By Fester:
From Without Banisters on the impact of the French torture regime in Algeria:
The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the
end of the war, most spectacularly during the "Battle of Algiers" in
1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated
drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape.....
what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to France, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria....
what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact
that the military was torturing, French governments turned to
censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and
reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of
journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to
publish evidence that torture was going on. Torture fueled high-level
government deception; it robbed France of any moral high ground from
which to denounce FLN terrorism; it put in an impossible, shaming,
corrupting position the roughly two million men who served in France's
conscript Army in Algeria. (Most of them had nothing directly to do
with torture, which tended to be the job of elite units.) And, of
course, inevitably, over time it seeped back into metropolitan France,
so that by the end of the war torture was being employed by the Paris
police.
end of the war, most spectacularly during the "Battle of Algiers" in
1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated
drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape.....
what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to France, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria....
what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact
that the military was torturing, French governments turned to
censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and
reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of
journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to
publish evidence that torture was going on. Torture fueled high-level
government deception; it robbed France of any moral high ground from
which to denounce FLN terrorism; it put in an impossible, shaming,
corrupting position the roughly two million men who served in France's
conscript Army in Algeria. (Most of them had nothing directly to do
with torture, which tended to be the job of elite units.) And, of
course, inevitably, over time it seeped back into metropolitan France,
so that by the end of the war torture was being employed by the Paris
police.
I've been trying to think of an historical instance of turning the other cheek in the kind of conflict you cite. I can think of none. It seems to be a visceral human response to terror to call for the SOB's. Very primal and seemingly inevitable. The high moral ground would appear to be an unpopulated wilderness most of the time.
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