France’s Dirty Indochina War & Whistleblower Jacques Despuech

1 Piastre Bank Note

Last week I wrote about a financial scandal that bilked the French people out of massive sums of money and slowed France’s economic recovery after World War II. Through a series of government-approved transactions, moving money from Saigon to mainland France, the French people inadvertently funded the weaponization of the…

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The Surprising Bilking of a Nation, The Piastres Affair

500 Piastres Bank Note

In the novel, Le Grande Monde, by Pierre Lemaître, part of the story anchors on a true financial scandal that bilked the French people out of massive sums of money and slowed France’s economic recovery after World War II. Through a series of government-approved transactions, moving money from Saigon to…

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The Battle Of Algiers, Cinematic Portrait Of The Algerian Revolution

Movie poster

This week I re-watched an unforgettable film that I discovered in 2013 while writing a paper on Algeria. La Bataille d’Alger, released in 1966 and banned in France for more than 5 years, is a remarkable movie, by Italian journalist and filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo. The screenplay, written by Yacef Saâdi,…

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