In any event, whether the bald killer or the persecuted persecutor rules over Hungary makes no difference as to the freedom of that country. I regret having to play the role of Cassandra once more and having to disappoint the fresh hopes of certain ever hopeful colleagues, but there is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society. Terror does not evolve except toward a worse terror, the scaffold does not become any more liberal, the gallows are not tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely.
The first thing to define totalitarian society, whether of the Right or of the Left, is the single party, and the single party has no reason to destroy itself. This is why the only society capable of evolution and liberalization, the only one that deserves both our critical and our active support is the society that involves a plurality of parties as a part of its structure. It alone allows one to denounce, hence to correct, injustice and crime. It alone today allows one to denounce torture, disgraceful torture, as contemptible in Algiers as in Budapest.
What Budapest was Defending
The idea, still voiced among us, that a party, because it calls itself proletarian, can enjoy special privileges in regard to history is an idea of intellectuals tired of their advantages and of their freedom. History does not confer privileges: it lets them be snatched away.
And it is not the function of intellectuals or of workers to glorify even slightly the right of the stronger and the fait accompli. The truth is that no one, neither individual nor party, has a right to absolute power or to lasting privileges in a history that is itself changing. And no privilege, no supreme reason can justify torture or terror.
On this point Budapest again showed us the way. Hungary conquered and in chains (which our false realists compare with commiseration to Poland), still on the edge of equilibrium, has done more for freedom and justice than any people in twenty years. But, for that lesson to reach and convince those in the West who close their eyes and ears, the Hungarian people (and we shall never be consoled for this) had to shed their own blood, and it is already drying up in people’s memories.
At least we shall try to be faithful to Hungary as we have been to Spain. In Europe’s present solitude, we have but one way of being so—which is never to betray, at home or abroad, that for which the Hungarian combatants died and never to justify even indirectly, at home or abroad, what killed them.
The untiring insistence upon freedom and truth, the community of the worker and the intellectual (who are still stupidly warring here, as tyranny aims to keep them doing), and, finally, political democracy as a necessary and indispensable (though surely not sufficient) condition of economic democracy—this is what Budapest was defending. And in doing so, the great city in insurrection reminded Western Europe of its forgotten truth and greatness. It made short work of that odd feeling of inferiority that debilitates most of our intellectuals but that I, for one, refuse to feel.
Reply to Shepilov
The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and errors very real. But in the end, let’s not forget that we are the only ones to have the possibility of improvement and emancipation that lies in free genius. Let’s not forget that when totalitarian society, by its very principles, forces the friend to denounce his friend, Western society, despite its wanderings from the path of virtue, always produces a race of men who uphold honor in life—I mean men who stretch out their hands even to their enemy to save him from suffering or death.
When Minister Shepilov on his return from Paris dares to write that “Western art is bound to tear the human soul apart and to form butchers of every sort,” it is time to reply to him that at least our writers and artists have never butchered anyone and that yet they are generous enough not to blame the theory of socialist realism for the massacres ordered by Shepilov and those who resemble him.
The truth is that there is room for everything among us, even for evil, and even for Shepilov’s writers. There is room also for honor, for the freedom to desire, for the adventure of the mind. Whereas there is room for nothing in Stalinist culture except for edifying sermons, colorless life, and the catechism of propaganda. To any who still had any doubts about this, the Hungarian writers have just shouted the truth before choosing permanent silence today when they are ordered to lie.
It will be hard for us to be worthy of so many sacrifices. But we must try to do so in a Europe at last united, by forgetting our quarrels, by getting rid of our own errors, by multiplying our creations and our solidarity. And to those who wanted to humble us and persuade us that history could justify a reign of terror, we shall reply by our real faith that we share, as we now know, with Hungarian writers, Polish writers, and even, indeed, with Russian writers, who are also gagged.
Our faith is that throughout the world, beside the impulse toward coercion and death that is darkening history, there is a growing impulse toward persuasion and life, a vast emancipatory movement called culture that is made up both of free creation and of free work.
Our daily task, our long vocation is to add to that culture by our labors and not to subtract, even temporarily, anything from it. But our proudest duty is to defend personally to the very end, against the impulse toward coercion and death, the freedom of that culture—in other words, the freedom of work and of creation.
The Hungarian workers and intellectuals, beside whom we stand today with so much impotent grief, realized that and made us realize it. This is why, if their suffering is ours, their hope belongs to us too. Despite their destitution, their exile, their chains, it took them but a single day to transmit to us the royal legacy of liberty. May we be worthy of it!
FRANC-TIREUR, 18 March 1957
SOCIALISM OF THE GALLOWS
(INTERVIEW)
1) Do you think that it is still possible to link the cause of truth with a Party, a State, or any organization whatever and to have complete confidence in it as if it could not possibly fail in its mission? Do you think it is still possible, in good faith, to speak of a “camp of peace”? Don’t you think rather that such an attitude stands now for the most serious form of “alienation” of conscience?
IF ABSOLUTE truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it. When historical truth is involved, the more anyone claims to possess it the more he lies. In the final analysis, he becomes the murderer of truth. The Hungarian uprising was originally directed against a generalized lie. Hence it was necessary to assassinate the men who were fighting the lie and then try to dishonor them through a reversed lie by calling them Fascists.
As for the “camp of peace,” it is better to ask the question of the former “partisans of peace” who mobilized at the time of the Stockholm appeal to outlaw atomic weapons and who now have to reconcile this with Bulganin’s ultimatum threatening England, France, and incidentally Israel, with atomic rockets. It is better to ask them the question, because apparently they are not asking it of themselves.
The truth is that no nation has a monopoly on peace. Not even, as we now know, the “neutral” nations of the Orient. The way in which they—the Arab countries (except Tunisia),1 and especially India (yes, the India of Gandhi)—betrayed Hungary and their own principles puts them henceforth on the same footing with the other nations. The nations of the Bandung group could have helped save a great European nation from slavery and death.
This would have amounted to admitting and partially rewarding the efforts of all free Europeans who freely argued the cause of the colonized peoples. But the Bandung group rapidly became realistic. Apparently it is easy to become an adult in history.
Consequently, those new nations must henceforth be judged as adults, on the basis of their deeds, without any special indulgence. And their attitude toward the Hungarian massacre is inexcusable. Most likely the future will show that such a self-centered sidestepping of the issue will not pay off. The moral advantage those nations derived from the fact that they had been oppressed in the recent past was wasted by them in a few days.
Hence we shall say that some nations are merely more bellicose than others. It seems, if I can believe the progressive newspapers (which previously thought or said the opposite), that America has been less bellicose than Russia of late. But there is no need for anyone to show us that socialism can, quite as well as capitalism, foment wars.
All it takes is a little will to power, and there is scarcely any nation without that (except for those which have no army, and even then you can’t be sure). This wasn’t known before simply
