Old, unhappy, far off things

Sixty-five years ago this month the Daily Express published a particularly horrific picture on its front page.  Under the heading Hanged Britons: Picture that will shock the world, it showed two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been murdered by Irgun paramilitaries in the Mandate of Palestine.  The sergeants had been kidnapped and killed in reprisal for the execution of three members of the Jewish underground organisation in what was becoming an increasingly ugly guerrilla war. 

There had been other terrorist incidents in the course of the conflict, but what became known as “the sergeant’s affair” was different.  The sheer ugliness of the event – the bodies were also bobby trapped – brought the conflict home to the people of Britain, causing the most widespread anti-Semitic rioting the country had ever seen, notwithstanding the fact that the killings had been condemned by British Jewish leaders.

By the end of the August holiday weekend there had been serious anti-Jewish rioting in Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool, with more minor disturbances in Bristol, Hull, Warrington and London.  Although there were no fatalities a number of people were beaten up and property destroyed, including a wooden synagogue in West Derby.  In Eccles, John Regan, himself a former sergeant, harangued a crowd of some seven hundred people, saying “Hitler was right.  Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child.  What are you afraid of?  There’s only a handful of police.”

Serious stuff, but in the end it all proved to be so much hot air, not just Regan’s incitement, for which he was charged and fined, but the whole violent wave.  Even obvious fascist politicians like Jeffrey Hamm, formerly of the British Union of Fascists and now in charge of the League of Ex-Servicemen, could not make any lasting political capital out of the incident.  The Express, which had triggered the violence with its sensational front page lead, backed off in shock, calling for calm and describing the attacks on innocent shopkeepers as a national disgrace.

That short hot summer has left almost no memory.  It’s a pity, really, because as history the whole episode is really quite intriguing.  Although superficially caused by an event far from these shores, it revealed much more about problems and difficulties far closer to home: the problems of austerity Britain. 

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published two years after the sergeants’ incident, is supposedly about a dystopian future.  In actual fact it was much more about a dystopian present, as people reading it at the time would have recognised.  The drab London he depicts in the novel was not some imaginative construct but a living reality.  Like so many other British cities, it had not fully recovered from the war.  Vacant lots and bomb sites were everywhere.  With a housing shortage came a serious problem of homelessness. 

The war, and its financial legacy, also had had a profound effect on the economy. Some foodstuffs, like butter, meat were still rationed. Confectionary had come off ration in 1949, but distribution had to be brought back under state control because demand was simply too great. Shortages meant that people took to producing their own food in back gardens and allotments. Income tax was at an extraordinarily high level, more than twice what it is today. Bureaucratic red tape was a major feature of everyday life, also brilliantly reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the 'social comedies' being produced by Ealing Studios, movies like Whisky Galore and Passport to Pimlico.

The war had been won; the peace was clearly being lost.  Food shortages and serious unemployment were compounded by a fuel shortage in the bitter winter of 1946-47, when coal was rationed in a coal-rich country.  Unhappy and bewildered, people looked for scapegoats, turning to the greatest scapegoats of all – the Jews.  Rationing created a vigorous black market which, by common perception, was controlled by the Jews. It’s not that surprising that so many ordinary people were taken in by this, especially as Ernest Bevan, foreign minister in the Labour government of the day, made anti-Semitic remarks, including one to the effect that the Jews of Europe were “pushing to the front of the queue.”

Cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, where the rioting was worse, also happened to be the places most affected by unemployment and general deprivation.  What began there as anti-Jewish riots soon turned into a looting free for all.  But the whole thing passed just as quickly as it had emerged.  The hooliganism had been based on personal frustration not on any deep rooted anti-Jewish hostility.  It was too soon after the Holocaust, details of which were still being revealed, for anti-Semitism to become a credible cause.  1947, as Lionel Trilling said in an article on the subject (New Statesman, 28 May), was the end of a chapter, not the beginning. 

The following year the state of Israel was formed and the sergeants’ affair, and the riots, forgotten.  It left one painful and unnoticed irony: Clifford Martin was Jewish.  

The Plague

There are two movies which gave me some limited understanding, like an archaeological evaluation, of the tragic modern history of Algeria – The Battle for Algiers and Of Gods and Men.

On the face of it they are about two completely unconnected events. The first deals with an episode in the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962; the second with an incident in 1996, when a small community of French Cistercian monks, living in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains, were kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by mujahedeen guerrillas, fighting a prolonged and brutal war with the government.

The connection lies at a deeper level; it lies in the nature of French colonialism in Algeria and the reaction of the local people; it lies in the nature of the resistance movements created in the drive for national liberation; it lies in the nature of a particularly brutal war that, so far as France was concerned, at lest until fairly recently, wasn’t a war at all; in lies in forms of uncompromising extremism, in torture and murder as legitimate political techniques; it lies most particularly in the pursuit of power, to he seized and held at all costs.

In Algeria: France’s Undeclared War Professor Martin Evans, who has previously published on Algerian history, weaves the various threads together. It’s an exhaustive piece of work, looking deep into the prehistory of a conflict that stands apart from Africa’s other wars of liberation in the intensity of its brutality. It also draws attention to its lasting significance, an unhappy postscript.

For a long time the Algerian conflict, like Vichy and war-time collaboration in general, was a particularly sensitive area in French national consciousness, visited at some peril. How could it not be, given that over a million settlers, the so-called Pieds-Noirs, were obliged to resettle in metropolitan France after Algeria achieved independence in 1962? Full of bitterness and resentment against the right-wing government of General De Gaulle, they went even further to the right, forming an active constituency that would eventually become the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

That’s perhaps the central paradox of France’s Algerian conflict: it was started by the left and ended by the right. In 1956 Guy Mollet, head of the Socialist-led Republican Front government, ordered the army to begin ‘pacification’ operations against Algerian nationalists. Although himself opposed to colonialism on principle, he had a duty, as he saw it, to defend the civilising mission of the Fourth Republic against the fanatical and barbarous forms of Algerian nationalism. As so often the defence of civilization descended into the forms of barbarism allegedly being fought against.

Evans writes that Algeria was one of the longest and most difficult episodes in the whole decolonisation process. There is one simple reason for this: officially it wasn’t a colony at all; it was part of metropolitan France - it had been since the 1880s -, no different from Brittany or Normandy. It was an illusion, of course, a legalistic fiction, but one with particularly bloody consequences.

The civilising mission was always barbarous. From the outset in 1830 the French intrusion into what was then an Ottoman province was marked by savagery. This was a genocidal war, one of partial ethnic cleansing, which might usefully be compared with the American expansion in the West at the expense of the indigenous peoples. It is estimated that by the mid-1850s Algeria had lost almost half of its pre-colonial population of some four million people. That’s when the settlement was planted, with roots so deep that they could only be pulled up in extreme violence.

The difference between the French and American example is that there were never enough settlers; that strong as they were the native Algerians were stronger. Fighting a war against history and demography, the French settlers, unlike the American colonialists, could never go their own way, which meant that France could not go its own way either without difficulty; without the death of one republic and the birth of another.

The French were brutal, certainly but, as Evans shows, the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), their leading opponent, were just as brutal, not just towards the colonialists but towards rival nationalist movements, applying savage cruelty even to deviationists within their own ranks. Liberation for them was about achieving power, to be held at all costs, which was to lead eventually to their own ‘pacification’ campaign against the Islamists in the 1990s.

The French mission was always hopeless. It gave rise to the ‘long hatred’, one of the key themes, as the author argues, that led to the revolt of 1 November, 1954, a new plague, that Albert Camus, author of The Plague and himself a Pied-Noir, had not anticipated.

There had been a prologue several years before in eastern Algeria, when a hundred Pieds-Noirs were killed in violent demonstrations, their corpses afterwards horribly mutilated. In wholly disproportionate acts of retaliation, the French slaughtered thousands, destroying many villages. “Nothing could be the same again,” Evans writes, “Rural Algeria had confronted European Algeria, producing a society more polarised than ever.”

The war caused thousands of lives and has left an unresolved legacy that exists so far as today; in Algeria, where the FLN ensures that there is no end to the Arab Winter; in France, where the 2005 riots by alienated migrants showed that the country still suffers from the ‘Algeria syndrome.’ For De Gaulle Algeria was a millstone around the neck of France. It still is.

Evans is to be congratulated on splendid piece of research, lucid, scholarly and balanced. He unfolds a tale whose lightest word harrows up the soul. Once again the lesson of history is that we learn nothing from history, otherwise we would not have had other ‘civilising’ missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, other plagues.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise

That's the way to do it!

It’s interesting to compare the success of the British in handling the communist insurgency in the old Malay States with the failure of the parallel French struggle in Indochina.

On the face of it the French should have had greater success because they deployed much more in the way of force and firepower in Indochina than the British ever did in Malaya. But what one really has to look at here- the key to the whole issue -is the differing political strategies adopted in each case.

The French intention was to restore, in almost all respects, their pre-war colonial authority, paying little attention to the emerging national movement. It was because of this that the Viet-Minh was able to move beyond its Communist ideological confines, becoming a movement of national liberation in the most complete sense.

Now, in strategic and political terms, the British position in 1945 was no better in Malaya than the French in Indochina. The Japanese had been defeated, yes, but the former subjects of the Empire were imbued with a new sense of national consciousness. There was also a vigorous and well-armed Communist guerrilla movement, organised in the Malayan National Liberation Army. But, almost from the beginning, the British adopted a different strategy from the French. Instead of struggling against the tide of Malayan nationalism they worked with it, effectively separating and isolating the Communist Min Yuen from the rest of the national community.

When the British returned the old federated and unfederated Malay States were reorganised into a new Malayan Union. However, because of opposition from Malayan nationalists this was quickly replaced by the Federation of Malaya, returning power to many traditional rulers. The long-term British intention, moreover, was not, as in Indochina, to re-establish colonial authority on the old basis, but to hand over power to a non-Communist native government as soon as this was practicable. During the course of the Emergency, before full independence in 1957, Malayans became an increasingly important part of the bureaucracy, the army and the police. In effect the whole insurgency, it might be said, was being eaten away, from the inside out.

Ethnic divisions between the Muslim Malays and the Communist Chinese served to isolate the guerrilla campaign still further. In his counter-insurgency operations, General Gerald Templer made use of this 'ethnic fragmentation', resettling large numbers of Chinese squatters away from the forest fringes to New Villages, where they could be protected and kept under watch. Deprived of this essential base of logistical support, the number of guerrilla attacks dropped from 6000 in 1951 to 1000 in 1954, just as the strength of the Min Yuen army declined by half. In that same year, while the French were being defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the Malayan Communists were forced to retreat into Thailand. And that was the way to do it!