'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Sartre speaks from beyond the grave

This afternoon I walked to the library in 94-degree heat to pick up some books I've been wanting to read for a while. On the way home, I already nearly finished reading (in English) Sartre's "Introduction" to Henri Alleg's classic testimony of his 1957 torture at the hands of the French in Algeria, The Question.

Alleg was a French-Algerian communist who had previously been a newspaper editor. The portion of his narrative that I've read so far already provides a chilling preview to what the US has been doing in its ongoing global gulag, including sickening descriptions of being tortured with electricity and of being "waterboarded".

Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.

Oh, and at one point they tied his neck-tie onto him like a dog-leash and tried to parade him round on his knees like a dog. All that in the first 20 pages, and many more to go... Not for the faint of heart.

Regarding Sartre's text there, he speaks very strongly to the current condition of US citizens regarding our society's condoning of the vilest tortures and abuses of "the Other". I did a quick Google search to see if I could find an online version of it and could not.

Might I suggest to the publisher of Harper's magazine or some similar publication that they contact the publisher of this English-language edition, George Braziller, and get permission to republish Sartre's entire text?

Not being able to link to an existing on-line version, I shall type out a few quick excerpts here:

[I]n the case of torture, this strange contest of will... the torturer pits himself against the tortured for his 'manhood' and the duel is fought as if it were not possible for both sides to belong to the human race.

The purpose of torture is not only to to make a person talk, but to make him betray others. The victim must turn himself by his screams and by his submission into a lower animal, in the eyes of all and in his own eyes. His betrayal must destroy him and take away his human dignity. He who gives way under questioning is not only constrained from talking again, but is given a new status, that of a sub-man.

In Algeria the contradictions are irreconcilable. Each side demands the complete exclusion of the other. We have taken everything from the Arabs and now we have forbidden everything even the use of their own language... They own nothing, they are nothing. We have wiped out their civilisation while refusing them our own.(pp.30-31)

...

[E]xploitation puts the exploiter at the mercy of his victim, and the dependence itself creates racialism. It is a bitter and tragic fact that, for the Europeans in Algeria, being a man means first and foremost superiority to the Moslems. But what if the Moslem finds in his turn that his manhood depends on equality with the settler? It is then that the European begins to feel his very existence diminished and cheapened.(p.32)

...

Anyway, if he [the settler] accepts the Moslems as human beings, there is no sense in killing them. The need is rather to humiliate them, to crush their pride and drag them down to the animal level. The body may live, but the spirit must be killed. To train, discipline and chastise; these are the words which obsess them. There is not enough room in Algeria for two kinds of human beings; they must choose the one or the other.(p.33)

...

Perhaps the greatest merit of Alleg's book is to dissipate our last illusions. We know now that it is not a question of punishing or re-educating certain individuals [in the torture system], and that the Algerian war cannot be humanised. Torture was imposed here by circumstances and demanded by racial hatred. In some ways it is the essence of the conflict and expresses its deepest truth.(p.36)

I should quickly note a couple of important things. Alleg did not give way under his torture. At the beginning of his narrative he makes clear that what he writes should be seen not only as an individual narrative but a testimony that represents what he knows has happened-- and in some cases even worse than his own treatment-- to numerous other resistants; and that he knows that many of them-- Arab-Algerians as well as "white" Algerians like himself-- also did not give way under their torture.

Also, though the struggle continued brutally for several years beyond 1957, in the end the FLN did win. Alleg's publication of his testimony apparently helped a lot to mobilize antiwar and anti-occupation opinion within France.