camus

"What with the general fear of a war now being prepared by all nations and the specific fear of murderous ideologies, who can deny that we live in terror? ... To emerge from this terror, we must be able to reflect and to act accordingly. But an atmosphere of terror hardly encourages reflection. I believe, however, that instead of simply blaming everything on this fear, we should consider it as one of the basic factors in the situation, and try to do something about it. No task is more important."

"I once said that, after the experiences of the last two years, I could no longer hold to any truth which might oblige me, directly or indirectly, to demand a man's life. Certain friends whom I respected retorted that I was living in Utopia, that there was no political truth which could not one day reduce us to such an extremity, and that we must therefore either run the risk of this extremity or else simply put up with the world as it is.

"They argued the point most forcefully. But I think they were able to put such force into it only because they were unable to really imagine other people's death. It is a freak of the times. We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in understanding."
...
"All I ask is that in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked."
...
"One must understand what fear means, what it implies and what it rejects. It implies and rejects the same fact: a world where murder is legitimate, and where human life is considered trifling. This is the great political question of our times, and before dealing with other issues, one must take a position on it. Before anything can be done, two questions must be put: 'Do you or do you not, directly or indirectly, want to be killed or assaulted? Do you or do you not, directly or indirectly, want to kill or assault?' All who say No to both these questions are automatically committed to a series of consequences which must modify their way of posing the problem. My aim here is to clarify two or three of those consequences."

...

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on 7 November 1913. His father was killed in the Battle of the Marne, 1914. He studied philosophy at the University of Algeria and began serious writing before he was twenty. Camus joined and left the French Communist party in 1934. During World War II he edited the French underground newspaper Combat. Following the war he rejected the use of violence to gain political objectives, as his exchange with Jean Paul Sartes and Neither Victims Nor Executioners are eloquent testimony. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Camus in 1957. A car in which he was a passenger crashed on 4 January 1960, ending his life.

(from Continuum Publisher's edition)

                               Where we are now, sort of...

Besides being mostly neutral, history has its good uses and its bad uses.   One good use of history is that it has many parables to tell us if we are willing to listen. Freeman Dyson, for instance, says his book Weapons and Hope (1984) is mostly a book of parables, "to help us to see where we are going." The worst use of history is to incite revenge as a means of achieving justice. This vengeful use of history is the basis for the continuing violence in the Middle East, and was the motivating factor in the incendiary speeches of Slobodan Milesovic that caused the Serbs� uprising and violence in the 1990s. History is also used by terrorists to recruit new members and to justify their cause, and by the U.S. government to justify some of its questionable actions.

Albert Camus had the bad uses of history (and also Marxism itself) in mind when he said: "We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible; because man has become wholly submerged in History; because he can no longer tap that part of his nature, as real as the historical part, which he recaptures in contemplating the beauty of nature and of human faces; because we live in a world of abstractions, of bureaus and machines, of absolute ideas and crude messianism. We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right, whether in their machines or in their ideas. And for all who can live only in an atmosphere of human dialogue and sociability, this silence is the end of the world."

Camus also rejected the idea that we should believe we are correct in our behavior simply because we have sincerity on our side. As he put it, "Sincerity is not itself a virtue; some kinds are so confused, they are worse than lies." In the Vietnam War, for instance, the anti-war argument turned out to be right, but the supporters of peace were not always knowledgeable or correct in their actions against the war. Robert Pickus, in his 1980 intro to the Continuum Publisher's edition of Neither Victims Nor Executioners, says, "One had only to live in Berkeley, read the underground or student press, or watch passion and ignorance combine to turn an anti-war innocent into a Bank of America bomber, to appreciate Camus' commitment to reason."

                             --DWT, last edited May 7, 2004. Link added, 6/24/04

Here are some excerpts from Neither Victims nor Executioners, which was first published in the Fall 1946 issues of Combat, the underground newspaper of the French resistance during WWII. The essay was translated by Dwight MacDonald and published in English in the July-August 1947 issue of Politics.

Although most of the links at this site don't seem to be working, here's more info on Camus and a photo.