Word: biares
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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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...
...painful identification that the reader feels with Alleg cannot blot out the nagging realization that, as a Communist, Alleg himself has been a consenting party to the same tortures and to a degradation of man that, for its wholesale scale, dwarfs the war-begotten atrocities of El Biar. But nothing can justify the use of torture by any nation passing as civilized. Henri Alleg's ordeal is a parable that mirrors the failure of France's Algerian policy. Just as Whitman found a blade of grass sufficient to stagger an army of atheists...
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