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| Albert Camus |
In March, 1957, Albert Camus published an essay, at great cost to himself, titled “Kadar Had His Day Of Fear.” His epitaph on the suppressed Hungarian revolution may serve as well as an epitaph on the suppressed Ukrainian revolution.
The Hungarian revolution had been suppressed, and Stalin had
installed in Hungary a political administration much to his liking. Camus regarded
the takeover of Hungary by totalitarian Stalinists as a counter-revolution.
His essay was costly to Camus for a number of reasons. It
was an epistle of liberty and a resolute, unambiguous disparagement of
totalitarianism.
The essay began on a defiant note: “The Hungarian Minister
of State Marosan, whose name sounds like a program, declared a few days ago
that there would be no further counter-revolution in Hungary. For once, one of
Radar's Ministers has told the truth. How could there be a counter-revolution
since it has already seized power? There can be no other revolution in Hungary.”
And the second paragraph likely was considered in France by what
we might call its philosophical establishment as an awakening slap in the face:
“I am not one of those who long for the Hungarian people to take up arms again
in an uprising doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society
that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their
slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There
are already too many dead in the stadium, and we can be generous only with our
own blood. Hungarian blood has proved to be so valuable to Europe and to
freedom that we must try to spare every drop of it.”
And then France’s apostle of liberty let loose the following
thunderbolt: “But I am not one to think there can be even a resigned or
provisional compromise with a reign of terror that has as much right to be
called socialist as the executioners of the Inquisition had to be called
Christians. And, on this anniversary of liberty, I hope with all my strength
that the mute resistance of the Hungarian people will continue, grow stronger,
and, echoed by all the voices we can give it, get unanimous international
opinion to boycott its oppressors. And if that opinion is too flabby or selfish
to do justice to a martyred people, if our voices also are too weak, I hope
that the Hungarian resistance will continue until the counter-revolutionary
state collapses everywhere in the East under the weight of its lies and its
contradictions.”
Camus himself was both an atheist and a socialist fully prepared to take to the ramparts, in fine French fashion: “For it [the Stalinist false front] is indeed a counter-revolutionary state. What else can we call a regime that forces the father to inform on his son, the son to demand the supreme punishment for his father, the wife to bear witness against her husband —that has raised denunciation to the level of a virtue? Foreign tanks, police, twenty-year-old girls hanged, committees of workers decapitated and gagged, scaffolds, writers deported and imprisoned, the lying press, camps, censorship, judges arrested, criminals legislating, and the scaffold again—is this socialism, the great celebration of liberty and justice?”
Here at last was a man who knew how to draw proper distinctions. The essay was bound to tread on tender toes.
In Hungary, a Joshua horn had been sounded, and walls had
begun to tumble: “Thus, with the first shout of insurrection in free Budapest,
learned and shortsighted philosophies, miles of false reasonings and
deceptively beautiful doctrines were scattered like dust. And the truth, the
naked truth, so long outraged, burst upon the eyes of the world.
“Contemptuous teachers, unaware that they were thereby insulting the working
classes, had assured us that the masses could readily get along without liberty
if only they were given bread. And the masses themselves suddenly replied that
they didn't have bread but that, even if they did, they would still like
something else. For it was not a learned professor but a Budapest blacksmith
who wrote: ‘I want to be considered an adult eager to think and capable of
thought. I want to be able to express my thoughts without having anything to
fear and I want, also, to be listened to.’"
It was an essay too far for stern socialists in France, some
of whom were prepared to avert their eyes so long as the Soviet experiment in
Russia moved forward unimpeded.
Camus stood in the way of totalitarian progress. He was of the
party of liberty and just revolt. As such, he ended his
essay: “Our faith is that throughout the world, beside the impulse toward
coercion and death that is darkening history, there is a growing impulse toward
persuasion and life, a vast emancipatory movement called culture that is made
up both of free creation and of free work.
“Our daily task, our long vocation is to add to that culture by our labors and
not to subtract, even temporarily, anything from it. But our proudest duty is
to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and
death, the freedom of that culture—in other words, the freedom of work and of
creation.
“The Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with so
much impotent grief, realized that and made us realize it. This is why, if
their suffering is ours, their hope belongs to us too. Despite their destitution,
their exile, their chains, it took them but a single day to transmit to us the
royal legacy of liberty. May we be worthy of it!”
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