You are with the oppressed. The wronged. The weak one. And always “with the man”. But how; How do you stay intact in the heights of your humanism without getting “dirty”? Is it happening?
It was December 12, 1957, and the place was Stockholm – or rather the “security” of Stockholm while the Algerian “dirty war” was raging. Albert Camus was there to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the debate, at a side event in the student residence, would probably have faded into oblivion before he even returned to Paris had it not been for the angry attack of an Algerian student. “Right now they’re putting bombs on the trams in Algiers,” Cammy told him. “My mother might be in one of them. If that’s called justice, I prefer my mother.”
The line had never been so clearly and so courageously drawn as it was that day. But no other line has since blurred as much and as many times as she has. It can retain its luster when Hamas “justice” is exercised by the slaughter of an infant. But something starts to go wrong when the “innocent victim” loses the halo of innocence. Is the girl partying in the desert that innocent? The farmer in the Kibbutz? Even worse for him, the yuppie of the Twin Towers? Or, worse, the Ukrainian civilian who “de-Nazises” with a bullet in the head?
The answer has been given by the blurred humanism itself with the aggressive identification of the victims. If there are innocent victims, then some others are not so innocent. The American citizen walking in Manhattan is labeled as complicit with the American soldier on duty in Afghanistan. Accomplices are the resident of Kiev who runs to the shelter, the peaceful Ashkelon who is punished with rockets, the Muslim women of Srebrenica who tear our “brothers” to pieces, Kami’s mother who takes the tram. “It’s good for them to suffer.”
Blurred humanism painstakingly singles out “innocent victims.” And while he “pains” on their behalf, at the same time he covers all the rest with a veil of complicity. Not even to demonstrate for the Bataclan victims. Not even to join our voices with others to shout that “we are all Charlie Hebdo”. Are we all Americans? No reason.
After all, the West is burdened with sins long before Cammy’s mother gets on the streetcar. Its attitude is “hypocritical” even when it only allows you to be “with man”, it threatens “world peace” even when neo-authoritarianisms unleash their power on the weakest. Really now, how many revolted for the “self-determination of the peoples” of Georgia and Chechnya? How many worried about the “right to self-determination” of the Taiwanese?
Certainly fewer than those who evaluated the niqab as a right to self-determination and the obligation to wear the headscarf as a right to self-determination. There the clouded humanism gives way to a supposed cultural acceptance of the Other, even if the Other beats his wife. In the meantime he has turned into a cold geopolitical analyst. In Ukraine there is no people living a drama, aggressor and victim, invader and defender. But only players of a geopolitical chessboard whose elaborate analyzes move like pawns.
It’s been that way ever since. Camus’ clear line was immediately blurred, the statement was misinterpreted, “ah, he prefers his mother to justice”, her spirit was abused, he himself returned to Paris as a dissociator of the French intelligentsia. And yet. No one loved Algeria and the Arabs as much as he did. Except he made the mistake of not saying he was “with the man”.
