian splinter group with nothing to recommend it but a holy desperation for martyrdom...From Russia to a cadre of bug-eyed Marxists strongmen shooting anything that even looked like a bourgeois intellectual...Billions in aid had been poured into the sub-Sahara, permanently warping governments into bizarre funnels of debt and greed, and as the situation worsened more and more arms were necessary for "order" and "stability" and "national security", the outside world heaved a cynical sigh of relief as its lethal junk was disposed of to people still desperate to kill each other...

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty during both world wars, and that remained true even as the German army rolled into the city in 1940. Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during civil wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. An Irish psychologist named H. A. Lyons found that suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down. Depression rates for both men and women declined abruptly during that period, with men experiencing the most extreme drop in the most violent districts. County Derry, on the other hand—which suffered almost no violence at all—saw male depression rates rise rather than fall. Lyons hypothesized that men in the peaceful areas were depressed because they couldn’t help their society by participating in the struggle. “When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, forty-nine media professionals have been killed in Russia since 1992. Only in Iraq and Algeria have more died in the line of duty during the same period. This, too, is a Russian tragedy.

They’ve been hiding in plain sight on some centuries-old rock carvings and paintings. Visit Wadi Mathendous in Libya, Kondoa Irangi in Tanzania, Kakadu National Park in Australia, El Abra in Colombia, Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria, and Vernal in Utah if you want to see proof.

As a corollary, guerrillas deny all information of themselves to their enemy, who is enveloped in an impenetrable fog. Total inability to get information was a constant complaint of the Nationalists during the first four Suppression Campaigns, as it was later of the Japanese in China and of the French in both Indochina and Algeria. This is a characteristic feature of all guerrilla wars, The enemy stands as on a lighted stage; from the darkness around him, thousands of unseen eyes intently study his every move, his every gesture. When he strikes out, he hits the air; his antagonists are insubstantial, as intangible as fleeting shadows in the moonlight.

As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it’s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.

Two great armadas would carry more than 100,000 troops to the invasion beaches. One fleet would sail 2,800 miles from Britain to Algeria, with mostly British ships ferrying mostly American soldiers.

Qu’importe si cent mille coups de fusil partent en Afrique! L’Europe ne les entend pas. Louis-Philippe, 1835

One of my earliest surprises in Algiers was that in the Casbah, where the highly emotive Battle of Algiers had been waged against Massu’s paras, there is not the smallest plaque or commemoration to indicate where such heroes of the Revolution as Ali la Pointe fought and died; and often it is hard to find residents who can guide or inform you, even though little more than a decade has elapsed.

control of Tunisia, and in both Algeria and

This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without men--who didn't help matters either. But Daru had been born here. Everywhere else, he felt exiled.

He’s not sure. Just weird addresses, kind of storage units in back streets in Algeria, storage units in industrial estates in Belfast. Jonno did Google Map Street View

The caliphate of al-Nasir saw the first sustained involvement by the Umayyads in North African politics.26 Morocco at this stage was, compared with Muslim Spain, a very underdeveloped country. There had been very little Arab settlement and the country remained over-whelmingly Berber and largely rural, the inhabitants living either as pastoral nomads or settled farmers. Tribal allegiances and rival-ries remained the basis of political activity. Only Fes, settled in the ninth century by colonists from Qayrawan and Cordoba, was a really urban community, although Sijilmassa, the great entrepot for Saharan trade far to the south, was a large oasis settlement. In theory much of the area was under the authority of the Idrisids, based in Fes. The Idrisids were descendants of 'Ali, who had fled west in 786 after a failed rebellion against the Abbasids.27 They did not rule a state in the conventional sense but, somewhat like the traditional Zaydi Imams of Yemen, enjoyed a certain prestige among the tribal leaders because of their religious status and were acknowledged as mediators if not rulers. They seem to have had no organized administration or government apparatus. By the beginning of the tenth century, the Idrisid family had split into many different branches which vied ineffectually for such authority as the family name could still command. Smaller but more coherent were the political units based on Sijilmassa and Nakur. Sijilmassa on the fringes of the Sahara was ruled by the Midrarids, a Berber dynasty of Kharijite persuasions. Nakur on the Mediterranean coast was a small city-state ruled by a popular Sunni dynasty, the Banu Witt, who had had contacts with the Umayyads in the previous century. There had certainly been commercial and personal contacts between al-Andalus and North Africa in the ninth century, especially with the Rustamid dynasty of Tahert in central Algeria.

Important factors included growing Muslim hostility toward Jews as a result of nationalist mobilization, the creation of Israel, rampant poverty, and the ongoing refusal of citizenship by the French as well as negative experiences with the anti-Semitic Vichy regime during the war.100 Tension with the Muslim majority population started to grow in Morocco in 1947 against the backdrop of the war in Palestine. Following the June 1948 pogroms in Oudjda and Djérada in eastern Morocco on the border with Algeria, emigration of Jews from Morocco to Israel became a more widespread phenomenon.101 When the French colonial rulers realized that the constant illegal flow of migrants could not be stopped, they allowed for the organized emigration of Jews, giving the Jewish Agency free rein in processing and selecting the migrants. For this purpose, the Jewish Agency–operated Kadima (forward) office was created in April of that year.102 A similar office had operated in Tunis since the second half of 1948, when the French authorities had started tolerating, if initially not fully legalizing, Aliyah.103

In principle, the document stated that selection should be carried out in any country where it was actually possible to select candidates. The countries explicitly listed were Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, Persia, India, and the countries of Central and Western Europe. The cases of rescue Aliyah that would be determined by the Coordination Committee were explicitly excluded.124 The class component of selection was clearly present in the decision to also exempt “people with means” (baalei emtzaim), and implicit in the choice not to include the Americas in the list of regions where selection would be implemented in order not to deter the “handful of Jews who would be interested in making Aliyah from there,” as Levi Eshkol put it.

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

corresponding roughly to modern-day Algeria.

But his experiences with the mentally ill in Algeria suggested that culture and the ability to breathe were inextricably connected—that cultural belonging, even clinging to seemingly outmoded traditions, could be a way in which the colonized body continued to draw breath, and affirm its will to live.

As it turned out, Fanon would aid the FLN inside Algeria not as a fighter, but as a doctor. But to make himself useful, he first needed to establish contact with this clandestine and highly secretive organization.

There are several reasons why a study of the French military experience in Algeria in this present work is necessary. The entire doctrinal system contained within Casey's Infantry Tactics and Hardee's Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics originated with the French infantry's experiences in North Africa, and these were but translations of a work utilized by French chasseurs and Zouaves.

a demand was made of the United States to return the Shah. When it didn’t happen, followers of Khomeini stormed the United States Embassy and took hostages. The United States President, Jimmy Carter, blustered that the country wouldn’t yield to blackmail, but when he attempted to send in a rescue operation, the mission failed, ending in the deaths of eight Americans and the destruction of two helicopters. The whole episode made the United States look weak. Gregory Evans’ plans were right on track until Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, decided to invade Iran for no apparent reason, then the Shah died, and Algeria offered to be the mediator between the Iranians and the Americans. The hostages were released after being held for four hundred and forty-four days and the new American President, Ronald Reagan, got all the credit for it; which irritated Gregory, because he didn’t think the American people would’ve voted for him if Carter hadn’t been such a nincompoop. Gregory decided he would have to eventually start interfering in American elections so he could get the result he desired.

The history of France, a permanent miracle,” says André Maurois at the end of his Histoire de la France, “has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.

The Cuban expeditionary forces carried on a code of conduct established since their first incursion to Algeria where astutely Raul Castro required the Cuban soldiers act with humility, to be modest and not act like experts.

disposal of the “inconvenient”,

Toţi vorbeau de o ţară care se numea Algeria; nu de cea despre care învăţam la şcoală, nici de cea a cartierelor de vază, ci despre o altă ţară, prădată, subjugată, redusă la tăcere şi care îşi rumega furia ca pe un aliment alterat − Algeria din Jenane Jato, a rănilor deschise şi a pământurilor arse, a ţapilor ispăşitori şi a hamalilor... o ţară care trebuia să se reinventeze şi în care toate paradoxurile lumii păreau să fi ales să trăiască ca rentiere

Bouteflika: Your position was one of principle, it was very clear. Your press—Newsweek, the New York Times—were very objective on the problem. And we find that the U.S. could have stopped the Green March. The U.S. could have stopped it, or favored it. Kissinger: That’s not true. Bouteflika: We think on the contrary that France played a crude role. There was no delicacy, no subtlety. Bourguiba, Senghor—they tried to use what influence remained for France. Bongo. No finesse, no research. I don’t know if this corresponds to your situation. But there are sentiments, and we were very affected because we thought it was an anti-Algerian position. Kissinger: We don’t have an anti-Algerian position. The only question was how much to invest. To prevent the Green March would have meant hurting our relations completely with Morocco, in effect an embargo. Bouteflika: You could have done it. You could stop economic aid and military aid. Kissinger: But that would have meant ruining our relations with Morocco completely. Bouteflika: No. The King of Morocco would not have gone to the Soviets. Kissinger: But we don’t have that much interest in the Sahara. Bouteflika: But you have interests in Spain, and in Morocco. Kissinger: And in Algeria. Bouteflika: And you favored one. [FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969-1976, VOLUME E-9, PART 1, DOCUMENTS ON NORTH AFRICA, 1973-1976 110. Memorandum of Conversation - Paris, December 17, 1975, 8:05–9:25 a.m.]

During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7

In the middle of a Christian culture asking, 'How do I find God's will for my life?' I bring good news. His will is not lost. With 1.4 million Bedouins in Algeria who have never even heard the gospel, it makes little sense for us to sit over here asking, 'What do you want me to do, God?' The answer is clear. The will of God is for you and me to give our lives urgently and recklessly to making the gospel and the glory of God known among all peoples, particularly those who have never even heard of Jesus. The question, therefore, is not 'Can we find God's will?' The question is 'Will we obey God's will?

Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, you reason in the French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria.” It was not at all the same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order to understand events from 1954 onwards it is necessary to accept the existence of three totally distinct peoples — the French of France, the French of Algeria, and the Muslims of Algeria.