“The Battle of Algiers” and Perspectives of Terror

Today I watched the classic 1966 French film “The Battle of Algiers” (available on YouTube). It’s about the urban uprising in the city of Algiers between 1954-1957 during the French-Algerian war when the people of Algeria where trying to overthrow the yoke of French colonization.

But what interested me most was the comparison of “The Battle of Algiers” with another picture I saw this week, “Zero Dark Thirty.” In “The Battle of Algiers,” the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) is a terror organization who is pitted against the antagonistic French paratrooper force who uses torture and heavy-handed methods to root out the FLN’s leaders and temporarily put down the movement. But, whereas in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the protagonists are the United States’ CIA who has to use torture to get the information they need to find and kill the enemy terror group’s leader, Osama bin Laden.

So just remember that one group’s terrorists are another group’s freedom fighters.