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News :: Miscellaneous |
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THE FRENCH CONNECTION |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
(No verified email address) |
17 Sep 2001
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Putting Afghanistan in perspective. Do we learn from history or simply stumble blindly ahead? |
THE REVIEW HAS NOTED that the hijack attacks have more in common with Dien Bien Phu than with Pearl Harbor, suggestive not of the beginning of empire but of the beginning of its end. There is, however, one big difference. France learned its lesson; it is deeply doubtful whether we will learn ours in time.
By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire." The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the Americans would. This was not the advice of a pacifist or a leader gone soft, but of a hard-nosed general who understood the importance of reality in military and political strategy. A few years earlier he had become prime minister and begun not only France's extrication from Algeria but from its other colonies. In 1958 he had proposed the "peace of the brave" but within one year was supporting full Algerian self-determination. He held to this position despite an attempted coup by members of the Foreign Legion and a secret army organization determined to keep Algeria French.
Among those supporting the liberation of Algeria was the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. As Danielle Costa has written, he "argued that the violence in Algeria was the French people's collective responsibility. He felt that the initial and fundamental violence in the Algerian situation was colonialism itself. He argued that the colonial system was based on violence - first conquest, then different forms of exploitation and oppression, and then pacification. By its own violence, colonialism had taught the natives to understand only violence. By colonialism's intransigence, it forced the native to resort to violence."
We have built our own colonialism using corporations rather than cavalry and with foreign trade rather than with the Foreign Legion. But the effects have been much the same, as is the best way out of the evil for which we, as well as others, bear so much responsibility. |
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