Left in the Dark

Thank you to Anonymous for her/his post in the comments.

Boy oh boy. Democracy: a Journal of Ideas is a strange publication. You could, for instance, follow the link from the index page to Nick Cohen's review of Left in Dark Times by Bernard-Henri Levy. If you did, you'd be disappointed, because only the first paragraph is displayed. The rest requires logging in (for "FREE access to all Democracy content"). Bugger. Or, you could follow Anonymous's lead and read the print friendly version. (I assume this works for all content: just change "article" in the url for "printfriendly" and access is yours - free, gratis, with for nothing thrown in!)

Our commenters have already made several astute points below Anon. I hope that one of my co-bloggers knows more about Levy than I do, but for now I'll limit myself to a couple of observations.

Lévy was embarrassed. He had indeed known Sarkozy for years, and had briefed him before a famous television confrontation with Tariq Ramadan, the leading Muslim Brotherhood apologist in Europe. Sarkozy challenged Ramadan over his support for a "moratorium"–instead of an outright ban–on the stoning of Muslim women found "guilty" of adultery. Soon after their debate, Ramadan moved from France to Britain. Once there, he wasn’t treated as an ideologue for a reactionary movement whose founders had been inspired by European fascism, but was feted by the nominally liberal academics of Oxford University and courted by ministers in the nominally left-of-center Labour government. Was this the European Left Lévy was meant to support?

The last sentence makes no sense. Never mind the caricature of British politics, why does Nick ask if the British Left is what Levy is meant to support after he's outlined differences between British and French leftist politics?

But Lévy couldn’t. "Personal relations are one thing," he said. "Ideas are another. And no matter how much I like and respect you, the Left is my family." It wasn’t much of an answer–and Lévy knew it. Left in Dark Times is his more considered attempt to explain how the left-liberalism he had dedicated his life to had gone wrong in Europe–and how it could easily be perverted in America as well, if liberals do not heed his warnings.

According to Nick, this was Levy's response to Sarkozy in 2007. Wikipedia's entry on Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Returning to Paris, Levy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, which articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union.[1] In contrast to the neo-conservatism of ex-leftist anti-Marxist American intellectuals, however, neither Lévy nor the New Philosophers was led to embrace capitalist ideology.[citation needed] Throughout the 1970s, Levy taught a course on epistemology at the Université de Strasbourg and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was in 1977, on the television show Apostrophes, that Lévy was presented, alongside André Glucksmann, as a nouveau philosophe. In the very same year he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie à visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

So Levy has always been known for criticising parts of the left. If Nick is to be believed, however, he has moved on from "a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas" to attacking everyone who calls themselves "progressive", "leftist", "socialist" or whatever. And Nick knows this:

When Lévy told Sarkozy that he could not vote for him because the Left was his family, Sarkozy cried, "What? Those people who have spent 30 years telling you to go fuck yourself? Do you really think I’m an idiot, or do you really believe what you are saying?"

Sarkozy has a point: it's hard to see what Levy believes. He attacks members of the left, then says the whole thing is his family. And Nick follows the above paragraph with this:

The language of the leader of the French Right was rough, but he asked a good question. It is a question that will soon occupy the American Left’s attention. True liberals should set out now to win the ideological battles that will come after Bush’s departure, so that no gleeful conservative can ever ask the same question of them.

At first I thought the question he meant was "Do you really think I’m an idiot?" but on consideration is has to be "Are you, or have you ever been, a Communist?"

I did like this from Levy's Wikipedia page:

Other critics of Levy attack his support of the Mitterrand doctrine that allows Italian terrorists members of Brigate Rosse to live in France as free men and women despite the fact that the Italian courts have sentenced them to long imprisonment or Life sentence. Levy argues that during the late 1970s and 1980s basic human rights were not respected in Italy.

Our terrorists are bad. Other people's terrorists, or, as I prefer to call them, freedom fighters, are good. Relativist? Moi?