In
the 1940s, the conquered French were tortured by their German occupiers. By the
1950s, the freed French were torturing the Arab natives in colonized Algeria.
That irony was not lost on philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Sartre
wrote a sensational review, published in L’Express,
of Henri Alleg’s book The Question,
an account of being tortured by paratroopers in Algiers,” wrote Ronald Aronson
in his book Camus & Sartre.
“Beginning
with the memory of the Germans torturing the French at Gestapo headquarters in
1943, Sartre recalled that the French had declared it to be impossible that
‘one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name. There is no
such word as impossible: in 1958, in Algiers, people are tortured regularly and
systematically… Appalled, the French are discovering this terrible truth: that
if nothing can protect a nation against itself, neither its traditions nor its
loyalties nor its laws, and if 15 years are enough to transform victims into
executioners, then its behavior is no more than a matter of opportunity and
occasion. Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or
executioner.’”
The
French government inadvertently underlined the truth of Sartre’s words by immediately
trying to censor them.
“His
powerful denunciation caused L’Express
to be confiscated by the authorities on March 6, 1959, and during the next
several weeks the article became famous by being published in a pamphlet,
confiscated, then appearing in a scroll that could only be read with a
magnifying glass, and finally being published in Switzerland,” Aronson noted.
Writing
in 1961, Sartre eloquently examined the full extent of what the tortured felt
prepared to do once they turned torturer.
“Violence
in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved
men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them,” Sartre wrote. “Everything
will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for
theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical
fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear
will finish the job; guns are leveled at the peasant; civilians come to take over
his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them. If he
shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades
himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his
character and make his inmost self fall to pieces.”
Before
Bush and Cheney’s regime, I too thought it impossible that men should be made
to scream by those who were acting in the name of my nation. During and since
Bush and Cheney’s regime, I too discovered that nothing can protect a nation
against itself, least of all rebranding it a “homeland” to justify the use of
torture.
Sartre
wrote, “We are living at the moment when the match is put to the fuse.” And I
know just how he felt.
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