"One commits crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The line thatseparates them is not clear. But the Penal Code distinguishes between them onthe concept of premeditation. We are now living in the era of premeditation andperfect crime. Our criminals are no longer those helpless children who pleadlove as their excuse; on the contrary, they are adults and their alibi is anirrefutable one: 'Philosophy,' which can be used for anything, even fortransforming murderers into judges. "
These words were written by Albert Camus in the preface of his novel, TheRebel. He, for all his masterly discontent, did not know that in a countrynot too distant from his own France, one engendered and nurtured in the spiritof French thought, in fact, Romania, the paroxysm of a whole series of crimeswas reached in secrecy after August 23, 1944 -- crimes of a nature so differentand unnatural that neither Camus nor any other Westerner could have believedthem possible, or even have imagined them.
An operation to invert and reverse human nature is something that defies theimagination of any normal human being. Except for the victims and theirtorturers, only a few, a very few, persons, who have had the opportunity ofinforming themselves, can give credence to those crimes, and furthermore canunderstand the deeper significance lying beneath the physical facts.
It is true that the last four decades constitute an era of crime, crimecoldly and logically calculated, even justified as rational. Such crime now dominatesthe whole world. It enters into everyday preoccupations. It has becomesomething normal, often commonplace. It has come to be accepted as natural, sothat people no longer take cognizance of it or comprehend the real threat tothe very existence of humanity.
No one can have the patience to compile a list of all the crimes consummatedin these four decades, nor could he do it in a lifetime. They would have toencompass the civil war in post-Czarist Russia with its forcedcollectivization, the crimes of which have since become well known andrecognized as such by the world's leaders. They would have to include the Greekcivil war in which the Communists ravaged whole regions; also the so-called"People's Tribunals" that came into being after the war; the bombingof defenseless cities and hospitals; the present camps of slavery and death inall countries under Communist control; Budapest in 1956. But all these are buta few chapters selected from the long story of unleashed evil. They proveeither that man has come to feel the necessity to kill as intensely as he hasfelt the desire to live, or that through a logical perversion of a desire toaccomplish an ideal he can easily and with scarcely a twinge of conscience bemade to murder the very persons to whom he once intended to give happiness --destroy them in the conviction that this is what he must do, that there is noother way.
All such crimes have one characteristic in common: they are perpetrated inthe name of humanity, the class struggle, the liberation of the people, theright of the strongest, all at the discretion of the individual. They all havethe same goal: the biological destruction of the enemy, a principle applied byStalin with fanaticism. The dead cannot defend themselves, nor can they accuse.
Such crimes have long been notorious and endlessly repeated. They havebecome commonplace and trite. But there is a deeper horror -- one of which theworld as yet knows nothing. What happened in the prisons of Romania after thenation was subjugated by the Soviets enlarged the domain of crime beyond whatpeople believed possible. Crime has been expanded beyond the biological limitsand placed on other coordinates and in a dimension heretofore unknown.Perpetrated in cold blood and cynically, with sadism never met before, crimenow aims not to destroy the body, but the soul.
The biological destruction of an adversary no longer satisfies, or pleases;or maybe it does not pay any more. The wrecking of the victim's mind and soulis more appealing and more useful: the destruction of human characteristics;the reduction of man to a level of total animality; a definitive dehumanizationthat transforms what was human into a docile, malleable protoplasm,instinctively responsive to all the trainer's whims -- a zombie.
What is about to be told is, I believe, a unique experience. But it did notspring from fancy, from a brain that had passed beyond the threshold ofrationality. In order for it to be possible, a distinct evolution was necessaryon a plane of thought, on a philosophic plane, through a long period ofupheavals, of breaking down and replacing all values in which man has so farbelieved. It was necessary that "speculations of pure reason and physicaldeterminism converge with human sciences from which man is virtuallyeliminated. " (G. Thibau, Babel ou le vertige technique)
What up till now was considered an unassailable truth -- that man is adivine creation -- has been replaced by a desiderate taken as truth that man isa creative divinity. The old values and the concept of man have been discarded.In the light of new realities and relationships, the experimenters crystallizedthe entire materialistic harvest of the last centuries into a venom worthy ofthe concept which spawned it. It was necessary that God be dethroned, and thatin His stead man be exalted; not an actual man but a hypothetical one, oneexisting only in the imagination of his creators. The divinization of matterresulted in the confusion of man and matter, with man's submission to matter.This last conclusion permitted the experiment to be made without inhibitions.
When no difference is recognized between a piece of iron subjected toshaping and a man subjected to psychological experimentation, the same workingmethods may be applied both to iron and to man and the same desired result willbe obtained. By virtue of such reasoning, stripped of all human sentiment, itwas possible to have toward man the same attitude the sculptor has toward apiece of marble. He carves away to produce from amorphous rock a model existingin his imagination. It does not matter if he is not successful -- there isplenty of marble; and if the treatment applied to man is also unsuccessful,again it does not matter -- of men there are more than enough.
One single thing may seem paradoxical -- that men have dared treat others oftheir own kind as though they were unlike themselves. Those of whom I shalltell arbitrarily considered themselves different from their fellow men and feltjustified in subjecting them to unprecedented treatment. They assumed forthemselves the role of creator but denied this to others, as if the latter werekneaded from a different and inferior matter. This was possible because thenormal sense of values had become so distorted that even the experimentersthemselves were not sure but that a deed conforming to the"principle" today would not be declared tomorrow a crime and they bepunished accordingly. But until then, for them the crime was legal. What isworse, they even proclaimed it a salutary act. They gave the torturer aneducator's certificate, and his victim, by virtue of the same contorted logic,they accused of being an odious criminal.
What were the methods used and what were the results of this experimentationin which the fashioning of a new kind of man was attempted, a man of whom eventhe most primitive savages would be ashamed?
Only the simple facts can tell us. They, above all other considerations,remain irrefutable proof of an era in which disdain for the human condition hasreached its lowest level, greatly exceeding anything thus far found inconcentration camps.
This is a characteristic of the Twentieth Century, and the contribution ofSoviet Russia to the history of mankind, to the history of the nations she hasbeen subjugating, that of having given, through Communist methods, the name tothis century: the "Century of Crime. "