My Battle of Algiers: A Memoir

[Al-khiyal]

Book review:


France's losing fight against an urban Arab insurgency in Algeria has uncomfortable echoes of Iraq.

In the fall of 1956, while serving with the French army in the Algerian back country, Ted Morgan killed a rebel soldier during an interrogation. The man had been strung up with his hands tied behind his back, his feet hovering above the ground. "I punched him hard in the stomach," Morgan recalls. He wanted the location of the man's base camp. "I swear I don't know," the man repeated. "Then something happened to me," Morgan writes. "I was in an altered state." Over a few minutes, Morgan punched the man to death. His killing of the enemy soldier is one of the least shocking events in this grave and relentless book.

Morgan is a historian and biographer who has written about figures as disparate as Franklin D. Roosevelt and William S. Burroughs. With My Battle of Algiers , he turns his pen on himself and his 1956-57 service in the French Army, which was then struggling to put down a nationalist insurgency in France's most prized North African colony....

The front lines of fear....

[Al-khiyal]

Ted Morgan: Algeria and Iraq: Yes, there are parallels

[lePharon]

QUOTE:"France's losing fight against an urban Arab insurgency in Algeria has uncomfortable echoes of Iraq."

Not a single Arab even visited Algeria at that time - Algerians didn't even speak Arabic - Algerian Revoluiotn was thought and conducted mostly by Intellectuals, who were all French speakers. It is "Existentialism" brought up to life. From Sartre to Camus the central idea was "to be born again" whereby dying is NECESSARY CONDITION TO LIVE, thus demistifying death. A better thought out "to be or not to be"

Arabs were middle-men, in the transfer of weaponery from the Eastern block to Algeria, but mostly this was rather taken directly from the ennemy itself.

This book seems like "GARBAGE IN - GARBAGE OUT" - A translation of official accounts by illegitimate offials.

give me a break ! But if that gives you the illusion of becoming an intellectual, so be it !

yak !

[WASSIL]

QUOTE:"France's losing fight against an urban Arab insurgency in Algeria has uncomfortable echoes of Iraq."

Not a single Arab even visited Algeria at that time - Algerians didn't even speak Arabic - Algerian Revoluiotn was thought and conducted mostly by Intellectuals, who were all French speakers. It is "Existentialism" brought up to life. From Sartre to Camus the central idea was "to be born again" whereby dying is NECESSARY CONDITION TO LIVE, thus demistifying death. A better thought out "to be or not to be"

Arabs were middle-men, in the transfer of weaponery from the Eastern block to Algeria, but mostly this was rather taken directly from the ennemy itself.

This book seems like "GARBAGE IN - GARBAGE OUT" - A translation of official accounts by illegitimate offials.



give me a break ! But if that gives you the illusion of becoming an intellectual, so be it !

yak !

are you sure? because I was born in Algeria to an Algerian Father and an Algerian Mother who could only speak Arabic and lived in a town that spoke arabic... and with the exception to places like aures, kabylia, mzab, tassili.. and few other isolated places .. Algeria was and still in its overwhelming majority an Arab speaking country.

by the way... Did I tell you that my Grandfather/Grandmother were also born in Algeria ... they too spoke Arabic...... hold on I am even sure their parents too spoke arabic