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April 13, 2019 - Steve Pieczenik

04:27

OPUS 140 History of Algerian War RAW

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	Hi, this is Dr.
	Buchanan.
	Today I want to talk about two events.
	One, President Macron of France apologized for the French killing of a million Rwandans when America did nothing at that particular point.
	Samantha Power said we were not complicit.
	In fact, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were very much complicit in the slaughter of a million Rwandans in 100 days.
	But the other thing that happened is even more important.
	Budaflaki, the head of Algeria, was taken out of power peacefully by the Algerians.
	He had been in power for 60 years and now was a man who was 83 and had to leave.
	What remains is a military junta with individuals who are powerful, but more importantly, the war in Algeria was a terrible war.
	I was not a direct Witness, but I was in Toulouse, France at the time that it occurred between 1954 and 1962.
	Over two to three million people were killed in that war, and it started with the FLN, A terrorist group in Algeria, primarily of Muslims, started to kill Algerian, what we call pied-noir, people who had lived in Algeria for hundreds of years, and Algeria was considered part of France.
	The war was just horrendous.
	There was torture on both sides, there was slaughter on both sides, and there was an incredible amount of killing that went on.
	In fact, the famous names that came out was General Salon France, who was portrayed in the Battle of Algiers, a famous movie, but it's not shown very often.
	And then there was Albert Camus, who was the famous writer, but he didn't do anything.
	Unfortunately, the FLN considered him to be kind of a moron.
	More importantly for me, as a psychiatrist, there was a man who came out from Martinique and actually was a theoretician.
	Of the Algerian War.
	His name was Franz Fannin.
	And he was a psychiatrist who talked about war and the dynamics of war and got me interested when I was a lot older.
	When the French came back, when the Algerians came back to France, they were called pied noirs, black feet, because the soil...
	In Algeria was a fertile soil.
	Included in that 1.2 million people who returned to Toulouse and Marseille and Montpellier and other places were my family, Sephardic Jews.
	So Christians and Sephardic Jews had left Algeria because their lives were at stake.
	What I saw in return was something quite interesting.
	Before there was the Vietnam War that we were involved in, I have seen the end of the Vietnam War in Dien Dien Phu in France, where the French were defeated and subsequently we were defeated.
	But unfortunately, this time around, I also saw explosions by the OAS, a French group of generals and colonels who fought against Charles de Gaulle.
	And what they did was to blow up places in Toulouse, Montpellier, and Marseille to try to depose de Gaulle because he was against the wishes of the generals who fought in Algeria and he wanted to give Algeria its complete freedom.
	In short, what I had been witness to was a constant Vietnam in France.
	Before we went into Vietnam, the French had had this history of constant battle.
	As warriors, they were not great soldiers.
	World War I, they were defeated.
	World War II, they were defeated.
	They were defeated in Vietnam.
	They were defeated in North Africa.
	But what they were known for was their ruthlessness when they came into their colonies.
	They were known to be incredibly ruthless.
	To example, the North Vietnamese.
	I remember when I negotiated with Premier Li Duc To over the peaceful treaties in Cambodia, I had asked the Premier of Vietnam, how did we Americans differ from the French in Vietnam and the treatment of the Vietnamese?
	He said, you Americans went to jail if you didn't come and serve in Vietnam.
	The French were totally different.
	They were ruthless.
	They belonged here.
	They thought they belonged here in Vietnam, and they killed many of us.
	In short, what I want to say is what one Frenchman once said in Algeria, and subsequently someone else repeated the same phrase in Rwanda.
	I shook hands with the devil, and I was wondering where God was.

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