”The battle of Algiers”

Conflict is competition by groups or individuals over incompatible goals, limited resources, or the sources of power desired to acquire them. This rivalry is also determined by individuals' perception of goals, resources, and power, and such perceptions may differ deeply among individuals (Avruch, pp147). The Battle of Algiers was created based on events during the Algerian Revolution that led to Algeria's independence from France in 1962. As Algerian insurgents plant bombs, demonstrate in the streets, and plan their next moves, the French army attempts to stop them by figuring out and dismantling the terrorists' operation system (Docherty, pp365).

Since the late '60s, whenever the issues of colonialism, terrorism, insurgency, and torture have come up every couple years, basically The Battle of Algiers has come up, too. The movie depicts some of the events that led to Algeria gaining independence from France, and does so in stark, realistic fashion. But the film's messages apply not just to the Algerian War but to war in general, and especially to conflicts between the occupied and their occupiers. In 1962, the North African nation of Algeria gained its independence from France after eight years of cultural violent conflict, ending the foreign control that had been in place since 1830. The 1960s were to be a decade of revolutions, uprisings, and hard-won reforms all over the world, and several other African countries had recently declared independence from their European occupiers (mostly France and Britain).

The issue of torture and cultural conflict in “The Battle of Algiers” is one of the regime in charge, the French, abusing the members of the FLN to gain potentially important information about the group and how to take them down. During the discussion after the film Professor Brown mentioned that the speech by Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu was eerily similar to ones made by United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made when he defended water boarding and torture of terrorists. It seems as though the Bush administration had the same position that the French counter insurgence had, that the torture was to protect the safety and well being of the people at large (Bourdieu, pp81).

The most obvious relation to recent political events is the depiction of a struggling group of people, in this case the Algerians, to the dominate regime, the French colonial powers. Like in the film, the governments that have been toppled in Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya used extreme force to try to stop the rebellion for freedom and independence. The people of those countries, as those before them in Algeria, united under the oppression of a regime they no longer wished to be a part of. In the same way the French responded with force and sometimes acts of violence the former regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and currently Syria all committed acts of terrible nature which further supported the cause of the peoples who were revolting.

The people who were involved in the Arab Spring now have the difficult task ahead of forming a ...