Women Have Always Worked: A New Online Course Premieres Today

in History, Online Courses | March 8th, 2017

It’s been said that the greatest achievement in American history in the 20th century is the progress that was made – although the journey continues – toward woman’s equality, what with women’s right to vote codified in the 19th amendment (1920), women’s reproductive rights affirmed by the Supreme Court over a half century later (1973), and every advance in between and since. Our national government has done what it can to recognize that progress, and to remind us whence we came. The National Park Service, for example, tells us that when our country started:

The religious doctrine, written laws, and social customs that colonists brought with them from Europe asserted women’s subordinate position. Women were to marry, tend the house, and raise a family. Education beyond basic reading and writing was unusual. When a woman took a husband she lost what limited freedom she might have had as a single adult. Those few married women who worked for pay could not control their own earnings. Most could neither buy nor sell property or sign contracts; none could vote, sue when wronged, defend themselves in court, or serve on juries. In the rare case of divorce, women lost custody of their children and any family possessions.…

And that … “Women actually lost legal ground as a result of the new United States Constitution.”

What if there were an opportunity to study this struggle and the progress we have made in great depth – in an online course from Columbia University and the New-York Historical Society featuring its star women’s historian, Alice Kessler-Harris, now emerita, and a lineup of guest voices from all around the country interviewed under her leadership to provide their expertise on matters of progress and equality? And what if there were a new Center for the Study of Women’s History launching at the same time, even on the same day – March 8, 2017 – to provide a more permanent place for examining and understanding how to make this progress even more expansive?

Women Have Always Worked, a 20-week online class, premieres its first 10 weeks today – free on the edX platform. The offering (enroll here) is unique in the history of education. The course introduces the first collaboration between a university and a historical society to present knowledge to the world – with extended video-recorded conversations and artifact and document discussions with renowned scholars and authors including Baruch’s Carol Berkin; Deborah Gray White from Rutgers; Iowa’s Linda Kerber; Carroll Smith Rosenberg from Michigan; Thavolia Glymph from Duke; St. John’s Lara Vapnek; Blanche Wiesen Cook from CUNY; Louise Bernikow; Harvard’s Nancy Cott; Elaine Tyler May at the University of Minnesota; NYU’s Linda Gordon; the great New York writer Vivian Gornick; and more.

The course page lists some of the questions covered:

• How women’s participation in, exclusion from, and impact on American economic, political, and social life have altered American history.
• How key figures and events have challenged the role of women in the home and workplace.
• How ideas, such as democracy, citizenship, liberty, patriotism, and equality have differently shaped the lives of women and men.
• How women of different races and classes have experienced work, both inside and outside the home.
• How historians of women and gender study America’s past, including hands-on opportunities to practice analyzing primary sources from the present and the past.
• How women’s history has developed and changed over time.
And did we say it’s free?

The second part of the course will launch in June, in association with the annual meeting of the Berkshire Women’s History Conference at Hofstra University – the largest meeting of women’s historians anywhere. The MOOC is inspired by Kessler-Harris’s book, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview, first published by the Feminist Press in 1981 and coming out in a newly updated edition also in 2017 from the University of Illinois, publisher of Kessler-Harris’s landmark Gendering Labor History (2007). The original book brings forth a million gems of knowledge and analysis in text and images; the online course brings forward video and audio and documents and artifacts such as few media can accomplish. Intelligent Television had the opportunity to produce many of the video interviews, conversations, and testimonials.

The struggle of women at work is the struggle of all who seek a better and more just world. The course is a little miracle alight within it.

Peter B. Kaufman runs Intelligent Television (www.intelligenttelevision.com) and twice served as Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia.

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by Peter B. Kaufman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will Wasn’t a Cinematic Masterpiece; It Was a Staggeringly Effective Piece of Propaganda

in Film, History | March 3rd, 2017

“Triumph of the Will,” says Dan Olson of the analytical video series Folding Ideas, “is not a triumph of cinema.” Already the proposition runs counter to what many of us learned in film studies classes, whose professors assured us that Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 glorification of Nazi Germany, despite its thoroughly propagandistic nature, still counts as a serious achievement in film art. “None of the ideas or techniques were new,” Olson explains. “It is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before.”

If it has value as nothing but sheer spectacle, does Triumph of the Will (watch it below) amount to the Transformers of its day — and with motives that make Michael Bay blockbusters look like noble, altruistic endeavors at that? Despite doing nothing new with its medium, the film does still showcase certain qualities of propaganda that, more than 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich, we’d all do well to keep in mind and keep an eye on.

Olson quotes “Ur-Fascism,” an essay by Umberto Eco (who spent a couple formative years “among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another”) explaining that, for fascist leaders to convince people to follow them,

the followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

Here we have summarized both a message that Triumph of the Will wants to convey and the intellectual Achilles’ heel of fascist propaganda. It must imply the strength of the enemies even as it makes the strength of the regime crushingly explicit. “To the modern viewer it may seem aimless and shoddily paced,” says Olson, “with montages that just go on and on and on long after the point has been made, but that’s the point: it is not merely a demonstration of presence, but of volume. The indulgence of it, the conspicuous cost, is as much a message of the film as any other.”

The words of Hannah Arendt, who once called science “only a surrogate for power,” also enter into the analysis. Olson uses the quote to get into the idea that “one of the main mechanisms of propaganda is to plant the idea of precedent, to alter the audience’s own sense of history and the world and appeal to the seemingly objective authorities of god, history and science” in order to, through what Eco called the “cult of tradition,” make “new institutions seem older than they really are.”

We might find all this a bit funny, given the highly premature termination of a reign the Nazis insisted could endure for a thousand years, but in some sense their propagandists had the last laugh. Whatever its cinematic merits or lack thereof, Riefenstahl’s film remains essentially effective. “To this day we continue to use Triumph of the Will as a reference point for our mental construct of the Nazi regime,” says Olson. “Our idea of the Nazis is deeply informed by a propaganda film produced by the Nazis for the explicit purpose of creating that mental construct.” When we think of the Nazis, in other words, we still think of the images manufactured more than eighty years ago by Triumph of the Will — “exactly the image they wanted you to think of when you thought of them.”

Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Propaganda Film Shows How Fascists Are Made

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Kurt Vonnegut Gives a Sermon on the Foolishness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Timely Again (Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

in History, Politics, Technology, Theatre | February 27th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Commons

Many writers recoil at the notion of discussing where they get their ideas, but Kurt Vonnegut spoke on the subject willingly. “I get my ideas from dreams,” he announced early in one speech, adding, “the wildest dream I have had so far is about The New Yorker magazine.” In this dream, “the magazine has published a three-part essay by Jonathan Schell which proves that life on Earth is about to end. I am supposed to go to the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, where all the people are waiting, and say something wonderful — right before a hydrogen bomb is dropped on the Empire State Building.”

It stands to reason that a such a vivid, frightening, and somehow funny scenario would unfold in the unconscious mind of a man who wrote such vivid, frightening, and somehow funny novels. (Vonnegut’s own interpretation? “I consider myself an important writer, and I think The New Yorker should be ashamed that it has never published me.”) As it happens, he did deliver these words in a cathedral, namely New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the spring of 1982.

This was just months after Schell’s three-part essay “The Fate of the Earth” (all three parts of it still available online) really ran in The New Yorker, and Cold War fears about the probability of a hydrogen bomb really dropping on America ran high. Vonnegut’s speech was one of a series of Sunday sermons the Cathedral had lined up on the subject of nuclear disarmament, assembling the rest of the roster from military, scientific, and activist fields. The author of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions—fresh off a trip to the Galapagos Islands with the St. John the Divine’s Bishop Paul Moore—presumably represented the realm of letters.

“At the time, NYPR Archives Director Andy Lanset covered the Vonnegut sermon as a volunteer for the WNYC News Department,” wrote WNYC’s William Rodney Allen in 2014 on the rediscovery and posting of Lanset’s recording. (The same public radio station, incidentally, would fifteen or so years later commission Vonnegut for a series of reports from the afterlife.) Now we can not only read but also hear Vonnegut, in his own voice, trying to imagine aloud a series of “fates worse than death.” Why? Not simply to indulge his famous sense of gallows humor, but in order to put the nuclear threat, and the anxieties it generated, into the proper context.

“I am sure you are sick and tired of hearing how all living things sizzle and pop inside a radioactive fireball,” Vonnegut says, going on to assure his audience that “scientists, for all their creativity, will never discover a method for making people deader than dead. So if some of you are worried about being hydrogen-bombed, you are merely fearing death. There is nothing new in that. If there weren’t any hydrogen bombs, death would still be after you.”

In any event, despite having shuffled through several candidates (“Life without petroleum?”), Vonnegut can come up with no fate believably worse than death besides crucifixion. But given that non-crucified human beings nearly always and everywhere prefer life to death, perhaps “we might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness” which gave us the ability to destroy all life on Earth. But “the inventiveness which we so regret now may also be giving us, along with the rockets and warheads, the means to achieve what has hitherto been an impossibility, the unity of mankind.”

Vonnegut sees this promise mainly in television, whose terribly realistic sounds and images ensure that “the people of every industrialized nation are nauseated by war by the time they are ten years old.” A veteran of the Second World War, he himself remembers a very different time, back when “it used to be necessary for a young soldier to get into fighting before he became disillusioned about war,” back when “it was unusual for an American, or a person of any nationality, for that matter, to know much about foreigners.”

Even before the 1980s, “thanks to modern communications, we have seen sights and heard sounds from virtually every square mile of the land mass on this planet,” and so “know for certain that there are no potential human enemies anywhere who are anything but human beings almost exactly like ourselves. They need food. How amazing. They love their children. How amazing. They obey their leaders. How amazing. They think like their neighbors. How amazing.”

Modern communications have, of course, come astonishingly far in the 35 years since Vonnegut’s Sunday sermon, but our fears about nuclear annihilation have had a way of resurfacing. In recent months, the American people have even heard talk of a reinvigorated nuclear arms race from their new president, a man whose rise detractors partly blame on modern communication technology — not a lack of it, but an excess.

“The global village that was once the internet has been replaced by digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day,” writes Mostafa M. El-Bermawy in a Wired piece on the threat social-media “filter bubbles” pose to democracy. “We need to remind ourselves that there are humans on the other side of the screen who want to be heard and can think and feel like us while at the same time reaching different conclusions.” Recent developments would probably disappoint Vonnegut (not that they would surprise him), but he’d surely get a kick, as he always did, out of the irony of it all.

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Vonnegut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Bertrand Russell Writes an Artful Letter, Stating His Refusal to Debate British Fascist Leader Oswald Mosley (1962)

in History, Letters | February 23rd, 2017

Image by National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons

Changing the minds of others has never counted among humanity’s easiest tasks, and it seems only to have become an ever-stiffer challenge as history has ground along. Increasingly many, as Yale professor David Bromwich recently argued in the London Review of Books, “have had no practice in using words to influence people unlike themselves. That is an art that can be lost. It depends on a quantum of accidental communication that is missing in a life of organised contacts.” We might find ourselves in reasonably fruitful debates with basically like-minded friends, acquaintances, and strangers on the internet, but can we ever convince, or be convinced by, someone truly different from us?

Bertrand Russell doubted it. In 1962, long before the structures of the internet allowed us to build tighter echo chambers than ever before, the Nobel-winning philosopher “received a series of letters from an unlikely correspondent — Sir Oswald Mosley, who had founded the British Union of Fascists thirty years earlier,” writes Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova.

“Mosley was inviting — or, rather, provoking — Russell to engage in a debate, in which he could persuade the moral philosopher of the merits of fascism.” Even at the age of 89, with little time and much else to do, Russell declined with the utmost force and clarity in a piece of correspondence featured on Letters of Note:

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

Russell passed on eight years later, in 1970, and Mosley a decade thereafter. “His final message to the British people appeared in a letter to the New Statesman written only a week earlier,” remembers journalist Hugh Purcell in that newspaper. It concerned an article’s description of the “Olympia rally,” the 1934 debacle that lost the British Union of Fascists much of what public support it enjoyed. “The largest audience ever seen at that time assembled to fill the Olympia hall and hear the speech,” Mosley insisted. “A small minority determined by continuous shouting to prevent my speech being heard. After due warning our stewards removed with their bare hands men among whom were some armed with such weapons as razors and knives. The audience were then able to listen to a speech which lasted for nearly two hours.”

The New Statesmen, printing Mosley’s letter posthumously, ran it under this introduction: “Throughout his life he was intent on persuading people that their view of history was mistaken.” Despite his unceasing efforts, he ultimately persuaded few — and it would hardly have required as keen an observer as Russell to see that someone like Mosley certainly wasn’t about to let himself be persuaded by anyone else.

via Letters of Note/Brain Pickings and The Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library

Listen to ‘Why I Am Not a Christian,’ Bertrand Russell’s Powerful Critique of Religion (1927)

Bertrand Russell and F.C. Copleston Debate the Existence of God, 1948

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How Bertrand Russell Turned The Beatles Against the Vietnam War

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Listen to Presidential, The Washington Post’s Podcast Exploring Each & Every U.S. President

in History, Podcasts | February 20th, 2017

A quick heads up on President’s Day: The Washington Post presents Presidential, a podcast that explores how “each American president reached office, made decisions, handled crises and redefined the role of commander-in-chief.” Naturally, it starts with George Washington. Hear that episode below.

Presidential is hosted by WashPo editor Lillian Cunningham and features Pulitzer Prize-winning historians like David McCullough and journalists like Bob Woodward. Right now you can get all 45 episodes (each about 30–50 minutes long) on iTunes, Soundcloud and Stitcher.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Machiavelli Really Thought We Should Use Power: Two Animated Videos Provide an Introduction

in History, Philosophy, Politics | February 15th, 2017

Nice guys, so they say, finish last. Many of us might instinctively label such a worldview “Machiavellian,” partially for good reason and partially not. It stands as a testament to the insights of the Renaissance-era Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, expressed with great clarity and succinctness in his books The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, not just that his name became an adjective, but that it became one that remains in wide use nearly 500 years after his death. But like other such terms — “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” come to mind — its modern usage tends to come detached from its namesake writer’s original ideas.

So what did Machiavelli actually have to say to humanity? “Machiavelli’s Advice for Nice Guys,” a new animated video from Alain de Botton’s School of Life, highlights the core insight of his work: “that the wicked tend to win. And they do so because they have a huge advantage over the good: they are willing to act with the darkest ingenuity and cunning to further their cause. They are not held back by those rigid opponents of change: principles.

They will be prepared to outright lie, twist facts, threaten or get violent. They will also – when the situation demands it – know how to seductively deceive, use charm and honeyed words, bedazzle and distract. And in this way, they conquer the world.”

This line of thinking, put in such stark terms, can make Machiavelli seem like an offputtingly harsh (if quite intelligent) character. But his writing is more nuanced: he advocates not using flat-out lies and violence to achieve one’s ends, but indeed to be nice — just “never to be overly devoted to acting nicely,” an attitude he thought the West’s popular readings of the story of Jesus of Nazareth too often advocated — while always knowing “how to borrow – when need be – every single trick employed by the most cynical, dastardly, unscrupulous and nastiest people who have ever lived.” Nice guys, in short, have no choice but to learn from their enemies.

You can learn more about the sometimes harrowing experiences that taught Machiavelli all this in the School of Life’s introduction to his political theory just above. He reckoned, more memorably than any other, “the price of dealing with the world as it is, and not as we feel it should be. The world has continued to love and hate Machiavelli in equal measure for insisting on this uncomfortable truth.” Machiavelli, as Salman Rushdie put it in a clip we featured a few years ago, lived in a time when Italy’s ruling families behaved “in the most ruthless way, and he wrote this little treatise about not what he would like things to be like, but how power actually works, which he observed.” Rushdie calls the negative associations with the philosopher’s name “a classic case of shooting the messenger” — something, alas, even the most good-intentioned ruler may find himself forced to do once in a while.

Related Content:

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Listen to a Marathon Reading of Elie Wiesel’s Night

in Audio Books, History, K-12, Letters, Life, Literature | February 13th, 2017

A couple of weeks ago on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a diverse group gathered for a marathon reading of Night, Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his youthful experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The event was organized in part by the National Yiddish Theatre—fitting given that Night was originally written in Yiddish, though first published in French. The theater’s artistic director and several actors from past productions claimed several of the reading slots, but left more than sixty to be filled by participants from an intentionally broad pool.

There were rabbis and Broadway performers, a New Yorker writer, the Consul General of Germany, and the Hungarian Ambassador to the UN…

Students and educators…

A number of Holocaust survivors…

Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Wiesel’s grown son, Elisha, who observed:

At a time when this country is feeling so divided, when so much negativity is circulating about those who are different from ourselves — those who have different ethnicities, religions or even different political leanings — my father’s words are an important reminder of the dangers of the ‘us versus them’ mentality.

It took the volunteer readers a little over four hours to get through the slim volume, which shows up on many American high schools’ required reading lists.

The free event was co-sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, whose location in lower Manhattan was quite convenient to another important event taking place that day—an interfaith rally to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigrants from 7 countries, suspending entry for all refugees for a period of four months, and calling for “extreme vetting” screenings.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December, 1986

h/t Jeff N.

Memory of the Camps (1985): The Holocaust Documentary that Traumatized Alfred Hitchcock, and Remained Unseen for 40 Years

Yes, the Holocaust Happened, Even If a Top Google Search Result Says It Didn’t

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Albert Camus, Editor of the French Resistance Newspaper Combat, Writes Movingly About Life, Politics & War (1944–47)

in History, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | January 31st, 2017

Image by United Press International, via Wikimedia Commons

When totalitarian regimes around the world are in power, writing that tells the truth—whether literary, journalistic, scientific, or legal—effectively serves as counter-propaganda. To write honestly is to expose: to uncover what is hidden, stand apart from it, and observe. These actions are anathema to dictatorships. But they are integral to resistance movements, which must develop their own press in order to disseminate ideas other than official state dogma.

For the French Resistance during World War II, one such publication that served the purpose came from a cell called “Combat,” which gave its name to the underground newspaper to which Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus both contributed during and after the war. Camus became Combat’s editor and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947. During his tenure, he “was suspicious,” writes Michael McDonald, and he urged his readers to “be suspicious of those who speak the loudest in defense of democratic ideals and absolutes but whose goal is to instill fear in opponents and to silence dissent.”

Camus witnessed and recorded the liberation of France from the Nazi occupation in moving passages like this one:

Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom’s barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men’s blood.

After the previously unthinkable event that ended the war in the Pacific, the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Camus explicitly critiqued the “formidable concert” of opinion impressed with fact that “any average city can be wiped out by a bomb the size of a football.” Against these “eloquent essays,” he wrote darkly,

We can sum it up in one sentence: our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.

Camus heavily documented the early post-war years in France, as the country slowly reconstituted itself, and as coalitions formerly united in resistance collapsed into competing factions. He was alarmed by not only by the fascists on the right, but by the many French socialists seduced by Stalinism. The very next month after the liberation of Paris, Camus began addressing the “problem of government” in an essay titled “To Make Democracy.” Government, writes Camus, “is, to a great extent our problem, as it is indeed the problem of everyone,” but he prefaced his own position with, “we do not believe in politics without clear language.”

By December of 1944, a few months before the fall of Berlin, Camus had grown deeply reflective, expressing attitudes found in many eyewitness accounts. “France has lived through many tragedies,” he wrote, and “will live through many more.” The tragedy of the war, he wrote, was “the tragedy of separation.”

Who would dare speak the word “happiness” in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? … We entered this war not because of any love of conquest, but to defend a certain notion of happiness. Our desire for happiness was so fierce and pure that it seemed to justify all the years of unhappiness. Let us retain the memory of this happiness and of those who have lost it.

These lucid, passionate essays “include little that is obsolete,” wrote Stanley Hoffman at Foreign Affairs in 2006. “Indeed it is shocking to find how current Camus’ fears, exhortations, and aspirations still are.” Hoffman particularly found Camus’ demand “for morality in politics” compelling. Though “deemed naïve… [by] many other philosophers and writers of his time,” Camus’ insistence on clarity of thought and ethical choice made for what he called “a modest political philosophy… free of all messianic elements and devoid of any nostalgia for an earthly paradise.” How sobering those words sound in our current moment.

Camus’ Combat essays have been collected in Princeton University Press’s Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947 and in Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944–1947 from Wesleyan.

Albert Camus Talks About Nihilism & Adapting Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed for the Theatre, 1959

Albert Camus’ Historic Lecture, “The Human Crisis,” Performed by Actor Viggo Mortensen

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Women Have Always Worked: A New Online Course Premieres Today

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will Wasn’t a Cinematic Masterpiece; It Was a Staggeringly Effective Piece of Propaganda

Kurt Vonnegut Gives a Sermon on the Foolishness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Timely Again (Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Bertrand Russell Writes an Artful Letter, Stating His Refusal to Debate British Fascist Leader Oswald Mosley (1962)

Listen to Presidential, The Washington Post’s Podcast Exploring Each & Every U.S. President

How Machiavelli Really Thought We Should Use Power: Two Animated Videos Provide an Introduction

Listen to a Marathon Reading of Elie Wiesel’s Night

Albert Camus, Editor of the French Resistance Newspaper Combat, Writes Movingly About Life, Politics & War (1944–47)

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