Follow us on social

Shutterstock_1220337556-scaled

Camus' plague and ours

"What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves." - Albert Camus, The Plague.

Analysis | Washington Politics

The coronavirus onslaught has brought new public attention to Albert Camus’ 1947 fictional masterpiece, “The Plague.” And rightly so. By absorbing his compelling narrative of an imagined bubonic plague striking his hometown, we can better appreciate the social impact of our own affliction. But the author also consciously uses the plague and its consequences as an allegory for political mass killings and humanity’s “natural” impulse to struggle against them. In this respect, Camus’ can stimulate Americans to raise questions about their country’s foreign policy priorities that go beyond the need to combat global pandemics.

In the novel, leaders and citizens of an “ordinary” city preoccupied with “business” and “simple pleasures,” are initially reluctant to admit that a deadly infection is abroad. But the rapidly growing number of deaths soon forces them to acknowledge, and act upon, reality. As the plague spreads, auxiliary hospitals are established. Family members and others close to the afflicted are quarantined in isolation centers. The city’s borders are closed except for imports of essential commodities. Mail is prohibited for fear of contamination and access to overloaded long distance phone lines is severely rationed.

Isolated from their absent spouses, lovers, children, and other relatives, people feel like they are in exile. Doctors rush to procure and develop vaccines and treatments, but they prove ineffective. As the death toll mounts, groups of corpses are transported to cemeteries, interred in mass graves and ultimately loaded into crematories. Finally, after several months, the assailant begins to retreat. One glorious day the city’s gates reopen, families and lovers are reunited and the residents gather in the streets to celebrate.

Much of this story resonates with the plight we find ourselves in today even though there are some differences of detail. Most importantly, the bacterial bubonic plague Camus explores is far more deadly than viral COVID-19. In addition, it is mainly, though not exclusively, spread by blood-seeking fleas rather than airborne human droplets. Thus, the citizens of Oran, desperately seeking to distract themselves from fear and loneliness, are permitted to gather at cafes and movie theaters. In contrast, we maintain our six feet of “social distance” while remaining free to communicate using phones, email, and social media. Nonetheless, we too suffer from the interruption of close human contact.

But the enduring greatness of the novel, and the most important way it should speak to us today, lies in how its main characters learn from and are transformed by their experiences with mass killing. At the center is Bernard Rieux, 35, a conscientious physician who has “never gotten used to” seeing patients die. From Oran’s often inspiring response to the plague, he reaches a broad conclusion about modern mass murder. “There are more things to admire than to despise” in humanity; “the evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance…the soul of the murderer is blind.” Confronted with undeniable mass killing, the people of Oran realize it is everyone’s business to struggle against it. This is less heroism, explains Rieux, than drawing a logical consequence: like two and two make four. Suffering from the absence of his ill wife in a mountain sanitarium, he nonetheless volunteers to direct new auxiliary hospitals.

In intimate conversations with the doctor, the other principals decide to take similar paths. Tarrou is a visitor to the city who seems to possess ample means. Beneath his outward self-confidence and detachment, he confesses he is searching for “inner peace.” At 17, he was traumatized by witnessing his father, a lead prosecutor, call in court for the head of a trembling convict and learning that his dad personally attended executions. An advocate for ending capital punishment, he also came to understand that he had “indirectly subscribed to the death of thousands of men and I had even provoked this death in my approval of the actions and principles that influenced them.” In Oran, he takes the initiative to organize voluntary health teams which pursue public hygiene, accompany doctors, provide transport and inspire others to resist the scourge.

Rambert, a young foreign correspondent stuck in the city, longs for his lover in Paris. For months, he has worked with seedy characters to organize his escape while volunteering as an aide to Rieux. Yet on the eve of his departure he realizes that he would be “ashamed” to leave and that would hinder his love: “Now that I have seen what I have seen, I know I am from here whether I want to be or not.”

Finally, Grand, a middle-aged public servant, can never find the right words to complain about a broken promise of promotion, works so much that he has “forgotten to love” his wife, who leaves him, and tries to write a novel but cannot get beyond perfecting the first sentence. Confronted with the plague, he constitutes himself as the data center of the health teams. It was “natural,” Rieux comments, for him to join this struggle against death “though there was nothing heroic about him.”

Today, we see countless instances of health workers, friends, neighbors and leaders “naturally” putting aside their private interests to defend their communities against a murderous virus.

Camus’s plea to his post-Fascist, post -World War II generation — and to us — is to use the “knowledge and memory” of our plagues, political as well as biological, to inform what “we still ought to achieve against terror and its untiring arm.” For the United States in 2020, this would entail much more than “getting back to normal” after driving back COVID-19.

Most obviously, it would mean giving much greater priority in U.S. foreign policy to combating the threats of global climate change and diseases, forging political settlements for the murderous military and economic conflicts which we have furthered (Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela) and reducing the danger of nuclear incineration with arms controls and diplomacy. The challenge for both our political leaders and ourselves is to make the realities and threats of mass killing so vivid, and policies to address them so convincing, that like Camus’s characters, we respond like two and two make four.


Photo credit: Julie Mayfeng / Shutterstock.com
Analysis | Washington Politics
Trump and Putin on phone
Top photo credit: Donald Trump (White House photo) and Vladimir Putin (Office of the Russian Federation President)
US-Russia talks: The rubber finally hits the road

Good, bad and ugly: Impact of US Iran strikes on Russia war talks

Europe

To a considerable degree, President Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 because voters embraced his message of keeping America out of protracted conflicts and his promise to end the war in Ukraine.

The administration has made substantial operational headway, particularly in reopening stable channels for dialogue with Russia, but it has proven difficult to arrive at a framework for a negotiated settlement that enjoys buy-in from all the stakeholders — Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.

keep readingShow less
Trump Netanyahu in Washington
Top photo credit: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (Joshua Sukoff / Shutterstock.com)

Netanyahu returns to DC — in triumph or with more to ask?

Middle East

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will arrive in Washington for his third visit of Trump’s second term. Today also marks 21 months of Israel’s war on Gaza. The purpose of the visit remains unclear, and speculation abounds: will Trump and Netanyahu announce a real ceasefire in Gaza? Will Syria join the Abraham Accords? Or might Trump greenlight even broader Israeli action against Iran?

Before Netanyahu’s visit, Trump posted an ultimatum on Truth Social, claiming Israel had agreed to a 60-day ceasefire. He urged Hamas to accept the terms, threatening that “it will only get worse” if it doesn’t. Although Trump intended to pressure Hamas, reiterating a longstanding narrative that portrays the group as the obstacle to peace, Hamas has long maintained that it will only accept a ceasefire if it is part of a process that leads to a permanent end to Israel’s war and its complete withdrawal from the enclave. Netanyahu, for his part, remains adamant that the war must continue until Hamas is eliminated, a goal that even the IDF has described as not militarily viable.

keep readingShow less
POGO The Bunker
Top image credit: Project on Government Oversight

Yes to 'Department of War' name change

Military Industrial Complex

The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.