Thus the celebrated words of Jean-Paul Sartre lent existential apology to the fists of torturers such as Belov, and provided moral comfort to listening ideologues and embryonic tyrants such as the Cambodian student named Saloth Sar, who joined the French Communist Party in Paris in the early 1950s and would become better known to the world as Brother Number One, or Pol Pot.14 Nor could Sartre possibly claim ignorance; he had only to step into any library and take down from the shelves André Gide’s account of his visit to Soviet Russia in 1936, whose publication had caused a sensation in
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