The Cost of the Line
“Whatever the cause being defended, it will always be dishonored by the blind slaughter of an innocent crowd when the killer knows in advance that he will strike down women and children.” ALBERT CAMUS · PREFACE TO ALGERIAN REPORTS
Nothing tested Camus’s ethic like Algeria. He was born there, in poverty, and his mother still lived in Algiers. He had spent his career documenting French colonial cruelty and he refused to defend the French use of torture. He also refused to excuse the bombs that the independence movement left in civilian streets. In the 1958 preface to his collected Algerian writings he set down the rule that cost him nearly everything.
Both sides despised him for it. To the French he was a traitor, to the revolutionaries an apologist for colonists, to the Paris intellectuals a sentimental fool. He spent the rest of his short life largely alone.
This is the part of the month the earlier days do not prepare you for. A limit is not merely difficult to keep. Keeping it can cost you your allies, because each camp wants the line abolished, and each wants it abolished for itself.
His answer was that a rule which bends for the side you happen to be on is not a rule. It is a preference wearing a uniform.
Apply one of your standards to your own side. Say the true thing about your own people, out loud, to your own people. Notice what it costs. That price is the difference between a principle and a slogan.
