Just spent a very pleasurable and interesting evening with a couple of colleagues, ending up in The Bank in Kamakura - it was a bank but now makes a mint from selling very good whisky at 900 yen a shot. But the best selection of whiskies I have ever seen.At one point we got onto the state of the world, in fact that was about half the evening, and my French colleague mentioned Albert Camus, and in particular The Outsider, which we had both read in our teens, and its relevance to today - Camus wrote as a French ex-pat living in Algeria during its struggle for independence:
The quote runs something like 'we have to accept violence as an inevitable part of human existence, but we must never accept the justification of violence.' The second point my colleague made was that we have to declare our opposition to the use of violence - even if it is just in a private conversation, that act is a subversive act, and a step, however small, towards peace.
