#4 In its haste to defeat the FLN, the French army had left a crucial hostage to political fortune. Military commanders had authorized army interrogators to use certain forms of torture to extract information from suspected terrorist detainees. This is not the place to debate the merits or demerits of torture in counterinsurgency operations--for the record, Galula himself considered it counterproductive. Nor was French opinion particularly sensitive to brutality per se; the FLN's own use of torture and outright butchery--Arab loyalists routinely had their tongues and testicles cut off and their eyes gouged out--had aroused little or no outrage. But, as with the incidents at Abu Ghraib 50 years later, news of the army practice gave domestic opponents of the war a weapon with which to discredit the entire enterprise.
It remains a consistent and curious pattern how Islamic torture and atrocities go entirely uncommented upon by those who simultaneously deplore the slightest abuse of power by their own nation's troops. For the Left, whose moral equivalency supposedly knows no bounds, this glaring exception exposes a deep and abiding hypocrisy.
It would seem that, no matter how much evidence to the contrary, the Left refuses to abandon its cherished notion that all interpersonal transaction must follow the Zero Sum Equation (i.e., whereby for someone to gain another must lose). This imbues the Left with a profound sense of guilt and self-hatred for their various socities' successes knowing, as they do, that all of this tremendous wealth was snatched from the hands of starving third world peasants who, in reality, could not produce the tiniest fraction of such treasure even if they had multiple lifetimes to do it in.
Undeterred by reason or logic, the Left continues to flog itself, and everyone else within range of their lash, over the West's stupendous success. That our troops should prevail in battle seems to them to be the ultimate outrage. Our foes are granted the most heinous and horrific liberties in order to thwart the hegemony of free market capitalism and its undeserved quality of life.
No hijacker, bomb vest murderer or car bomber can possibly commit an atrocity which exceeds that of the West's decadent life of luxury. The Left continues to adore the Noble Savage, even though one has never existed. It accords even the most brutal and unflinching barbarians a free hand in their savagery just so long as it is turned against the tides of progress. They do this depsite the fact that recent progress is all that allows such counterproductive individuals as themselves to survive. Much unlike in the not too distant past when such misfits were tied inside a sack filled with a dog, cat and rooster and then thrown off of the nearest bridge. |