Chapter II - Denialism and the Problem of Indifference

Summary

In Albert Camus’ classic novel La Peste, a physician diagnoses the plague. Soon, however, he discovers that the people around him refuse to acknowledge the threat of the contagious disease. When, at last, they can no longer deny the fact that an epidemic has infected them, it is too late.

In recent years, La Peste has been read as a comment on denialism of the AIDS epidemic. Traditionally, however, Camus’ novel was interpreted as an allegory of how the French population responded to the occupation of France by Nazi Germany. At first, they could not imagine that the German army would force the French army to surrender. Then they wanted to believe that it would be best to submit and live with the inevitability of a long-term occupation or to even collaborate with the occupational forces.

Obviously, the meaning readers gave this allegory – in 1947, when the novel was first published – is quite different from the meaning the story has for readers today. As historian Carl Becker has noted:

‘it is well known that every generation writes the same history in a new way, and puts upon it a new construction. The reason why this is so … is that our imagined picture [of a past event] is always determined … by our own present purposes, desires, prepossessions, and prejudices, all of which enter into the process of knowing it’.

In other words, even though the past itself does not change, it will be rewritten by every new generation.

An example of rewriting the past is the debate concerning what the general population in the Netherlands ‘knew’ about the Holocaust. It is a question that even today, seventy years after the war, continues to create conflict and controversy.

In the 1960s, it was argued that, during the war, the general population did not know about the Holocaust because available information was fragmented, inconsistent and, untrustworthy. In the 1980s, that view was challenged by the argument that people could have known but did not want to know what was going on. Information about large-scale ‘extermination’ of Jews was available, but many preferred to deny the facts and remain ignorant.