[Peace-discuss] Some nonsense on Sunday afternoon

[David Green]

So how does Schmitt fit into this argument, for better or worse?

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:  [While Mort's away instructing the French Left, here's some strong evidence that 
they need it. This article is an illustration of why some of us condemn "left" 
or "liberal" positions, when they're represented by media darlings (in France 
and the US) like B.-H. Levi. Roughly, I'm for what he's against, and 
conversely. --CGE]

Bernard-Henri Lévy’s plan for the French left
Lévy’s pet hates
By Serge Halimi

In his latest book (1) Bernard-Henri Lévy lists “laboratories brewing
atrocities”. This list features, in order of appearance:

*Hugo Chávez, “whose anti-neo liberal rhetoric recalls ‘fascist or Nazi-style
regimes’ according to Latin-America’s bishops”.

*Etienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida, held
responsible for the “widely publicised rediscovery... of a theoretician, driven
by his hatred of free markets to espouse Nazism: Carl Schmitt. He is presented
as the saviour of a left that has lost its bearings.”

*Slavoj Zizek and Peter Sloterdijk: “A significant number of European
intellectuals have wholeheartedly embraced this curious, indeed hallucinatory,
notion that a Nazi thinker [Schmitt] could rescue the left from its current
problems. Heidegger used to say that only a god could save us. Now, echoing the
idea, this leftwing fringe repeats that only a Nazi can save us.”

*Emmanuel Mounier and Jean-Marie Domenach: “The idea [attributed to them] that
the real danger was not the Soviet Union, but the United States, not communism
but Americanism, resurfaces among the ideologists of the new right in the 1980s,
and then in all the neo-Nazi sects, mentioned above, such as Nouvelle
Résistance, and finally in [France’s] National Front.”

*Le Monde diplomatique: “An editorial of Le Monde diplomatique explaining that
America ... has found a secret weapon for ‘domesticating souls’... almost
exactly the same words as Drieu la Rochelle (2) used .... Or here again, in the
same issue ... the foul stench arising from the condemnation of the
‘cosmopolitan establishment of bankers and corporate lawyers’ that dominates the
US, and therefore the world. Maurras (3), or nowadays Le Pen, would say the
same... In yet another article, by Loïc Wacquant and Pierre Bourdieu ... how can
one not react to the disturbing similarities with another strain of
anti-Americanism, the one and only true variety, hatched by Arthur Moeller Van
den Bruck, the man who invented the idea of the Third Reich.”

*Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 “was no more than a variation on the old
isolationist, populist, ultra-nationalist and chauvinistic ideas of Pat Buchanan
and other rightwing US extremists”.

*Harold Pinter: “You would think you were listening to Pinter, Chomsky,
Bourdieu or a neo-Trotskyist. But no. The nerve, the investigative style, the
obsession with manipulation ... it all brings us back, I fear, to the ravings of
the tsarist police fabricating its famous fake that supposedly proved Jewish
domination of the world.”

*Noam Chomsky: “this maniacal negationist”.

*Olivier Besancenot and the Attac organisation: “Why have we never heard any
of them, ever, telling us what they think about Iran’s president Ahmadinejad,
who repeatedly says that he dreams of annihilating Israel?”

Referring to Lévy’s publications in 1979, Cornelius Castoriadis found “a good
sample of devious Stalinist techniques”. This is a severe criticism,
particularly as Lévy claims to write “without any sense of controversy”, though
“I do of course simplify”, and even suggests the reader “look at things calmly
and with a cool head”. He sees himself as being “trained, I think, to be curious
and respectful”.

Lévy defends the US industrialist Henry Ford, who inspired Adolf Hitler. As Lévy
himself acknowledges, his commitment to the cause of Darfur brought him into
contact with “an increasing number of Islamic militants, sometimes even
Islamists, linked in particular to Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.” (The preacher
Louis Farrakhan is, among other things, an anti-semite.)

Perhaps it would be most effective to refer Lévy to his own writings:
“Sometimes, overwhelmed by exhaustion or disgust, it is just too hard to go on.
What is the point in trying to make someone see reason, when they just will not
listen?” Just so.
_________________

Translated by Harry Forster
(1) Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ce grand cadavre á la renverse, Grasset, Paris, 2007.

(2) French writer who headed La Nouvelle Revue française during the Occupation
and advocated collaboration with the Nazi authorities.

(3) Leader and principal thinker of the reactionary Action Française.



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