Protect Ya Neck (Remix)

Abstract

The screening of the gillo pontecorvo’s 1965 film battle of algiers at the Pentagon in 2003 revealed a great deal about American imperial ambition and the measures that they were willing to take in order to fulfill the neocon prophesy of “full spectrum dominance.” As a result of the Pentagon screening, the film has garnered a great deal of attention and quite predictably has also been completely reappropriated by the Beltway belligerati not as the embodiment of the struggles for national liberation against racist colonial violence but instead as a blueprint and training manual for “terrorism” in a post-9/11 world. In framing the film in this way, American officials engaged in an act of selective memory and collective amnesia as they attempted to erase the history of colonialism and violence that is endemic to the European and American encounter with the Third World. Not only that, this attempt at historical revisionism also sought to erase America’s own complicity with, and extension of, European colonialism as the Cold War unfolded (Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, etc.) while also attempting to reaffirm their current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as another example of American imperial benevolence.