Should we give up on everything – on humanity and humanitarianism – just because today’s “Grand Inquisitors”, from Bucha and Izium to Be’eri, Khan Yunis and Rafah, have opted for nihilism? Here, Christophe Courtin turns to the French writer Albert Camus, as some often do in the face of despair and when looking for a voice for inspiration. He shares with us the one of the author who wrote The Stranger.
Seventy-three years ago, when the Cold War was in its early years, Albert Camus wrote, in his introduction to The Rebel, that massacres carried out in the name of love for people “disorientate judgement in a way”.[1]Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté, éditions Gallimard, 1951. During that period of history, each side – let’s say capitalist and communist – would denounce the crimes of the other side to start its wars. Back then, in that period of crimes committed out of ideology, between the 1950s and the 1990s, leaders would justify their economic and geopolitical clout in the name of a worldview. They would consider the immediate evil, its cost to usher in progress and their end goal. The possibility of universal rights was the issue, though this universal morality often covered up ordinary geostrategic interests. Fear of the consequences of Nazi ideology had spurred each side to apply Albert Camus’s phrase “a man stops himself”[2]Albert Camus, Le Premier Homme, éditions Gallimard, 1994. to the whole of humanity.
In addition to the humanitarian crises in Sudan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are we witnessing, in Ukraine and Gaza – helpless in the face of repeated hate-driven massacres – the arrival of what the poet Paul Celan called “the metallic advance troops of the next primitive century”?[3]Paul Celan, Partie de neige, traduction française, éditions du Seuil, 2007. In fact, are those “metallic troops” that made themselves heard before the Second World War actually now returning?
“Are we witnessing, in Ukraine and Gaza – helpless in the face of repeated hate-driven massacres – the arrival of what the poet Paul Celan called ‘the metallic advance troops of the next primitive century’.”
In 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross counted a total of twenty ongoing conflicts in the world, yet today, in the year 2024, there are more than 120.[4]International Committee of the Red Cross, Declaration by Mirjana Spoljaric for the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, 12 August 2024, … Continue reading In a way, what still disorientates our judgement, more specifically in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Israel-Palestine conflict in Gaza, is an absence of end goals – unless the purpose of these conflicts is simply brute force, violence and domination with an aim of imposing particular interests – and a universal moral debasement, which Albert Camus saw as a part of nihilism where anything is permitted. This disorientation, this awareness of the absurdity of present times, is born of our need for meaning in the face of human suffering and the rationality of violence.
The peak of human rights
In the wake of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on 10 December 1948. On the previous day, United Nations General Assembly had adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And eight months later, on 12 August 1949, four new Geneva Conventions were signed. This adoption of a series of founding texts in international law was the expression of universal values after thirty years in which Europe imploded between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Second World War. This adoption of texts affirmed that a human being as an individual had inalienable rights, including the right to freedom and the right to resist oppression, and that the dignity of each individual should be protected. The first modern expressions of natural law from the 16th century onwards had created a fertile ground in which Western thought could develop the principles of human rights – now a pillar of international law. With decolonialisation, the fights against slavery and the struggles for civil rights, the powerful anthropological dynamic of human rights gave rise to the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention in 1864, the idea of a borderless world, the institutions of the UN, and international humanitarian law (IHL) with a body of international legal texts for exercising human rights.
This universalist trend perhaps reached its peak in 2002 when sixty States ratified the international treaty that created the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Since then, an awareness of a propensity for colonial domination in this trend has prompted countries of the Global South[5]Sixty years ago, we used the term “Third World countries”. And thirty years ago, we used the term “developing countries”. Despite their new power, but because of their past, China, Brazil and … Continue reading to radically call into question Western universalism, especially in regions of the world that have historically benefitted from our aid for development, our humanitarian interventions and our compassion.
“It is as if the West’s moral capital has been squandered in the military operations that it has pursued since its decolonial wars: operations ranging from the Vietnam War to anti-terrorism fights.”
This modern trial even undermines the very principles of IHL, which seemed set in stone, though they had always been trampled upon. It is as if the West’s moral capital has been squandered in the military operations that it has pursued since its decolonial wars: operations ranging from the Vietnam War to anti-terrorism fights through the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and especially that in Iraq in 2003. Today, in the eyes of the Global South, the impression of double standards given by the contrast between the West’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and its reaction to the mass bombing of Gazan civilians since October 2023 has shattered the West’s moral legitimacy based on universal reason. For the Global South, this so-called universal reason is actually an instrument exploited by the West, rather than a benevolent emancipatory force for individuals. Like Camus back in his time, facing the possibility of nuclear apocalypse, we are facing a similar level of gravity in the present day: a growing self-destructive frenzy among many political leaders, who are no longer held back by international law.
An absence of end goals
Up to now, the globalisation of economies and public development aid that funds charities have gone hand in hand, the latter making up for the imbalances of the former. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in development have tried to fill this growing gap. Humanitarian NGOs have intervened when civilian populations are victims of natural catastrophes or of violence caused by geostrategic power at play. These NGOs have been encouraged – and taken advantage of – by Western democracies and have therefore been funded by them. UN organisations, funded by States, have delegated some of their work to NGOs. Humanitarian reason has become part of the free-market matrix, so aid work is now widely seen as a charity-based form of international morality that the West subcontracts out. In a way, the absence of end goals that now disorientates our judgement is the logical conclusion of an assumption that there is “no alternative”[6]Margaret Thatcher: “Yet I believe people accept there’s no real alternative to the market economy”, Conservative Women’s Conference, 21 May 1980, … Continue reading to globalisation: capitalism’s marketisation of the world whereby goods and their value become the only anthropological driving force of human activity. Yet this period when, in spite of everything, countries rooted in economic globalisation have treated humanitarian work benevolently – or, at worst, indifferently – also now seems to be over.
“For the humanitarian sector, there will be a pre-Gaza and post-Gaza dividing line in history: aid workers there have been specifically targeted without Europe or the United States properly intervening.”
For the humanitarian sector, there will be a pre-Gaza and post-Gaza dividing line in history: aid workers there have been specifically targeted without Europe or the United States properly intervening. The legitimacy of the International Court of Justice and UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) is now under fire from Western countries. And for IHL, there will be a pre-Mariupol and post-Mariupol dividing line in history: there, in 2022, Russians bombed a children’s hospital and then a theatre in which hundreds of civilians had taken refuge, killing tens of people without Russia accepting that this was a massacre of civilians and without its allies of the Global South denouncing it. Does humanitarian action and, more broadly, international solidarity still have any meaning now that the legal basis of humanitarian interventions is undermined by the ones who have historically championed international law?
Indulgence towards nihilism
Today, do declarations from Russian, Israeli and Hamas politico-military leaders reveal what Camus called, in his book-length essay The Rebel, “indulgence towards nihilism”? For Camus, this “indulgence towards nihilism” was the fruit of accepting the world’s absurdity, where permission for anything, in the name of domination, is the only basis for action. In regard to what is unfolding today, Camus was absolutely right as he added: “This permission for anything is where the story of contemporary nihilism really begins.” Yet what he could not observe was that the 21st century would herald a return of mass killings, against which the body of human rights and humanitarian law, developed after the Second World War, was designed as a rampart. Eighty-three years after the Babi Yar massacre,[7]The Babi Yar massacre in Kiev on 29 and 30 September 1941 where 33,771 Jews were assassinated. mass graves for civilians with hands tied behind their backs have been discovered once again in Ukraine: in Bucha and Izium. And once again, the term “pogrom” has been used in current affairs to describe the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 in the Be’eri kibbutz. The possibility of a genocide being underway, waged against the inhabitants of Gaza, has been documented by UN institutions against the country that was founded in response to Europe’s guilt in the wake of the Holocaust. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov[8]Fiodor Dostoïevski, The Brothers Karamasov (translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett), Modern Library, 1977., the Grand Inquisitor defends a vision of the world where the most high-minded human values should be sacrificed for the sake of social stability founded upon the religious illusion of authority. In the speech that Camus gave on 10 December 1957 in Stockholm, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the French writer looked back at this issue of consenting to servitude that the Grand Inquisitor raised. He said: “In a world threatened with disintegration, in which our Grand Inquisitors run the risk of establishing, forever, the kingdoms of death, our generation knows that it should […] remake, with all men, an Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task …”. IHL and international human rights law built this humanistic Ark of the Covenant upon the ruins of the Second World War. These legal constructions now seem overwhelmed by a return of mass killings, no longer carried out in the name of ideology but in the name of nihilism itself: the modern amorality of today’s war leaders and their allies. Camus gave his speech following the murderous madness of two world wars. He underlined the gravity of his time. Today, there is reason to fear that the nihilism that our major post-war legal texts have, apparently, restrained is now back on its irreversible track once again.
The original heartbeat
Yet even though nihilism seems to be, sadly, back on track, the trend towards natural rights that began in Europe will not stop. Camus’s reflections were not a kind of passive resignation in the face of modern absurdity. He maintained that in a world devoid of ultimate meaning it was still possible to choose a human-centred response in spite of absurd violence. The violence of today’s Grand Inquisitors should not be accepted as inevitable, just as the violence of Camus’s time should not have been. Camus advocated a revolt against moral dead ends – a revolt that still finds expression in commitments to justice and human dignity. The end of Western universalism must not sound the death knell of the possibility for a human-centred universal – the ethical basis of any commitment to humanitarian work. The universal nature of natural rights is part of a long, evolving process of hominisation whereby a human species with a collective consciousness emerges. The major legal texts of 1948 and 1949 were in tune with this long-term process of hominisation, this low-frequency long wave that we can trace back to the dawn of humanity and that is now being disrupted by the dramatic events unfolding in Palestine and Ukraine. This slow, steady heartbeat continues, despite hazards, and it carries on spreading throughout humanity. Camus would have said that the challenge of our generation is to find a new source of emancipatory energy in tune with the energy behind human rights.
The centrality of feminist struggles
Is the issue of gender equality now rekindling this energy worldwide, beyond cultural differences? The issue of gender equality transcends the wars of civilisation that our Grand Inquisitors are now trying to make us buy into with their passions tristes (sad passions, in French). Feminist struggles are no longer just about political, judicial or ethical issues. By calling into question domination at the heart of human relations, these struggles concern changes being made to a violent international order. Bruno Latour[9]Bruno Latour, La Religion à l’épreuve de l’écologie. Suivi de Exégèse et Ontologie, Éditions La Découverte, 2024. considered that the centrality of gender equality in all its possible forms, even its most incomprehensible expressions in countries of the Global South, could be seen as the mark of widespread doubt about the neoliberal marketisation of human relations, which itself brings domination.
“Feminist struggles are no longer just about political, judicial or ethical issues. By calling into question domination at the heart of human relations, these struggles concern changes being made to a violent international order.”
To think that women usher in, by their very nature, egalitarian relations, rather than domination, would be yet another essentialist stereotype. But the presence of women in the globalised public arena is now unavoidable and this female presence determines power balances and violence differently because these women themselves have been part of the story and are still the subject of domination and violence. In all countries, struggles against domestic violence, struggles for the right to contraception and abortion, struggles for the right to keep one’s name, struggles against female genital mutilation, struggles against religious rules on clothing, struggles against feminicide, struggles for the education of young girls, struggles for equal pay, and struggles for peace all bring together local revolts against the bellicose absurdity of a world founded upon a male order.
In Russia, from the outset of the invasion of Ukraine, it was women who organised anti-war protests in several cities. The “Feminists Against the War” movement has published manifestos and used social media to encourage society to swing into action. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, which was created in 1989 at the end of the Soviet-Afghan war, despite repression, still holds Russian authorities to account, denouncing the lack of information about the fate of their sons and the conditions in which they are fighting. It was a female journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova, who burst into a television news show in March 2022 to denounce Putin’s “special military operation”. In Ukraine, the feminist group Bilkis helps female victims of the war and also decries a lack of gender equality in Ukrainian society. The Ukrainian army includes a feminist association of soldiers, Veteranka, which fights sexism in the military. And in Israel, the movement Women in Black, which was founded in 1988 during the First Intifada, is made up of women protesting against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Moreover, the group of Israeli women Machsom Watch, created in 2001, monitors Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank to document human rights violations against Palestinians. Even though the massacre of 7 October 2023 slowed down partnerships between Palestinian and Israeli feminist NGOs for a feminist approach to peace and justice, the organisations Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP), created in 2000 during the Second Intifada, and Women Wage Peace (WWP), founded in 2014 after the “Protective border” operation, still keep in touch with each other.
Camus after all
We cannot say that Albert Camus was a feminist. His female characters play secondary roles or simply appear alongside the central plot of the male hero’s actions. His relations with women were typical of his time, reflecting the social constructions of relations between men and women in his intellectual milieu and in his narrative identity as a man of French origin living in French-ruled Algeria: passion, exaltation of the mother figure, unfaithfulness, seduction and authority. Yet Camus campaigned for human dignity and equality among human beings. Today, these principles underpin feminist struggles. And they can help us preserve the original heartbeat of natural rights as a rampart against the absurd. That is the immense task that our generation must try to accomplish, even though it is not certain that it will ever be able to accomplish it…
Translated from the French by Thomas Young
