NEITHER VICTIM NOR EXECUTIONER

 'Do you, or do you not, directly or indirectly, want to be killed or assaulted? Do you or
  do you not, directly or indirectly, want to kill or assault ?' All who say No to both
  these questions are automatically committed to a series of consequences which
  must modify their way of posing the problem.'

Two answers
Saving our skins
The self deception of the socialist
Parody of revolution
International democracy and dicatorship
The world speeded up
A new social contract
Towards sociability

ALTHOUGH Camus fought during the Second World War in the Resistance and would not have considered himself a pacifist, all his writing displays a concern with the problem of killing - suicide and murder, different aspects of the same 'encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe'. In his essays, novels and plays he grappled with the problem of the individual caught in history's illogical web, and it was man and humanity that he affirmed. The world had seen enough of men and women dying for causes; it was time to live for one. 'Neither Victims nor Executioners' appeared serially in the autumn of 1946 in Combat, the daily newspaper of the Resistance, which Camus helped edit during the Nazi occupation and for a short time after the war. It was published in English in the July-August 1947 issue of Politics. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, the second youngest writer to receive this honour. He died three years later in an automobile accident.
The translation is by Dwight Macdonald.

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