Latest news with #FrenchLiterature
El Chorouk
5 days ago
- General
- El Chorouk
Debate on Colonial Crimes and Their Impact on the Algerian-French Crisis
In line with the French historian of Algerian origin, Benjamin Stora, who argues that the memory file can help ease tensions between Algeria and Paris, two countries experiencing an unprecedented political and diplomatic crisis, the French capital is hosting a debate on the French colonization of Algeria and its impact on the current disputes between the two capitals. The roundtable discussion will take place on June 14 in Paris, under the title 'The French Colonisation's Past in Algeria and the Current Diplomatic Dispute Between the Two Countries.' It will feature well-known historians, academics, and journalists in France, including Alain Riscio (historian), Jean-Pierre Sereni (journalist at Orient XXI), a French historian of Algerian origin, Nedjib Sidi Moussa, sociologist Aïssa Kadri, jurist Mouloud Boumgar, and moderated by the Egyptian journalist (PhD in French Literature) and editor in chief of the leading newspaper of the Arab and Muslim community. The round table discussion is prepared and organised by the Association for Colonial and Postcolonial History, in collaboration with Orient XXI magazine and , to 'decode the current crisis between France and Algeria.' The Association for Colonial and Postcolonial History is known for its tireless efforts to combat colonialist ideology and call for rectifying the disasters of colonialism by offering an apology to the peoples affected by it. Organisers open the debate for the public with free admission at the International Centre for Popular Culture in Paris, on Saturday, June 14, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. The title of this debate highlights the extent of the impact that France's colonial past has had on Algeria, which has been escalating since last summer. The work of the mixed committee on memory was halted, coinciding with Algeria's recall of its ambassador, Mohamed-Antar Daoud, from Paris, following French President Emmanuel Macron's shift in position on the Western Sahara issue. A few days ago, historian Benjamin Stora, who chairs the French Memory Commission, said that the memory issue 'represents a possible way out of the crisis, and is indispensable in any case, and necessary in any case, because we cannot consider the Algerian history to be like all others.' On this occasion, he called for working towards a quick settlement: 'We need strong initiatives, especially regarding the issue of the French colonisation of Algeria in the nineteenth century. But today, in my opinion, considering the possibility of launching initiatives on memory could serve as an alternative to resuming political relations, which is necessary to resolve immigration or visa issues.' Benjamin Stora is presented as an advisor to the French president on memory matters. He has previously blamed the French side for the ongoing tensions, accusing Macron personally of causing the crisis in a previous interview with France 24, where he stated: 'First, it is important to note that French President Emmanuel Macron's statement regarding the Moroccan regime's (alleged) sovereignty over the Sahrawi territories has added fuel to the fire.' Since the outbreak of the crisis, French officials have not stopped demanding the resumption of work on the memory file. However, the Algerian side has shown no response. Rather, it has raised its demands for the return of all the looted Algerian archives in French vaults, as stated by the head of the Algerian memory commission, Mohamed Zeghidi. The possibility of resuming work on this file appeared on the horizon after the visit that led the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, to Algeria on April 6th. However, the recklessness of Bruno Retailleau, the Interior Minister in the government of François Bayrou, by kidnapping an Algerian consular employee in a Parisian street outside diplomatic norms, brought the crisis back to square one. This incident also revealed the existence of a real crisis in the decision-making circles in Paris, and that the French President had lost control of things, even if some tried to talk about a well-crafted scenario for exchanging political roles in relations with the former colony.
The Guardian
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates review
Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple's Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing 'effective altruism' long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros. Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977. He grows up in a pleasant suburb of Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother's skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn to manipulate. As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: 'He had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.') Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen – who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD – and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers. There follows a smooth transition to Harvard, where in the ferment of anti-war campus protests our hero is more interested in the arrival, one day in 1969, of a PDP-10 computer. Gates takes classes in maths but also chemistry and the Greek classics. Realising he doesn't have it in him to become a pure mathematician, he goes all-in on computers once a new home machine, the Altair, is announced. He and Paul Allen will write its Basic, having decided to call themselves 'Micro-Soft'. The early home computer scene, Gates notes, was a countercultural, hippy thing: cheap computers 'represented a triumph of the masses against the monolithic corporations and establishment forces that controlled access to computing', and so software was widely 'shared', or copied among people for free. It was Gates himself who, notoriously, pushed back against this culture when he found out most users of his Basic weren't paying for it. By 'stealing software', he wrote in an open letter in 1976, 'you prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?' This rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and still does, at least in the more militant parts of the 'open-source' world. But he had a point. And that, readers, is why your Office 365 account just renewed for another year. Fans of Word and Excel, though, will have to wait for subsequent volumes of Gates's recollections, as will those who want more about his later battles with Apple, though Steve Jobs does get an amusing walk-on part. (Micro-Soft's general manager keeps a notebook of sales calls, on one page of which we read: '11.15 Steve Jobs calls. Was very rude.'). This volume, still, is more than just a geek's inventory of early achievements. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout. Gates gleefully records his first preschool report: 'He seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life.' Later, he explains how he acquired a sudden interest in theatre classes. 'Admittedly the main draw for me was the higher percentage of girls in drama. And since the main activity in the class was to read lines to each other, the odds were very good that I'd actually talk to one.' Strikingly, unlike most 'self-made' billionaires, Gates emphasises the 'unearned privilege' of his upbringing and the peculiar circumstances – 'mostly out of my control' – that enabled his career. Adorably, he even admits to still having panic dreams about his university exams. The book's most touching pages recount how one of his closest friends and colleagues in the programming group, Kent Evans, died in a mountaineering accident when he was 17. 'Throughout my life, I have tended to deal with loss by avoiding it,' Gates writes. He says later that if he were growing up today, he would probably be identified as 'on the autism spectrum', and now regrets some of his early behaviour, though 'I wouldn't change the brain I was given for anything'. There is a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better, a thing that no one has yet seen Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg attempt in public. That alone makes Bill Gates a more human tech titan than most of his rivals, past and present. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
