[Peace-discuss] Some nonsense on Sunday afternoon

[C. G. Estabrook]

I've never understood the po-mos' enthusiasm for Schmitt. Perhaps it's no more 
than what Chomsky would call the wide-spread contempt for democracy among 
intellectuals of the left and right.  BHL may almost accidentally be right, that 
Schmitt's seen as a savior by a (certain M-L) "left that has lost its bearings" 
-- or perhaps more accurately been transmogrified into an academic simulacrum 
with bloody dreams (i.e., po-mo).  But I doubt that Schmitt was "driven by his 
hated of free markets." He's a stick for Levy to beat Derrida et al. with.

This article made me go renew my lapsed subscription to Le Monde diplomatique... 
  --CGE


David Green wrote:
> 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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