"TERROR AND LIBERALISM"

OU QUANDO OS OCIDENTAIS

 SE ENGANAM DE INIMIGO...

.

Debate, num blog do Le Monde, à volta de Paul Berman ( “one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East”) e do seu interessantíssimo livro "Terror and Liberalism":

http://jcdurbant.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/07/03/islamisme-quand-les-ennemis-de-la-raison-ne-peuvent-etre-ennemis-de-la-raison-the-folly-behind-the-logic/

"(...) Petit retour à nouveau sur l'un des rares intellectuels (de gauche, de surcroit) à avoir bien saisi (dans son magistral livre "Terror and liberalism - présenté ci-dessous dans une conférence pour la Fondation Carnegie en pleine guerre d'Irak au printemps 2003) la vérité du terrorisme et du totalitarisme qui le secrète mais aussi justement de l'aveuglement quasiment inhérent à l'intelligentsia à son égard, l'essayiste américain Paul Berman. A savoir, le fait, notamment, que des peuples entiers (allemands, russes, chinois, cambodgiens, etc.) puissent s'emballer pour des mouvements de pure irrationalité. Mais aussi justement l'incapacité, pour une société possédant une aussi grande foi dans la rationalité universelle que la nôtre et en son sein tout particulièrement pour ceux dont celle-ci est à la fois la raison d'être et le gagne-pain, de l'accepter.

D'où, à l'instar de ces libéraux des années 30, cette volonté si bien intentionnée et inextinguible de refuser de condamner et de vouloir comprendre, voire de justifier l'injustifiable (N'y avait-il pas un peu de vrai dans les critiques nazies des Juifs ? Ne devait-il pas être possible de les critiquer sans pour autant être antisémite ?) qui finira, on le sait, par leur faire voter massivement les pleins pouvoirs à Pétain.

Extraits (traduits au babelfish):

Le progrès du totalitarisme dépend et est inséparable de ce genre de naïveté libérale. Sans coopération des compagnons de route avec Staline, sans les socialistes pacifistes français dans le cas d'Hitler, sans la naïveté de toute une série de conservateurs et de membres de la droite démocratique pour tout un ensemble de fascistes et de Nazis, sans la naïveté même des Etats-Unis en ce qui concerne Hitler lui-même dans les années 30, on a du mal à imaginer que ces mouvements auraient été très loin.

Ainsi c'est une erreur de penser les mouvements totalitaires comme des mouvements isolés. Ils ont existé à l'intérieur d'une dynamique, et une partie de cette dynamique est la naïve réticence des libéraux à les identifier pour ce qu'ils sont.

Le succès du totalitarisme musulman dépend pour une bonne part de la naïveté libérale - et d'ailleurs de sa cécité. Le monde a tout simplement détourné son regard de ces millions qui en ont été les victimes ces vingt dernières années.

Jamais les libéraux où qu'ils soient n'ont renoncé à vouloir décrire ces mouvements comme en un sens raisonnables et ordinaires, comme des mouvements basés sur de réelles revendications - "ces mouvements sont antisionistes, et Israël n'a-t-il pas souvent été en tort?" "ces mouvements sont anti-américains, et les Etats-Unis n'ont-ils pas souvent des choses à se reprocher?" (...)"

Terror and Liberalism
Paul Berman, Joanne J. Myers
Carnegie Council
April 15, 2003

Introduction

JOANNE MYERS: On behalf of the Carnegie Council I would like to welcome members and guests to our Author in the Afternoon program.

Today we are delighted to have Paul Berman, a writer who has been especially recognized for his penetrating philosophical perspectives on a vast array of social and cultural topics. His latest work, Terror and Liberalism, focuses on a subject that is generating a great deal of interest, as it is the first book to address the political/philosophical dimensions of the current conflict found in Islamic fundamentalism and on the War on Terror.

I have asked Jack Diggins to introduce Mr. Berman. Jack is a Distinguished Professor of American History at the City University of New York. He has also taught at Princeton, Cambridge, and the University of London. Jack has published a number of books dealing with American politics and history, including Up From Communism: The Liberal Persuasion; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past; The Promise of Pragmatism; The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and The Proud Decades, America in War and Peace, 1941-1960. Just by listening to these titles you can easily conclude that Jack has concerned himself with, among other things, American intellectual history, liberalism, pragmatism, and the American past and its influence on the present, which makes him the ideal person to introduce our guest today.

JACK DIGGINS: Thank you. I am very pleased to be here and to introduce my old friend, Paul Berman.

I came to know Paul many years ago when I was living on the West Coast and there was an essay in the Village Voice on the philosopher Sidney Hook. I thought I was the only person in the United States who admired Sidney Hook, but there was one other, Paul Berman. Hook was a leading philosopher of pragmatism and Marxism and became an ardent anti-communist, which in the 1960s was not politically correct, at least on the campuses.

And then, watching television, the Iraq war, the aftermath of the war, and seeing the scenes of fists in the air and anti-American statements and rumors of Baath police being lynched and the scenes of looting, I said to myself, "This is not going to bother Paul."

Many years ago Paul was with me in California and said, "I'm going to take a trip to Tijuana." At that time, if you went to Tijuana and parked your car for ten minutes, the tires were gone. But Paul came back just smiling and praising it as a land of moral solidarity and all the people with hearts of gold. I couldn't help remember the last time I was there I was taken to the police station because I refused to pay a cop a $50 bribe for crossing the street the wrong way. But Paul is so much more optimistic than I am, and maybe he is right.

With the fall of Communism, he and I would debate every day, and I would side with Gorbachev and he would side with Yeltsin or anyone who let the whole system come down. Paul describes himself as a democratic socialist, but deep down he has an anarchist impulse and he does think that out of chaos will come freedom. I am a little bit more cautious.

But the fall of Communism was, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, the greatest peaceful transfer of power in modern history, and Paul was right about it, and perhaps he will be right about his position on the Iraq war.

Some people will be curious why I dedicated a book that is about the great prudent conservative President-statesman John Adams to a radical activist from the 1960s. People wonder if there is an incongruence there. But I would like to read you the last sentence of my acknowledgement: "In the 1790s John Adams reflected on events in France, in the 1980s Paul Berman on events in Nicaragua. Both faced the wrath of some of their own friends for telling us that a revolution without representation is destined to devour itself. Truth dared to speak before its time."

Remarks

PAUL BERMAN: I'd like to thank the Carnegie Council for inviting me to speak and my dear friend, the slyly brilliant Professor Diggins, for this introduction.

I would like to offer ten propositions with which our present crisis could be observed.

1) In the nineteenth century, the belief arose that the secret of human progress had been discovered and had been proved to be correct. This secret was thought to be a belief in the many instead of the one, a belief that each aspect of life should be allowed to remain in its own sphere — the public and the private, the state and society, the religious and the civil. There was a belief that society ought to govern itself through rational analysis.

Many different philosophies and political movements expressed this idea. None of them, none of the large ones, expressed it fully consistently. Marx had some aspects of this idea. The French Revolution stood for some aspects and could not quite get the other aspects right. Thomas Jefferson stood for a very pure version of this idea and yet couldn't quite straighten out the part regarding human slavery. Each separate movement in the nineteenth century, or in the early eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, had some aspect of it and some contradiction which was yet to be worked out.

And yet, in spite of the contradictions, there was consensus about general principles which were seen to be working in some of the societies that we think of as the West and which were regarded by some people in all regions around the world as the secret of human progress universally, not just in the places where they were seen to be prospering at that moment.

There was among a very large number of people, a general feeling of underlying optimism, which you can see in many of the writers of the nineteenth century, in many of the doctrines that came to dominate political movements.

2) At the same time, there was reason to be suspicious of these doctrines. There was a whole series of criticisms about hypocrisies or inconsistencies or lies that were concealed within it. Marx was the great prophet of this.

But beyond these doctrines of suspicion, there were also some elements that not even Marx discussed, something that went beyond exploitation and hypocrisy. This could be seen by the late-nineteenth century in King Leopold's war in the Congo or in German Southwest Africa at the turn of the century, where the very countries, Germany and Belgium, who were among the principal exemplars of the doctrine of human progress, were in some other aspect of their national activity somehow engaged in the most grotesque genocide. The combination of the sense of optimism and the genocidal atrocities, seemed to be beyond the capability of the liberal imagination to conceive.

In the First World War, these darkest aspects, which had already been visible in the Congo and in Southwest Africa, finally rolled back across Europe. What had been unimaginable throughout the nineteenth century finally took place in Europe itself, which was mass death on the most colossal scale, nine or ten million people killed for reasons that were ultimately unintelligible. Each country went into the war with a logical set of reasons instead of treaties and alliances. The final outcome was a catastrophe beyond that which anyone would have or did predict.

3) From the nineteenth century and onward, a series of rebellions against this prevailing liberal optimism arose. Some of these rebellions are particularly worth observing.

First, there was a rebellion within the romantic literary tradition, in romantic poetry. An important sign of this was Victor Hugo's verse play Hernani in 1830, which already broached certain themes. The play ends with the attempted assassination of the King of Spain and a triple suicide. The theme of murder and suicide in the context of rebellion had already been broached.

Baudelaire picks up the same theme. In the second edition of The Flowers of Evil, the inscription mentions enrolling in the rhetorical school of Satan.

And, in fact, there is a religious subtext that underlies this notion of rebellion, which is the romantic cult of Satan, which, within the literary tradition, begins to mean a cult of murder and suicide as literary postures.

Later in the nineteenth century among the poets, the religious aspect of this rebellion, of this notion of transgressive rebellion against the existing order, takes a new form. You can see it in Rimbaud and in a marvelous version in the greatest of the turn-of-the-century Spanish-language poets, Ruben Dario.

This new version is not the cult of Satan. It is a series of images that come out of the Book of Revelation. There is a Millenarian idea, of an impending calamity, that something unspeakable is about to occur. You can see it in Yeats. This idea emerges as the new religious underpinning.

There is something self-ironic about the writers who were writing about Satan but there is nothing ironic or self-ironic about the writers who were drawing on images from the Book of Revelation.

At the end of the First World War, these currents in poetry, from the romantic to the symbolist poets at the end of the century and the beginning of the new century, finally convert themselves into a series of political movements, which are mass movements against the idea of liberalism. They are movements of rebellion against the belief in the many instead of the one, against the idea that life should be divided into a series of spheres — the public and the private, the state and society, the civil and the religious — and at some level, in different ways, they are movements of rebellion against the idea of rational analysis. Instead, they are movements in favor of the one, the solid, the granite, of authority, as opposed to rational analysis — sometimes of mysticism, but in any case of authority.

These movements were founded by Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, the leaders of the Iron Guard in Romania, various figures from the extreme right in France, and through every single country in Europe in some version or another — the Bolshevik movement on the Left, all of the other movements on the Right.

The movements were utterly different one from the other, and the Left and the Right hated each other, and sometimes the Right and the Right hated each other. But what I am struck by is the similarities.

4) In all of these cases, the similarities consisted of a belief in a deep myth, the Ur myth of the twentieth century and into our own time. The name of this myth is the Book of Revelation.

It is a variation on the themes of the symbolist poets. It takes the idea of transgressive rebellion, which the earlier Romantics had already come up with, of murder and rebellion as satanic acts of rebellion against liberal society, the conversion of this idea into the mythology that you see in the Book of Revelation, and then finally these political movements convert that same notion into political doctrines in this way.

The story in the Book of Revelation says: There is a people of God; the people of God are being afflicted and polluted by forces from within their own society, who worship at the synagogue of Satan. At the same time, the people of God are being afflicted by cosmic foes from abroad.

The people of God who are oppressed rise up in rebellion against these polluting forces from within and against the cosmic forces from abroad. The name of this war is Armageddon, and it lasts, according to St. John, the author of Revelation, one hour.

And at the end of the war, with all of those foes dispatched, the reign of Christ is established and lasts a thousand years. It is a perfect, stable society with no polluting elements. It is the millennium.

Each of the movements that arose in the period after World War I found a new way to tell this story. There was always a people of God. The people of God were proletariat. The people of God were the children of the Roman wolf, the Italian people. The people of God were the Catholic warriors of Christ, according to the King in Spain. The people of God were the Aryan race.

There were always polluting elements from within society, such as the bourgeoisie, or the Trotskyite wreckers, or the Jews, or the Masons, or the Communists.

There were always external foes from abroad. These were the forces of capitalist encirclement, or Anglo-American imperialism, or what Heidegger described as the "pincer pressure" of the United States and the Soviet Union pressing on the people of Germany.

There was always going to be a war, which would be a war of extermination against these external and internal foes. This war would be the class war, or the crusade in Franco's version, or the biological war in the Nazi version.

At the end was always the perfect society, which was pictured either as a sci-fi leap into the future or as a return to the golden age of the past, usually as some version of both.

The Communist version was a leap into the future, though if you read your Marx carefully, you understand that this is also a leap into the primitive Communism of the past. And in the Soviet version there are many references to the primitive Communist traditions of the Russian peasants.

All of the right-wing versions were variations of a slightly different sort.

Mussolini was going to recreate the Roman Empire, and when he marched on Rome in 1922, he organized his followers into legions. They were centurions marching on Rome. The Roman Empire was going to be recreated in a modern version. They weren't going to go back to the ancient version. It was would be a modern version of the Roman Empire.

Franco was going to recreate the medieval Crusades of Spain at its greatest. He would do this in a modern version.

Hitler was also going to recreate the Roman Empire. The Third Reich meant the new Reich after the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. He would recreate the Roman Empire, but in an Aryan version instead of an Italian version.

And likewise, this cult of the ancient, the reestablishing of the ancient, was a leap into the future at the same time, a modernism.

The symbolist cult of the Book of Revelation is also a cult of ancient myth, which is a cult of modernism at the same time. If you want to see that artistically, picture some of Picasso, where he is evoking the ancient myths of the Mediterranean but in the most modern of ways.

5) All of these movements proposed impractical programs which were unachievable except in one way, which was through mass death. Mass death showed that these were movements of transgressive rebellion, not movements of reform, not conservative movements of reform or social democratic movements of reform, Left or Right, but movements that would break through the ordinary morality of behavior, thus would break through the existing world view.

The reassuring demonstration that one had really gone beyond the ordinary was a commitment to mass death. All of these movements failed completely in achieving what they stated to be their worldly aims, and in achieving mass death.

6) The liberal society which in its weaknesses and contradictions and inability to conceive of the dark in human nature, the liberal society which in some way had inspired these movements and against which these movements now arose in rebellion, also had a great deal of trouble in identifying what these movements were.

We are all too familiar with the failures of the left-wing Fellow Travelers, who could not understand Stalinism and could only understand it as an exceptionally advanced form of social democracy. But you can take examples of this kind of error across the spectrum.

I write about the French socialists of the 1930s, who were a deeply democratic and liberal, in my sense of the word, movement with an impeccable record of liberal democratic credentials going back into the nineteenth century, without any of the aspects of Bolshevism, Marxism, or Leninism. One has to remember that in the 1930s, the French socialists were the enemies of Nazism and of the Right.

And yet, the majority of the French socialists finally voted for Marshall Pétain because they could not get themselves to understand the nature of Nazism. They managed to tell themselves that Nazism was a legitimate movement, that the Germans did have grievances, that the Treaty of Versailles had been unjust, that Hitler might be raving but he was stating truths.

The French socialists in their majority faction certainly did not regard themselves as anti-Semites, and yet they asked themselves: "Every time somebody rails against the Jews, is it always an example of anti-Semitism?" The French socialists were, by definition, the enemy of financiers — "and weren't some of the financiers Jewish?"

The French socialists finally thought that the great danger to France was represented not by Hitler and the Nazis but by the hawks in their own society. And who was the leading hawk? Unfortunately, it was their own leader, the leader of the minority faction, who had managed to get himself elected Prime Minister, Léon Blum, whose ethnic identity now became itself a source of much speculation.

With this kind of reasoning, the French socialists in the majority faction not only managed to vote for Pétain, but quite a few ended up joining his government, and in this way the impeccable liberal democrats of the French Left managed to convert themselves into fascists.

7) The progress of totalitarianism depends on and is inseparable from this kind of liberal naïveté. Without the cooperation of the Fellow Travelers with Stalin, without the French anti-war socialists in the case of Hitler, without the naïveté of any number of conservatives and democratic right-wingers in the case of a variety of fascists and Nazis, without the naïveté even of the United States with regard to Hitler straight through the 1930s, it would be inconceivable to imagine that these movements would have gotten very far.

So it is a mistake to think of the totalitarian movements as isolated. They existed in a dynamic, and part of the dynamic is the liberal naïve unwillingness to recognize them as what they are.

8) Totalitarianism arose in Europe in the fifteen years after the First World War. In the first twenty-five years, similar or identical movements arose on the other side of the Mediterranean too, in the Muslim world.

One of these movements was certainly Muslim Communism, which everyone forgets about. In the interpretation of the clash of civilizations, one would imagine that a Western movement like Communism would be inconceivable in what is called a non-Western society. In fact, Communism was a large and lasting movement.

But the totalitarian ideal also arose in two other versions, which were distinctly not European. The radical Islamist movement — that is, the notion of Islam as a revolutionary political movement, not just as a religion — was founded in 1928 with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Pan-Arabist movement in its most radical version, the Baath, was founded formally in 1943 in Damascus.

These movements are conventionally seen as opposites. If you turn on the TV, you will see any number of people automatically saying that these movements have nothing in common; one is religious, the other is secular; they despise each other. And it is true that they have despised each other and have committed mutual massacres on a gigantic scale.

It is useful to point out the ways in which these two movements resemble each other. The totalitarian movements in Europe also were different one from the other, and sometimes were at war with one another, and yet there were underlying similarities.

In the case of Baathism and Islamism, these similarities are easy to see. There is a people of God. The people of God should be described as the "true Muslims" in the case of the Islamists, or as the "true Arabs" in the case of the Baath. The people of God are afflicted by internal corruptors within Muslim society. These internal corruptors are the Jews or the Masons or the Muslim hypocrites.

The people of God are afflicted by sinister external foes, Western imperialists or the worldwide Zionist conspiracy. The people of God will resist these internal foes and external foes in a gigantic war of Armageddon. This war will be the liberation of Jerusalem or it will be the jihad.

Afterwards the reign of purity will be established and this reign of purity is described in the case of both of those movements in the same way: it is the re-resurrection of the Caliphate of the seventh century in the years after the Prophet Mohammed. The Caliphate is described by each of these movements in a slightly different way. For the Islamists, it means the reinstating of Shar'iah or Qur'anic law. For the Baathists the emphasis is secular; it is the recreating, the resurrecting, of the Arab empire when the Arab empire was on the march.

Finally, these two movements have lacked for nothing in the realm of practical achievement – killing millions. In the last twenty years, several million people have been killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq war, which pitted one of these movements against the other — the mass human wave suicide attacks on the part of the Iranian Islamists against the cult of cruelty, and of chemical weapons on the part of the Baathists. It is estimated that between one and a half million and two million people were killed in Sudan; 100,000 are thought killed in Algeria over the last several years.

It is conventionally said that in these movements today we face nothing like Hitler or Stalin, but statistically this is not true.

9) The success of Muslim totalitarianism has depended on liberal naïveté — in fact, blindness. The eyes of the world have not been on these millions who have been killed in the last twenty years.

Always the liberals all over the world have wanted to describe these movements as in some way rational and conventional, as movements based on grievances — "The movements are anti-Zionist, and isn't it the case that Israel has often been at fault?" "The movements are anti-American, and isn't it the case that the United States has often been at fault?"

And these grievances do exist, but the effort to take them seriously tends often to distort their madness in such a way as to make it unrecognizable, for totalitarian doctrines are always mad. The Nazis thought they were engaged in a biological struggle. The Stalinists thought they were the proletariat and their enemies were the bourgeois exploiters. The Baathists and Islamists see a cosmic Zionist-Crusader conspiracy.

It is important to keep a sense of the madness in these ideas, even if it is true that in the years after World War I some Germans were oppressed outside of the borders of Germany, and Israel and the U.S . have done bad things.

10) All of the totalitarian movements were at bottom ideological movements, not based on a normal sense of grievances of political claims or expression of real-life interests, but movements based on ideological visions.

Each of these movements in the past was defeated not militarily but ideologically. World War II was violent and military, but although D-Day was important, de-Nazification was the actual victory. The defeat of Nazism militarily would not have been all that helpful if Germany, which is inherently an extremely wealthy and powerful society, had continued to remain a society of millions and millions of convinced Nazis.

The same is true now. The struggle we are involved in now has, had, and will continue to have a military aspect, but this aspect must be secondary to the ideological aspect, to the war of ideas.

The basic danger we are facing now is not weapons of mass destruction, per se, because we know very well that box cutters can be lethal weapons of the worst sort. The danger that we face is not inherently military; it's not armies in the conventional sense. It is above all ideological. As long as millions of people are committed fanatically to doctrines that are ultimately mad and that follow in the tradition of the totalitarian madnesses of Europe in the twentieth century, the danger persists.

I maintain that the struggle we are involved in is, or ought to be, ultimately a war of ideas.

Thank you. "

Paul Berman:

L'islamisme est un totalitarisme comme les autres

(Why Bush was right about Saddam)

Au moment où, avec la complaisance des médias, la pathologie terroriste semble sur le point de se démocratiser au point que le premier imbécile venu (voir les zozos – n'ayant heureusement pas fait de victimes - des derniers jours à Londres et Glasgow) se sente obligé d'y sacrifier et de s'y sacrifier …  Petit retour sur l'un des rares penseurs américains de gauche à avoir pris la mesure des attentats du 11/9 et d'avoir, en bonne logique, soutenu à la fois les interventions alliées en Afghanistan et Irak, à savoir "le faucon de gauche" comme il a été surnommé et membre du comité de rédaction de la revue de gauche Dissent, Paul Berman.

Et sur le livre qu'il en a tiré ("Terror and Liberalism", 2003 - "Les habits neufs de la terreur", en français), où il démontre brillamment à la fois la parenté idéologique du totalitarisme islamique (comme du panarabisme ou du baasisme) avec ses prédécesseurs bolchévique, fasciste et nazi et (même s'il sacrifie encore au dénigrement, à notre avis exagéré, du président Bush) l'aveuglement de la gauche progressiste, incapable de reconnaître ce retour de la pathologie du massacre.

Procédant à une véritable typologie de ces différents mouvements, il les décrit comme autant de variations d'un même thème (en gros le Millénium de l'Apocalypse biblique).

Où un peuple d'élus (le prolétariat, les enfants de la louve romaine, les soldats du Christ guerrier franquistes ou la race aryenne) menacé par des ennemis de l'intérieur (bourgeoisie, francs-maçons, cosmopolites ou juifs) eux-mêmes appuyés par des ennemis extérieurs (capitalistes et bien sûr le complot juif mondial) est appelé, via une lutte finale (Armageddon ou le bain de sang de l'extermination totale), à accéder ou à revenir à un nouveau royaume ou Règne de Dieu (l'âge du prolétariat, la grandeur de l'Empire romain ressuscité, le Royaume du Christ ou la pureté raciale du Troisième Reich).

Avec toute une panoplie telle que les chemises monochromes (rouges, noires, brunes et maintenant… vertes !), les phalanges, les grandes foules hystériques, mais aussi et surtout le culte de la mort, c'est-à-dire à la fois le massacre et le suicide ("Viva la muerte !").

Mais aussi toute la complaisance des autres mouvements de droite ou la naïveté et l'ignorance des opposants de gauche (compagnons de route et autres idiots utiles ou pacifistes comme les paul-fauristes du socialisme français des années 30 qui ont fini par voter les pleins pouvoirs à Pétain et à flirter avec l'antisémitisme), incapables avant comme maintenant d'en discerner le totalitarisme.

Et notamment une Europe qui, après n'avoir pas su protéger chez elle ses juifs (il y a 60 ans) puis les populations de sa partie orientale (pendant la Guerre froide) et enfin ses musulmans (Bosniaques et Kosovars) il y a 10 ans, continue aujourd'hui à refuser de voir que les premières victimes du totalitarisme islamique sont les musulmans eux-mêmes (Algériens, musulmans modérés ou femmes d'Afghanistan et d'autres pays musulmans, Kurdes ou arabes des marais irakiens, non-Arabes du Darfour), pour qui d'ailleurs les Etats-Unis, dénoncés unanimement par tous, ont fait la plupart de leurs guerres récentes (Liban en 83, Koweit en 91, Irak à partir de 91 pour les Kurdes et les Chiites, Somalie en 98).

Extraits de son entretien sur Salon à la veille même de l'Opération "Liberté pour l'Irak" (traduits au babelfish):

Nous imaginons, parce que la Guerre froide est finie en Europe, que toute la série de luttes qui ont commencé avec la Première guerre mondiale et qui sont passées par différents mouvements totalitaires — fasciste, nazi et communiste — était finalement terminée.

Hors de la Première guerre mondiale est venue une série de révoltes contre la civilisation libérale. Ces révoltes accusaient la civilisation libérale d'être non seulement hypocrite ou en faillite, mais d'être en fait la grande source du mal ou de la souffrance dans le monde.

[Avec] une fascination pathologique pour la mort de masse [qui] était elle-même le fait principal de la Première guerre mondiale, dans laquelle 9 ou 10 millions de personnes ont été tués sur une base industrielle. Et chacun des nouveaux mouvements s'est mis à reproduire cet événement au nom de leur opposition utopique aux complexités et aux incertitudes de la civilisation libérale. Les noms de ces mouvements ont changé comme les traits qu'ils ont manifestés – l'un s'est appelé bolchévisme, et un autre s'est appelé fascisme, un autre s'est appelé nazisme.

À un certain niveau très profond tous ces mouvements étaient les mêmes — ils partageaient tous certaines qualités mythologiques, une fascination pour la mort de masse et tous s'inspiraient du même type de paranoïa.

Mon argument est que l'islamisme et un certain genre de pan-arabisme dans les mondes arabe et musulman sont vraiment d'autres branches de la même impulsion. Mussolini a mis en scène sa marche sur Rome en 1922 afin de créer une société totalitaire parfaite qui allait être la résurrection de l'empire romain. En 1928, en Egypte, de l'autre côté de la Méditerranée, s'est créée la secte des Frères musulmans afin de ressusciter le Califat antique de l'empire arabe du 7ème siècle, de même avec l'idée de créer une société parfaite des temps modernes. Bien que ces deux mouvements aient été tout à fait différents, ils étaient d'une certaine manière semblables.

Le fascisme en Italie est arrivé au pouvoir en 1922 et il est demeuré puissant jusqu'à ce qu'il soit renversé par les Américains et les Anglais. L'islamisme est arrivé au pouvoir en divers endroits, commençant en 1979 avec l'Ajatollah Khomeini en Iran. Le baasisme est encore une autre variante de la même chose, et probablement que dans les jours à venir, en Irak, il sera renversé par les mêmes Américains et Anglais qui ont renversé Mussolini. L'islamisme est arrivé au pouvoir en Iran en 1979, et la révolution islamique en Iran était une vraie force mondiale. Alors l'islamisme est arrivé au pouvoir au Soudan et en Afghanistan, et pendant un moment il a semblé progressé tout à fait bien. Les Iraniens sont chi'ites et les autres pays sont sunnites, donc ce sont des dénominations différentes de l'Islam. Mais, cependant, c'était un mouvement qui jusqu'à récemment semblait avancer d'une manière traditionnelle — c'est-à-dire par la capture d'Etats.

Ce qui s'est produit avec Al-Qaida est une situation compliquée parce que l'slamisme force politique de capture d'états est sur le déclin parce que les Taliban ont été défaits militairement. En outre, nous pouvons voir les commencements d'une révolution libérale prenant si tout va bien racine en Iran. L'islamisme au Soudan est tombé. Mais malgré cela, Al-Qaida représente une structure extrêmement puissante avec des bases sociales multiples et le soutien de banques et d'associations caritatives et de grands intellectuels, bien qu'il ne commande plus un Etat. Malgré tout, il est devenu évident qu'Al-Qaida est soutenu ou à demi soutenu par une variété d'états et d'élites régnantes.

Leur désir est très clairement de régner sur le monde. Ce n'est pas un grand secret. Un grand philosophe du radicalisme islamiste, Sayyid Qutb, qui a été pendu par [le président égyptien ] Nasser en 1966, ne s'en est pas caché. Le but de l'islamisme est de recréer ce que Mahomet avait fait au septième siècle, c'est à dire de fonder un état islamique et de l'imposer au monde entier. Le but de l'islamisme n'est pas de résoudre un problème social particulier ici ou là, ou de régler un certain conflit de frontières entre Israel et la Palestine ou entre le Pakistan et l'Inde ou le Tchéchénie et la Russie, bien que ce soit des questions réelles. Le but est absolument grandiose et global.

Le baasisme est peu un plus modeste parce que c'est explicitement un nationalisme arabe. Ainsi le baasisme veut recréer l'empire arabe du septième siècle dans une certaine version moderne mais il n'est pas tout à fait aussi global et grandiose que l'islamisme. En outre, le baasisme est dans un état d'affaiblissement profond. Il ne rend pas Saddam Hussein moins effrayant parce qu'un état d'affaiblissement profond peut être extrêmement dangereux…

La doctrine islamiste est que l'Islam est la réponse aux problèmes du monde, mais que l'Islam a été la victime d'une conspiration cosmique géante pour la détruire, par les Croisés et les sionistes. (le sionisme dans la doctrine de Qutb n'est pas un mouvement politique moderne, c'est une doctrine cosmique se prolongeant tout au long des siècles.) L'Islam est la victime de cette conspiration, qui est également facilitée par les faux musulmans ou hypocrites, qui feignent d'être musulmans mais sont réellement les amis des ennemis de l'Islam. D'un point de vue islamiste, donc, la conspiration la plus honteuse est celle menée par les hypocrites musulmans pour annihiler l'Islam du dedans. Ces personnes sont surtout les libéraux musulmans qui veulent établir une société libérale, autrement dit la séparation de l'église et de l'état.

De même que les progressistes européens et américains doutaient des menaces de Hitler et de Staline, les Occidentaux éclairés sont aujourd'hui en danger de manquer l'urgence des idéologies violentes issues du monde musulman.

Les socialistes français des années 30 (…) ont voulu éviter un retour de la première guerre mondiale; ils ont refusé de croire que les millions de personnes en Allemagne avaient perdu la tête et avaient soutenu le mouvement nazi. Ils n'ont pas voulu croire qu'un mouvement pathologique de masse avait pris le pouvoir en Allemagne, ils ont voulu rester ouverts à ce que les Allemands disaient et aux revendiquations allemandes de la première guerre mondiale. Et les socialistes français, dans leur effort pour être ouverts et chaleureux afin d'éviter à tout prix le retour d'une guerre comme la première guerre mondiale, ont fait tout leur possible pour essayer de trouver ce qui était raisonnable et plausible dans les arguments d'Hitler. Ils ont vraiment fini par croire que le plus grand danger pour la paix du monde n'était pas posé par Hitler mais par les faucons de leur propre société, en France. Ces gesn-là étaient les socialistes pacifistes de la France, c'était des gens biens. Pourtant, de fil en aiguille, ils se sont opposés à l'armée française contre Hitler, et bon nombre d'entre eux ont fini par soutenir le régime de Vichy et elles ont fini comme fascistes! Ils ont même dérapé vers l'anti-sémitisme pur, et personne ne peut douter qu'une partie de cela s'est reproduit récemment dans le mouvement pacifiste aux Etats-Unis et surtout en Europe.

Un des scandales est que nous avons eu des millions de personnes dans la rue protestant contre la guerre en Irak, mais pas pour réclamer la liberté en Irak. Personne n'a marché dans les rues au nom des libertés kurdes. Les intérêts des dissidents libéraux de l'Irak et les démocrates kurdes sont en fait également nos intérêts. Plus ces personnes prospèrent, plus grande sera notre sécurité. C'est un moment où ce qui devrait être nos idéaux — les idéaux de la démocratie libérale et de la solidarité sociale — sont également objectivement notre intérêt. Bush n'a pas réussi à l'expliquer clairement, et une grande partie de la gauche ne l'a même pas perçu.

Ce dont nous avons besoin est un nouveau radicalisme contre le prétendu réalisme cynique du conservatisme américain et de la politique américaine traditionnelle, dans lequel les idées libérales sont considérées non pertinentes pour la politique étrangère. Et également contre la cécité et la tête-dans-le-sable d'une grande partie de la gauche américaine, qui peut seulement penser que tous les problèmes de par le monde sont provoqués par l'impérialisme américain et qu'il n'y a rien d'autre dont il faudrait s'inquiéter.

Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam
Paul Berman, one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East.

By Suzy Hansen
Salon
March 22, 2003

On Sept. 11, Paul Berman, political and cultural critic and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968″ watched from his roof as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. That day, Berman says, he "woke up" to the threat of what he calls Islamic totalitarianism. Berman lives in Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue where a Yemeni cleric was recently convicted of funneling $20 million to Osama bin Laden.

During the last year and a half he has picked his way through the Islamic bookstores in his neighborhood, hunting down volumes by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual whose "In the Shade of the Qur'an" is the groundwork for Islamic fundamentalism. Berman finds Qutb's analysis of the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern society "rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt." Qutb's work also convinced Berman that in Islamism we face a threat not unlike such 20th century totalitarian movements as fascism and communism. Berman feels similarly about Baathism, the nationalist ideology of Iraq's ruling party.

In fact, Berman believes that Islamism and Baathism emerged from the same great rift in liberal society, the First World War. "Terror and Liberalism," Berman's bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.

The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America's New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration — actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns "we will pay for it" — he thinks it was also dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world.

We spoke with Berman in New York, before and after bombs started falling on Baghdad.

Had you been interested in Islamism and Baathism before Sept. 11?

No. Yes, in a general way, but I hadn't paid special attention to it. Then it became obvious to me on Sept. 11 that the giant screw-up by the FBI and the CIA and the Pentagon was also a giant screw-up by the journalists and intellectuals and everyone else. We too hadn't been paying attention.

Why do you think it was easy for all of these people to miss the idea, which becomes the central argument of your book, that these Arab movements are extensions of totalitarianism?

A lot of people have misunderstood the nature of Islamism for a whole series of reasons. The biggest and most important of those reasons is Eurocentrism, which prevented people from looking at these movements at all. And the Eurocentrism has a flip side, a soft-headed multiculturalism in which movements in other parts of the world are regarded as hopelessly and wonderfully exotic and not to be judged or analyzed. In the last 20 years literally millions of people have been slaughtered by these movements and the wars they've begun. All of this has received a shockingly small amount of attention.

Another reason that these movements have received very little attention has to do with anti-Zionism, the true origin of which is anti-Semitism, the assumption that the Jews are the center of the world and therefore the center of the world's evil. So the problems of the Muslim world in the Middle East can be located in the tiny issue of a border dispute in a place the size of Connecticut. Across the world people are convinced of this. It's a preposterous idea, but this idea is really widely shared. Anybody who holds this idea therefore has carte blanche to ignore the fact that the Iran-Iraq war killed a million people or that Islamism in the Sudan has killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people, or that 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria.

So you're saying that we're likely to ignore these forms of Islamist violence because we're consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

No, I've outlined three reasons. These series of attitudes have flowed together to make it respectable or normal for intellectuals and journalists to pay no attention at all to these vast tragedies deploying across huge parts of the world. Only when these vast tragedies came and hit us in the face did a lot of people wake up. Among those people was me.

Does this also have to do with this idea that we think history ended in 1989?

Yes. It absolutely does. This is part of the Eurocentrism. We imagine that because the Cold War ended in Europe that the whole series of struggles that began in Europe with the First World War and then went through the different totalitarian movements — fascist, Nazi and communist — had finally come to an end. Many people were so caught up in the more or less victory of liberal democratic ideas and institutions that there was a tendency to imagine that problems in other parts of the world were just going to be regional problems that really weren't deeply going to affect us. All that was a scandalous delusion.

And in fact you're arguing that Islamism and Baathism grew out of the First World War in the same way that communism and fascism did?

It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock — eternal and perfect.

These new ideas were in a sense utopian, but they were also very bloody. Behind all the movements that made these proposals was a pathological fascination with mass death. Mass death was itself the principal fact of the First World War, in which 9 or 10 million people were killed on an industrial basis. And each of the new movements proceeded to reproduce that event in the name of their utopian opposition to the complexities and uncertainties of liberal civilization. The names of these movements varied and the traits that they displayed varied — one was called Bolshevism, and another was called fascism, another was called Nazism.

So you're saying these movements are similar to Islamism and Baathism, but on a very deep level. You're drawing specific parallels — what are they?

At some very deep level all these movements were the same — they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.

My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse. Mussolini staged his march on Rome in 1922 for the purpose of creating a perfect totalitarian society that was going to be the resurrection of the Roman Empire. In 1928, in Egypt, just across the Mediterranean, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed for the purpose of resurrecting the ancient Caliphate of the Arab empire of the 7th century, likewise with the idea of creating a perfect society of modern times. Although these two movements were utterly unalike, there was some way in which they were alike.

Fascism in Italy came to power in 1922 and it remained in power until it was overthrown by the Americans and the British. Islamism came to power in various places, beginning in 1979 with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Baathism is yet another variant of the same thing, and probably in the next few days it will, in Iraq, be overthrown by the same Americans and British who overthrew Mussolini.

Next page: Osama is no Hitler — or is he?
Log in

It seemed to me that what's different about Islamism is that there isn't a country really leading this fight. There's Osama bin Laden, but that's quite different from Hitler.

That's true and it's not true. Islamism did come to power in Iran in 1979, and the Islamic revolution in Iran was a real world force. Then Islamism came to power in the Sudan and Afghanistan, so for a while it was looking like it was advancing quite well. The Iranians are Shi'ite and the other countries are Sunni, so these are different denominations of Islam. But, still, this was a movement that until recently looked like it was advancing in a traditional way — that is, capturing states.

What's happened with al-Qaida is a complicated situation in which Islamism as a political force capturing states is on the decline because the Taliban was defeated militarily. Also, we can see the beginnings of a liberal revolution hopefully taking root in Iran. Islamism in the Sudan fell. But in spite of that, al-Qaida represents an extremely powerful institution with multiple social bases and banks and charities and great intellectuals behind it, although it doesn't control a state anymore. Still, it's become obvious that al-Qaida's been supported or semi-supported by a variety of states and ruling elites.

And you see the same desire to rule the world in the way that Hitler or Stalin wanted to?

The desire is absolutely to rule the world. That's not a great secret. A great philosopher of Islamist radicalism, Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged by [Egyptian president] Nasser in 1966, said that all plainly. The goal of Islamism is to recreate what Muhammad did in the seventh century, which was to found an Islamic state and bring that state to the entire world. The goal of Islamism is not to resolve some particular social problem here or there, it's not to straighten out some border conflict between Israel and Palestine or between Pakistan and India or Chechnya and Russia, although those are genuine issues. The goal is absolutely grandiose and global.

Do you see that same goal in Baathism?

No. Baathism is a little more modest because Baathism is explicitly an Arab nationalism. So Baathism wants to recreate the Arab empire of the seventh century in some modern version but it's not quite so global and grandiose as Islamism. Also, Baathism is in a state of deep decay. It doesn't make Saddam Hussein any less scary because a state in deep decay can be extremely dangerous, but it's hard to imagine that Baathism has inspired enthusiastic idealism, although it used to.

But you did say in your book that after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he captured the imagination of the Arab world.

When it looked like he was winning, he had a lot of support. That's probably the danger with him now. If he does get his weapons, if he got the atom bomb, if he was able to fend off the U.S. and Britain, he would certainly gain a lot of followers. It's just that the doctrine of a radical pan-Arabism has become a little tired. Islamism is more of a happening thing.

You argue that secularism is the most terrifying issue to the Islamists.

The Islamist doctrine is that Islam is the answer to the world's problems, but that Islam has been the victim of a giant cosmic conspiracy to destroy it, by Crusaders and Zionists. (Zionism in Qutb's doctrine is not a modern political movement, it's a cosmic doctrine extending over the centuries.) Islam is the victim of this conspiracy, which is also aided by false or hypocritical Muslims, who pretend to be Muslims but are actually the friends of Islam's enemies. From an Islamist point of view, then, the most heinous conspiracy of all is the one led by the Muslim hypocrites to annihilate Islam from within. These people are, above all, the Muslim liberals who want to establish a liberal society, which means separation of church and state.

The first and most grievous step toward the annihilation of Islam is taken by the Turks in 1924, when Kemal Ataturk created a secular Turkey and abolished the institutional remnants of the ancient Caliphate. This was a devastating blow and the whole goal of the Islamist movement has been to undo that.

What does it mean to Islamists to see Turkey as a Western ally?

From their point of view, to see the Turks line up with the U.S. now must be enraging. And the fact that Turkey is led by an Islamist party which appears to have become a liberal party in its principal instincts, this fact must be enraging beyond words.

Well, these passages in your book about anti-secularism in the Arab world really struck me. It seems that this whole neoconservative theory — the democracy domino theory, arguing that if we bring down Saddam we're going to bring democracy to the entire Middle East — is countered by the firm-rooted hatred of secularism. Why would we think anyone in the Muslim world would welcome democracy or this liberal secularism that you're talking about?

I don't think that that idea is so preposterous, necessarily. Bush is not proceeding in a way that instills any confidence in me that he's going to pull it off. But the notion of overthrowing Baathism — a rival/cousin totalitarian movement of Islamism — and being able to help the Iraqis replace it with some aspect of a liberal society would hearten liberals, people with rationalist ideas and the notion of liberal rights and separation of church and state, throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. If a liberal Iraq could be made a success, that would be hugely encouraging. Whether it could be a success is contingent on what a lot of people do. And I fear that the people who ought to be doing what they can for this are not. Bush is hugely at fault here.

Next page: Trying to save the world, Bush terrifies it

It seems that you are more critical of what Bush says — how he presents the war on Iraq — than what he's actually doing.

Well, I thought I was criticizing what he's doing.

You do think there are reasons for going to war, though.

Yes.

So you think the way he's presenting this war to the world is really where he's gone wrong.

Yes, it has been wretched. He's presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He's certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can't understand his reasoning. He's aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he's made good arguments, he's made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do — overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons — is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It's a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We're going to pay for this.

Then what is it that the public doesn't understand? What hasn't he been able to get across?

One thing he hasn't gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there's ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There's every reason to think that Saddam, who's used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.

Do you believe Bush has such motives?

It's not right to utterly dismiss these motives. A lot of people look at Bush and sneer a little too easily and think that these motives cannot possibly have anything to do with him or his policies. This is a mistake too.

In Afghanistan, everybody sneers at the achievements of the United States and its allies because we see the warlords in the provinces, we see the extreme suffering, we see all the things that haven't been done. But what has been done has really been quite magnificent. A hideous tyranny was overthrown, a new government was established in more or less the way that any liberal democrat would advise: Afghans were consulted from around the country, more or less democratic councils led to the forming of a new government with a new leader for Afghanistan who is not a warlord or a corrupt figure or a friendly religious fanatic but who is in fact a man of modern liberal democratic ideals.

Bush announced that the war in Afghanistan was going to be fought on behalf of women's rights. Everybody deeply laughed at that and for reasons I can understand because in the United States Bush has not been a promoter of women's rights. Still, the result of the war was in fact that women's rights in Afghanistan have made a forward leap larger than anywhere in the world in history. From a certain point of view this has been the first feminist war in all of history.

He's unable to do that partly because the man is fatally inarticulate and he's also unable to do that, I'm sure, because he's confused ideologically about whether he's really in favor of the do-good aspect of his program or indifferent to it.

He hasn't given us much of an indication that he's preoccupied with these humanitarian issues. Maybe he simply isn't.

He hasn't straightened it out in his mind. His initial instinct was to oppose this sort of thing. He was against nation-building. Events have driven him to engage in nation-building, but he's done it in a halfhearted way. Although he's done some of these things which are admirable, he has not been able to enlist the world's sympathy or support. He's left people all over the world in a position where they have no way to regard his motives as anything other than the most cynical.

But I should add that although Bush is hugely to blame for this — it's just tragic that the United States is led by such an inarticulate and intellectually confused and unattractive figure who personally makes me cringe — other people should be standing up and trying to fight for issues of humanitarianism and social solidarity, of women's rights and liberal freedoms.

One of the scandals is that we've had millions of people marching through the streets calling for no war in Iraq, but we haven't had millions of people marching in the streets calling for freedom in Iraq. Nobody's marching in the streets on behalf of Kurdish liberties. The interests of the liberal dissidents of Iraq and the Kurdish democrats are in fact also our interests. The more those people prosper, the safer we are. This is a moment in which what should be our ideals — the ideals of liberal democracy and social solidarity — are also materially in our interest. Bush has failed to articulate this, and a large part of the left has failed to see this entirely.

Next page: We are all Noam Chomsky

Tony Blair, who is more articulate and charming and smarter, has also failed to make a case to the public. Doesn't this suggest that perhaps their ideals are not in the right place?

Yes. I admire Tony Blair but I imagine that he's hobbled by the Bush policy. Bush has confused the whole situation by saying that the goal of the war in Iraq is disarmament. Disarmament has nothing to do with the establishment of liberal freedoms.

He was trying to scare us into this.

He's made it very difficult to present the war as an extension of the liberal and humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s in which Tony Blair played a distinguished and honorable and brave role.

But when did you formulate these opinions on Iraq? Was it during the war on Afghanistan? After 9/11? Have you always been concerned about the liberation of the Iraqi people or is there some threat from Iraq that suddenly became more serious to you in the last year and a half?

I formed these opinions on Iraq in 1990 when I began to pay attention to Saddam Hussein, and then when he invaded Kuwait. I came to the conclusion then that Saddam Hussein was a fascist maniac and that we had every reason to be frightened of him and act against him. I am a man of the left and I was then one of the very few people on the American left to support the Gulf War in 1991. So I have a long history of being worried about this guy.

Am I more worried about him now? Yes. One of the things that hasn't gotten through to many people is that the Sept. 11 attacks broke a taboo. There had been a taboo before against staging random massacres against the United States. Now that it's been successful, it is certainly the case that other people are going to want to do the same. So we have a lot of reasons to be much more worried than we have been in the past.

The problem of weapons of mass destruction is certainly a real problem, although as our experience with box-cutters shows, weapons of mass destruction are hardly necessary for random massacres. But we have every reason to be much more alarmed than before. Those of us who consider ourselves on the left now have to consider national security issues in a way which has never been our habit in the past. The response of many people on the left is to think that if the United States will just withdraw its troops here and there and bury its head in the sand, everything will be OK. That's delusional.

I'm sure this one line in your book will infuriate some and surprise others — especially Europeans. You wrote: "In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky." What do you mean by that?

Chomsky is a man who thinks the entire world operates on simple and rational principles. The reason he's able to crank out these thousands of pages a year on all subjects is because he has an extremely simple analysis: Evil American corporations are acting in their own self-interest and trying to increase and spread their exploitation around the world. The American government is in their hands and is acting to expand its nefarious control over the world. The press has been corrupted by the wealth and power of corporations and spreads the propaganda messages required by the corporations. American claims to ever do any good around the world are merely hypocritical mendacities uttered for the purpose of advancing the larger cause of exploitation and oppression. And the response of other people in the world is that of resistance as inspired by an instinct for human freedom, even if the resistance sometimes takes a perverse and unfortunate form. Therefore, from Chomsky's point of view, all events are rationally explicable according to one or two tiny little factors: the self-interest of American corporations and the urge to resist the American corporations.

It's a very simpleminded view in which nothing inexplicable ever occurs. And yet although Chomsky is regarded by some people as the great anti-American, this kind of thought is entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have emerged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed. Finally, even the FBI and the CIA have obviously thought along these lines because it never crossed these people's minds — not seriously anyway — that somebody was going to be so mad to attack the United States directly. Sept. 11 revealed many shocking things and the most shocking was that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. In that sense, everybody in the United States, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everybody is a simpleminded fool.

All this is part of your belief that good people can end up supporting horrible movements if we're not vigilant.

People ought to think coldly about it. There really is a long history of excellent people with the best of hearts and the best of intentions ending up inadvertently collaborating with the worst of totalitarians. There's a long history of this. To look into your own heart and ask yourself if you're good and honest and to examine yourself to see if your own analyses are moral and well-intended is not enough. You may have the best of intentions and the purest of hearts and the warmest of feelings of solidarity for other people and yet be led by some failure of imagination to end up more or less aligned with the baddest of bad guys.

Example?

There's a long history of this kind of thing. The simplest history is of the fellow travelers of Stalin. But there's even more grotesque examples of it — that of the French socialists in the 1930s. They wanted to avoid a new outbreak of the First World War; they refused to believe that millions of people in Germany had gone out of their minds and supported the Nazi movement. They didn't want to believe that a mass pathological movement had taken power in Germany, they wanted to be open-minded to what the Germans were saying and to the German grievances of the First World War. And the French socialists, in their open-minded, warm-hearted effort to avoid seeing anything like the First World War occur again, went out of their way to try and find what was reasonable and plausible in the arguments of Hitler. They really did end up thinking that the greatest danger to world peace was not posed by Hitler but by the hawks in their own society, in France. These people were the antiwar socialists of France, they were good people. Yet one thing led to another, they opposed France's army against Hitler, and many of them ended up supporting the Vichy regime and they ended up fascists!

Where's the parallel to today?

It's not impossible to see something like that today. People want to avoid a war in the Middle East, they say they're not for Saddam but yet they don't really want to do anything against Saddam. They see Iraqi liberals and Kurdish democrats struggling against Saddam, and they really don't want to help these people. They see pathological movements in Palestine and elsewhere engaging in acts of random murder for the purest of irrational reasons and these people, the warmhearted, good-souled antiwar socialists of the Western countries, fall all over themselves in finding ways to justify the terrible things that are happening elsewhere and find ways to prevent themselves from showing solidarity with the victims.

We do see some of the same things. With the French socialists of the 1930s, there was even a slippage into outright anti-Semitism, and no one can doubt that some of that has been occurring in the antiwar movement in the United States and above all in Europe. Of course most people in the antiwar movement are against that. But signs of it exist and it would be foolish to close your eyes to that.

So what should the left's position be today? If your argument is that we are facing a totalitarian threat similar to those of the first part of the 20th century, what do you suggest?

The true model of what the left should be doing here is shown by the other wing of French socialism, that of Léon Blum, an antifascist who was willing to fight and did fight. This ought to be the real goal of the left in the Western countries — to be antifascist, to be in favor of liberating the people who are suffering under these regimes which are threats not only to their own citizens but to us.

Instead, we have the Bush administration's "realist" approach, which is propelling us to war.

Yes, it's the so-called realist policies of the American conservatives that ultimately got us into this situation. We, the United States, have followed the most cynical policies in the Middle East. We've aligned with reactionary feudal monarchies of the worst sort, backing the most horrendous right-wing tyrants and dictators, thinking that liberal values ought to play no role at all in formulating American policy. All this has especially been the doctrine of American conservatism. It's what I call the Nixonian tradition. It was certainly the policy of Bush the elder and it was the original instinct of the present Bush, although now he appears to be confused.

This has simply been catastrophic for people in the Middle East and ultimately for ourselves. What we need is a politics as I describe in my book, a new radicalism which is going to be against the cynical so-called realism of American conservatism and traditional American policy, in which liberal ideas are considered irrelevant to foreign policy. And also against the head-in-the-sand blindness of a large part of the American left, which can only think that all problems around the world are caused by American imperialism and there's nothing else to worry about.

What we need is a third alternative — a politics of liberal solidarity, of anti-fascism, a politics that's willing to be interventionist when tyrants or political movements really do threaten us and the people in their own countries, a politics that's going to be aggressive in spreading and promoting liberal ideas and values in regions of the world where people who hold those values are persecuted. A politics of active solidarity, not just expressions of solidarity, but actions of solidarity with liberal-minded people in other parts of the world.

It's scandalous to me that large parts of the political spectrum aren't acting on this now. Where are all the universities and human rights foundations and trade unions and all the other civic associations in the United States? Where are those groups now? Why aren't those groups acting now to establish links of solidarity with people of the Middle East and Muslim world? To try to foment movements, or even revolutions, on behalf of liberal ideals?

But it seems impossible to work for such ideals under the current administration.

We don't need Bush to lead us to do that, we can do that without him. Even if Bush does the wrong thing, which he's bound to do, we can act on those ideas ourselves. The notion that we, the high-minded people of the left, ought to confine ourselves to marching against Bush is a very foolish idea. There's much that we can do.

That's what I call for. It's vastly needed in Europe too. Why aren't the Germans doing this? The Germans are pacifist-minded, they don't want to participate in the war, but there's a lot Germany could do. They should have people all over the Middle East promoting liberal ideas, they should be spending billions of dollars to engage in solidarity with the liberal movements in those countries. They are not doing that. All they appear to be doing is opposing Bush but not taking on a very large role themselves, though they do have peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and Kosovo. But there's much more that Germany and France could be doing.

Even people who think that Bush is making a blunder with his military approach can try to undo that blunder themselves in some way by going ahead and doing the things that ought to be done — promoting liberal ideas. Promoting liberal ideas, finally, is the only real way to oppose the totalitarian movements that threaten us and threaten people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, whether they're Baathist or Islamist.

I want to be clear on something. Do you support this military invasion?

I can certainly imagine how the whole thing can be done better. Bush is probably the most inept president we've ever had in regard to maintaining foreign alliances and presenting the American case and convincing the world. He's failed in every possible way. The defeat and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is in the interest of nearly the entire world and although it is in the interest of nearly the entire world, nearly the entire world is against Bush. That situation is the consequence of Bush's ineptness.

At the same time, I think that getting rid of Saddam is in our interest and in the interest of Iraq and in the interest of the Arab world. Saddam is a mad tyrant.

So I wish Bush had gone about it differently. But now that the thing is getting under way, I fervently hope it goes well. And I think that the attitude of everyone with the best of motives who have opposed the war, should now shift dramatically. The people who have demanded that Bush refrain from action should now demand that the action be more thorough. The danger now is that we will go in and go out too quickly and leave the job half-done. The position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligations to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system. We've done this in Afghanistan but only in most halfhearted way. We should now do more in Afghanistan and do a lot in Iraq. The people who've opposed the war should now demand that Bush do more.

Are you apprehensive?

I'm scared out of my mind! Only a lunatic could be calm and confident at such a moment.

But you do think we're doing the right thing this week?

You're trying to pin me down. I'm not going to endorse Bush's policy. I'm saying that he went about it in the wrong way but I want the U.S. to do it thoroughly. No goodhearted person should imagine that it would be a bad thing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But we have to do it well.

Have you been watching the war coverage on the news?

A little bit. I can say that there was something truly pathetic in seeing antiwar demonstrations denounce the war at one moment and then in another moment seeing grateful Iraqis welcome their British and American liberators. If I were a member of the antiwar movement, I would have felt a moral shudder at that experience.

But we can imagine the devastation in Baghdad as well.

We have no idea what it is. Like anybody I'm hoping for the least amount of suffering. The war could certainly end up achieving the opposite of what its goals should be. History offers more than one example of that.

By which you mean? Is this campaign what you expected, for the most part? War is war?

Well, no. If it turns out that our bombs have ended up slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians, that would be a horror. But we don't know what's happened. We won't know for a while.

So what's particularly struck you has been some of the protests.

Yes, because the role of the left ought to be to express solidarity with the Iraqi people, to hope for the defeat of the fascist tyrant and to see their freedom and our own self-defense. This in fact became visible today, when some Iraqis at least, celebrated their liberation. “

 02 juillet 2007 Publié Histoire, Islam et Occident, Irak, terrorisme, guerre & paix | Lien permanent |