"[Albert Camus] found himself fighting a Sisyphean battle during the 1940s. He was a man troubled by the possibility that anti-fascism could come to mirror its enemy (a charge many liberals have now levelled at Antifa)—that it could start to embrace the very same principles of domination and the overuse of violence. Following the defeat of fascism, and turning his attention to questions of post-war justice in 1945-1946, Camus claimed to be neither “victim” nor “executioner,” not an easy ethic to put into practice, yet the alternative for Camus was “murder.” As the intellectual historian George Cotkin explains: “Camus… worried about how the rebel could avoid becoming the oppressor, about whether the rebel’s critical knowledge of the problems of nihilism and revolution could allow him to act instead of becoming frozen in self-doubt and hesitancy. In the face of such existential knowledge, Camus counseled rebellion that is anchored in ‘thought that recognizes limits.’ [..] Orwell and Camus warned us that anti-fascism can curdle into something dangerous, a sort of boundless self-righteousness that eventually loses sight of itself. While battling white supremacists and fascists, it would do us good to remember the anti-fascist ethic of self-scrutiny, that fear of becoming what you are fighting.”
| ← Previous day | (Calendar) | Next day → |