During the second world war, the French-Algerian author Albert Camus wrote a remarkable series of letters to an anonymous German friend. For Camus, it was a way to explore the cancer of nationalism and to reveal the humanity and shared history that ultimately unites the continent: “For us Europe is a home … where for the last twenty centuries the most amazing adventure of the human spirit has been going on. It is the privileged arena in which western man’s struggle against the world, against the gods, against himself is today reaching its climax.”
Camus’s uplifting hymn of praise to the idea of Europe, written amid the despair of war, is included in this new collection of more than 60 letters, edited by Travis Elborough. Written by ordinary citizens as well as famous figures such as Karl Marx, Joan Baez, Nelson Mandela and Albert Einstein, they expose injustice, challenge pernicious ideas and champion idealism. The anthology begins with William Wilberforce’s 1808 message to the American president Thomas Jefferson opposing the “destructive Ravages” of the slave trade and concludes in our age of digital “clicktivism” with a letter to the New York Times in December 2017 from Time’s Up: “The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly.”
Many of them are humbling. They include Ron Ridenhour’s 1969 letter to members of Congress and to President Nixon exposing the My Lai massacre that had occurred the year before. A helicopter gunner in Vietnam, Ridenhour had heard rumours about the massacre from fellow soldiers who had witnessed it, convincing him that “something rather dark and bloody” took place. This “conscientious citizen” was so appalled by accounts of hundreds of men, women and children being shot in cold blood that he could not remain silent. In his letter he quoted Winston Churchill: “A country without a conscience is a country without a soul and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.”
As Elborough writes in his brief introduction, these pieces of correspondence are a reminder that “if we want to change the world, standing up for and voicing our personal and political beliefs is both a right and duty”. At a time of great political uncertainty and indeed when letter writing is almost a forgotten art, the collection demonstrates the vital and enduring importance of speaking truth to power.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion