The Algerian Chronicles

Albert Camus The Algerian Chronicles Cambridge, UK: The Belknap Press, 2013Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyI am sitting at a keyboard just a few miles north of Toronto. It is just a few months after the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of US President John F. Kennedy. Americans have recently celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. Despit e howls of abuse from Republicans and dire warnings from Benjamin Netanyahu on the one side and cautious reassurances that President Obama has finally done something to justify his Nobel Peace Prize on the other, a tentative and temporary agreement involving Iran's nuclear policy has been signed. It seems like an auspicious moment to reflect on the state of politics in my own and other countries.The inventory of social insanity seems limitless. It's enough to turn sensitive or even mildly sentient people to cynicism, spirituality or some form of intellectual, emotional or physical suicide.In Canada, there are reasons for concern at all three levels of government. At Toronto City Hall, there is a bizarre situation as a result of its Mayor becoming the object of serious criminal investigations and self-inflicted ridicule around the world. At the provincial level, Ontario is enduring serial scandals involving the waste or worse of billions of dollars on a failing electronic health record system, the privatization of air ambulance services and the news that over a billion dollars was squandered to terminate the construction of locally unpopular electricity generation plants in order to save four government seats in the most recent election. Then, there is a federal government embroiled in multiple layers of disgrace, notably involving electoral malfeasance and voter suppression, possible criminal charges against government-appointed Senators, various cover-ups and the revelation of multiple abuses of power that may lead through the Prime Minister's Office to Stephen Harper himself. These headline-winning events capture public attention, but there are far deeper levels of democratic deficit to be plumbed. In combination, these events would merit the adjective surreal, were it not for the fact that the overuse of that term has become ... well, surreal.Moving from the merely mendacious to the potentially catastrophic, it is possible to witness everything from Wall Street bankers still collecting enormous bonuses for having almost ruined the world's already fragile financial system to extraordinary weather patterns that betoken the consequences of climate change which some powerful political leaders still deny, though most have stopped calling it a socialist plot (at least in public).And, of course, there remain chronic international conflicts, ethno-religious slaughters, huge human rights abuses and utterly unnecessary levels of poverty, ignorance and disease throughout human society-all of which could be ameliorated if not extinguished by a modest 25% reduction of global military budgets. The inventory of social insanity seems limitless. It's enough to turn sensitive or even mildly sentient people to cynicism, spirituality or some form of intellectual, emotional or physical suicide. If anything should compel our attention and urge truly innovative thought and action, the catalogue of existing and impending calamities is surely it. Indeed, a case can be made that the time for transformation and not merely innovation within existing, ossified categories of policy development and implementation is at hand.As background for a review of a solitary writer's reflections on a single North Afri can war of independence that came to a close over half a century ago-before, even, the premeditated death of the 36th president of the United States-this might appear to be an odd and possibly hyperbolic construction. Indeed, the relevance of that writer's contemplation of events in Algeria and the entire Algerian conflict itself might seem remote at best. …

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