{"id":151184,"date":"2020-01-06T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=151184"},"modified":"2020-01-06T06:59:03","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T06:59:03","slug":"the-searching-life-and-enigmatic-death-of-albert-camus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/01\/the-searching-life-and-enigmatic-death-of-albert-camus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Searching Life and Enigmatic Death of Albert Camus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cEveryone wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions.\u00a0 A thousand voices are already telling him what he has found, and yet he knows he hasn\u2019t found anything. Should he search on and let them talk? Of course.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Albert Camus, \u201cThe Enigma\u201d in Lyrical and Critical Essays<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Albert Camus\u2019 search ended sixty years ago on January 4, 1960, the day he died.\u00a0 Although he had already written The Stranger<\/em>, The Rebel<\/em>, The Plague<\/em>, and The Fall<\/em>, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he felt his true work had barely begun. Alongside the car in which he died, his briefcase lay in the mud.\u00a0 In it was the uncompleted, hand-written manuscript of his final quest, The First<\/em> Man<\/em>, an autobiographical novel written in a raw emotional and lyrical style that was liberating him from the prison of a classical form he felt compelled to escape.\u00a0 He was on his way to a new freedom, in writing and in life, when he was cut down.\u00a0 The book was published posthumously in 1994 by his daughter and son.\u00a0 It is a beautiful peek into a reserved man\u2019s youthful inner development, the loneliness of a poor boy made fatherless by an absurd war, and the ways in which the boy \u201chad to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth.\u201d\u00a0 It explains a lot about Camus\u2019 later writing and why, at the end of his life, he was so isolated and criticized by the right, left, and center for his various political positions.<\/p>\n

He could not be pigeonholed. This drove many crazy.\u00a0 His allegiance was to truth, not ideologies.\u00a0 He was not a partisan in the Cold War between the U.S.\/NATO and the U.S.S.R.\u00a0 An artist compelled by conscience and history to enter the political arena, he spoke in defense of the poor, oppressed, and powerless.\u00a0 Among his enemies were liberal imperialism and Soviet Marxism, abstract ideologies used to murder and enslave people around the world.\u00a0 He opposed state murder, terrorism, and warfare from all quarters. He was an artistic anarchist with a passionate spiritual hunger and an austere and moral Don Juan.\u00a0 He was a mystery to himself in many ways. He made mistakes. But he was honest and honorable.<\/p>\n

He is the kind of thinker we need today.\u00a0 But he is still easily used and abused by those with their own agendas, and in that way, he is emblematic of the ways the search for truth today can be manipulated.\u00a0 It is a sly game, one that only can start to make sense when one puts concentrated effort into unraveling the endless propaganda that is the fabric of our lives today.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has followed the evidence knows that Russia-gate, Ukraine-gate, the anti-Putin hysteria, and the new Cold War is a fabrication concocted by deep-state intelligence and political forces in the United States and the West.\u00a0 Of course, many will deny these facts.\u00a0 Anti-Russia hysteria has filled the airwaves for years.\u00a0 It is pure propaganda that is manna from heaven for liberals and conservatives wishing to maintain their religious belief in American holiness, even as the U.S.\/NATO has surrounded Russia with military forces.\u00a0 Anything that can intensify this mania is used by the corporate media. It is a very dangerous game of nuclear brinkmanship.\u00a0 For many people, studying such issues in depth is beside the point.\u00a0 As Camus wrote in 1954, \u201cToday one takes a side based on the reading of an article.\u201d\u00a0 In 2020 it may be just a headline.<\/p>\n

Here is a case in point. Perhaps minor, perhaps not.\u00a0\u00a0A relative, knowing I had previously written about a book claiming that Camus\u2019 death in a car was not an accident but an assassination carried out by the KGB, recently sent me a link to an article in The Guardian, <\/i>the paper <\/i>that <\/i>published a tiny portion of the Edward Snowden documents after allowing the Intelligence authorities to censor them, then oversaw the destruction of all Snowden\u2019s computer documents, and finally became a full-time mouthpiece for the security state. The article was entitled: \u201cNew Book Claims Albert Camus Was Murdered by the KGB.\u201d <\/a>\u00a0The article was published on Dec 2, 2019 and my relative naturally assumed it was a new book.<\/p>\n

So did I, but I didn\u2019t know there was a new book.\u00a0 A year ago I had written about a book, Camus deve morire<\/em> (Camus Must Die), published only in Italian in 2013 by the Italian writer Giovanni Catelli, that claims that Camus was assassinated by the KGB.\u00a0 So I read the article and was perplexed.<\/p>\n

There is no new book; there are new translations into French and Spanish of the same book from 2013. The French edition has a forward by the American writer Paul Auster, who finds Catelli\u2019s argument convincing. \u00a0More than a year ago Catelli had kindly sent me an English version of his book, which I had read before writing about it, and I assume I am the only person to have read the book in English.\u00a0 I think it is persuasive, but not dispositive.<\/p>\n

The recent Guardian<\/em> article was picked up by various publications that repeated much of it, adding incorrectly that The Guardian<\/em> interviewed Catelli, etc., implying that it was all new.\u00a0 This was picked up by other publications that repeated this plus other erroneous claims , including one from a linked \u00a0New Yorker <\/em>article<\/a> from 2014 that says, as do many others, that Catelli\u2019s claims of a KGB hit on Camus couldn\u2019t be true because Camus had a train ticket in his pocket and only made a last minute decision to ride in the car back to Paris with his friend Michel Gallimard and his family.\u00a0 This is false, but it fits into the attractive theme of \u201can absurd death.\u201d\u00a0 The truth is Camus had written a letter on December 30 to Maria Casar\u00e8s that he would be taking a car, not the train, adding \u2013 believe it or not \u2013 that he would be arriving on Tuesday, January 4, \u201ctaking into account surprises on the road.\u201d\u00a0 Then on the night of January 2, he had a nightmare in which he was pursued by four faceless men on a country road where he got into a car to escape and another faceless man drove the car straight into the side of a house, as Camus awoke terrified.<\/p>\n

As I said, it\u2019s a sly game, this publication business where little things can mean a lot, or not. \u00a0Subtle points.\u00a0 Many mistakes.\u00a0 Some out of ignorance, others intentional.\u00a0 Things repeated.\u00a0 The timing often important to send implied messages.<\/p>\n

This speculation about Camus\u2019 death began in 2011 when the media were abuzz with a report out of Italy that, rather than an accident, Camus may have been assassinated by the Soviet KGB for his powerful criticism of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, their massacre of Hungarian freedom fighters, and for his defense and advocacy of Boris Pasternak and his novel, Doctor Zhivago<\/em>, among other things. For those who study history, all these issues are complicated by CIA involvement, which is not to say that Soviet forces did not massacre Hungarian freedom fighters or that Pasternak should not have been defended and the massacres condemned. Those things are clear, while others are murky, as was then and is now the CIA\u2019s intention in so many terrible events around the world.\u00a0 This murkiness is created by the mass media that does the bidding of the intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

These reports of a KGB hit on Camus were based on an article in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera<\/em>, and came from the remarks of Catelli, an Italian academic, Slavic scholar, and poet.\u00a0 Catelli said that he had read in a diary, published as a book, Cel\u0341\u0341y\u0341 z\u036eivot<\/em>, written by Jan Za\u0341brana, a well-known poet and translator of Doctor Zhivago<\/em>, the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cI heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources.\u00a0 According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organized by Soviet spies.\u00a0 They damaged the tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole at speed.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This claim was quickly and broadly rejected by Camus\u2019 scholars and it just as quickly disappeared from view.<\/p>\n

But in 2013 Catelli published Camus Must Die<\/em> that suggests there may be more to it than those early dismissals of the Corriere della Sera<\/em> report indicate. One has only to harken back to the 2013 mysterious death of journalist Michael Hastings in the United States when his car accelerated to over 100 miles per hour and exploded against a tree on a straight road in Los Angeles to make one think twice, maybe more. To question that death is of course to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist, a bit of mind control straight from the CIA\u2019s playbook.<\/p>\n

Camus and Hastings. Tree lined straight roads, no traffic, outspoken writers, anomalous crashes, different countries and eras \u2013 tales to make one wonder.\u00a0 And probe and research if one is so inclined.\u00a0 Read more than one article.\u00a0 Perhaps a book or two.<\/p>\n

Whatever the cause of Albert Camus\u2019 death, however, it is clear that we could use his voice today.\u00a0 I believe we should honor and remember him on this day that he died, for as an artist of his time, an artist for our time and all time, he tried to serve both beauty and suffering, to defend the innocent in this murderous world.\u00a0 Quintessentially a man of his age, he was haunted by images that haunt us still, in particular those of being locked in an absurd prison threatened by madmen brandishing weapons small and large, ready to blow this beautiful world to smithereens with weapons conjured out of their hubristic, Promethean dreams of conquest and power.<\/p>\n

For we live in plague time, and the plague lives in us.\u00a0 Like the inhabitants of the rat-infested French-Algerian city of Oran in Camus\u2019s The Plague,<\/em> the United States is \u201cpeopled with sleep walkers,\u201d pseudo-innocents, who are \u201cchiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests.\u201d\u00a0 That their own government, no matter what political party is in power (both working for deep-state, elite interests led by the organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator of a world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be denied and divorced from consensus reality.\u00a0 These plague-stricken deaths visited on millions around the world \u2013 by Clinton, the Bushes, Obama, Trump \u2013 must be denied by diverting attention to partisan politics that elicit outrage after outrage by the various factions and their minions.<\/p>\n

The true plague, the bedrock of a nation continually waging wars against the world, is avoided. Presently, it is the liberals that are \u201cshocked\u201d that Trump is the President as he bombs Iraq and assassinates Iranian leaders. These are the same people who went silent for the last eight years as Obama ravaged the world and lied about his cruel policies. Their outrage over Trump\u2019s victory reeked of bad faith, with most of them supporting Hillary Clinton, a neo-liberal war-monger par excellence. Further \u201cshocks\u201d will follow when Trump leaves office and the latest neo-liberal avatar succeeds him, whether that is this year or in 2024; conservatives will resume their harangues and protestations, just as they have done during Obama\u2019s reign. The two war parties will exchange insults as their followers are outraged and the American Empire, built on the disease of violence, will roll along or perhaps disintegrate. No one knows. But the plague will rage on and the main stream corporate media will play along by sowing confusion and telling lies in big and little ways.<\/p>\n

For \u201cdecent folks must be allowed to sleep at night,\u201d says the character Tarrou sarcastically in The Plague<\/em>; he is a man who has lost his ability to \u201csleep well\u201d since he witnessed a man\u2019s execution where the \u201cbullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist.\u201d\u00a0 He awakens to the realization that he \u201chad an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people.\u201d\u00a0 He loses any peace he had and vows to resist the plague in every way he can.\u00a0 \u201cFor many years I\u2019ve been ashamed,\u201d he says, \u201cmortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rats are dying in the streets. They are our rats, diseased by us. They have emerged from the underworld of a nation plagued by its denial.\u00a0 Unconscious evil bubbles up.\u00a0 We are an infected people. Worry and irritation \u2013 \u201cthese are not feelings with which to confront plague.\u201d But we don\u2019t seem ashamed of our complicity in our government\u2019s crimes around the world. Camus knew better. He warned us,<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a wearying business being plague-stricken.\u00a0 But it\u2019s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That\u2019s why everybody in the world looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the fight against the plague must go on; that was Camus\u2019 message.\u00a0 If not, you will be destroyed by your own complicity in evil.\u00a0 You will be plagued by your own hand.<\/p>\n

Were Camus alive today, he would no doubt be struck by the constant stream of news reports exemplifying the hubris of our technological rationality, a mode of thinking that has made a fetish out of technology, worships efficiency, and considers any critical protest as irrational.\u00a0\u00a0 For Camus was deeply influenced by ancient Greek philosophy.\u00a0 He wrote,<\/p>\n

\u201cGreek thought was always based on the idea of limits.\u00a0 Nothing was carried to extremes, neither religion nor reason, because Greek thought denied nothing, neither reason nor religion \u2026. And, even though we do it in diverse ways, we extol one thing and one alone: a future world in which reason will reign supreme.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He would be appalled by the arrogance of a nation led by technocratic experts and politicians who have embraced the power of pure reason devoid of values.\u00a0 Despite all rhetoric to the contrary, the embrace of technical reason, which is innately amoral, has caused many of the problems we seem unable to remedy.\u00a0 These include environmental catastrophe, high-tech wars, GM foods, drone killings, drug addiction, and nuclear weapons, to name but a few.\u00a0 For such problems created by technology, our esteemed leaders have technological answers.\u00a0 The high-priests of this technological complex \u2013 organization types all \u2013 use the technology and control the information which they then present as \u201cfacts\u201d to justify their actions.\u00a0 The absurdity of this vicious circle is lost on them.\u00a0 Their unstated assumption: We have a prohibition to prohibit.\u00a0 If it can be done, it will be done.\u00a0 We have no limits.<\/p>\n

Camus thought differently:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once Furies swoop down upon us to destroy.\u00a0 Nemesis, the goddess of moderation, not of vengeance, is watching.\u00a0 She chastises, ruthlessly, all those who go beyond the limit.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Camus reminds us that we must break free from the \u201cmind-forged manacles\u201d that render us prisoners of hopelessness. This world as a prison is a metaphor that has a long and popular tradition.\u00a0 In the past hundred or more years, however, with the secularization of Western culture and the perceived withdrawal of God, the doors of this prison have shut upon the popular imagination, with growing numbers of people feeling trapped in an alien universe, no longer able to bridge the gulf between themselves and an absent God.\u00a0 Death, once the open avenue to the free life of eternity, has for many become the symbol of the absurdity of existence and the futility of escape.\u00a0 \u201cThere is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man\u2019s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is,\u201d wrote George Orwell in 1944.<\/p>\n

Camus was haunted by these images, intensified as they were by a life of personal isolation beginning with the death of his father in World War I when he was a year old and continuing throughout his upbringing by a half-deaf, emotionally sterile mother.\u00a0 His entire life, including his tragic art, was an attempt to find a way out of this closed world.\u00a0 This was his search.<\/p>\n

That is why he continues to speak today to those who grapple with the same enigmas, those who strive to find hope and faith to defend the defenseless and revel in the glory of living simultaneously.\u00a0 Not absurdly, he left clues to that quest in his briefcase on the road where he died \u2013 the unfinished manuscript to his beautiful Le Premier Homme<\/em> (The First Man).\u00a0 It was as if, whether he died in an accident or was murdered, the first man was going to have the last word.<\/p>\n

In his last novel, The Fall<\/em>, he left us Jean Baptiste Clamence, a nihilist worthy of our times, a lawyer dedicated to abstract justice, a phony actor who, in the name of absolute sincerity, lies in order to mask his destructive nihilism that knows no bounds. He reminds me of our power elites. His maxim cuts to the heart of our modern madness:<\/p>\n

When one has no character, one has to apply a method.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Albert Camus had character.\u00a0 Let us honor him.<\/p>\n

I can imagine Camus saying with Hamlet:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Oh, I could tell you \u2013<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But let it be, Horatio, I am dead;<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thou livest; report to me and my cause aright<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To the unsatisfied.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let us do just that.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Albert Camus\u2019 search ended sixty years ago on January 4, 1960, the day he died. Although he had already written The Stranger, The Rebel, The Plague, and The Fall, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he felt his true work had barely begun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[978,813,1452,260,234,91,278,70],"class_list":["post-151184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-albert-camus","tag-cold-war","tag-edward-snowden","tag-history","tag-media","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}