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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A vision of pacifism,
By Eliyah (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Neither Victims Nor Executioners (Paperback)
I first bought this slender book in 1976 at 17, when I first became aware of the outside world and didn't understand how to reconcile my instinctive pacifism with the violence of public discourse. I was too young to understand more than a few words. But today, while packing up some books to donate to the library, I stumbled on it and began to read. Camus captivated me again, and this time I began to understand his message. It is as though a fog has lifted.Camus rejected war, the sanctioned murder of humans. My nascent understanding of his argument is that although it's not realistic to hope to stop all war, it's important for the individual to overcome the fear that makes us root for one side or the other. This rings particularly true right now for this American woman, having grown frustrated with our president's recent "terror speeches." How, indeed, can we each think clearly, apply our values with integrity, and face down what we know is fundamentally wrong, while we cling to fear? How can we respond to our frightened friends and acquaintences when they insist that we must "defend" ourselves at all cost? Change is difficult, and may take the rest of time to accomplish, but we must endeavor to change, if only to experience peace in our own lives. The book was written in 1972, but the ideas are fresh, perhaps eternal. Yes, it's deep, but even at 17 I underlined the key ideas, and even without wading through the dense language you will come across clear restatements of the principles. I recommend it for anyone who is uncomfortable with current events and needs encouragement to live their ideas. I, in fact, am about to order around 10 of these to give to my friends, who've been as confused and exasperated by their inability to articulate their beliefs as I. I hope you'll consider it, too.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Albert Camus' discourse on peace,
By Matt (Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Neither Victims Nor Executioners (Modern Classics of Peace Series) (Paperback)
Camus sets forth his views on how peace should be universal but how it is unlikely to occur in the near future due to rising and conflicting world powers. This is more of a position paper than a book, but is rather deep.
5.0 out of 5 stars
We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right...,
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This review is from: Neither victims nor executioners (Paperback)
I have, for some reason, never been a very big fan of Camus' fiction but I love his essays. The book Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays is a real gem. This essay "Neither Victims nor Executioners" is another gem from Camus. One of Camus' greatest gifts is his ability to infuse the middle position, the position that holds to the relative values of life, dialogue, and reason over any absolute interpretation of history, with moral passion. Those who hold to absolute ideologies, whether of the left or the right, are often able to inspire extreme degrees of passion and moral zeal in their followers, and history is largely the history of the violence of those clashes, but it is much more difficult to inspire passion for the middle position since, by definition almost, it seems less extreme. Camus is able to write beautifully and to communicate the moral force of his decision for the middle position since, as he writes, "We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right...And for all who can live only in an atmosphere of human dialogue and sociability, this silence is the end of the world" (6).On the one hand Camus' essay is situated deeply within his own time. The essay is largely a response to the French Marxists, like Sartre, who were arguing that Marxists should refrain from being critical of the Soviet Union and Stalin since such criticism damaged the cause and supported reaction. There were also philosophers putting forth arguments that in the case of Soviet communism the ultimate end justified the means (I am always sad that one of my very favorite philosophers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, wrote an essay defending the Soviet show trials in just those terms, though he later changed his mind). This was not a peculiarity of the left since the defenders of free-market capitalism were also demanding silence about the Anglo-American support of Franco since making such views public provided support for communism. Camus is responding to this atmosphere of silence as well as the clash of absolute and contradictory ideologies within history. But the fact that Camus' essay is tied so closely to his own times does not at all limit its general relevance. We still live in a world often dominated by ideological clashes in which the extremes are often the loudest voices. We still live in a world where ends are often used to justify means, and where silence is often demanded of us in order to avoid hurting the cause, whatever that might be (if you criticize the U.S. you wind up lending credence to the arguments of the terrorists; if you believe in liberal values you support U.S. imperialism, etc.). Camus refused to give into such simplistic either/or representations of our choices and so should we. To those who were holding up absolute ideals, of a perfectly just society or mode of distribution, Camus was holding up the relative ideal of simply staying alive in the face of the dangers such ideological wars posed to humankind, especially after the development of the nuclear bomb. In an essay in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death Camus expressed the opinion that rather than fighting for absolute ideals we should be fighting for the relative ideals (free speech, etc.) which allow us to continue fighting for our absolute ideals in the first place. In the essay "Neither Victims nor Executioners" Camus calls this Relative Utopia which, "demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity's lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off shadowy ends...or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are" (21). Such a position does not entail passivity to the status quo but it does require us to take Camus' decision seriously when he decided, "I could no longer hold to any truth which might oblige me, directly or indirectly, to demand a man's life" (7). We must decide against becoming executioners but that does not mean we must assent to being victims. We must also give up the notion that what happens in the rest of the world does not concern us, "There is no suffering, no torture, anywhere in the world which does not affect our everyday lives" (15). Camus gives the example of blood shed on the banks of a Central European river which brings a Texas farmer to spill his own blood in the Ardennes (14-15). This is a point we still have to learn. We divide up the world too easily into spheres of strategic interest and relative unimportance and believe we can ignore the latter but since we all live in the world, and since the world is more interconnected now than it ever has been, we are all affected by everything that happens in the world, however distant. Despite its short-length this is an essay packed with ideas and I give it my highest recommendation along with all of Camus' essays.
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