“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language….In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”
Karl Marx wrote these words in 1851, while he watched, in horror, as the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte cannibalized the Revolution of 1848, spitting it out as the body of the Second Empire. In the whole of Marx’s writings, there are few phrases more elegant, more lyrical, than the one with which he launched his attack on the forces that supported the Bonapartist counterrevolution, the one from which this blog takes its title: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” This phrase, so evocative of the punishing burden of the historical past—literally, the dead weight of history—appears in The Eighteeenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as the dialectical negation of that equally poetic line, from the Manifesto, where Marx and Engels described the revolutionary capacity of capitalism to reveal the truth of proletarian exploitation: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” In the first instance, the bourgeoisie rips the halos off every anointed head; in the second, it brings them crashing back down. There is little doubt that Bonaparte’s coup was a turning point for Marx; and, indeed, the Brumaire marks a moment of transition in his work, a step away from the almost naïve faith that capitalism would, by its own interior logic, reveal itself in its gory monstrosity. Instead, in the Brumaire, we find Marx convening with the spirits; a séance staged in the hope of betraying its secret. Forced to watch the old ghosts walk again, Marx does his best to strip them of their sheets.
While the Brumaire is primarily occupied by an analysis of the political relations that facilitated Bonaparte’s rise to power, its opening passages are often read as a forthright rejection of the sort of political pageantry that found Louis Bonaparte staging his coup on the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation. This reading is more or less confirmed by Marx’s injunction that the “social revolution of the nineteenth century must not take its poetry from the past but from the future.” Such conclusions are qualified, however, by the very language in which Marx makes his point. “The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.” The important turn of phrase, here, is “let the dead bury their dead,” a very direct reference to a well-known passage from the Gospel of St. Mark. After castigating the nephew for masquerading as the uncle, and mocking Luther for “donning the guise” of St. Paul, Marx goes one better, taking up the words of Christ himself. In critiquing the abuse of history in the service of political ends, Marx goes to the ostensible heart of the Western political tradition, hijacking it at its root. This is, in essence, a far more dramatic echo of the famous opening line of the Brumaire, where Marx sets up his critique of historical ventriloquism by attributing, to Hegel, a point that—as far as anyone can figure out—Hegel never actually made. At the very moments in which we find Marx at his most caustic, in other words, his argument turns back on itself, leaving his words pregnant with an explosive potentiality. Rather than rejecting history, Marx subjects it to a withering critique and, in so doing, disrupts its otherwise normative orientation.
The reference to St. Mark offers a particular apt example of this procedure. In Mark, Jesus uses these words in response to a potential disciple, a man who asks to bury his father before taking up Christ’s mission. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has pointed out—though he was certainly not the first to recognize it—this is one of the most inconvenient injunctions within the Christian gospels, one that has been quite deliberately misconstrued in order to mute its overwhelmingly anarchistic thrust. As he appears in Mark, Jesus takes an exceedingly harsh line on tradition, everywhere rejecting customary forms of social obligation as impediments on the path to the Divine. This, of course, became a problem for Christianity as it began, over time, to calcify into its own body of traditions, customs, and duties. This aspect of Jesus’ ministry has, as such, been minimized, enveloped by the far more congenial story of the Holy Family, the Three Wise Men, and the Baby in the Manger. By casually referencing the passage from Mark, however, Marx calls attention to its negative force, conscripting its power to his critical project. Jesus’ abrasiveness within the historical tradition in which he is embedded becomes, in this instance, the model for the way Marx proposes to rub history against itself, seeking out those very aspects of the historical past that militate against their political ossification. The tradition of the dead generations, after all, is no anodyne dream; it is a nightmare, sundering the subject from herself, and the tradition in which she moves.
The Algerian revolution occupies a roughly analogous position in relation to many historical traditions, even, of course, unto itself. Like any revolutionary movement, the Algerian revolution was composed of different factions, and while all of these factions were motivated by similar questions and conditions, each sought to realize somewhat different ends. From the perspective of contemporary Algerian politics, perhaps the most significant of these divisions were between those who were actively engaged in the struggle against French colonialism in Algeria, and those who directed the revolution from outside the country, as part of the exiled FLN leadership. In the aftermath of the revolution, as FLN leaders returned from Tunisia and Libya and settled down into business of building the postcolonial state, longstanding tensions between these factions were overlaid with far more general tensions between those who had advocated the development of a secular, socialist nation, and those who envisioned a nation united by Islam. From the 1970s into the 1980s, opponents to the single-party rule of the FLN often expressed their desire for democratic reform through the language of Islam, culminating, in the late 80s, with the formation of the Front Islamique du Salut—the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS. The FIS claimed to represent the redemption of the revolution from its socialist misrepresentation, and, by the early 1990s, the party could claim significant support among Algerians. When national elections in 1992 revealed the full extent of this support, the military effectively annulled the results, leading to a wave of guerilla reprisals that helped plunge the country into civil war.
Contemporary struggles over the Algerian state have often taken the shape of debates over the nature and legacy of the revolution, yet this debate is of a qualitatively different nature than the historical pageantry Marx so vociferously condemned. Both the FLN and the FIS have a legitimate claim to the Algerian revolutionary tradition, after all; it exists for both parties as the very cause of their politics, the thing that divides the nation from itself and is, thus, the condition of its historical dynamic. This is not, however, to say that such pageantry does not exist. To find the old ghosts of the Algerian revolution, one need look no farther than the secondary literature on the revolution, a good portion of which has dedicated itself to the interests of international policymakers. One of the most conspicuous offenders, in this regard, is Sir Alistair Horne, the English historian of France whose A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 remains—despite some rather obvious failings—an invaluable source on the events, course, and players of the revolution. Initially published in 1977, Horne’s work is marked by a moderate aristocratic bearing that surfaces, most powerfully, in his racialist assessments of Arab personality and political orientation, and in his vaguely apologetic attitude toward French colonialism. While, on the whole, Horne’s account of the conflict between French authorities, pieds noirs, and native Algerians is remarkably evenhanded, this has not kept it from being imbued with the designs and desires of a new generation of empire-builders. Horne, for his part, has responded to later crises in the greater Muslim world by recommending his work as a primer on “regional” dynamics. While admitting certain differences of context, Horne nonetheless ended the 2006 preface to his history with a perfectly clumsy comparison: “After all the hopes generated for a free, happy and prosperous Algeria at Evian in 1962, within years of the departure of the French Army she was tearing herself apart in the most senseless and bloody civil war (between fellow Muslims) of recent times. Does much more need to be said about the relevance of Algeria’s Savage War to contemporary Iraq?” Well…actually, yes.
Horne was not alone in looking to the Algerian revolution for lessons that could be applied to the War on Terror. Although he was kept out of foreign policy circles in the initial years of the Iraq war, Horne eventually scored an invitation to the White House, where he met with George W. Bush in 2007. While it is likely that this meeting had more to do with burnishing the historical reputation of Bush’s flagging presidency than it did with questions of policy, this degree of access speaks to the breadth of Horne’s influence. Although it was written some thirty years ago, in response to an entirely different political situation, Horne’s work has been, nonetheless, widely touted by both advocates and critics of Bush’s Iraq war strategies. In their rush to locate these lessons, however, meaningful social, cultural, political, and economic differences between Algeria and Iraq have been swept away in a tide of Orientalist fantasies. In his review of the 2006 reissue, Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post wrote that “‘Algeria’ has become a…shorthand for the depth and complexity of the mess we face in Iraq….” Apparently, this bit of irony was entirely unconscious. (How does one find a “shorthand” for “depth and complexity”?) Neither he, nor the military commanders to whom he referred, were alone. When a new print of The Battle of Algiers was released in 2004, it was widely publicized as an allegory for Iraq; most press releases also mentioned the fact that it had been screened at the Pentagon in the summer of 2003, as the Iraqi insurgency was beginning. Perhaps the most pathetic episode in the strange history of such revisionism came when Richard A. Clarke, the former federal counter-terrorism adviser, led a panel of other experts in a roundtable on the lessons of the revolution. Rather than acknowledging the moral righteousness of the Algerian cause, the debate revolved around the question of how the French could have won the battle of Algiers. Should you want to witness this travesty, the discussion is included as an extra on the most recent DVD release of Pontecorvo’s film.
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