Hot Type: A Simple Defiance Against Trump

Columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda on historic examples of Resistance which must inspire the fightback against the incoming US administration

Protesters in New York, 9 November 2024. Photo: Ed Lefkowicz/Alamy

As a student of history and a cinephile, I am well prepared for this war.

I have seen Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows a dozen times. The French director who was part of the French Resistance uses a 1943 book by Joseph Kessel as the foundation of the story of the underground movement to thwart the Nazis in Vichy France. Although the 1969 film is brutal and realistic, fascism isn’t something that should be sugarcoated.

In addition, I learned so much from The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 documentary-style film, co-written and directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, that tells the story of how the rebels during the Algerian War wrestled back control of their country from the French government in North Africa. The film is used as a training exercise by the US military and law enforcement.

There’s a moment in The Battle of Algiers where a rebel leader is under media assault for a picnic basket bomb detonated in a café frequented by Europeans, and he tells the gathered reporters: 

“Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”

I think it was in that moment I understood that, often, what we see in the international news is the poor fighting back against oppression. Looking back now, I also understand that what Western nations have been enduring is the digital carpet-bombing of the minds of their citizens by hostile powers, using social media as the weapon’s delivery system, to make people overthrow their own governments.