The More Things Change...Torture in a Global Context

I recently had the chance to follow up the viewing of "The Battle of Algiers" with a series of documentaries on the making of the film and on the actual battle for Algerian Independence on the Criterion set. While the making-of-the-film documentaries were so-so, the documentaries on the actually independence fight, and particularly the French methods, were harrowing and important into understanding geopolitics to today. Witnessing actual accounts not just from the tortured, but from French paratroopers and officers themselves, we are reminded that, after 50 years, the techniques and the rhetoric have barely changed.

Many of the French officers take a dual-line approach, insisting that what they are doing/did in Algeria was not "torture," but rather "intense interrogations" (ah, semantics), even while also defending in the abstract the use of torture against their "enemy combatants" due to the guerrilla-nature style of warfare in Algeria. They downplay the actual effects of torture on the mental and physical condition of the victims in the abstract, insisting that what they do isn't torture, and even if it were, it's not that severe.

There is much to take from this. First, there is the origins of torture itself. I previously posted about the ways in which the United States bears much of the burden for the conditions of neo-liberalism in the world today, while Europe conveniently forgets or ignores its role in processes of colonialization and globalization. Certainly, the film "The Battle of Algiers" reminds us that Europe has been complicit and involved even longer than the US (the dividing up of Africa in the mid-1800s the most obvious, but not the exclusive, example). However, the documentaries are also compelling. We are all aware of the use of torture throughout the world, particularly in the "Medieval" period of Europe. However, the family tree of torture comes up again in the excerpt from a 2002 French program on the French-Algerian war. Many officers refer to the torture they themselves suffered at the hands of the SS during World War II, when many of France's military leaders in later wars (Indochina, Algeria) were involved in the resistance. One in particular even comments on the guilt he felt, saying that here he was doing the same thing to Algerians that, only 15 years earlier, Nazis had done to him. He doesn't reassign blame to his subordinates - he admits doing it, and admits that much of the tactics derived directly from the Nazis, who doubtless had their own antecedents (though my familiarity ends there).

Just as we see the precedents for French torture, so, too, do we see the legacies. The same conditions that dominated in Algeria would come to dominate throughout Latin America throughout the 1960s-1980s, from Mexico to Argentina and Chile, and virtually everywhere in between. Just as in Algeria, the military either overtakes or co-opts the police force, often proclaiming a "military state" or the need to impose martial law, only to proceed with torture, summary executions, and disappearances with virtual impunity (we won't discuss the legacy of truth commissions and legal loopholes that are still working their way in Chile, Guatemala and elsewhere - that's a post unto itself.) We even see the same methods. For example, in Pontecorvo's film, we see a technique in which a man's legs and hands are tied together, and he's put on a rack for torture purposes. I don't know if France was the innovator of this, but I do know that, only 7 years later, beginning in 1964, in Brazil, the same techique was used, called in Brazil the "Parrot's perch." The techniques the French used - beatings, burnings, water torture, the "Parrot's perch," and numerous others, all made their way into Latin America, which should be no surprise, as many French officers who fought in or were trained in Algeria offered advice to their Latin American counterparts. The relation between the military taking on a police role and the subsequent use of torture is undeniable.

Finally, there is the importance of this analysis to the current geopolitical condition, particularly the US's role in the so-called "War on Terror." Here we are, 50 years after Algeria, and despite the collapse of Communism as it was understood, despite the success of nationalist movements throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, things haven't changed. As the reports of the United States's use of torture and secret European prisons came out, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and press secretaries, and senators all insisted, just like the French officers, that the US was not "torturing" but "interrogating" (despite the photos from Abu Ghraib and other reports), and besides, we ARE at war against "terrorists" (conveniently enough, the same term that the French used for the Casbah and that Latin American dictatorships uniformly used for their opposition), and thus, abstractly, torture could be necessary and isn't that bad anyways. The politics of the globe have transformed radically since the 1950s, yet the rhetoric is the same, with the same double-speak that both denies even while defending.

Perhaps more frighteningly, yet unnoticed by the American populous at the time it was uttered or since forgotten, there is the prospect of military figures serving police roles. Although it flew under the radar in all of the real tragedy, in the wake of 2005's Hurricane Katrina, as the New Orleans police force was devastated, Bush proposed giving the military a police role in future "disasters" (doubtlessly to be defined by the administration). While African-Americans "looted" and Caucasian-Americans "foraged," Bush thought putting the military in the capacity of police would be a great idea, and although it hasn't popped up in recent rhetoric, he at the time made it clear that such an option could remain open in the event of future "catastrophes" such as hurricanes (or whatever else demanded a military state.) While such a prospect seems relatively unlikely, it still seems far more likely than it had prior to September 2001, and given the other blatant violations of executive power during the current administration, it seems vaguely realistic.

Certainly, Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" has much to offer us, but the documentaries that accompany it may offer even more in the current political and cultural climate. Anybody who would deny the glaringly obvious similarities between the US military and the current administration on the one hand and the French officers on the other would have the right to do so, but it would be only one more example of the American tendency to believe we're "different" from those oppressive forces of the past, and to continue the "hide in your shell when reality confronts you" attitude that has dominated the general population of this country since 2000.