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Although Camus saw man’s fundamental choice in his time as being between communism and Christianity, it seems safe to say he did not feel a need to put up much of a fight against God, a concept which had become fairly meaningless over the past century. He devoted his rhetorical guns to the looming threat of Marxism, focusing on the evil of political violence. He brought out his argument in his November 1946 edition of Combat magazine under the title “Neither Victims nor Executioners”.
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“Terror is legitimized only if we assent to the principle: ‘the end justifies the means’.” … Rejecting political violence, Camus insisted that to accept “Marxism as an absolute philosophy” was no more and no less than to legitimize murder. “In the Marxian perspective,” he wrote, “a hundred thousand corpses are nothing if they are the price of the happiness of hundreds of millions of men.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
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I doubt that Marx would have thought his philosophy to be particularly murderous, but such is the Leninist-Stalinist cast, and I imagine they were less concerned about the happiness or equality of anyone as much as they were about power for themselves for its own sake.
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“Terror is legitimized only if we assent to the principle: ‘the end justifies the means’.” … Rejecting political violence, Camus insisted that to accept “Marxism as an absolute philosophy” was no more and no less than to legitimize murder. “In the Marxian perspective,” he wrote, “a hundred thousand corpses are nothing if they are the price of the happiness of hundreds of millions of men.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I doubt that Marx would have thought his philosophy to be particularly murderous, but such is the Leninist-Stalinist cast, and I imagine they were less concerned about the happiness or equality of anyone as much as they were about power for themselves for its own sake.
