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🪵 The Threshold

Perpetrators of torture carried its moral damage home to France in person

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tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@horne_savage_1977, loc. 730

4 min read

Perpetrators of torture carried its moral damage home to France in person

Evidence

It was not only public revelations that brought the “gangrene” of torture home to France; the young men who had been forced to administer it brought it back in their own persons, profoundly—and often permanently—marked by their experiences. Vidal-Naquet quotes a letter from a young soldier: — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 730 (#expands, via linked claim)

The death of Ben M’hidi left, alive and at liberty, only Belkacem Krim out of the original neuf historiques of the F.L.N. Like an unsightly molehill, it also threw up the whole ugly but hitherto largely subterranean issue of the maltreatment of rebel suspects, of torture and summary executions; or what, in another context and depending upon the point of view, might perhaps be termed “war crimes”, and what in France came simply to be known as la torture. From the Battle of Algiers onwards this was to become a growing canker for France, leaving behind a poison that would linger in the French system long after the war itself had ended. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 580 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For the rest of the modern world (and not least Southern Africa), the French experience in the Algerian War — a prototype of its kind — continued to offer its compelling lessons, most of them painful, for anyone prepared to heed them. There was the failure of a materially mighty Western power to combat a civil insurrection equipped with little more than ideology, without resort to the means one condemns in one’s enemy; in Algeria, the instrument of torture, as well as being fundamentally wicked in itself, was proved to be a boomerang weapon. There was the failure of the West to comprehend Third World aspirations; and the failure of the moderates everywhere to prevail against the extremist minority on either side; the Gironde is sent packing by the Montagne. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1659 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Torture in Algeria left a lingering poison in the French system; Conscripts forced to commit torture brought psychological scars back to metropolitan France — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 730; Torture boomeranged against France in the Algerian war (+4 more)

Broader Connections

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