A-Infos (en) Italy, Ponte Ghisolfa: The Freedom They Gave Us Back! by Albert Camus from msette (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Did you know? ---- Today is October 23, the anniversary of the Hungarian 
revolution, a surge of freedom repressed in blood. ---- These are the 
words of the great writer Albert Camus spoken at an anti-fascist 
meeting. ---- In the photo, what remains of a statue of Stalin torn down 
by the insurgents. ---- Hungary 1956 ---- The Freedom They Gave Us Back! 
---- by Albert Camus ---- Speech given at a meeting in Paris on March 
15, 1957, organized by the International Anti-Fascist Solidarity 
(S.I.A.) on the occasion of the anniversary of the Hungarian revolution.
The Hungarian Minister of State Marosan, whose name sounds like a 
program, declared a few days ago that there would be no more 
counter-revolution in Hungary. For once, a minister of Kádár spoke the 
truth. How could there be a counter-revolution when this one is already 
in power? There can only be a revolution in Hungary.
I am not one of those who hope that the Hungarian people will take up 
arms again for an insurrection destined to be crushed before the eyes of 
an international society that will lavish it with applause, with 
virtuous tears, but which will then return to its slippers, as the 
sportsmen do in the stands on Sunday evenings after a boxing match. 
There are already too many dead in the stadium and we can only be 
generous with our own blood. Hungarian blood has proved too precious to 
Europe and to freedom for us not to be stingy with it even to the 
smallest drop. But I am not one of those who think that there can be an 
arrangement, even if temporary, with a regime of terror that has the 
right to call itself socialist just as the executioner of the 
Inquisition had the right to call himself Christian. And on this 
anniversary of freedom I hope with all my strength that the silent 
resistance of the Hungarian people will be preserved, strengthened, and 
repeated by all the voices that we can give it, will obtain from the 
unanimous international opinion the boycott of its oppressors. And if 
this opinion is too weak or too selfish to do justice to a martyred 
people, if even our voices are too weak, I hope that the Hungarian 
resistance will still be maintained until the counter-revolutionary 
state collapses everywhere in the East under the weight of its lies and 
contradictions.

The counter-revolutionary state

Because it is indeed a counter-revolutionary state. How else can you 
define a regime that forces the father to denounce the son, the son to 
ask for the supreme punishment for the father; the wife to testify 
against the husband, and that has placed denunciation on the level of 
virtue? Foreign tanks, police, hanged twenty-year-old girls, murdered 
and imprisoned workers' councils, the campaign of lies, the camps, the 
censorship, arrested judges, criminals who legislate and the gallows 
again and again, is this socialism, the great celebration of freedom and 
justice?
No, we have known, we know this: these are the bloody and monotonous 
rites of the totalitarian religion! Hungarian socialism is, today, in 
prison or in exile. In the palaces of the State, armed to the teeth, the 
mediocre tyrants of absolutism wander, frightened by the very word of 
freedom, enraged by that of liberty.
The proof of this is that today, March 15, a day of truth and invincible 
freedom for all Hungarians, for Kádár has been a long day of fear.
For many years, however, these tyrants, aided in the West by accomplices 
whom nothing and no one forced to such zeal, have spread torrents of 
smoke about their true action. When something transpired, they or their 
Western interpreters explained to us that everything would be sorted out 
in about ten generations, that in the meantime everyone was walking 
happily towards the future, that the deported peoples had been wrong to 
obstruct a little the circulation on the proud road of progress, that 
those killed were in complete agreement with their elimination, that the 
intellectuals declared themselves happy with their graceful gag because 
it was dialectical and that, finally, the people were happy with their 
own work, because if they did, for miserable wages, overtime, they did 
it in the good sense of history.
Alas! The same people took the floor and spoke in Berlin, in 
Czechoslovakia, in Poznan and finally in Budapest. And in this city, at 
the same time as the people, the intellectuals tore off their gags. And 
both, with one voice, said that we were not walking forward but 
backwards, that we had killed for nothing, deported for nothing, 
enslaved for nothing and that now to be sure of advancing on the right 
path it was necessary to give everyone the truth and freedom. Thus, at 
the first cry of the insurrection in free Budapest, kilometers of false 
reasoning and beautiful deceptive doctrines of scientists and poor 
philosophies were reduced to dust. And the naked truth, so long 
outraged, appeared before everyone's eyes.
Contemptuous masters, who were unaware of even insulting the working 
class, had assured us that the people could easily do without freedom if 
only they were given bread. And the people themselves suddenly responded 
that they did not even have bread, but even supposing that they had had 
some, they would still want something else.
For it is not a wise professor but a blacksmith from Budapest who wrote: 
"I want to be considered as an adult who wants and knows how to think. I 
want to be able to say my thoughts without having anything to fear and I 
want to be listened to too."
As for the intellectuals, who were preached to and shouted at that there 
was no other truth than that which served the objectives of the cause, 
here is the oath they took on the graves of their comrades murdered for 
the said cause: "Never again, not even under threat and torture, nor for 
a misunderstood love of the cause, will nothing but the truth come out 
of our mouths." (Tibor Meray on Rajik's grave).
Hungary
like Spain
After this the cause is clear: This massacred people is ours.
Hungary will be, today, for us what Spain was twenty years ago. The 
subtle nuances, the artifices of words, and the wise considerations with 
which they still try to mask the truth, do not interest us. The 
competition between Rákosi and Kádár with which they want to entertain 
us, does not matter. They are both of the same race. They differ only in 
their titles of hunting glory and if Rákosi's are bloodier they will not 
be for a long time.
In any case, whether it is the killer or the persecuted persecutor, 
nothing changes in the freedom of Hungary. I regret in this respect that 
I must still play Cassandra and disappoint the new hopes of certain 
tireless colleagues, but there is no evolution possible in a 
totalitarian society. Terror does not evolve, except towards the worse, 
the gallows are not liberalized, the guillotine is not tolerant. Nowhere 
in the world has there been seen a party or a man who, having absolute 
power, has not made absolute use of it. What defines the totalitarian 
society of the right or the left is first of all the single party and 
the single party has no reason to self-destruct. This is why the only 
society that must retain our critical and operative sympathy is the one 
in which the plurality of parties prevails. It alone allows us to 
denounce injustice and crime, and therefore to correct them. It alone, 
today, allows us to denounce torture, the ignoble torture, abominable in 
Algeria as in Budapest.
The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and its errors are 
real. But, finally, let us not forget that we are the only holders of 
that power of improvement and emancipation that resides in free thought. 
Let us not forget that while totalitarian society, with its very 
principles, forces friend to denounce friend, Western society, despite 
its errors, always produces that race of men who retain the honor of 
living, I mean the race of those who extend their hand to the enemy 
himself to save him from pain or death.
When Minister Chépilov, coming from Paris, dares to write that "Western 
art is destined to dismember the human soul and to form massacrers of 
all kinds" it is time to answer him that our artists and our writers, at 
least they, have never massacred anyone and that they have enough 
generosity not to accuse the theory of socialist realism of the 
massacres covered up or ordered by Chépilov and those who resemble him.
The truth is that there is room for everyone, among us, even for evil, 
and even for Chépilov's writers, but also for honor, for the free path 
of desire, for the adventure of intelligence. While there is no room for 
anything in Stalinist culture, except for patronage sermons, the gray 
life and the catechism of propaganda. To those who could still doubt it, 
Hungarian writers recently shouted it out to them, before manifesting 
their definitive choice because they prefer to remain silent, today, 
rather than lie by order.
History cannot
justify terror
It will not be easy for us to be worthy of such sacrifice. But we must 
try to be so, in a Europe finally united, forgetting our complaints, 
making justice for our own mistakes, multiplying our creations and our 
solidarity.
Finally, to those who wanted to humiliate us and make us believe that 
history could justify terror, we respond with our true faith, the one we 
share, we now know, with Hungarian and Polish writers and also, yes, 
with Russian writers, who are also gagged.
Our faith is that there is, on the move in the world, parallel to the 
force of constraint and death that obscures history, a force of 
persuasion and life that is called culture and that is made at the same 
time with free creation and free work. Our daily task, our long vocation 
is to increase this culture with our work and not to take something away 
from it, even temporarily. But our proudest duty is to defend 
personally, and to the end, against the force of coercion and death, 
from whatever side it comes, the freedom of this culture, that is, the 
freedom of work and creation.
The Hungarian workers and intellectuals, to whom we are close today with 
such helpless pain, have understood this and have made us understand it 
better. That is why if their pain is ours, their hope also belongs to 
us. Despite their poverty, their exile, their chains, they have left us 
a royal inheritance that we must deserve: freedom, which they have no 
choice, but which in a single day they have given us back!
Albert Camus
Taken from "Volontà" n. 7, year X, 1 April 1957

https://ponte.noblogs.org/2024/3867/la-liberta-che-ci-hanno-resa-di-albert-camus/
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