>> Assuming the radio host went into this stunt with the motives he
>> claims (and wasn't, say, trying to find some dramatic, show-biz way
>> of changing his position on torture), to me it shows a typically
>> American style of brutalism. Do you think French right-wingers in the
>> 50's, when they denounced leftists for criticizing torture in
>> Algeria, tried to make the argument that it didn't really hurt?
>
> Actually they rather famously did. One of the standard methods of
> torture during the Algerian war was attach wires to a gegene (the army
> signals magneto) and apply electrodes to the penis. It left no traces
> and was quick and easy to do. The victim's feelings were vividly
> described by Henri Alleg in The Question in 1958 and it became a huge
> scandal. Colonel Massu (one of the models for Colonel Mathieu in The
> Battle of Algiers) had himself and several of his men connected and
> said it was no big thing. People argued that he did it for a short
> time and knowing it could be turned off made made all the difference.
> But at the time it was a big propaganda coup of precisely the sort
> that I think this idiot was hoping to pull off.
But he was the actual perpetrator. He wasn't some right-wing ideologist trying to come up with an abstract defense of the gegene. Searching for more on Massu and his penis, I found this:
> Ethics and war in the 21st century
> Christopher Coker
> ...For the authorities torture had two purposes. Instrumentally, it
> was used in interrogations to elicit information that might save lives
> or prevent future killing. At the time Massu's chaplain Delarue called
> it "the lesser of two evils." It was also expressive; it was designed
> to send a message, to deter the local population from supporting or
> giving information to the FNL. The normative context changed. Even
> this was defended by Delarue: "Here, it is no longer a matter of
> waging war but of annihilating an enterprise of generalized, organized
> murder." The object was not winning hearts and minds so much as
> frightening the Algerians into accommodation....
>
> To be fair to the French, they believed they had a duty to engage in
> an unremitting and courageous determination to face reality. Every
> discourse on war, they argued, should be empirically rooted in
> experience. In this case terror was matched with terror...."One does
> not fight a revolutionary war with a Napoleonic code," insisted
> Colonel Lacheroy, a leading proponent of Massu's revolutionary warfare...
That sounds more like the French Right to me...
SA