Word: alleg
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...QUESTION (123 pp.)-Henri Alleg -Braziller...
Though it summons up the fictional nightmares of a Kafka or a Koestler, this episode is a matter of cold-sweat fact. It was the first session in an ordeal by torture undergone by French Communist Journalist Henri Alleg, 37, at an "interrogation" center at El Biar, in suburban Algiers, during June and July 1957. His torturers: paratroopers of the French army's 10th Division-later rebels against the Republic-to whom the use of torture has apparently come to be regarded as a "necessary" weapon against the Algerian nationalists...
...Shame to the Cause." Before his arrest, without a warrant, Alleg had been hiding out for months to escape internment after the banning of Alger Républicain, the Communist daily that he edited 1950-55. He wrote The Question four months after he was tortured, managed to smuggle it out of the civil prison in Algiers where he is still held on the charge of "endangering the safety of the State...
...candor, the book is much more than a scalding footnote to fever-hot headlines. The Question does not stop with the Algerian question but goes on to ask: What does it mean to be a human being? It tells of the shame and glory of man. At the outset, "Alleg's inquisitors were as cocksure in their cynicism as in their brutality. They believed that just as every man is said to have his price, so every man has his breaking point. "You're going to talk! Everybody talks here!" they told him. With obscene thoroughness, they used...