One of the jewels in the crown of fine television here in New York is Professor Jerry Carlson's City Cinematheque. For several years now, Professor Carlson has been providing access (followed by fine commentary) to the best from the archive of foreign film. During the month of March, Professor Carlson selected a fascinating group of films from Algeria. The latest in the series, Merzak Allouache's Bab El-Oued City, tells the story of a young baker living in the section of Algiers from which the film takes its title. Early on in the war in Iraq, it was revealed that U.S. generals were being treated to viewings of Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. They would do well to add Bab El-Oued City to their list of essential viewing.
What Bab El-Oued City reveals is the oppressive nature of living under an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Yet, subtly, without lecturing the viewer, this and others of Allouache's work reveals the primary source of this trend in Algeria, and, by extension, in much of the post-colonial Muslim world. In a word--the disinvestment by the U.S. and the European powers in any newly liberated nation that chose either a socialist or even an independent path. "Disinvestment" may be too mild a word. What this film makes clear is that the price of independence for many of the former colonies was a brutal and punishing economic isolation and abandonment. After milking their colonies of wealth for decades, the American and European former masters supported the most reactionary elements in these societies and thereby short-circuited any hope of evolving secular states.
During the Cold War, the natural tendency of many former colonies was to look to the Soviet Union for help. The case of our current bete noire, Iran, provides a perfect example of Western paranoia when faced with the prospect of a secular leader taking the reins of leadership in a former colony. The removal of Mossadeqh in Iran (1953) established a pattern that would be followed again and again.
As I say, one cannot watch Bab El-Oued City without experiencing a sense of outrage at the oppressive nature of what we have recently labelled Islamo-fascism. Even those most sympathetic to Muslim culture and to its treatment at the hands of Western nation states could not deny that many Muslims live under regimes that are dead end economically, intellectually and even spiritually, particularly for women. Yet, though the behavior of some Muslim males toward women rankles our sense of justice, (to put it mildly), Merzak Allouache shows how a complete absence of economic opportunity and grinding poverty leaves the men feeling helpless, impotent and therefore intensely angry. The candor in his work has forced him in many cases to make his films surreptitiously in the streets of what was once his home community.
One telling sequence in the film depicts the young baker's fascination with a woman who has been labelled a pariah in the city. Her sins are to live alone, to have a university education, to drink wine, and to have a past as a Marxist revolutionary during Algeria's struggle for independence. By the time the film nears its conclusion, we find this woman looking down the barrel of a gun aimed at her by an Islamic fanatic. Ultimately, both she and the young man leave Algeria, perhaps to carve out a new life in the very nation that once oppressed them.
The enemy of an enemy is never really a friend. The Harvard and Yale educated masters of covert operations here in this country as well as their counterparts in other allied capitals displayed an adolescent arrogance that they raised to moronic and puerile levels appropriate to James Bond movies perhaps, but not to policies that actually affect the lives of human beings. The only sector for whom their various "capers" were actually covert were the American and European peoples who were innocent enough to believe that they lived in democracies where "open covenants openly arrived at" ruled the day.
They were innocent enough, too, to plaintively ask in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, "Why are these people so angry? What do they want?" If the United States had spent a fraction of the trillions of dollars we have spent on security measures and illegal wars overseas on assisting the peoples of what was once called the Third World, a "9/11" would never have occurred. One year's military budget in Iraq could have transformed the lives of Palestinians and served as a message that we care more about people than we do oil or an insane need to illustrate that we are willing to bring high tech hellfire out of the skies on any who cross us.
The Cold War is not over because the Cold War mentality still dominates the American and many European mentalities. Our main competitor for the hearts and minds of the world's lesser powers is no longer a player. What this early post-Cold War behavior is revealing is that it was never as much about "defeating Communism" as we were asked to believe. Our way or the highway? All roads lead to Washington? The yellow arches covering the entire globe? Sad.