The LSE holds a surprising number of open lectures that are free to the public - www.lse.ac.uk/events  It is currently one lecture into a five lecture series (and conference) on Secularism.  This week saw the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton give his view on 'morality and public space' where he drew a distinction between the emergence of the territorially-based Christian-Enlightenment concept of public space and the faith-based law of religious community, much to the disadvantage of the latter.  

What Scruton Teaches Us

Scruton is like the Curate's Egg, good and bad in places, and it becomes clear why this is so as he lectures.  He is the most articulate and (in my view) intelligent conservative philosopher of our time.  Anyone on the centre-left side of the political spectrum has to engage with his ideas on consensus and tradition, on the nation, on the rights of the mass to their illiberal conventions and on threats to liberalism from outside.  He is a standing challenge to elite liberal manipulation of the public agenda, to the pretensions of internationalism and to 'political correctness'.  A debate between him and Peter Singer on what 'rights' animals may hold would be high entertainment indeed.

Above all, although he almost threw the point away, the optimistic liberal has yet to come to terms with the social reality of the predator whose ever-presence is always lurking in the corner of the eye of the true conservative.  True socialists see the predator in terms of economic exploitation but even this very sound critique of capitalism misses out the problem of the minority of individuals whose activities are psycho- or socio-pathic and who can emerge to rule political movements, businesses and street gangs as much as to abuse children or vulnerable women. 

Some think that this can be dealt with through an assertion of State authority but the wise man knows that the only true restraint on the predator is the community that is vigilant about its leaders and of its own members in equal proportion  It is in this area, with his interest in custom and tradition and in the 'existential' (his phrase) values of the members of an organic community, that Scruton should challenge those of us on the liberal side of the values game.

What Scruton Misses ...

Unfortunately (although to his credit he does not hide this aspect of himself), he is also a public intellectual whose exposition elides into what can only be termed 'ideology'.  He is a partisan for causes.  His position on hunting and Europe (which I happen to agree with from a different reasoning) may have been philosophically cogent but it was presented as wisecracks that detracted from the rest of his presentation.  His reasonable point (well taken) was about New Labour's reassertion, in a one-sided way, of public morality in legislation. 

Instead of wisecracks, he should have been debating (I believe) the extent to which the political use of morality is instrumental.  He seems to have no clear theory of power, class or exploitation (even conservatives can consider these matters).  There appears to be no zone in which (on the basis of this lecture) conservative intellectuals can truly engage with their socialist opponents - both sides are engaged in an almost collusive conspiracy of silence about awkward truths in order not to open themselves up to too deep a scrutiny of their various refusals to recognise what humans are really like (the problem of the Left) or how power is actually managed (the problem of the Right).  The one cannot cope with 'original sin', the other with 'entrenched incompetencies'.

Scruton's account of public space in the West also omitted any reference to the deliberate construction of identity by those in authority ['national myth-making'], to the multiple identities currently emerging as social and political facts, to identity as technologically as well as geographically and faith-mediated or to identities of social resistance as formative in the initial creation both of public spaces and of conventional morality.  There are few people more socially conservative than political revolutionaries and po-faced social reformers.  'Reformers' have often twisted the libertarian moral climate of one era to impose a more restrictive one that Scruton appears to assume to be 'normal' or 'traditional' when it is merely the latest in sight.  It could be argued that his current conservative consensus in the community is the creation of do-gooding reformers from another age.

Above all, he seems not to contend with the probability that the de-moralisation of public space is partly a function of battles over time between different moral positions (whether as in a classic full-scale kulturkampf or as in the debate over the veils) taken by political, social and economic groups seeking other advantages than the moral.  In other words, with the use of the ethical high ground as a political tool.  He certainly seems to have no notion that 'struggle' can be creative in itself or of the importance of allowing 'moral interventions' to test the durability of the system and mobilise argument.  There is much more that could be said on this, but it requires a more sceptical reading of history than the one received in school.

The Problem of the Contemporary Conservative

Scruton is a social conservative with decidedly negative views about modern libertarian culture.  As a public intellectual, when he slips over the edge from clear exposition to position-taking, you also, as listener, have to realise that a learning experience must now be treated partially as an entertainment.  Although he has an admirable understanding of the complexity and confusion that makes up existence as it really is lived, he seems not to live in that confusion himself except as observer.  He is clearly not excited by the possibilities of transgression (say) or of shifting identity as a creative act - both normal and safe considerations to many educated persons in the generations below his. 

This is his business but it means that his conservatism is as much a product of who he is as what he thinks - as it is for all of us despite all our pretensions to objectivity.  He fails, and he is not alone in this amongst intellectuals, in understanding how society and politics shift and move in a way that makes the categories of traditional political philosophy and even ethics increasingly contingent, often mere tools themselves for political, factional or special interest advantage.  This statement would probably horrify him because shifting sands are not to be marked and managed but to be concreted over in moral philosophy.

For Scruton, (based on his ruminations on Turkey during questions) the strong mildly unjust state is still preferable to any democratic justice system that is faith-based (a reasonable if debatable position).  He prefers a sclerotic order over creative chaos, worries about the angst of the unchallenged ordinary person, and seeks (perhaps like Wyndham Lewis) to teach us all the 'art of being ruled' rather than to resist poor rule.  An important thinker but perhaps one of the last of his line, though with a late flowering as we work through the current short burst of existential authoritarian angst appearing within the Western bourgeoisie.  The thinking middle classes are currently in one of their periodic states of panic at the world - in this case about the world that their global free market has created - but this will subside.  Nevertheless, Scruton is (and is going to be) an important influence on the language in which that panic is expressed.

The Death of 'Auctoritas'

However, one thing has gone that will never come back and on which Scruton's conservatism depends - the belief in an apparently competent elite.  That lie has been exposed.  It needs more than the man on the white horse or the exhortation of 'leaders' to be restored as a truth.  'Auctoritas' as Augustus Caesar would have understood it is no longer viable in a highly developed technological society.  It can only return with economic breakdown and as a reaction to true anarchy. 

In this way, one suspects that hardline communists and High Tories with their penchant for pessimism almost hope for the crisis that will either bring the brave new dawn or a return to traditional values.  Lurking at the corner of society are the Reds and the Blacks (though I hasten to add that Scruton's own liberal democratic values cannot be questioned).  But, until that day when auctoritas becomes necessary for the many instead of desired by the few, these people who rule us will actually have to buckle down and learn how to meet the needs of a nation as people and not a nation as state.  Mr. Blair and Mr. Sarkozy's interest in 'values' and 'gloire' is the long drawn-out swan song of Western imperial aspirations - and the West, far from decaying, will be stronger for their passing.

Scruton's social conservatism may have a part to play in that process because his wisest uncovering is that of the fact of existential angst in populations under pressure from modernisation.  So far liberal elites have managed to drive through modernisation faster than resistance can grow.  Much to Scruton's chagrin, I suspect that the libertarian agenda has reached such critical mass in the West that it is unbeatable in the long term and that resistance will take the form of community self-organisation, often on faith-based lines, well within the liberal public space.  Muslims, for example, will become voters within European liberal democracy and not proponents of a separate but equal Sharia law.  Eventually, the new technologies will reach the limit of innovation and new social patterns will emerge that may have conservative characteristics but not on lines recognisable to the High Tory.

Foreign Policy Implications

Where existential angst is most politically interesting is where modernisation is moving too fast for the elites to manage it - where the economies are still mid-twentieth century in structure or where feudal elites are trying to hold on to power in a service-led world.  The former are going to manage modernisation through 'guided' democracy as in Iran, China and Russia while the jury is out on the survivability of the latter.   Is social conservatism (the existential yearning of the masses for what they know) or public space the more important value?  This is a question that is going to be played out across the world in the coming decades.  It is the real question - not the 'clash of civilisations'.  It is bad news for liberal internationalists.

Scruton is a social conservative who empathises with the masses but who comes down firmly in favour of the Western model of public space.  This works in the West - after all faith-based groups can infuence matters in the US and UK without imposing their standards on private life - but in the developing world, whether in relation to homosexuals in Africa or Russia or women's rights in the Islamic World, matters are not so simple.  Democracy in these worlds will mean that the liberal element in the elite will be overwhelmed by demands for protection of cultural identity.  The choice (for the Western liberal) is supporting liberal dictators or colonels or accepting such concepts as Islamic Democracy or Chavezism as legitimate. 

In the end, Scruton chooses Ataturk over the Islamic Democrats - his conservative instincts place the organic State and the rule of law far above the resolution of the existential angst of the Muslims.  He is consistent - although a social conservative, he does not resent that the conservative moral position has been placed to one side as irrelevant by the liberal implications of the concept of public space in the West but only that the ‘other side' has begun to use public morality arguments to whittle away the very concept that was used to advance their cause to hegemony.  This strikes him as just plain unfair - and I agree!

But, though he is right that liberalism is going too far in its claims in the UK and that the preservation of public space is prior to moral claims in the West (partly because it advances liberalism), he is wrong (in my opinion) about the situations in other countries.  He cannot have it both ways - both respect for national organic conceptions of public space that emerge through struggle to protect the citizen and support for top-down elite public spaces trying to emulate the West against the tide of popular resentment of modernization.  Top-down management and organic cultural development are in tension and can only be resolved through democratic and, in extremis, street struggle.  Liberalism that privileges the role of vanguard elites is interpreted in the outside world not (as we would like to see it) as a universalist desire for good but as an imperialist attempt to hold on to territory informally whether as market or as cultural hinterland.

An Alternative Stance

I would argue that a more tolerant attitude in the West to third world socialisms, to Islamic democratic models and to various nationalisms would have caused different problems but would not have left us with the current danger of a growing insurgency against us and our ‘allies' - nor seen certain states harden their position as ‘rogues'.  Just as Stalin could seize power on the credible determination that the West was a threat, so extremism in the third world thrives on the so-called war on terror.  The West would do better to strengthen democracy and public space in its own zone of direct influence, give economic advantage to similar democrats as they emerge in the third world and place radical democracy ahead of liberalism (for at least a period) as an emerging world value. 

Of course, this will mean a plethora of socialisms, populisms and Islamisms but, over time, unthreatened, internal demands, the natural emergence of reformers within these countries (unhampered by an association with Western interference), open debate and pragmatic concerns to ensure trade and economic development will combine to liberalise these countries.  It will move them towards a tolerable version of public space.  It  will take longer but it will be more certain.  It will still mean suffering for many in a minority situation and relative disadvantage for women in some parts of the world, but less deaths and poverty and a more realistic hope that the next generation of women and minorities overseas will have a much more secure hold on their lives, freedoms and property than they have ever had in the past.

Poor Paris Hilton!  Well, not so poor ... she is an heiress.  The natural instinct is to distance ourselves from such gilded butterflies and feel little compassion when they get pinned to the board of life by the public's insatiable demand for entertainment.  After all, she is in her mid-twenties and not some vulnerable teenager - and she brought it on herself.  And yet the nasty little incident surrounding Paris might be considered to be much more serious in its implications than we think.  Let us recap with the facts.

Paris Hilton (who needs no introduction) broke the law.  Perhaps she thought she was above it - or just has a brain that can't remember things like a reckless driving sentence.  Reckless driving is a serious matter.  It is not just that she is at risk herself but she could kill someone else.  The laws have a purpose.  The law had every right to demand that the punishment go to the next stage beyond probation, education and a small fine to something more salutory.  Even the harsh 45 days is not what it seems - a state good behaviour law means that it should be 23 days if she keeps her nose clean.

But the circus surrounding her case has been disturbing, not for the usual reason given that it shows a celebrity culture out of control but because it has taken a celebrity's apparently a-social behaviour to show what a sink-pit we have in the Western prison system.  The British system is not much better than the US.  We close our eyes to these overcrowded abominations much as we close our eyes to the abattoir, the crematorium, the sink housing estate, the true nature of war, the conditions of asylum seekers, many of our care homes and so much else that is not glamorous.

So, glamour now enters the sink pit.  Now we see the sink pit for what it is - thanks, in the UK, to the somewhat graphic account by the BBC of what the Century Regional Detention Centre is actually like.  Let us see what this girl went through, according to the reputable Forbes magazine - http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/10/ap3805741.html  She is clearly in a state of extreme distress: "Hilton, in tears and screaming for her mother, was taken to the downtown Twin Towers facility Friday afternoon ..."  The local Sheriff had referred to an an "unspecified medical condition" which was clearly interpreted as "psychological".  He added that "she had arrived at her original jail with a condition he hadn't been apprised of and that it immediately began to deteriorate to the point that he feared for her safety".  She is, in short, highly vulnerable.

Reading between the lines, the Hilton team are desperately trying to get this unhappy and disturbed girl into conditions that are far more humane than the dreadful human pig pen that we have seen on television. Hilton herself (apparently) asks (quite reasonably) 'that the public and media focus on "more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq".  This rather suggests that the lawyers have worked out that the greatest blocks to that move are the political opinions of the authoritarian republican Right.  Now she is "at a maximum-security detention center, where she was believed to be undergoing medical and psychiatric evaluations to determine the best jail to keep her in as she serves the rest of her sentence."

And this is where it gets really disturbing.  Even if we accept that the woman has done wrong and that the community must take action to express its concern, deter and correct (if not punish), it is clear that she is psychologically vulnerable.  The prison process, on the other hand, seems to depend on creating high levels of psychological stress.  We see levels of cruelty that may be acceptable in the nation that turns a blind eye to Guantanamo Bay but levels that should be deemed ethically unacceptable in any truly civilised society.

Because she is a 'celebrity' (more than because she is rich), she now has entire teams of people worrying about how to 'triangulate' traditional American righteousness with the fact that the whole world is seeing this cruelty played out in public.  The problem is that poor Paris is not alone - thousands of young males and females, who have lost their bearings, breach laws that are randomly policed and where policing is targeted at the under-class.  American egalitarianism dare not say that these thousands are less valued than Paris Hilton yet they have been treated like social prisoners of war rather than as troubled fellow citizens for decades.  Now that a gilded beauty has been captured for the killing bottle, the system is briefly open to public gaze. 

Western prisons are often vile and unsanitary, the atmosphere inside them cruel and brutal, the professionals overworked and increasingly cynical - the dustbins of massive social failure across the West.  This poor girl is now in a lose/lose situation.  If the system fails to recognise her misery (the level of cruelty seems now to far exceed the requirements of the reckless driving crime), it is because to do so might require a re-think on cruelty perpetrated daily on thousands of young people that society cannot otherwise control.  The system cannot afford to admit that it is involved in a crime to defeat crime.  If so, she is stuck in hell for another three weeks or so. 

But if the system treats her exceptionally, even by recognising her 'mental illness' as a special case, a sort of 'depression brought on by adverse conditions in the context of wealth and high status', then it is tantamount to saying that good lawyers and money can always buy a way out of a system fixed against the poor.  Of course, the system usually arranges a 'fudge' in these cases - she will be incarcerated but the mental condition will be used as an excuse for the sort of round the clock care that no one from the underclass would dream of getting.  In the end, like a latter day Winston Smith, Paris admits her guilt, pledges to reform and the system will claim that justice works - as in 1984, there will be no one around to say otherwise.

What no American commentator seems capable of asking is what sort of culture is it that thinks that freedom for the many can only be bought at the expense of a systematic programme of cruelty directed at the most vulnerable in society - whether rich or poor.  This is not a class point.  Paris needs care too - in fact, at some time in our lives, we all do.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I am no bleeding heart liberal.  I am persuaded that prison works in the sense that there are hardened communities of criminality that are taken off the streets through the prison system.  However, effective social control (let's call it what it is) also requires reducing the pool in which criminality can swim, not only through sensible security but through investment (yes, that is the word) in marginal and vulnerable communities.  It also means not taking vulnerable kids who are repeat offenders and then assuming that they are criminals, offering them nothing but cruelty in debased conditions.

The Western prison system is an abattoir for the human spirit - a growing social gulag designed to deal with the consequences of our inability to think in terms of the communal and the collective.  This social collapse has more to do with material conditions than the moral rot much preferred by the right-wing as analysis.  No, I am not at all saying that criminality is necessarily a matter of poverty (any more than terrorism) but that is another analysis for another day.  I am only saying that criminality expands with social anomie and social anomie is linked to the way our material culture is structured.

This Autumn, I understand, a campaign is on the way to raise mental health and 'happiness' higher up the British political agenda.  It is led from the New Labour centre-right and it is to the discredit of those to their Left that they failed to lead in this area.  However, if anyone thinks that greater happiness will come from yet more moral exhortation and rhetoric in the New Labour tradition, then they are deluding themselves.  It is not for the State to promote happiness but it is for the State to enter into the process of reducing misery - dealing with poor material conditions and exploitation, providing access to mental healthcare services and maintaining a much more aggressive approach to improving and limiting the scope of our mental abattoirs.

So, I really do feel compassion for Paris Hilton.  If she was bright and compassionate enough herself and could get away from the grip of her lawyers, the experience should turn her into a socialist.  It probably won't, of course.  She'll probably do something similar to what Naomi Campbell and Emily Parr and all the other 'celebrity' victims of the public's righteous indignation have done - adjust to prevailing public opinion, express regret, intend to turn over a new leaf, be watched like a hawk by the minders, use the publicity to re-build public awareness, trade on the notoreity, have fun to make up for the bad times.  And why not?  That is how it works now.  Best of luck to them.

Meanwhile, deep inside the sink pit, I bet there are other young women, somewhere between 18 and 30, in a state of extreme distress "in tears and screaming for [their] mother" with an "unspecified medical condition" who will not get the attention of specialists and who will be left to bleed out their souls unnoticed and uncared for by a callous public and a cynical judicial system.  Don't sleep easy at night until you know just how wrong this is ...

I missed a week!  Sometimes it's good to do that.  If writing becomes routine, then it's no fun, for me or for you.   Anyway, my writing was getting more and more po-faced as the weeks went by - not only here but elsewhere. The last straw was some relatively turgid postings on Syrian-British relations and heroes of the Labour Movement on Virtual Journal last week.  Best take a deep breath and stop when that happens.

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On the other hand, I am a rather serious-minded person. You cannot change your true nature.  So, this week, I'll cover ... terrorism .... or rather how we have forgotten just how violent life could once be for intellectuals when they got engaged in serious politics at times of crisis.  And how we can learn from history to try and avoid terrorism in the first place.

The Complexity of the Terrorist Impulse

I refuse to write too much on the current so-called 'war on terror'.  I prefer to call it a post-imperialist insurgency.  Most coverage is horribly over-simplified by all those with an axe to grind or who have to meet a news deadline.  There probably is a serious future threat from Islamist radicals but the Oklahoma bombing and the recent calling off of the cease fire in the Basque Country by ETA suggest that radical political violence is a much more complex phenomen than all that effort applied to demonising 'Islamo-Fascism' might imply.  

Indeed, if you analyse the information on 2006 arrests, inquiries and incidents from Europol (a rather weak European proto-FBI) then, while the French and British have been merrily picking up Muslims to trawl for intelligence, most of the actual incidents were from regional separatist organisations in Spain and France.  Ah, France!  For it is France that maintained a fearful obsession with domestic political violence, while the rest of us were busy bombing the doo-doo out of small third world countries in the certain knowledge (as we thought) that such activities could never blow back on our blithely ignorant electorates.  When 9/11 took place, French security intellectuals were jumping up and down crying, 'told you so! told you so! should have listened to us'.

There are sound reasons for this French obsession - but it is not Corsica or the Basques (or potentially the Bretons or the Gascons) who unnerve Paris so much as the remembrance of the peculiar quasi-civil war and brutalities of Algerian de-colonisation.  Algeria is France's Ireland - a mass of people from a different religion and culture who were once treated as a pariah by colonisers, who then wondered why, after failures to provide some sort of home rule, the colonised turned to the gun and to the bomb.  Morality tends to be dictated by those in power. The ethics surrounding resistance are little different in this respect.  Those ruled are always expected to see such a rule as a benefit merely because it preserves order.

Algeria was the struggle of a people against a centralised power that would not offer democracy. Indeed, in the early 1990s, France encouraged opposition to a 'dangerous' democracy in the successor state - it was as if London were to have encouraged a military coup in Ireland against the Catholic countryside in the run-up to the Second World War to maintain security on its border. The current tension between Fatah and Hamas in Palestine is a small-scale re-run of the recent history of Algeria - the same struggle between secular liberation nationalism and Islamist democracy.  In both cases, the West chose to tip the balance in favour of the secular party against an unpalatable democracy.  The current struggle in Turkey between military and Islamist politicians may conceivably result in similar alignments with similar violent effects.  We never learn.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Psychology of Insurgency

These thoughts arose from reading a very old and rather pedestrian biography of Jean Paul Sartre by Ronald Hayman [Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, London 1986]. This was the story of another world, that of the Cold War and decolonisation.  The years 1961 and 1962 saw an upsurge of 'terrorism' in which Frenchmen tried to murder other Frenchmen simply because they disagreed on a foreign policy issue, albeit one that affected the economic livelihood of tens of thousands and cut deep into the self-identity of the French nationalist Right.  And, of course, it was not a foreign policy but a domestic policy issue to half of France.

In this vicious environment, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pre-eminent philosopher of the French Left at that time, was a direct target of terror - perhaps not entirely without reason.  He had split with others on the French Left (those, like Camus, who were more like our 'liberals') in order to assert the right of oppressed peoples to kill their oppressors if necessary for national liberation. One of the greatest philosophers of our time was thus both approving of terrorism and, as we shall see, the subject of terrorist attacks - he was simultaneously villain and hero, complicit in crime and victim.

Sartre publicly identified the Algerian FLN with the Resistance to the Nazis and it was Le Temps Modernes, the intellectual journal associated with his circle, that led the field in exposing the use of torture by the French military much as Sartre's role in the Russell Tribunal exposed US war crimes in Vietnam before My Lai had brought the matter to the American public's attention. 

Both sides, the OAS [Organisation de l'Armee Secrete] and FLN were terrorists in the current use of the term, that is they indiscriminately targeted civilians.  The practice of the French State came to be not much better in its desperate attempts to maintain order.  The OAS moved on to assassinating Muslim and European FLN sympathisers as 1960 turned into 1961.  There was an attempted coup by the army in Algiers, defeated by the courage of De Gaulle and ordinary national servicemen who listened to their President when he ordered them to disobey their Officers' orders.  Nothing like this has ever quite happened in the Anglo-Saxon world - at least not since the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland.

Sartre in the Firing Line

The OAS went ever deeper underground.  Sartre received threatening letters in May 1961.  He moved his mother into a hotel for safety.  A small plastic bomb exploded in the entrance hall of his flat at 42 Rue Bonaparte.  Sartre provoked further attack in agreeing to write the Preface to Frantz Fanon's seminal Les Damnes de la Terre and Fanon's first chapter on violence was published in the June Edition of Les Temps Modernes. 

I recall passing a copy of Fanon's remarkable and dark book to a former South African Special Forces operative (wholly cured of any lingering racism) to demonstrate how the 'other side' thought under colonisation and how violence might seen as a cathartic expression for impotence.  He empathised.  He could see what men could be driven to.  Sartre wrote in the Preface to his countrymen: " ... you pretend to forget you have colonies and that massacres are carried out in your name."  Familiar stuff to Anglo-Saxons today.

Sartre was out of Paris over the summer of 1961 but nothing had improved by his return - September saw an attempt to assassinate De Gaulle.  Bombings increased in both Algeria and France - there were six hundred explosions by the end of that year.  We have seen only two in London since 9/11, though much larger than the typical small plastic bomb of the period.  This rather puts things into perspective.  There were serious police atrocities in the very streets of Paris.  A plastic bomb harmlessly exploded at a rally that Sartre spoke at in November.  He was, by now, moving towards overt support for the Algerian rebels. 

He tried to move for safety only to find that hoteliers were nervous, eventually finding a furnished flat.  A bomb nearby in January 1962 was not intended for him but another bomb blew out 42 Rue Bonaparte three days later.  There was some weak daytime police protection: bombs went off periodically in the neighbourhood.  They moved on.  You get the picture ... it got worse, though for others and not for Sartre and his longtime partner Simone De Beauvoir.

So Why Is This Interesting?

What is the point of this tale from over forty years ago?  Only that, with due respect to Salman Rushdie who is doing from the Right what Sartre did from the Left in terms of 'provocation' and whom we wish every success in eluding those who would target him, conditions for the Western European public intellectual of forty -five years ago were far worse than they are today.   The intensity of France's tussle with its own imperial withdrawal scarred the heartland's psyche and has made it an unreliable judge of best practice in defeating insurgency. 

The very real horrors in the early 1960s with an Iraq-type situation close to emerging on the very borders of a key Western State created a paranoia and hysteria in security circles about the insurgent question that lasts to this day.  Algeria brought violence to the very streets of the capital.  One million may have marched against the war in London in 2002 but no-one was killed and no bombs went off until 7/7.  This is an important qualitative difference - especially when we consider that in 1968 student and workers forced the departure of that same De Gaulle who had stood up to his own Generals.

There is not space to go into whether Sartre was right or wrong.  My view is that he was right to expose the implicit racism and thuggery of a declining French State, but that he was wrong to 'go native' and espouse revolutionary violence (though neither his nor Fanon's arguments were necessarily wholy evil ones on closer examination).  European intellectuals have a tendency to strut like revolutionary cocks for a universalist ideal and never think about the rotting bodies and orphans that are left behind.  If you really want to have your hair stand on end, then you should read Slavoj Zizek's Preface to a Selection of Robespierre's writings [Verso, 2007] which reminds one of the importance of never ever letting an intellectual near the levers of power. 

What we have to do is learn something from this history - that 'terrorism' is not new, that determinedly resisting the aspirations of peoples is the real provocation to terror and that terrorism lies not only in the evil that men do but in the way that policy has driven such men to undertake such desperate acts.  Finally, that frustration with the way of the world eventually leads fine minds into the abyss of complicity with murder.  This appreciation of the need to compromise with the rage of the 'other' is counter-intuitive to much Western morality but we, in the West, must accept some responsibility for the effects on others of our ancestors' actions.

Analysing Algeria for Today

Algeria did something to a whole generation in France much as Vietnam did something different to the same generation in America - the political Left (never a national majority in any Western country) shifted at this time from class war within the West to an interest in class war between the West and the rest.  In America, the political left moved from collective organisation and discipline towards free-spirited individualism.  This is where we are now.

This new thinking in Europe underpinned secular, often Marxist, third world nationalisms.  Its collapse and its failure to change the terms of political trade under globalisation has subsequently made space for new movements like Islamism or Chavez' or Subcommandante Marcos' populism. 

If the Western Left is splitting now, (and we believe it is), it is doing so on these same basic lines but under new conditions, between those who recognise the reality of imperialism's effects on the rest of the world (and give a damn) and those who do not.  Part of the tragedy of the situation for America today is that significant elements in the Third World were once persuaded that the US was anti-imperialist and this held the line against Communism - since 2003, that argument has become much harder to sustain.

So, French culture briefly accepted as 'normal' (probably inured by the horrors of the second world war) that two warring sides within a country could engage in extreme political violence. The student revolt of 1968 took place not long afterwards.  Both Germany and Italy then saw outbreaks of similar violence, albeit that the German version involved State rather than radical Right terror through draconian use of legal instruments. In other words, democratic Western Europe saw an extended period of extreme violence (to which we might add Northern Ireland) that may now have settled down (or degenerated into regionalism and organised crime) but which has never quite disappeared entirely.  The experience burned itself into the institutional memory of national security and intelligence communities across Europe.  For this reason alone, politicians should be wary of their advice.

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For me, the seminal document on the Algiers War, and indeed on insurgency in general, remains Pontecorvo's masterful near-contemporary film, The Battle of Algiers.  I have been told that it was not easy to get hold off in France for many years and the biography of Sartre referred to above is an eye-opener on the ability of the French middle classes to do anything to avoid having their sensibilities upset.  However, it is easily available, certainly as a DVD in London (probably in France now), was shown very recently in a run at the ICA and (as you will see if you take the time) it cannot be called propaganda for either side. 

What it does do (and this makes it essential viewing for anyone interested in the 'war on terror') is explain how the two sides perceived matters and why, unless the military is permitted absolute power with no domestic constraints (in a Spartan or Roman approach) or moderates are detached with material concessions, the insurgents will win in the end.  And in that analysis, we have the essence of the strategic policy war within the West - do we crush them with maximum force and silence dissent at home? or do we concede ground from the beginning and engage half the enemy in partnership to eliminate the other half?  History will say that the dumbest thing we ever did was to try to resist Islamist democracy and turn it over to the extremists ...