I was dealing with men who only considered people of their party as
comrades, men who were covered with orders and prohibitions, who judged me as a
provisional fellow traveler, and who placed themselves in advance in the future
moment when I’d disappear from the melee, taken back by the forces of the
right. For them I wasn’t a whole man; I was a dead man on reprieve. No kind of
reciprocity is possible with men like that; nor any mutual criticism, which
would have been something to hope for…. We lived in a poisoned atmosphere of
thoughts that didn’t resist examination, but that they avoided examining. It
was putrid, and we were never sure that they weren’t in the process of
slandering us somewhere.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, A Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party, 1972
