Permit me to preface my remarks with an explanation of how I came to this subject. Born and educated in part in the USA, my first contact with Algeria was through the work of Albert Camus. It was in The Stranger (L’Etranger, 1942) and the film adaptation by Luchino Visconti (1967), while an undergraduate, that I first found any sense for this country beyond its location on the map. Later I became acquainted with the story of the OAS and its attempt on the life of Charles de Gaulle, also dramatized among others based on a thriller by Frederick Forsythe.

Then I learned about the serious disagreement between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre on the question of Algerian independence and the war waged to decide it. Camus’s abrupt, accidental death ended his contribution to that debate. 

The next stage of my studies, in fact a continuation of my high school interest in military science, turned to an examination of anti-colonial liberation struggles, especially because of the French and US wars to maintain control over Indochina. I studied the way these wars were waged and lost.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Siege of Algiers, showed me what I subsequently found in the literature, namely the French lessons taught to US covert and overt forces in Vietnam. Roger Trinquier’s book on La Guerre Moderne (1961), an appreciation of the Algerian campaign in which he operated, was published in English by the US Army as a textbook for counter-insurgency. Several years ago, the publisher of the English translation of Zohra Drif’s Inside the Battle of Algiers (2013/2017) asked me to write a review. Toward the end of her book she recounts an interrogation by Trinquier after her arrest and before being sent to prison—where she remained until conclusion of the Evian accords. Since the book had been published long after Trinquier’s death, I wondered that there was no appreciation of her interrogator’s subsequent infamy. 

While I have not become an expert in Algerian history or current affairs, accidents of interest and research have directed my attention to Algeria on numerous occasions. Cultural history, the term I use to denote my research approach, includes questions of coincidence. While we often describe the similarities or divergence in historical events as the product of influence, I prefer to distinguish between two different explanations. 

The first is convergence. Humans as an animal species do have substantial biological similarities that enable or limit their range of behaviours. Therefore it ought not to be surprising that humans faced individually or collectively with roughly similar natural or artificial phenomena will respond within similar ranges of behaviour. The great difficulty of scientific investigation is to establish what precisely is the phenomenon to which any human is actually responding. 

The second is conversion. If humans transform the world by their actions, it is also true that limits are placed on their actions.

Left to their own devices, that is to say un-policed, the range of behaviour can expand to such a degree that conflicts arise among other humans. Because there is no immanent connection between the world and the languages we use to manipulate it, there is constant need for measures which limit behaviour by specifying and enforcing a range of response judged to be acceptable or tolerable. A political system is nothing more than a means for judging what behaviour is acceptable and tolerable as well as enforcing that judgement. A political system is essentially a means for judging what is meaningful, ought to be understood as meaningful, and enforcing those judgements to control the behaviour of those who live in that system. If humans create meaning by their actions in responding to the world, then political systems create shared meaning, judging the responses of its members and enforcing the meanings deemed essential to the system itself. That said the fundamental means by which a political system in the widest sense of the term becomes established is by classifying and ordering responses, convergent and divergent, to the world in which the system holds sway. On a daily basis it provides the redundancies for its members to judge their own appropriate responses and the behaviour associated with them. Hence a political system is at the same time a knowledge system since the act of appraising/ assessing phenomena to determine the appropriate response to it constitutes cognition—the basis of knowledge generation. In other words, a political system converts individual human responses into categories of responses that are then judged either to be acceptable or unacceptable or even intolerable. This body of acceptable or unacceptable responses and the means for judging individual or collective behaviour in accordance with what we shall call for convenience “law”—whether written or unwritten—is the material from which social knowledge is produced. It also includes the instruments for applying that knowledge and judging the result of such application.

Therefore to change a political system means altering the foundations of social knowledge, shared meaning, as well as possibly the means of enforcement. Political transformation is not a mechanical process because human societies are not machines, even if some machine attributes can be found in modern social formations. The German philosopher Hegel wrote of the transformation of the Geist, usually translated as “spirit”. However, the American philosopher and literary scholar, Morse Peckham, argued that a better translation of Geist is “culture”. Peckham applied the term “culture” in a far broader sense than is commonly used. “Culture” in Peckham’s definition constitutes “instructions for performance”. Humans learn what is expected of them from culture. This learning may be individualistic or collective, such as the difference between a personal clothing style and the requirement that certain dress be worn by men or by women. Politics in this sense is the action taken to maintain a functioning culture. Politics is also the means by which conflicts, disagreements, or merely ambiguities and ignorance about the application of those instructions or their due performance are resolved. When politics fails then the only means remaining for enforcing shared meaning is brute force. 

Image: Thomas Hobbes (Public Domain)

Thomas Hobbes might be considered the penultimate “modern” philosopher of “brute force” as the underlying and necessary result of political failure. His interpretation of the English Civil War (1642-1651) led him to assert that the political system must be equipped to prevent the “war of all against all” that only ended, in his view, with the brutal imposition of a new absolutist State. However Hobbes apology for absolutism elevates what was in fact the organized conflict in English culture to a principle, in fact derived from the theological propositions and contradictions of Christendom. His “state of nature” was a metaphorical application of the doctrine of the Fall. English “individualism”, a corollary to the Tudor rejection of papal supremacy, stood in sharp contradiction to the rigid papal hierarchy promulgated by the Latin Church. However, there was no such “state of nature” in reality. Neither party to the English Civil War rejected Christendom per se. Both Royalists and Parliamentarians considered themselves Christians upholding the true faith. As such the conflict was over the local (English) means for deciding disputes over the shared meaning both accepted as Christian doctrine.

As brutal as that war was, what made it civil was precisely the fact that the underlying belief system was not at issue. Rather the instruments for implementing it—for judging performance to be adequate—were challenged. Parliamentary supremacy in England can be understood as a principle equivalent to the dispute within the Latin Church itself as to whether the Roman pontiff was primus inter pares or the supreme authority in the Church. This conflict prevails today between the adherents to the Latin Rite and Orthodoxy. The ultimate restoration of the English monarchy and the established church with the monarch as its head proved the stability of the Christian character of British culture. It also disproved Hobbes hypothesis that such a doctrinal myth as the “state of nature” adequately described English society. In fact the Civil War could also be seen as a violent exercise that would “teach” Britain how to expand from the dominion of the British Isles to the imperium it would soon become. Unlike Spain, whose imperial expansion was explicitly guided by the mandate to convert the world to Christendom, Britain had until that point engaged merely in commercial adventure, i.e. piracy. The Civil War consolidated English power with Christian zeal. This can be seen best in the contrast between the English plantations in Virginia and Carolina and the theocratic colony of Massachusetts Bay, established by partisans of fanatical English Puritanism.

The war fought between Great Britain and its 13 North American colonies is sometimes called the American War of Independence but in the US it is more commonly called the American Revolution. The latter designation obscures more than it explains. When the French overthrew the Bourbon monarchy, the French aristocratic supporters of the Americans—especially the Marquis de Lafayette—clearly thought that the aim of the revolt was to achieve in France what the English Civil War had accomplished. However an entirely different process had begun in France. The Jacobins, as the vanguard of the French Revolution, did not want to establish a smoother, more consensual version of dynastic rule. They aimed to change the entire basis of the polity. They sought cultural transformation. Not only did they abolish the monarchy they removed the Latin Church from its privileged place in the country’s culture. Nothing of the sort had ever been contemplated in North America.

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Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, N.Y.C., depicting American patriots tearing down a statue of King George III in New York City on July 9, 1776, five days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. (Public Domain)

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When the US Constitution by amendment proclaimed that Congress would not establish a religion, it merely echoed the Puritan opposition to a single state church. Religious qualifications for suffrage continued well after the ratification. Whereas in France the State deprived the Latin Church of its authority to officiate marriage and other relations with civil consequences, the American republic established that clerical certification enjoyed the same authority as the acts of civil servants. The American republic denied citizenship to anyone who was not deemed “white”, i.e. of European descent. France—until the counter-revolution abolished slavery and extended French citizenship to anyone born in France or its overseas possessions. In fact, it was this very revolutionary difference that provoked the revolt in Saint Dominique (Haiti). With the defeat of the Jacobins (in no small way accelerated by British intervention), the nationalist universalism of French citizenship was repealed and the legal regime of slavery restored. Ironically it has been the misinterpretation of the unilateral declarations of independence in British North America that on one hand inspired revolution on the Continent and the reaction that forced Haiti into debt slavery that continues to this day.

The emergence of the US as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere can be understood best in theological terms. It presented the other colonies with a manifestation of the Lutheran “two swords” doctrine (Roman 13) rather than the laicist doctrine of Jacobin France. On one hand, the creole inhabitants seized the sword of the European colonizer—in the form of state independence. On the other hand, the sword of the economy was to be held by those whose commercial interest had funded the establishment of the colonies in the first place. Haiti would be permitted to enjoy formal sovereignty only if it indemnified all those slave owners who had been expropriated by the Jacobins, deposed in the metropolis but surviving in the new Black republic.

Meanwhile the revolutionary nation of the French embarked upon a campaign first to repel Hanoverian and Habsburg monarchists and then to transform the territories and subjects of those monarchies into citizens along the French model. Notwithstanding the restoration of autocratic and monarchical institutions under Napoleon and his successors, France retained almost uniquely the ideal of the universal national citizen. Although Prussia followed a regime of relative religious tolerance and equality of its subjects under the Hohenzollern dynasty, only revolutionary France had succeeded in establishing a republican citizenry as a collective political institution. The revolts that followed the restorations once Napoleon had been exiled to St. Helena were largely attempts to recreate the French ideal of the national citizen. The North American model was more often than not rejected because it failed to remove the clergy from government and it denied universal citizenship to its inhabitants.

In fact the popularity of the American republic for nascent revolutionaries had little to do with any revolutionary culture in the US. Instead the geographical isolation of the US and its relative weakness in the 19^th century made it a safe harbour for dissidents of all sorts until the beginning of the 20^th century. The American ruling elite, not unlike their British cousins, also understood the benefit of cultivating dissidents from abroad—as long as they played no part in domestic politics—as a valuable resource. The agents today associated with so-called “colour revolutions” are merely a more sophisticated version of the cadre trained and funded by the Christian missionary societies in Britain (and later with somewhat less success for the imperial service of other European states). Remarkably, France was often a destination for exiled North Americans, especially Black Americans.

Nationalism as a dominant element in modern culture was invented in France but quickly suppressed as a popular political instrument. Instead the wars that followed through to the Franco-Prussian War were essentially the political expression of industrialization. The regimentation of the population through universal military service was really a process of creating a population governed by industrial processes rather than those of popular politics. The US Civil War is a case in point. Officially a dispute about slavery, the war actually established the domination of the country by emergent industrial and financial cartels. To do this it was necessary to destroy the agriculture-based regime of the southern states. Not only were Southern political institutions destroyed but also massive transfers in the application of labour were imposed. Although the US never had an indigenous peasantry to be forcibly urbanized, it had what in English is called the yeomanry—the small and medium-sized farmer—and labour-intensive latifundia to be expropriated by economic and political means. Unlike in Europe the land-population ratio was such that even more labour was required than the defeated South could provide. Hence the US policy of relatively open immigration, imitated in Brazil for similar reasons after slavery was abolished there, was not intended to extend citizenship. Asians and Mexicans, who comprised the largest portion of the labour force west of the Mississippi River, were not included in the American nation at all. Asians, even those born in the US, were not eligible for citizenship until after the Second World War.

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A portrait depicting the Battle of Antietam, which resulted in over 22,000 casualties, the Civil War’s deadliest one-day battle (Public Domain)

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It was the Great War that gave impetus to the myth of the American melting pot, the metaphor for synthetic American nationality open to (almost) anyone who made it to the shores of North America. Only then did a latter day version of Napoleonic citizenship emerge in the republic—and for the same reasons.

The decision by the Anglo-American elite to save Britain and their investments in the 1914 war required that recent immigrants be integrated as Americans and severed from whatever cultural loyalties they retained with the countries and peoples they had left behind.

Practically speaking, sending a recent German immigrant in Wisconsin to the western front to kill Germans could only be rationalized if that immigrant was wholly American and no longer in the tiniest way identified with family and ancestors in the enemy nation. This feat could not be accomplished merely by issuing a citizenship certificate. More was needed. The US government created the Committee on Public Information, aka the Creel Committee, to promote the war effort covertly. One of its key strategies was to instil a new sense of nationalism and patriotism strong enough to overcome the cultural foundations among the disparate immigrant communities. This effort, coordinated with similar covert activities in the British Empire, included the use of every available medium. The beginning of covert government support to the film and publishing industries can be fairly dated with the start of the Great War in Britain and the US decision to join the British Empire against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Until this time, nationalism was concentrated in marginal groups or the middle classes who supplied the bulk of the officer corps in the civil and military services. The Creel Committee, a combination of civil service officials and Business executives, merged government propaganda with the mass media industries creating what Stuart Ewan called the “captains of consciousness”. Industrialization was led by the captains of industry, who turned masses of agricultural labourers and petty artisans into interchangeable parts in the great factories. These armies were then “nationalized” by means of the rapid developments in psychic technology. Their bodies were disciplined by the machines in which they worked. Now their minds would be disciplined by the mass media they consumed. The particular framework for this discipline was nationalism because this was rationale for the reorganization of the empires under attack. The British psychological operations aimed to cultivate vigorous nationalisms in Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and to isolate the relatively homogeneous German Empire. US psychological operations aimed to turn a heterogeneous population comprising mainly European immigrants and their descendants into a synthetic nation—aided by the sheer geographical isolation the US enjoyed—that could be mobilized at war against the “Old World”.

It is therefore no accident that the leading modern nationalists have come from the Western hemisphere or alternatively from militarized movements. The success of the US nationalist or national patriotic project, unlike its French alternative, has relied on the power of this industrial synthesis and geographical isolation. Moreover to the extent that in the Western hemisphere indigenous cultures were either extinguished or marginalized, it was not only conceivable but also imperative to imagine nations without previous cultural content. The history of Haiti, Trinidad, Guyana, Martinique, and Jamaica engendered national identities on the basis of settler/ slave populations equally isolated. Kwame Nkrumah’s nationalism and Pan-Africanism have clearly identifiable references to political concepts from the Western hemisphere. 

Image: Kwame Nkrumah

While there can be no doubt that the thought and actions of anti-colonialists like Garvey, du Bois, Rodney and Fanon were based on careful analysis of the conditions of colonization in Africa, the concepts of African nationalism that have been derived from their critique presume material and psychological conditions in no way comparable to those by which nationalism was invented and manufactured in North America or attempted in revolutionary France. This criticism has been explained by showing that Africa has been systematically underdeveloped and thus deprived of economic sovereignty. It has also been argued convincingly that the retention of colonial institutions, especially in education, inhibits national development. Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism, frustrated at every turn by overt and covert operations, was based on a federal model like that of the US. US federalism is usually interpreted as evidence of a nationalism capable of integrating virtually any amount of diversity, whether ethnic, religious, and even language. The creation of US colonial and territorial borders was also not intrinsically consistent with the demography of any particular cultural community. Hence it is understandable that the US, as opposed to any European federal entity, would serve as a model. 

Continuous US and European efforts to maintain or manage the political configuration of Africa and its constituent states notwithstanding, the attempts to create a federation of African states, comparable to the US or EU have failed because of a more fundamental incoherence, one obscured in large part by a misunderstanding of nationalism and the production of the modern nation-state. Neither the US nor the EU would have been possible in their current forms without massive wars. These wars were waged in the obvious manner of asymmetrical or reciprocal mass murder. However the modern warfare that created the Atlantic nation-state was always also psychological. Rapidly enhanced lethality was complemented by intensified manipulation of consciousness.

Cultural convergence can explain how many anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists sought solutions to the pathology of domination by the Atlantic powers. Even those who led the first successful overthrow of a slaveholder regime in Haiti were able to theorize an alternative political regime far away from Paris or Boston. Shackled arms and legs, whipped backs, raped women, do not need the influence of distant intellectuals to imagine their liberation. The viability of options will be tested until the theory matches the result or it is possible to theorize the result itself.

Political transformation, regardless of its character, requires a change in the cultural foundations of the society. That is because a transformation will give inception to different ways of knowing and judging what counts as social knowledge. The content of Atlantic style nationalism is inseparable from the industrialization of war for which it was invented. Industrialization is too often seen merely as a phase in human development, a stage in the march of human progress. The imperatives of industrialization were political and cultural. Eric Williams argued that without slavery in the Caribbean Britain would not have had the surplus to industrialize. Andre Gunder Frank argued further that industrialization in the West was compelled by the chronic shortage of labour and only became profitable after the manufacturing in labour-intensive countries like India had been suborned or destroyed. This leads to the question how industrialization and the industrial nation-state can be viewed as progress when it could only be produced by impoverishing or annihilating disproportionately large portions of the world’s population?

If instead of perceiving industrial development as a universal historical stage on the way to human salvation (secularized Christian dogma), it is recognized as a historically specific form of cultural reproduction, then industrialization is not the invention of the steam engine or the aeroplane but the rigid, centralized reorganization of human society into urban machines. It is a specific technological process for changing the basis of human knowing and hence ultimately a cultural transformation of which the steel or silicon machines are the exoskeleton.

The inability to model other parts of the world, especially what was once called the Third World, into stable, “modern” nation-states, nurtured by some nationalist ideology, is not a defect. Nor is it merely a result of legacy cartography or sustained economic parasitism. More simply it is the lack of psychic technology sufficient to sustain the culture of a nation-state with its patriotic accoutrements. That technology was developed in the Atlantic basin, first by the Latin Church with its missionary deployment through the Iberian adventurers. Then the British and Americans fundamentally industrialized this technology. The proprietary monopoly is enforced by the control exercised globally over the consciousness industry (consumer goods, entertainment, drugs, mass and social media). Financial and military power assures this control too. The technological matrix is designed to reproduce and if necessary modify consciousness, to saturate lived experience with “instructions for performance”, with culture that is consistent with the limits of what increasingly is a universe defined by digital code, both implicit and explicit.

Perhaps the most frequently advocated alternative to this unattainable “nation-state” status is a supra-national political form. In this debate, both the supposed virtues of the United Nations and the supposed evils of nationalism are opposed to each other. Since the official end of colonialism in Africa (more or less) the frustration of national sovereignty and integrity on the continent ought to be ended by abolishing the very privilege of national sovereignty in favour of global governance, presumably with global citizenship but conspicuously without any global suffrage. This hypocrisy is understandable. As Michael Manley once made clear, the United Nations organizations were created by the colonial powers, reluctantly including the Soviet Union, with no serious intention to end the prevailing hierarchy of global power. Like the League of Nations, it was a victors’ club. The only “nationalisms” to be tolerated were those in the Security Council. Every subsequent effort to change the technological base for that power structure, let alone the economic foundations, has been frustrated or utterly obstructed. The MacBride Report (UNESCO, 1980) was buried because it dared to suggest that the Atlantic stranglehold on information media be removed. The intensity with which so-called “intellectual property” is horded by those same powers is further testimony to the importance psychic technology has for control over the global consciousness markets.

However “nationalism” is defined today by societies organized to preserve their sovereignty and self-determination, it cannot be expected to function if understood as mere state-organized patriotism or forced political unity. No later than 1990 did it become obvious that even the territorial boundaries set by the Atlantic imperial powers or conceded by them at the end of World War II can be violated at will or dissolved by command. The language of the Balkans, taught until 1991 as Serbo-Croatian, distinguished by being written in both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, became two languages, Serbian and Croatian after the leaders in Zagreb declared unilateral independence from the Yugoslav Federation. Borders that no anti-colonial leader was allowed to change in the 1960s are now redrawn routinely to create new “nations”. In other words, this is no idle academic controversy. New nations are being made by deployment of firearms and psychological weapons. The idea of “nation” and “nationalism” itself are technologies in this psychological arsenal. They aim to capture consciousness and with it the way of knowing humans need to survive. Any society with the aspiration to protect and promote its citizens must understand the range and force of such psychic technology and the consequences of its use.

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