Customer Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant study of the torture endemic to colonial wars
Comment: Marnia Lazreg is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Hunter College, the City University of New York. In this brilliant and disturbing book, she studies France's war against Algeria (1954-62).
She shows how a militarised colonial state used torture and terror to forestall the collapse of its empire in the age of decolonisation. The political economy of colonial rule required violence, including torture.
Once torture was permitted, it became routine. Euphemised as `screening' and `pacification', its purpose was to enforce obedience. It continued right to the end of the war. The only way to stop it was to end the war.
Torture routinely practised was routinely denied. Politicians tried to excuse it as coming from `a few rotten apples', as `occasional excesses' and `regrettable incidents', and blamed the victims, claiming that Algerians `only understood force'.
Novelist Albert Camus condemned the violence by both sides, yet defended France's claim to Algeria, which could only be upheld by violence. He supported the settlers against the colonised, using the same arguments as the colonial state, calling for peace and coexistence within colonial rule.
Today, apologists for torture like Alan Dershowitz, Michael Walzer, Jean Elshtain and Michael Ignatieff assist politicians who destroy civil liberties at home and cause chaos abroad. Blair seeks solace in confession and God's forgiveness, preferring these to democratic accountability.
Lazreg shows that despite the cultural differences, French, British and American war practices and rhetorics are similar. Their wars of occupation disguise material and strategic interests as civilising or democracy-building. The French, like the US and British occupiers today, used the rhetoric of women's emancipation, claiming that they were `protecting' women from Islam.
And torture of prisoners was part of every French colonial war, part of every British colonial war, from Malaya in the 1940s to Kenya in the 1950s, Oman in the 1960s and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and part of the current wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Finally, Lazreg argues that acts of terror, like any other crimes, do not threaten democracy. They do not even affect democracy - unless states respond by violating democratic rights, as the French state did and as the British and US states are doing. As she concludes, "The `war on terror' has become a war of terror."
|
