Domhnall

Napoleon's occupation of Egypt sparked a fascination with the so called Orient and a lust for its wealth and resources but strangely no corresponding understanding or respect for the Islamic culture of the region. Still, the French gained no lasting legacy from the episode, so when they set about an unprovoked and entirely vicious invasion of Algeria in 1830, seeking a more lasting material acquisition, they brought with them the policies of extreme violence, genocide, dispossession and colonisation which they learned from America's approach to their native Indians.

Over the following century, the dregs of Southern Europe were enabled by French arms to steal houses, land and businesses across a swathe of North Africa, reducing the native Muslim Arabs and Berbers to a wholly marginal and deprived status in countries where they were hardly even allowed to be citizens. The colonists themselves and the French authorities imposed their will through levels of barbarity that are still shocking, and this remained true through to modern times, provoking perfectly plausible comparison with the behaviour of the Nazis in WW2.

The French ran their empire for the benefit of their colonists and invested little in the education and improvement of the "native" peoples. The proud French tradition of "secularism" became and remains a valuable tool by which to make it very hard to participate in public life without abandoning the Muslim faith, something which was of course impossible without also sacrificing family and community. When even this monstrous empire lost its capacity to terrorise the people into continued submission, the French withdrew in a manner that left new regimes poorly equipped to govern, largely still amenable to military and other backing from the French, with economies that were wrecked and remained dependent on French business interests. The French, in other words, simply and cynically turned to neocolonial methods to sustain their strategic control, a process that persists to this day.

Huge numbers of North Africans found their way into France itself during and after the empire, and were required as relatively unskilled and pliable labour for French industry. However, their marginal status within France was reflected in effectively segregated housing on estates outside Paris and other cities or towns. The failure of France to accommodate them properly in French society has been responsible for a level of alienation and frank hostility which, today, represents a dangerous threat to social order. The response to French racism is not always a humble desire for integration in a secular and multi-cultural society, something that has never been offered or achievable, but rather a growing sense that the muslim people have their own culture which they prefer.

Of the millions of French Muslims, it is perfectly clear that most simply aspire to live decent lives and to make their own way in life. Racism makes that hard though. It is not surprising that alienated and disadvantaged Muslims turn to crime and violence. Some 70% of the population of French prisons are thought to be Muslims. It is also the case that a number of terrorist outrages have now been committed by Muslims in France, as well as other countries. The pornographic nature of some of the violence has seemingly shocked Europeans and Americans, as though it represents some inhuman perversion. This is nonsense of course, since the French have been responsible for orgies of obscene violence against "their Arabs" throughout the past century and unsurprisingly they have provoked orgies of obscene violence in retaliation. To some extent, this book suggests that the nature of the violence in recent terrorist acts is shaped by a desire of aggressive young men to impress their peers, in a way that has little to do with political, let alone religious ideology. But the reality is that violence has been prevalent across French territories in North Africa ever since the first invasion of Algeria and it is nothing new for either the French authorities, their colonists, or their enemies.

The writer effectively mocks efforts by "liberal" and "progressive" movements on the Left to empathise with the liberation struggles in various parts of the former empire. Typically they have been based on absolute ignorance of the real conditions. The North African, Muslim experience of Western values of Left or Right, of modernity, of democracy, of Liberal values, is entirely negative - in fact, it is associated with the most extreme forms of brutality and oppression. The idea that the liberated peoples of North Africa will now struggle to achieve a modern, open democratic society is probably unrealistic and even deluded. What Left and Right in the West need to get to grips with is that the Islamic world has its own values and culture and will seek to develop in accordance with quite different principles.

Unfortunately, what those values and principles are to be is seriously contested, and a major threat to the region is the Saudi funded spread of the extremist, puritan Wahhabi version of Islam. To a lare extent, its appeal is the complement to the challenges from Western values as these have been expressed in practice. What also needs to be more apparent is that the Western imperialist project is not yet defeated and has merely changed its style and approach, remaining very powerful and even in control of key institutions.

It really is time for Western citizens to discard their wide eyed innocence about the effects of empire and racism and about the continuing violence that is neocolonialism. The "liberal values" which the West takes such pride in are not benign, but poisonous and oppressive in the extreme. This is not to say that the ideals of democracy and tolerance lack value but that they are only ideals until people engage more seriously with the political and social transformation required to make them a possibility even in the West. As for Europe's [let alone France's] mission to civilise the world, it is time this was put to rest as the genocidal and racist project it always was.

This book stops at 2013 but does not suggest for a moment that history has ended there.

During this period the term 'mission civilisatrice' entered the French language and by the end of the Nineteenth Century it had passed into common usage as a justification for French military activity in Algeria. The background to this ideological development was an address to the French Parliament in 1882 by the republican politician and journalist Jules Ferry. He famously asserted: 'We must believe that Providence deigned to confer upon us a mission by making us masters of the earth, and this mission consists not of attempting an impossible fusion of races but of simply spreading or awakening among the other races the superior notions of which we are guardians." [p112]

The rapper Abd al Malik has devoted a song on his latest album to Celine. 'Celine revolutionised literature because he was very close to real people, like us rappers today ... That's generally a good thing, but there's a danger about being so close to the people; you can start to embrace all the things that are wrong with society." [P30]

The French were really only deluding themselves, as George Orwell had noted in his diary while convalescing in Marrakesh... 'When you walk throguh a town like this -- two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in - when you see how people live and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact... How long can we keep on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?" [p291]