"Mad Beasts," from Selected Prose:  The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1974: 207-11.  This article was originally published as "Les Animaux malades de la rage" in Libération, June 22, 1953- See also Vol. I, 53/240.

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      THE ROSENBERGS ARE DEAD and life goes on. That's the way you wanted it, wasn't it? Just yesterday we were still the brothers, and you killed them as fast as you could to make us their survivors. You are counting on the passing time to make us day by day a little more forgetful, a little guiltier toward them and you just a little less cruel. Of course. It will cost you a little:  windows will get broken at your embassies. But you'll replace them, and then with just a little luck the cops will fire on European crowds and we'll have some nice fresh dead of our own to distract us from thinking about your two.

      You already tried that on us with Sacco and Vanzetti and it worked.

      This time it won't work.

      You'll win your case on one point: we don't wish anyone harm; we refuse to turn the scorn and horror you fill us with into hatred. But you will not succeed in making us take the Rosenbergs' execution for a "regrettable incident," or even for judicial error. It's a legal lynching which covers a whole people with blood and definitively and unmistakably exposes the bankruptcy of the Atlantic Pact and your inability to assume the leadership of the West. I'm going to tell you where you made your mistake: you thought that when you assassinated the Rosenbergs you were settling a private account. A hundred thousand voices kept saying, "They are innocent." And you answered

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stupidly, "We are punishing two of our own citizens according to our own law. It's none of your business."

      Well, you're wrong! The Rosenberg business is precisely our business. Innocents who are put to death are the whole world's business. The Vatican's spokesman himself told you again Thursday that "civilization is faced with a choice which will determine whether it will be acquitted or condemned." From every side people cried out: "Be careful! In judging them you judge yourselves; you are deciding if you're men or beasts." Do you understand now why we begged you to hold a new trial? When we were asking justice for the Rosenbergs, we were also saying, "Let your own cause be just." When we were asking that you spare their lives, we were also saying, "Spare your own." Since we had been made your allies, the Rosenbergs' fate threatened to be the foreshadowing of our own. You who claim to be the masters of the world, you had the chance to prove that you were masters of yourselves. But if you gave way to your criminal insanity, that same insanity was capable tomorrow of throwing us pell-mell into a war of extermination. No one in Europe had any illusions about it: depending on whether you gave the Rosenbergs life or death, you were getting ready for world peace or world war.

      There had been MacArthur's sinister buffooneries, the bombing of the Yalu, and McCarran's cop stuff: each time, and by yourselves, you hit Europe a low blow. But your supporters still had not lost all hope. The reason why our governments had not been able to make their point of view prevail was that they had not been able to get together, that France had not gone along with England, that the two countries did not have the support of their people. But yesterday the whole of Europe, with its masses, priests, foreign ministers, and heads of state, demanded in a single voice that your president make the most human, the most simple, of gestures.

      We weren't asking for your dollars, or your weapons, or your soldiers. No; we were just asking for two lives, two innocent lives.

      Have you at least understood what this extraordinary truce meant? Class conflicts, old animosities, everything was set aside; the Rosenbergs had brought about European unity. Just one word from you and you too would have reaped the benefit of this unity: the whole of Europe would have thanked you. And you answered, "Who gives a fuck for Europe." All right. But

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don't come talking to us about alliances any more. Allies consult with one another, talk things over, make mutual concessions; each one influences the others. If you answer no when all we're asking you is not to dishonor yourselves for nothing, how could we possibly believe that you will let us have our say when major interests are at stake?

      And you say we're your allies? Come on. Today our governments are your house servants. Tomorrow our peoples will be your victims, and that's it. Of course you're going to give us shameful excuses: your president couldn't permit himself the luxury of pardoning the Rosenbergs; he had to toss out ballast so that he could make his view prevail in Korea. In Korea? Come on! He gets scoffed at there every day by his own generals and by old Syngman Rhee.

      And what kind of a country is it whose leaders have to commit ritual murders to be forgiven for stopping a war?

      From now on we know how we weigh on your scales. You've put the universe in one pan and McCarthy in the other. At the moment Rosenberg sat down in the electric chair, the scale tipped to McCarthy's side.

      Do you think we're going to die for McCarthy? Bleed ourselves white so that he can have a European army? Do you think we want to defend McCarthy's culture? McCarthy's freedom? McCarthy's justice? That we'll make Europe a battleground to let this bloodstained idiot burn all the books? Have all the innocents executed and imprison the judges who protest?

      Don't kid yourselves. We'll never let the Rosenbergs' assassin lead the West.

      You say that McCarthy won't last forever and that people are working secretly to get rid of him. So what? Your McCarthy has a million heads. Cut one off and a hundred new ones will grow.

      Listen, I have on my desk a picture taken last Thursday in Washington: well-fed, well-dressed men and elegant women are marching to demand the Rosenbergs' necks; and in the front row a pretty young girl is carrying a sign which reads:

      Fry them and send their bodies to the USSR!

      You've seen these people parading through your streets while a man and a woman were living out their final hours in a prison, while two desperate children were asking in vain that their parents be given back to them. You've seen them laugh, cry out, and wave their signs and banners, and there was not a single

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one among you who came up and smashed their faces. There really is something rotten in America.

And don't protest that it is just a question of a few aroused people, irresponsible elements: they're the ones who run your country, since the government gave in to please them. Do you remember Nuremberg and your theory of collective responsibility? Well, today you are the ones it ought to be applied to. You are collectively responsible for the Rosenbergs' death—some of you because you provoked this murder, others for allowing it to be carried out. You have tolerated the United States' being the cradle of a new fascism, and it won't do any good for you to answer that just one murder cannot be compared to Hitler's hecatombs: fascism is not defined by the number of its victims but by its way of killing them.

And why has this fury been unleashed against a man and a woman on the eve of their death? Why this hatred which has stupefied the universe?

It's because you've been persuaded that they wanted to take your bomb. You don't rest easy unless you are the only ones able to destroy the earth. President Eisenhower counted the Rosenbergs' innocent victims in the dozens of millions; each one of you already feels like one of the dead of future wars. It was dead men who were asking Thursday that those who had stolen atomic secrets be put to death.

Unfortunately, when we look at you from Europe we don't mistake you for the innocent or the dead. We see only two innocent dead—your victims. And as for atomic secrets, they're the fruit of your sick imagination; science develops everywhere at the same rate, and the manufacture of bombs is a matter of industrial potential.

In killing the Rosenbergs, you simply tried to stop scientific progress by a human sacrifice. Magic, witch hunts, autos-da-fe, sacrifices: we've reached that point. Your country is sick with fear. You're afraid of everything: the Russians, the Chinese, the Europeans. You're afraid of each other. You're afraid of the shadow of your own bomb. Ah, what fine allies you make!

And you would like to lead us! You are leading us to war out of terror, and you'd lose it out of panic at the first bombardment. I know, there are men of courage in your country: the Rosenbergs' lawyer—the very one who said yesterday, "I'm ashamed to be an American"—Judge Douglas, the members of

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the Committee to Free the Rosenbergs, and hundreds of thousands of others. But what can they do except become martyrs?

And then there are the masses who are still sound but mystified by you. There are the blacks you are oppressing. And above all, there is that frail voice which today has fallen silent and which we could hear better than your rodomontades, saying these admirable words:

"We're young, and we don't want to die, but, we won't live at this price."

After all, the Rosenbergs are Americans; and if there's any hope we still can cling to, it's that your country gave birth to this man and woman you killed.

Perhaps one day all these people of good will may cure you of your fear. We hope so, because we loved you.

In the meantime, do not be surprised if we cry out, from one end of Europe to the other) "Be careful; America is mad. Break all the ties which bind us to her, or we in turn shall be bitten and made mad."