Response to The Battle of Algiers Can violence ever be justified? This is always a thorny question. During the peaceful era, the answer seem to be rather straightforward— in order to achieve social harmony, no violence should be justified. However, when situation complicates, it seem to be hard to give such a simple reply. After reading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and watching the Battle of Algiers, I think, in the colonial context, it is justifiable for the colonized to use violence in pursuit of liberty for three reasons: first the colonial government is not illegitimate; second, the colonial government deprived the colonized of their natural resources and violated their both natural and civil rights; third, the colonial government
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The original goal of having a colony is to gain resources, to expand global market, and most importantly, to ensure superiority of the colonizers. Therefore, they make a clear distinction between the natives and the colonizers and use every signification to assert their supremacy. Fanon delineated this exact phenomenon in the Wretched of the Earth. He wrote that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world, …, a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border is represented by the banacks and the police station.” We can also see that in the Battle of Algiers. In the film, the native sector, where Ali and all the other FNL live, is crowed, dilapidated, and depressed. The native sector is filled with hungry and poor people, and the public facilities are shabby. On the contrast, the colonist’s sector has all kinds of fashion facilities. There’re club, cafe, and bank. The colonist sector is “a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things”(Fanon, 4). The colonized cannot step into the colonist’s sector without a government issued paper, and whoever breaks the rule will be punished by the authority (1:17:00). According to those, we can see that, in essence, the colonizer never wants the colonized acquire the same right as they do. They don’t want to share their benefit with the natives, and consequently, colonized can never enjoy the same civil right as the colonizer
The original goal of having a colony is to gain resources, to expand global market, and most importantly, to ensure superiority of the colonizers. Therefore, they make a clear distinction between the natives and the colonizers and use every signification to assert their supremacy. Fanon delineated this exact phenomenon in the Wretched of the Earth. He wrote that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world, …, a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border is represented by the banacks and the police station.” We can also see that in the Battle of Algiers. In the film, the native sector, where Ali and all the other FNL live, is crowed, dilapidated, and depressed. The native sector is filled with hungry and poor people, and the public facilities are shabby. On the contrast, the colonist’s sector has all kinds of fashion facilities. There’re club, cafe, and bank. The colonist sector is “a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things”(Fanon, 4). The colonized cannot step into the colonist’s sector without a government issued paper, and whoever breaks the rule will be punished by the authority (1:17:00). According to those, we can see that, in essence, the colonizer never wants the colonized acquire the same right as they do. They don’t want to share their benefit with the natives, and consequently, colonized can never enjoy the same civil right as the colonizer