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Comment by hueyluey | Hacker News Reader

I dislike this scene for personal (?) / historical (?) reasons.

The French are singing this nice liberation / freedom song against the germans. This is nice and all, but they are in freaking occupied Morocco, not France! They continued to occupy it even after the war.

The people that made the movie didn't care about this irony because they didn't consider moroccans to be equal to the french. I get that. What I'm surprised is that people nowadays don't find this scene ridiculous (or at least very ironic). Coming from a colonized country (and being one of those people that weren't considered worthy of having their own country back then), I can't like that scene.

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While the occupation of France by Germany was a matter of ideology, the occupation of Morocco etc by France was a matter of a different stage of human evolution.

I would argue that the colonisation of Morocco by France was a net positive event and jump-started them out of the middle ages into an industrialised society.

I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this statement, I would like to express it nevertheless

Maybe the germans had the same excuse?

This is a reason that has been given for centuries to justify invading and occupying countries.

But if you're in favor of colonization then you won't have an issue with this scene. It precisely what I said before: it's ok if Moroccans get invaded and occupied, but french shouldn't, because white/christian/civilized/european/developed/ {insert favorite keyword here}

I would be fine for the French to be invaded and occupied by a superior civilisation, if in the long run helped their advancement as well.

But actually and tangibly superior, not as was the case with Germany for example, where both countries were in a similar level of evolution

This is a definitely something that should be pointed at every time we mention the movie.

Yes and there was a lot of uncertainty on the Allied side about whether France would fight with them or against them in Operation Torch.

This lasted for a while as the French intentions were pretty ambiguous to the very last minute.

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