In Cold Type

The current Salmagundi (Summer-Fall 2002) has a section on what it calls "Femicons" (the category includes articles on Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Willa Cather); but before that comes a stunning "Letter from Paris" by the writer and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, on the French use of torture during the Algerian War.

Really a review of the French television program and book by Patrick Rotman called L'ennemi intime ("Intimate Enemy"), Todorov's essay examines the root causes of the torture, including the demonization of the enemy, the youthfulness of the French recruits and their isolation in Algeria. He also points out that neither "culture, education, accumulated wisdom...nor...religion...provides efficient protection" for an individual against the possibility of becoming a torturer.

The French Army worked hard to develop a political rationalization for the systematic torture of Algerian rebels, a rationalization that will be of interest to anyone who has followed the Israeli courts' legitimization of forms of physical abuse of prisoners in certain situations. A hypothetical case always cited is that of the captured bomber who has killed once and set other bombs to go off shortly. Do you "question him politely" or "torture him so as to uncover and disarm the bombs"? Todorov says this time-honored defense of torture is specious. First, "the bomber caught between bombings is rare indeed." Second, he writes, the argument involves at its core the "principle that torture was necessary to win the war." Yet torture was practiced, and the war lost.

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