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How the FBI targeted Camus, and then Sartre after the JFK assassination (2013)

January 29, 2024
in General
How the FBI targeted Camus, and then Sartre after the JFK assassination (2013)
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Sartre y Camus

Today, as you must sure­ly know, marks the 50th anniver­sary of John F. Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and also sure­ly marks a revival of inter­est in the myr­i­ad con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that abound in the absence of a sat­is­fac­to­ry expla­na­tion for the events at Dealey Plaza on Novem­ber 22nd, 1963. One the­o­ry I’ve nev­er heard float­ed before comes to us via Andy Mar­tin, lec­tur­er in French at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty and author of The Box­er and the Goal­keep­er: Sartre vs Camus. In an arti­cle for Prospect mag­a­zine, Mar­tin writes:

To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Cas­tro, Hoover, and LBJ, we can now add: Jean-Paul Sartre. FBI and State Depart­ment reports of the 1960s had drawn atten­tion to Sartre’s mem­ber­ship of the Fair Play for Cuba Com­mit­tee, of which Lee Har­vey Oswald was also a mem­ber. And—prophetically?—Sartre had “dis­missed the US as a head­less nation.” […] Could he, after all, have been the Sec­ond Shoot­er?

It’s prob­a­bly fair to say that Martin’s tongue is wedged firm­ly in his cheek through­out this open­ing of his fas­ci­nat­ing chron­i­cle of the FBI’s sur­veil­lance of Sartre and his one­time friend and edi­tor Albert Camus. But Martin’s inter­est in the mis­al­liance of Sartre and the Feds is very seri­ous. What he finds dur­ing his inves­ti­ga­tion of the FBI files on exis­ten­tial­ism is that “the G‑men, ini­tial­ly so anti-philo­soph­i­cal, find them­selves reluc­tant­ly phi­los­o­phiz­ing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philo­soph­i­cal police­men.”

While we have become accus­tomed, since the days of Joe McCarthy, to ide­o­log­i­cal witch hunts, it seems that Sartre and Camus served as test cas­es for the sort of thing that fre­quent­ly plays out in over­heat­ed Con­gres­sion­al hear­ings and media denunciations—agents with fur­rowed brows and lit­tle philo­soph­i­cal train­ing des­per­ate­ly try­ing to work out whether such and such abstruse aca­d­e­m­ic is part of a grand con­spir­a­cy to under­mine truth, jus­tice, the Amer­i­can Way, etc.. Sartre appeared ear­ly on the anti-Com­mu­nist radar, though, iron­i­cal­ly, he did so as a plant of sorts, brought over in 1945 by the Office of War Infor­ma­tion as part of a group of jour­nal­ists the Unit­ed States’ gov­ern­ment hoped would put out good pro­pa­gan­da.

“Hoover won­dered,” how­ev­er, writes Mar­tin, “what kind of good pro­pa­gan­da you can hope to get out of the author of Nau­sea and Being and Noth­ing­ness.” It turned out, not much, but a year lat­er Hoover latched on to Sartre’s friend and edi­tor Albert Camus, whose name he and his agents spelled, var­i­ous­ly, as “Canus” or “Corus.” Where Sartre had breezed into the country—smitten by its lit­er­a­ture and music—Camus was held at immi­gra­tion on Hoover’s orders. He would spend a brief, depress­ing time and nev­er return.

How we get from post-war sur­veil­lance of French exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­phers to Sartre and the grassy knoll is a long and com­pli­cat­ed tale, befit­ting the para­noid imag­in­ings of J. Edgar Hoover. He was, after all, the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist par excel­lence and “he need­ed to know,” writes Mar­tin, “if Exis­ten­tial­ism and Absur­dism were some kind of front for Com­mu­nism. To him, every­thing was poten­tial­ly a cod­ed re-write of the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo.” What Hoover feared from Sartre, how­ev­er, was that the lat­ter was him­self an influ­en­tial believ­er in a con­spir­a­cy, one that cast doubt on the FBI’s strong­ly-held belief that Oswald was the lone gun­man.

Despite gath­er­ing years of NSA-wor­thy sur­veil­lance on the philoso­phers, Hoover’s agents were nev­er able to dis­cern the ide­o­log­i­cal pro­gram of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Com­mu­nist or anti-Com­mu­nist.” The black-and-white, spy-vs-spy world of the FBI left lit­tle room for philo­soph­i­cal nuance and lit­er­ary ambi­gu­i­ty, after all. But they nev­er stopped watch­ing Sartre, con­vinced that “there must be some kind of con­spir­a­cy between com­mu­nists, blacks, poets and French philoso­phers.” As it turns out, there were several—political and aes­thet­ic con­spir­a­cies involv­ing such ter­ri­fy­ing fig­ures as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. These poets and close rela­tions of Sartre did, indeed, help foment rev­o­lu­tion in the Caribbean and elsewhere—but theirs are sto­ries for anoth­er day.

Read Martin’s Prospect arti­cle here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

FBI’s “Vault” Web Site Reveals Declas­si­fied Files on Hem­ing­way, Ein­stein, Mar­i­lyn & Oth­er Icons

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : Hacker News – https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/the-existentialism-files-how-the-fbi-targeted-camus-and-sartre.html

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