>What are you trying to say? That every time a third world nation during the Cold War moved towards democratic rule (along with the land and resource re-distri

>What are you trying to say? That every time a third world nation during the Cold War moved towards democratic rule (along with the land and resource re-distribution that will inevitably follow from politicians engaging with the interests of the franchised population) there was immediately counter-opposition in the form of reactionary para-paramilitaries, or military coups internal to the state. This subversion was often funded by foreign intelligence agencies and business interests (essentially always, though the degree may vary e.g. Brazil had a much more embedded reactionary sector thanks to the legacy of slavery and the social castes that arose, compared to say Indonesia where the CIA had to do a lot more work in directly authorizing bombing campaigns and funding anti-communist programs for young military officials in Sukarno's government) [see Vincent Bevins book on Indonesia]. >The fact that the French were as brutal or much more brutal is tangential No its not tangential at all unless you are missing the point I've made. Do you not understand that militant terrorist tactics come out of a reaction to brutal oppression? It's not a difficult concept to grasp: any situation where peaceful opposition is stifled, democratic political action is repressed, and activists targeted for arrest and extra-legal violence, you force people to either form or support groups wielding militant guerilla tactics which include terrorism and brutality, since such groups cannot be quelled so easily. And this is a fact well known to colonialist powers both historical and contemporary as is reflected in their tactics, since a militant opposition is much easier to frame as violent barbarians than their peaceful predecessors and is used retroactively to justify their oppression. >I'm not sure why do some people insist on treating the world as black and white and are so obsessed with some sort of ideological purity of one type or another Where are these people you're talking about? Can you show how anything I said relies on some explicitly moralistic or ideological argument? Do you understand that I'm not thoughtlessly cheer-leading violence but simply pointing out that it is an inevitable consequence of colonial repression? To the contrary I think the moralistic position would be to argue that historical actors should be condemned retroactively for engaging in any kind of violence while refusing to consider the immediate (and asymmetric) cause of such violent resistance as a contingent factor. Not sure how your abstraction of history into a series of totally unrelated events, wherein the actors should be morally judged individually constitutes a less subjective analysis. Who would you have supported in the place of FLN? What should they have done to earn your approval? Would would be the outcome of such an action in that context? Of what use is any of this speculation?