A Savage War of Peace is a brilliant covering of the Algerian war of independence against the French in the 1950’s. Post the fall of French Vietnam, the French moved to defend the crown jewel of its colonial holdings and where hundreds of thousands of native French had established their lives. This work, like Earth Abides which is my next review, came back into the modern consciousness due to world events.
In this case it was the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the GWOT in general as well as the topic of “torture” in particular. Algeria was one of the first modern conflicts where the media and politicians latched onto the “conduct” of the war and expressing distaste for the manner in which the war was conducted. The western press and politicians of course focused on tearing down the western forces and their methodology while absolving the “revolutionaries” for theirs. Even this great work falls into that same trap. Again and again we are told “torture doesn’t work” and yet immediately thereafter are told…well….”torture doesn’t work but….due to “torture” the French were able to uncover X assassination plot or X bombing or discover X’s location”. The hard truth that the West has never accepted but that all revolutionaries do…is that your feelings of disgust don’t matter. Torture works. Always has, always will unless you find a human without pain receptors. Further the work does tend to gloss over, to its detriment, the atrocities and causes of many of the events it describes.
Example—it mentions the event that is considered the kickoff of the conflict which was the events around Setif in 1945. Here it is described that Algerian natives were marching and these same natives began shooting some French Algerian police which then “repressed” the ongoing riots both there and in a nearby town. Bad right? Not remotely in the same league as the Algerian native response which was to butcher French civilians across the country because they had their feelings hurt about their flags being taken away. This massacre of French civilians was then followed by the French authorities proceeding to kill many native Algerians in response…and so it goes. But what you’ll notice is that while reams of pages and ink are spent here and elsewhere to detail just how horrible the French were? Very little is devoted to the culpability of the Algerians themselves. In this one incident…the author focuses heavily on the French reprisals AFTER their own citizens had been chopped up. Very little effort is spent to focus the blame on the Algerian butchers.
I get it…you’re a Western writer…you have access to Western records and documentation and sources, so what you write about is what the Westerners do. To the detriment of your reader…and history.
None of which is to say this isn’t an incredible work—it is. Its detailed and global in scope moving from Dien Bien Phu to the UN to Moscow to Cairo to DC. The number of “players” covered is incredible as is the research into the minute day to day almost, events that drove this conflict forward.
Its link between the “battlefield” events in the Battle of Algiers bombings, the attempted overthrow of DeGaulle’s government by force, the cultures of both societies and individual personalities is beyond reproach. It truly should be a primer for any modern military thinker who seeks to understand the nature of modern conflict and operate better within it. I’d be stunned if not more than a few Israelis have this work in their library at the moment. So should every military leader everywhere and every geopolitical leader. Understanding how France won the battles militarily but lost the war anyway (as the US would see in Vietnam and eventually Iraq II and Afghanistan) is instructional though likely unheeded. Few people have the will to conduct war in the manner it must be conducted, least of all modern Western societies. Socialists, Communists, terrorists, Islamists…they all understand this. 70 years later we are still trying to grasp it. Learn from Alistair Horne’s work here.