This will be a short training outline of the film “The Battle of Algiers” which I offered here a few days ago. It should also open your eyes to some modern beliefs about Islam that were not necessarily so the decades before 911.
When non-Islamist terrorism runs smack dab into the iron-fist of occupation-colonialism, as practiced especially by the French and Spanish iof modern history, does a Christian, or a democrat (with a little “d”), need to step back and weigh some of the acts the Algerian rebels committed compared to acts of their overlords, the French, who colonized Algeria after an invasion and war lasting 17 years, starting in 1830.
Except along the coast, there was not really that much worth invading for, you’d think; almost all sand, except a few along the Mediterranean coast. The French were a curious lot, too, for unlike the Spanish, who invaded two continents more for booty than saving souls, the French, after having lost their North American empire in Canada to England in the 1700’s, followed by the rise and fall of Bonaparte’s Empire in less than 15 years, they felt the need to create an entire empire in North and Central Africa, and southeast Asia, for no apparent commercial or religious reason. Just for the hell of it.
It’s almost as if they were just trying to keep up with the Joneses, (the English), just so they could sit around the colonial councils and smoke cigars and drink brandy with the rest of the mavens of royal power.
You see, the Sahara of North Africa had been a verdant garden about 6000 years ago, with much heavier rainfalls, most of those cities now buried under thousands of feet of sand. That 80% sandy part of Algeria was occupied by Berbers, desert Muslim but not Arabs. Along the Algerian coast were largely Arabs.
And the Mediterranean coast of North African was like Miami Beach, a pleasant place for Frenchman to relocate, and tens of thousands more flocked there for the rich farmland. Most of that land was bought up by government officials and army officers who had taken it from the Arabs. It took 17 years to subdue the people, and the French ran their colonies like totalitarian states. Algiers, the capital, was the largest city, but there were other cities along the coast. The French carved the cities up into French and European quarters, where all the foreigners lived and all the businesses were located, with wide boulevards, paved streets, much like Marseilles and the Gold Coast of France.
Then there was the Arab quarters, the casbah, where all the mostly Arab Muslims lived. The film was produced in the same Casbah only ten years later. That was where the Muslim population were huddled in tight little tenements, and from where the French drew their manual day labor.
The Algerians began their rebellion for independence in 1953-54. A friend of mine who I’ve known for several years, and who writes at UnifiedPatriots.com, where I sometimes appear, wrote a splendid piece in October dissecting the many Kurdish political factions in Syria. The National Liberation Front, or FLN, which you see in the film, was an outgrowth of several anti-colonial groups in Algeria that had arisen since colonization almost a century earlier. By the time the civil war began in 1953-54, they had been driven underground, their known political leaders wanted men, their faces known to police. Algeria was run by an Assembly composed entirely of “colons”, French colonists. By 1954, although Algeria was still 70% Arab and Berber (7 million) only 50,000 were allowed to vote, and then, only in select local elections.
Do the math.
Unlike Sinn Fein, who fronted for the IRA, the Algerian rebels had no legal mouthpieces in government. And being Muslim part of their revolt was to restore Muslim law (sharia) about the use of alcohol, drugs, and prostitution. People in America who came from parts of our country where these things are illegal even today might have some sympathy for what the Muslims of Algiers wanted to achieve in this regard, although not by the methods used. Most American communities want local control over access to booze, certainly drugs and streetwalkers, and can shut down sales on Sunday with blue laws.
But since the French colonials owned the prostitution, alcohol and drug enterprises which they owned, a big profit line, it was impossible for the FLN to separate this “morals clause” from the political in their revolt. (The film starkly depicts this.)
Brief film outline: “The Battle of Algiers” begins with a scene of an Muslim man who has been broken by torture by the French Army, and who identifies the hiding place of one of the “cells” of people who had been terrorizing the city. Then the story flashes back three years earlier to the beginning when the FLN first recruited a principal terrorist, a man named Ali, who was in that hiding place.
The rebels began by shooting police officers in the street, one at a time, taking no collateral damage, until a group of French plainsclothes policemen bomb an entire tenement building of civilians, killing dozens, thus setting off a retaliatory series of bombs by the terrorists in the French section of Algiers; a dance shop for teens, a soda counter and an airline counter, also killing several.
That’s the first hour of the film, and makes up the “instructional” part of this film.
At this point the French Army is sent in to replace the police, and impose martial law, which never seems to work. Finally torture does. The French prove to be as good at torture as they are making soupe à l’oignon
I’ll spare you a lecture as to why some cultures are less religious about killing people than our culture teaches. Arabs have been indifferent about cutting off the heads of infidels, or stoning prostitutes, or even worse in some Muslim realms, Christian converts, for 1500 years. But the French seems to have matched them in history going back to the Crusades, responsible for most of the “Christian” massacres of entire cities over those centuries. They even managed to sack and burn Orthodox Constantinople in 1204 when the Fourth Crusade was rerouted because no one really wanted to take on Saladin, who, even today, is still a hero in the West.
Carryover lessons learned: If your dark alley purpose is to only give our enemies bloody noses instead of bloodshed, you can learn very much from the way the Algerian rebels organized their “cells”, for no one knew anyone other than the three or four people who teamed with them.
They used hand-written notes, which with today’s technology, is a fool proof way to communicate. A little slower but it keeps police and enemies alike totally in the dark about your plans.
The Algerians greatest advantage was in being invisible to their colonial masters. In India they called it “the thousand-yard stare” which Indians noticed when English men and women walked along the streets looking straight ahead, never looking right or left, or in any way acknowledging the people they pass.
Being a trained “noticer” I’ve seen this among the government class all over America, federal, state, and local, and it is an indication of their sense of class and distance. On campus it’s the same, from administrators to instructors, They don’t know you until you sit in their classroom. And most of those students who love God, America, the Constitution, or even just good old-fashioned football where everyone stands for the National Anthem, know how those people feel about them.
It was impossible for the French to catch these rebels because they never looked at them as people in the first place. Today, of course, with technology, they can identify a person more easily. Or trace them, Cell phones. In France they still can’t prevent a terrorist from blowing something up, including Notre Dame cathedral, and will expend more effort in hiding the fact they fell asleep at the switch than in preventing it.
So, since your little cells will be using physical force only to bloody someone’s nose, or “skunk” their $1000 Givenchy purse or Armani business suit, or kill their prize rose bushes…let you imaginations run wild with the possibilities…Just imagine the local police response when a county supervisor with a bloody nose storms in to file a complaint that a jogger with sunglasses and a hood had whacked him with a hard object that looked like a rolled-up newspaper.
Imagine the cops’ response to a simple assault. Witnesses? Street cams?
Then imagine the supervisor’s surprise when he gets a “clean” letter in the mail explaining why. And to expect more. Unless….fill in the blanks.
The idea is not just to not get caught, but not be seen in any identifiable sort of a way. To be entirely anonymous. It’s easy if you follow certain rule.
(I discussed this need in my 2013 outline, “A Strategy down a Dark Alley” but will be updating it before the New Year, to account for newer realities, such as the greater possibility of a civil war not of our making from the rise of an anarchist army (Antifa 2.0) now that the Left’s political gambits are beginning to crash and burn. Some will not go lightly and there’s plenty of money that can be invested into turning those thugs into mercenary militia with real weapons. So while we have recommending a misdemeanor-based action plan designed to discourage the left, with an existing stealth organization, we need to have our own Dark Alley 2.0 plan should the Left decide to leave their protective blue-city and state sanctuaries begin going scorched earth. I’ve written at least half a dozen pieces in these six years about various aspects of these dark alley strategies and will update them over the first half of 2020, and post them forward.)
Personal security is everything, even among closest friends. The film depicts how pistols were passed on the streets or in litter cans. The same could apply to “weapons of mass misdemeanors”.
Planning and intelligence gathering are the brains part of these projects. Along with a group of snitches and watchers who are for the cause, but have not been read into the operational plan. Keep them compartmentalized, as the film proves works.
Give fear a chance. Leftist elites in America are largely cowards. They have to hire their bullying. They also, probably from childhood, believe they are immune from punishment. But they are not immune from pain or fear, once they learn they may be a target. They will generally project onto their assailants, hidden out there in the dark, the same level of pain they would hire down in the tables were turned. Because they would kill you, if they could, they assume you would try to do serious harm to them.
This is a good thing, for it can have them looking over their shoulders even every trip to the grocery store, Yes, give fear a chance.
You may not be able to change what they teach, or how they vote on local and state laws, in the short run, but you will increase citizen support for change from the top. An invisible force felt if only by a few dozen bad people.
As a rule Washington cannot fix our universities and public schools. Or local government. It can only come from the bottom. And just for the sheer joy of knowing some people in dark alleys are doing something about it, whatever the issue, will have a great effect on politicians.
After all, we’re not French.
