Jean-Paul Sartre and Insurgency

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 ...