LEFT BEHIND – LEFT IN DARK TIMES: A STAND AGAINST THE NEW BARBARISM, BY BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
by Claire Berlinski
National Review
December 15, 2008
A curious thing happened as I was reading Bernard-Henri Levy’s latest
book: I found myself moved.
It begins with an account of a phone call from Nicolas Sarkozy in
March 2007. Levy recalls Sarkozy’s triumphant tone as he asked whether
Levy had seen Andre Glucksmann’s article in Le Monde. Glucksmann,
like Levy a prominent intellectual of the kind France particularly
treasures and like Levy a man of the Left, had just announced his
support for Sarkozy against the pretty socialist airhead Segolène
Royal. "Let’s get to the point," Sarkozy says to Levy, cutting him
off in mid-pleasantry. "When are you going to write your article
about me? Huh, when? Because Glucksmann is fine. But you, after all,
are my friend."
Levy is steamrollered in the face of Sarkozy’s force majeure. "No
matter how much I like you," he at last stammers, "the Left is my
family, and . . ."
"Emmanuelli, your family? Montebourg, your family? The people who’ve
spent thirty years telling you to go f**k yourself? Do you really
think I’m an idiot or do you really believe what you’re saying,
that these people are your family?"
Levy captures both Sarkozy’s unctuousness and his steroidal aggression
— but captures, as well, his paradox: The man is right about a great
many things and braver by far than his enemies. It is I, not Sego, who
speaks out about Chechnya, about Darfur; it is she, not me, who praises
Hezbollah and extols the virtues of the Chinese justice system . . .
Sarkozy hangs up; Levy is left uneasy. "Unfortunately," he writes,
"he was right. . . . The Left to which I had stayed faithful was
behaving strangely."
At that point, he remarks, this book began. The first half of the
book may best be described as Levy’s apology for voting against
Sarkozy all the same. It reflects the thinking of a deeply conflicted
man, and while it is to be applauded for its honesty, it cannot be
celebrated for its rigor: Again and again, Levy refuses to follow
his own arguments.
Levy rightly scorns the relativist who has "nothing against the stoning
of adulterous women in Afghanistan. Nothing against mutilating the
genitals of young girls"; he rightly acknowledges that the Left
was blind to the evils of Stalinism and a host of other evils as
well. He is of course not the first man of the Left to note this: The
American neoconservative movement was made up originally of refugees
from the Left; 9/11 prompted fresh apostasy among such figures as
Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen (whose What’s Left? is a more
disciplined book). Levy’s observations are more or less those made
(with welcome Anglo-Saxon verbal economy) by the drafters of the 2006
Euston Manifesto in Britain.
But Levy cannot bring himself simply to reject and renounce the
Left. Like a battered wife remembering from her hospital bed the
exquisite roses her husband once brought her, Levy lets his beautiful
memories of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King prevent him, too,
from petitioning for divorce. No, he argues, the Left is still the
place for the pure of heart; it must only remember what it stands
for, to wit, the instinct to support the Dreyfuses of the world,
the "good memory of antifascism," the lessons of anticolonialism
and antitotalitarianism. This is well-meant, vaporous, and empty. We
remain with the question: Is it the Left or the Right that supports
the Dreyfuses of the world and opposes colonialism, fascism, and
totalitarianism?
Levy makes the case that the Left is morally unmoored, but nonetheless
insists he will remain of it — a policy as ruinous in politics as it
is dangerous in seamanship — for one belongs on the Left, he insists,
if one sympathizes with human suffering. "Man," he writes, "the man
of the Left, is the only animal who can shed his own self to enter,
without fusion or effusion, someone else’s mind and heart." Now,
this is first of all not true on the face of it, and Levy offers
no evidence to the contrary. The evidence we do have suggests that
those who describe themselves as men of the Right tend to give more
— a lot more — to charity. In any case, if the Left stands on its
natural sense of sympathy, its defense is not apt to persuade those who
believe it more important to rectify than to sympathize with suffering;
Levy himself offers ample evidence that many of the Left’s schemes,
however well-intentioned, in the end increase the sum of suffering.
Elsewhere too Levy seems unwilling to follow his own thoughts. He
concedes that there was a "whiff of barbarity" about the rioters
who torched the suburbs of France in 2005, but cannot bring himself
to agree with Sarkozy, who condemned them as "scum," for, he admits,
all the historic riots so beloved to the collective memory of the Left
were barbarous. "The Paris Commune, for example . . . do we really
think that event was purely grandiose, majestic and glowing, worthy
of entering, all of a piece, the golden legend of the Republic?" No,
I don’t. But I’m not the one with a contradiction in thought to defend.
Levy rightly deplores the exclusion of these banlieues,
suburban ghettos, from French society. He sympathizes with their
inhabitants. But he does not ask — much less answer — the important
questions, important, at least, if he is trying to buttress the case
against Sarkozy he implicitly sets out to make. Beyond saying that
this situation makes him feel bad — because he is a sympathetic man
— and beyond suggesting that it might be best for France were its
leaders to use mollifying rhetoric to describe the inhabitants of
the suburbs (rather than suggesting, as Sarkozy did, that they be
treated to the business end of an industrial-strength fire hose),
what can be done to improve things?
Here there is an important debate between the Right and the Left,
one that is of much greater moment than a debate over rhetoric:
Should France attempt to reduce barriers to entry into its workforce
by liberalizing its economy? Or should the state instead redistribute
income from France’s wealthier citizens to the inhabitants of the
suburbs? I am willing to be persuaded that the more sophisticated
theorists of the Left may have something worthwhile to say about
this, but is it too much to ask to see the argument and look at the
evidence? An appeal for compassion for the wretched of the banlieues
is not a policy prescription. Nor is it a reason to regret the defeat
of Sego, who more than ever seems determined to become the Eva Peron
of French political life.
But then we come to the second half of the book, where Levy
denounces the anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of the modern
Left, and here something remarkable occurs. Now, I confess to an
interesting experience: I read this book out loud. This, obviously,
is how Levy intended it to be read, and read this way, this part of
the book is exceptionally effective. Those easily mocked exclamation
points and sentence fragments and one-sentence paragraphs and long,
run-on passages when declaimed acquire an extremely powerful rhythm.
My listening audience was a Turkish friend (I live in Istanbul)
of half-formed but vaguely leftish political sensibilities, prone,
like most Turks, to believing the worst of America and raised in a
climate where the proposition "Israel is the world’s worst nation"
is taken as a self-evident statement on the order of "The Armenians
had it coming." When I came to the passages in which Levy denounces
the moral disgrace, the appalling apologetics, the sheer imbecility
of a Left that would dismiss the suffering of the persecuted of Darfur
on the grounds that admitting it might encourage the Americans — the
Empire — to intervene, I saw something in his eyes that I had not seen
before: a visceral and emotional understanding. For Levy’s voice, here,
is powerful, it is scathing, it is thunderous and outraged; it places
this failure in its historical context, it is deeply learned and rich
with authority, and it is the best indictment of its kind in print.
His condemnation of the 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban
is masterly. His reply to those who would diminish or deny the
Holocaust is eviscerating. His response to apologists for fascist
Islamic movements is furious and deserves to be the final word on the
subject. It is entirely worth suffering through the book’s first half
to reach his devastating rebuke to Chomsky, Pinter, Badiou, Galloway,
Carter, and a long list of similarly craven fools.
Thus the book leaves the reader with a question. If Levy knows all
of this, and obviously he does, why was he "literally incapable"
of voting for Sarkozy? Why did he bother with the first half of this
book at all? Surely a man of his intellect isn’t really persuaded by
the silly arguments he makes in defense of the Left? There are deep
and unexamined emotional issues at work here, but the book is no less
fascinating for that.
Claire Berlinski is the author, most recently, of "There Is No
Alternative": Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
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