>
> Got together tonight with the Kansas City anarchists and wacthed the
> Battle of Algiers.
>
> The similarities to the situation in contemporary Iraq are uncanny.
>
> It will be interesting to see how quickly the US is defeated in Iraq and
> pulls out.
> Fuck the troops
No, Chuck fuck Wolfowitz, Perle', Bush, Rumsfeld and all the other militarists that sent the troops there. Contact Military Families Speak Out. Whatever Stan Goff's shortcomings (a weakness for 9-11 conspiranoia, http://www.apfn.org/apfn/wtc_media.htm he knows the successes of the GI movement component of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The Pentagon's Film Festival A primer for The Battle of Algiers. By Charles Paul Freund Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003, at 4:59 PM PT http://slate.msn.com/id/2087577/ A column in the Washington Post reported http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A45136- 2003Aug25¬Found=true yesterday that the Pentagon's special operations chiefs have decided to screen The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 classic film of urban terrorist insurgency, for Pentagon employees on Aug. 27. The decision to show Algiers, David Ignatius writes, is "one hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq." He even quotes from a Pentagon flier about the movie:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.
It's welcome news that the military is thinking creatively about the American role in Iraq, but the lessons and pleasures of The Battle of Algiers are a lot more ambiguous than this Pentagon blurb implies. To praise the film for its strategic insights is to buy into the 1960s revolutionary mystique that it celebrates; it is the collapse of that very mystique that has contributed to the film's current obscurity and made screenings "rare.
-- Michael Pugliese