For the rest of the modern world (and not least Southern Africa), the French experience in the Algerian War — a prototype of its kind — continued to offer its compelling lessons, most of them painful, for anyone prepared to heed them. There was the failure of a materially mighty Western power to combat a civil insurrection equipped with little more than ideology, without resort to the means one condemns in one’s enemy; in Algeria, the instrument of torture, as well as being fundamentally wicked in itself, was proved to be a boomerang weapon. There was the failure of the West to comprehend Third World aspirations; and the failure of the moderates everywhere to prevail against the extremist minority on either side; the Gironde is sent packing by the Montagne.

XREF: Connects to counterinsurgency history and modern asymmetric conflicts where state power faces ideological insurgencies. SEED: Potential essay angle: how 20th century colonial counterinsurgency lessons map onto contemporary asymmetric warfare and the perpetual failure of moderates against extremists.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1659