Oliver Gloag

I always feel obligated to write reviews of book I give low ratings. I know it takes a lot of time and effort to write a book like this and it seems disrespectful of the author not to explain why I did not like the book.

This book was actually an easy read and provided lots of interesting tidbits about Camus and his life. The problem is the author is a professor deep in the academic cult of “Critical theory” and it’s simple minded view of the world. In particular this author is obsessed with colonialism and a page doesn’t pass (I exaggerate a bit, sometimes it’s two pages) where the author doesn’t remind us that Camus is guilty of the sin of being pro colonialism. For that alone the book loses two stars. Books that morally hector are boring and annoying. I’ve written about this in other reviews so I won’t go on about it.

The other two stars I remove because the author is unfairly judging the complexity of Camus thought and making it one dimensional. In fact, the author’s critique is one dimensional. The problem starts with the use of the word “colonialism” in this academic dogma. In fact it is used ahistorically (something the author accuses Camus of being). “Colonialism” is narrowly defined as European colonialism which is seen as the root of all evil in the modern world.

In the world of history, North Africa has been colonized for thousands of years, the penultimate of the colonizers being the Arabs who brutally imposed their language, culture and religion on the region. The French were just one more brutal regime in a long chain. The anti-French “revolutionaries” didn’t bring justice and democracy to Algeria. They brought an even more brutal regime that rules to this day.

Camus was strongly opposed to French brutality. But he also understood that “revolution” does not bring liberation and freedom. Quite the opposite. This was the reason Camus was also anti-communist, unlike French intellectuals like Sartre who were apologists for one of the worlds most brutal dictatorship and yet another imperial power (read Tony Judt’s Postwar for more on the shameful behavior of Sartre Et al, which this author minimizes. The author also tries to argue that Marxism is anti-colonial. Perhaps in theory, but in practice most Marxist regimes engage in imperial conquest).

In the dogmatic world of academic Critical Theory” Camus is “problematic” (how I hate that word. If I could gives this book zero stars, I would remove another one for the authors overuse of that ridiculous term). For the author, he is a racist colonialist. In the real world, it was precisely Camus humanism that prevented him from being a supporter of the FLN.… (mehr)