De Gaulle’s France on the Road to Neutralism

Public opinion in the West seems to be indifferent to the shameful and bloody events that are taking place in Algeria. That an entire Christian and Jewish population of more than a million human beings, plus a considerable percentage of the Moslem population, should be turned over to a clique of bloodthirsty assassins; that in the countryside the triumphant FLN has slaughtered more than 10,000 Moslems friendly to France since the so-called cease-fire of March 18, and has been piling up murders and abductions in the cities; that the so-called “forces of order,” obeying the directives of the Paris government and now linked, through a monstrous complicity, to the FLN terrorists, are using inhuman methods of collective repression against the people of Algiers and Oran—machinegunning, killing and wounding women and children, systematically starving whole districts after the manner of the Nazis in Warsaw and the Communists in Budapest; that a territory with vast petroleum reserves and a strategic importance basic for the Mediterranean and all western Europe should be abandoned to a totalitarian force closely linked to Chinese and Russian Communism: all this seems neither to interest nor in the least degree alarm the “free world.”

Nevertheless it is not altogether paradoxical to suggest that for the security of the West, Algiers is at least as important as Vientiane, and North Africa at least as important as the little Laotian kingdom.

JS

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Jacques Soustelle

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Public opinion in the West seems to be indifferent to the shameful and bloody events that are taking place in Algeria. That an entire Christian and Jewish population of more than a million human beings, plus a considerable percentage of the Moslem population, should be turned over to a clique of bloodthirsty assassins; that in the countryside the triumphant FLN has slaughtered more than 10,000 Moslems friendly to France since the so-called cease-fire of March 18, and has been piling up murders and abductions in the cities; that the so-called “forces of order,” obeying the directives of the Paris government and now linked, through a monstrous complicity, to the FLN terrorists, are using inhuman methods of collective repression against the people of Algiers and Oran—machinegunning, killing and wounding women and children, systematically starving whole districts after the manner of the Nazis in Warsaw and the Communists in Budapest; that a territory with vast petroleum reserves and a strategic importance basic for the Mediterranean and all western Europe should be abandoned to a totalitarian force closely linked to Chinese and Russian Communism: all this seems neither to interest nor in the least degree alarm the “free world.”

Nevertheless it is not altogether paradoxical to suggest that for the security of the West, Algiers is at least as important as Vientiane, and North Africa at least as important as the little Laotian kingdom.