I saw this movie called The Battle of Algiers last week and there's a great scene in the film where some reporters are asking a French colonel if he used torture in the interrogation of Algerian terrorists. The colonel responds that yes, he did use torture—that using torture is the price of continuing to occupy Algeria as a colonial power and that if the people of France object to the use of torture they need to reevaluate their commitment to the continued occupation of Algeria. One of the things that's interesting about the scene is that the colonel's position is that he would gladly go home tomorrow if the French government recalled him, but that as long as they've charged him with maintaining control of Algiers, he's going to have to use torture.
Compare that to this business here.
I get the impression sometimes that, in the '50s and '60s, most Europeans and Americans honestly believed the paternalistic propaganda of the old colonial system, so their treatment of colonized territories was blatantly imperialistic and often inhumane in that way; punishment being an unfortunate necessity in pursuit of discipline. But then the whole post-WWII "four freedoms" thing really took off, and the attitude of the people changed—but the attitude of governments stayed the same. Colonialism was never about anything other than money, and the people who made money off it then make money off it now. Only now they periodically trot out a new rationale for the global empire so they can just keep doing business as usual. And instead of changing their methods they just keep working from the same playbook, and making up new lies to cover the old tactics.
Though this business of "stopping terrorism" may work out to be the ultimate heuristic bugbear, since terrorism, as a collection of methods, has always been the only viable model for a small poorly funded group to fight a large well funded army.
Heh. Bugbear.
Posted by: David Grenier at December 27, 2004 07:42 PM