ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Thanks, Tore and all, for starting a discussion of terrorism, good or bad?  The ghost that haunts this whole book.  How do present-day Iraq invasion-inspired al Qaeda terrorists feel about Americans?  And how do we, as Americans, potential victims of terrorism who bear the guilt of the invasion, feel about their feelings?  

I haven't seen the movie, The Battle of Algiers, for ages, so my memory may be off, but I recall a scene where an Algerian woman terrorist?/liberator? watches a little French kid walking into a building that she's about to bomb.  She watches silently, but the whole conversation is carried out on her face:  "Too late to stop it?  Aren't they all guilty?  Aren't all kids innocent?  Am I a murderer or liberator?"  The kid dies. 

I've found an interesting 2004 review of the movie:

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0401,atkinson,49999,20.html

Excerpt:  This past August, as both Iraqi and "coalition" cadavers piled up in post-"victory" insurgency fighting, the Pentagon's Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict office sent out an e-mail advertising a private screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 The Battle of Algiers. "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas," the flyer opined: "Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."


>From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>

>
>>The discussion of how and where to strike at the railroad, blending into
>>Webb's anger "like a kid about to cry" at  _provocateur_ attacks arranged
>>"not by Anarchists but by the owners themselves," opens a can of worms, of 
>>ends and means, of justifications and smoke clouds tinged with blood, that 
>>will be with us throughout the book.
>
>It is indeed a can of fat, wriggling and blind worms that is opened here. Is 
>dynamite a valid means for the end of an Anarchist Utopia, especially when 
>the wrong people have an annoying way of getting in the way of explosions? 
>Webb has clearly given this issue some thought:
>
>"The tricky patch, it had seemed to Webb for a while now, came in choosing 
>the targets, it being hard enough just to find time to think any of it 
>through, under the daily burdens of duty and hard labor and, more often than 
>you'd think, grief. Lord knew that the owners and mine managers deserved to 
>be blown up, except that they had learned to keep extra protection around 
>them - not that going after their property, like factories or mines, was 
>that much better of an idea, for, given the nature of corporate greed, those 
>places would usually be working three shifts, with the folks most likely to 
>end up dying being miners, including children working as nippers and 
>swampers - the same folks who die when the army comes charging in." (84-85)
>
>We can easily agree with Webb here that bombing innocent children to 
>oblivion is not a good idea, but can we also agree with him that "the owners 
>and mine managers deserved to be blown up"? Webb clearly thinks so, but does 
>the author of AtD think the same? A very similar discussion takes place on 
>p. 922, where Ewball Oust stresses the importance of going after the right 
>people:
>
>"After a while they got into a discussion about Anarchists and their 
>reputation for rude behavior, such as rolling bombs at people they haven't 
>been introduced to.
>"There's plenty of folks who deserve being blown up, to be sure," opined 
>Ewball, "but they've got to be gone after in a professional way, anything 
>else is being just like them, slaughterin the innocent, when what we need is 
>more slaughterin of the guilty. Who gave the orders, who carried 'em out, 
>exact names and whereabouts - and then go get 'em. That's be just honest 
>soldiering."
>
>Ewball's "to be sure" here mirrors the "Lord knew" in the previous quote: 
>Both Webb and Ewball find it self-evident that there are people that deserve 
>to be blown up, and the narrator doesn't question their assumptions in any 
>explicit manner. He just lets them fly by, so to speak, but should we as 
>readers do the same? Do we *really* need, as Ewball argues, "more 
>slaughterin of the guilty"? Should we cheer when Frank blows up a trainload 
>of federales with his máquina loca?:
>
>"The explosion was terrific, shrapnel and parts of men and animals flew 
>everywhere, superheated steam blasting through a million irregular flueways 
>among the moving fragments, a huge ragged hemisphere of gray dust, gone pink 
>with blood, rose and spread, and survivors staggered around in it blinded 
>and coughing miserably." (985)
>
>Is this is explosion really terrific, or should we rather regard it as 
>terrible, and try to listen more closely to those accusing words whispered 
>to Frank by that statue "Victory"/"The Angel" on p. 989 -words Frank never 
>wanted to hear? It's a subtle game Pynchon plays here, perhaps more subtle 
>than anything found in GR. The narrator never explicitly condemns all this 
>dynamitic mania, and if one sympathizes with the Anarchists' quest for 
>freedom it is altogether too easy to refrain from questioning their violent 
>methods and to agree with their assessment that there are several people who 
>"deserve to be blown up." The Pynchon I know wouldn't agree with this 
>assessment, despite his sympathies for outlaws and preterite rebels, but in 
>AtD he leaves it up to the reader to take a stance. Should we agree with 
>Webb and Ewball that we need more slaughterin of the guilty? Should we even 
>grin elatedly along with Flaco as he and Reef are nearly killed in an 
>explosion in a café?:
>
>"Some of these bandoleros," Flaco still grinning, "they don't care who the 
>hell they do this to." (851)
>
>Or should we do what Webb has a hard time finding the time for: should we 
>think things through, and try to consider other viewpoints that are not 
>explicitly stated in AtD, or that are at least hard to hear amid all the 
>happy dynamite blasts of the novel?
>

>