Empire and Strategy

The Arabs can at least claim kinship, not in a nation, but in a sort of Moslem empire, either spiritual or temporal. Spiritually that empire exists, its adhesive force and doctrine being Islam. But there also exists a Christian empire, at least as important, which there is no question of bringing back as such into temporal history. For the moment, the Arab empire does not exist except in the writings of Colonel Nasser, and it could not come about without world-wide upheavals that would mean the Third World War in a short time. The claims for Algerian national independence must be seen in part as one of the manifestations of this new Arab imperialism in which Egypt, overestimating its strength, aims to take the lead and which, for the moment, Russia is using for its anti-Western strategy. The Russian strategy, which can be read on every map of the globe, consists in calling for the status quo in Europe (in other words, the recognition of its own colonial system) and in fomenting trouble in the Middle East and Africa to encircle Europe on the south. The happiness and freedom of the Arab populations are of little account in the whole affair. One has only to think of the slaughter of the Chechens or of the Tartars in the Crimea or of the destruction of the Arab culture in the once Moslem provinces of Daghestan. Russia merely takes advantage of such dreams of empire to serve her own designs. Those nationalistic or, in the strictest sense of the word, imperialistic claims, must in any case be responsible for the unacceptable aspects of the Arab rebellion – chiefly, the systematic murder of French civilians and Arab civilians killed without discrimination and solely because they were French or friends of the French.

Albert Camus, writing in 1958.