The Century of Fear was
an article published in Combat in 1948 by Albert Camus and he said –
“The years we have just gone through have killed
something in us. And that something is the old confidence man had in himself,
which always led him to believe that he could elicit human reactions from
another man if he spoke to him in the language of humanity. We have seen men
lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture - and each time it was not possible to
persuade those who did these things not to do them, because they were sure of
themselves and because one cannot persuade an abstraction, i.e., the representative
of an ideology. Mankind’s dialogue has just come to an end. And, naturally, a
man who can’t be persuaded is a man to be feared”.
The year is 2016. The
world is in utter disarray. As much as people are sure of themselves, they are
also unsure, not so much because of anything in particular, but mainly due to their negligence
as it is no secret that man is entirely responsible for his own ignorance. If
Albert Camus had said what he had to say in those words way back then about
humanity, my younger brother Ali Zafar has said more, and in words much fewer
on the existing atrophic methods of the world. While Camus is Camus, our Ali is
Ali, and while Camus shaped the time he lived in, our Ali is shaping the time
he is living in.
In Defence of Honour
was an anecdote that was published on Saturday 2:52
PM – 16th Jul 2016 on Twitter by Ali Zafar
“If women started killing us to protect their honour, a lot of us would be dead!”
