The O.A.S. concealed wildly contradictory, even utopian, political aims.
Evidence
But the O.A.S. was, as one of its chroniclers, Paul Henissart, remarks: “a very odd organisation, an uncooked pudding of conflicting freakish ideas and aspirations and principles”. The idealist Gardes, for instance, who still claims to have joined the O.A.S. because he “could not abandon the Muslims”, continued to aim for a utopian Algeria in which the Muslims would be fully integrated. Susini, who admired the “fanaticism of the Jews of Palestine” and their passionate attachment to the soil (though he thought the pieds noirs too soft by comparison with the Israelis), wanted a kind of ”… Algerian Haganah, a civil army powerful and with conviction, which would regain Muslim confidence from the F.L.N., and carry along the Europeans … to seize power in Algeria, in order to assume it one day in France.” At the end of the road he desired a true revolution introducing reforms and a kind of socialist corporate state, but retaining French rule. Pérez, on the other hand, considered the struggle for Algérie française as “the last battle for White Christian civilisation in the northern part of Africa”. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1481
Categorization
- XREF: Shows ideological permutations across colonial contexts — a Haganah model, white Christian civilisational war.
Related
- OAS leaders dreamed of a South Africa-style apartheid Algeria. (similarity 0.82)
- Desperation drove the poorer pieds noirs to rally to the O.A.S. as their protector (similarity 0.78)