Urban Guerilla Warfare at its Most Intense

I first saw "The Battle of Algiers" in Berkeley in 1971. It was one of the free movies being offered at the NCCF, later ICCF's collective house in west Berkeley. For those of you not familiar with the history of 60s and early 70s radicals and revolutionaries, NCCF stood for National Committee to Combat Fascism and was the white radical group that was aligned with the Black Panthers (the Bobby Seale-Huey Newton faction). They joined with the Panthers, especially the West Berkeley branch of the Black Panthers for such things as the Community Control of Police Initiative, which even in Berkeley failed by a 3 to 1 margin. Later they changed their name to Intercommunal Committee to Combat Fascism based on Huey Newton's theory of Intercommunalism which one of them tried to explain to me once but I never completely understood. Suffice to say if a movie was shown at the ICCF house (admission was always free) it had a revolutionary message and Battle of Algiers was certainly that. It was almost a textbook exploration of urban guerilla warfare, how the cells of the FLN were formed (groups of three so that any captured guerilla could only betray two others at most), to the internal workings of the French anti-guerilla effort, to the most amazing confrontation in the movie, the scene where some FLN guerillas are surrounded by French forces and offer to surrender by lowering a basket containing their guns out the window. They are hoping to entice the French general to pick up the guns himself but at the last minute he sends a sergeant to get the basket, and, of course, it is a bomb. Aware that they are going to die one of the guerillas says to his fellows, "at least we got that bastard." In light of the recent attack on the American destroyer in Yemen, I think of Pacino's statement in Godfather II that he knew the rebels would win in Cuba when he saw one of them give up his life just to kill one of Batista's soldiers. That and the fact that Algeria is still one of the most dangerous places on earth suggests to me that this is a very important film and we would be wise to pay attention.