Permanent Disgrace
“No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people in which the killer knows in advance that he will kill women and children.” — Albert Camus, “Preface” The Algerian Chronicles p. 27, 2013 Original, 1958.
With the terror attacks this week in Nairobi and Syria, we have found ourselves starting off 2019 like so many years of the past century, in places where it happens too frequently. Syria has had almost too many to count (although organizations like GTD and ACLED do a pretty good job) and Kenya with high profile attacks that garner lots of attention like the embassy bombing, Westgate Shopping Mall Attack (HBO Doc is worth it), and the Garissa College massacre. I’ve been to those locations in Kenya, more than a few times, and am once removed from victims of the recent attack, so once again it’s close to home. Not as close as when I sat in the Westgate Café just some months prior, and knew people in the videos, but feeling it nonetheless.
There has been a serious increase in literature and academic work on terrorism since the events of 9–11 and subsequent wars, but terror’s been around along time, even if we easily forget. It certainly impacted Algeria considerably during Camus’ lifetime even though he ultimately missed its peak and eventual Algerian independence. I took a particular interest in Algerian terrorism during my studies, and there are many “canonical” academic works still studied that emerged on both sides during that time. I actually felt parallels to Camus’ descriptions of the death penalty and his arguments in Reflections on a Guillotine and the guillotine scene in Battle for Algiers (IMDB), an excellent film worth watching.
But I digress. In his Algerian Chronicles Camus addresses terrorism a few times, and I thought this a fitting quote for the week. It’s a lengthy topic to cover, the justification that organizations use to justify total war against civilians, but I think the counterarguments are easy.
-DA
