Election posters of Marine Le Pen, French National Front (FN) and Emmanuel Macron, head of the political movement En Marche. Picture by Alfred Yaghobzadeh/ABACAPRESS.COM. All rights reserved. When we see or hear evil we have a moral imperative to call it out. Otherwise evil seeps into our narrative, our media, our politics and our lives. The words uttered by Marine Le Pen – France’s presidential candidate on the eve of one of the most important elections in Europe – insisting that colonialism was a positive thing, are so fundamentally wrong. To then further precise that in Algeria in particular it was beneficial is an incitement to hatred, a blatant lie and the worst form of fascism that we now face in Europe.
The actual denial of France’s painful history in Algeria goes even beyond the amnesia of British colonialism. For young French people who are denied the truth about their past, actively lied to, this is a crime. And it is particularly so for the descendants of the Algerians in France, including for the pied noir families, who were all victim to this cruel and barbaric regime which ran for 132 years until 1962.
In the May 1945 uprisings following the Second World War, when Algerians who had fought to liberate Europe demanded their basic human rights, the colonial government brutally massacred 15,000 Algerians. 104 Europeans lost their lives. Wiping out entire villages, throwing people out of airplanes in a campaign of fear and brutal repression, the French violence was a turning point in the Algerian struggle for civil rights and justice.
