The rebel
The political right and left have been fighting for Albert Camus' legacy, but Europe's most influential literary export remains stubbornly elusive.

Quote:

Indeed they do not, as so many French, English and American intellectuals discovered when the Algerian nationalist group they endorsed proved to be as brutal and despotic as any fascist engine

Any fascist regime? As bad as Nazi Germany, which caused a war where at least 50 million people died? As bad as fascist Italy, which attacked and occupied Ethiopia in 1935-36, Albania in 1939 and Greece in 1941? As bad as Franco´s Spain? As bad as Portugal´s fascist regime(up to 1974), which not only oppressed it´s own populace, but millions of people in Africa too?

Let´s not be naive. The Algerian state that formed after 1962 wasn´t ruled by great humanists, but it wasn´t worse than many other countries of the time, counting both newly independent and established states; the Algeria of the 1990s was still in the future with it´s maybe 150 000 victims of the civil war.

And what comes to Albert Camus, it´s false to claim that he wouldn´t have endorsed the Algerian war of independence because of some great revelation to the nature of the FNL and it´s leaders. He clearly says in his own writings enough times that he doesn´t support the Algerian independence movement because the French settlers, the blackfoots, were his people, and even if the opposition of the French settlers to any kind of compromise prior to the start of the rebellion in 1954 - like giving the native Algerians right to vote - was the reason of the bloodshed, he still wanted to give them as large a part in Algeria as possible. To Camus, blood was thicker than his principles. What should be done to native Arabs and Berbers was never certain him, and he really didn´t have much interest on them, at least based on his writings. He truly was a child of the European Mediterranean, not the southern part of the Mediterranean and certainly not Africa. He didn´t want the native Algerians to be oppressed forever, but he wasn´t ready to give them what they wanted, as he knew that the French Algeria was founded on the basis of military occupation. The world of his childhood and adolescence would be gone if the majority of the people living in Algeria could chose what road the country would take in the future.

That after 1962 thing went as they went is no reason to claim that Albert Camus was right when it came to Algeria. There was no way that Algeria could have stayd under French rule and the million French settlers could have continue to rule the country. The chance of any reconciliation between them and the native Algerians was gone by 1954, and Camus just couldn´t accept the truth when it was bad for the people he considered his own.