III. The Marxists and their followers likewise think they are
humanists. But for them human nature will be formed in the
classless society of the future.
To begin with, this proves that they reject at the present
moment what we all are: those humanists are accusers of man.
How can we be surprised that such a claim should have developed
in the world of court trials? They reject the man of today in the
name of the man of the future. That claim is religious in nature.
Why should it be more justified than the one which announces the
kingdom of heaven to come? In reality the end of history cannot
have, within the limits of our condition, any definable significance.
It can only be the object of a faith and of a new mystification. A
mystification that today is no less great than the one that of old
based colonial oppression on the necessity of saving the souls of
infidels.
IV. Is not that what in reality separates you from the
intellectuals of the left?
You mean that is what separates those intellectuals from the
left? Traditionally the left has always been at war against injustice,
obscurantism, and oppression. It always thought that those
phenomena were interdependent. The idea that obscurantism can
lead to justice, the national interest to liberty, is quite recent. The
truth is that certain intellectuals of the left (not all, fortunately) are
today hypnotized by force and efficacy as our intellectuals of the
right were before and during the war. Their attitudes are different,
but the act of resignation is the same. The first wanted to be
realistic nationalists; the second want to be realistic socialists. In
the end they betray nationalism and socialism alike in the name of
a realism henceforth without content and adored as a pure, and
illusory, technique of efficacy.
This is a temptation that can, after all, be understood. But still,
however the question is looked at,
the new position of the people
who call themselves, or think themselves, leftists consists in
saying: certain oppressions are justifiable because they follow the
direction, which cannot be justified, of history. Hence there are
presumably privileged executioners, and privileged by nothing.
This is about what was said in another context by Joseph de
Maistre, who has never been taken for an incendiary. But this is a
thesis which, personally, I shall always reject. Allow me to set up
against it the traditional point of view of what has been hitherto
called the left:
all executioners are of the same family.
پاسخ با گفتآورد