home
about us
subscriptions
supporters
benefactors
contact us
....................................
The War
By Charles O'Brien
Peace
Timothy Mayer
....................................
© 2001, 2002 First of the Month
|
Reality Bites
Fredric Smoler
Paul Berman tells some pretty good stories, but you have to
wait for the punch line. No one
will be astonished to learn that Breyten Breytenbach, the celebrated South
African novelist and homme de gauche,
last year published (in Le Monde) an open letter to Sharon, and began with
the now-rote observation that when any criticism of Israeli policy is vilified
as anti-Semitism, free speech is imperiled. You may be mildly surprised to learn that Breytenbach thinks
the Israelis, a people with a notorious tin ear for the way they sound to
foreigners, are nonetheless manipulating American public opinion with fantastic
success. But read on in the
Breytenbach letter, and you will be diverted to learn that the "used-car salesman
doppelganger, Netanyahu, ploys this craft of crude propaganda more openly, as
if he were a dirty finger tweaking the clitoris of a swooning American public
opinion." While this sort of
language does evoke the bad old days, one can look on the bright side: Breytenbach's trope arguably bolsters
the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Even sixty years ago, few people
implied that assimilationist Jewish fingers, however dirty they might be when
probing and manipulating literal or metaphorical gentile women, were also
prehensile. As for
Zionists--uniquely blessed with the ability to tweak things with a single
finger--well, who knew?
It can be
difficult to keep straight that much-urged distinction between anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism. When Nobel laureate Jose Saramago described last year's siege
of Arafat's compound as "a crime comparable to Auschwitz," I confess that my
confidence in the distinction briefly faltered. I imagine that Berman's confidence in the distinction
sometimes falters, too: when he
googled "Jenin" and "Auschwitz," he got 2,890 hits; when he googled "Jenin and
Nazi", he got 8,100 hits; "Sharon and Hitler" got 63,100.
It is not the smallest virtue of Terror and Liberalism that its argument establishes a plausible motive for
these linguistic tics. On Berman's
account, while anti-Semitism infiltrates this sort of anti-Zionist polemic, the
anti-Semitism is beside the point. Berman establishes a fascinating inverse
correlation: last year's
hysterical anti-Israeli passion rose with Palestinian atrocities, specifically
with the rise of the suicide bombers' attacks on civilians, and fell with the
largely successful Israeli repression of the suicide bombers, and the
accompanying vast increase in Palestinian misery and oppression. So it was not Palestinian suffering
that produced the Left's demonization of the Israelis; only Palestinian crime
had that effect. How did this
happen?
Berman argues that a significant portion of the Left cannot
abide evidence that large numbers of people adopt mad and murderous politics‹and
have never been able to abide such evidence. The resulting parody of reasoning is by now wearily
familiar: if a
political group is given to serial atrocity, its members must surely
have been grossly provoked. If
they have been so grossly provoked, those who have provoked them more or less
deserve the atrocities inflicted on them. The impulse to serial atrocity is thus understandable, at least
partially extenuated, and in some sense rational.People who are rational and aggrieved can be appeased, or
better yet, persuaded. People who
are rational, unappeasable and un-persuadable can be deterred. If you live in the shadow of the Somme,
or Nagasaki, or Vietnam, it is very appealing to think that your enemies can be
persuaded, or appeased, or deterred.
On the strength of Berman's analysis, we can also make sense
of some of the first (and very imperfectly-remembered) responses to September
11th. For example, that
lively issue of the London Review of Books,
where Cambridge classicist Mary Beard startlingly observed that after the first
unreflecting reactions wore off, "when the shock had faded, more hard-headed
reaction set in. This wasn't just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress
it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people
openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right
place, will in the end pay the price." When some of the London
Review's American correspondents expressed
their irritation and incredulity at this little homily, and doubted that the
incinerated office workers and crushed firemen "had it coming," Mary Beard's
circle of acquaintance was by no means eager to back away from her summary of
its pithy moral calculus. The exchange
ran for months‹and the LRB's
circulation allegedly rose on the strength of it. It is important to remember, as we hear repeated warnings
that our subsequent actions have cost us the almost-universal sympathy
September 11th is supposed to have earned us, that the comments
cited above were among the earlier reactions to the attacks. Assertions of near-universal sympathy
for our losses are fantasies; what was most striking about the first reaction
to September 11th was what seemed to be the venomous Schadenfreude it evoked.
But on Berman's reading, it wasn't Schadenfreude: it was
the recurrent, seductive desire that the world be less terrible than the world
turns out to be.
So a year and a half ago, it was necessary to look a little
carefully at those bullying acts we had committed in the immediate run-up to
September 11th. Which
bullying had so offended al-Qaeda?
We had (very belatedly) rescued the Muslims of Bosnia from their
Christian tormentors, the Muslim Kossovars from their Muslim tormentors, the
Muslims of Kuwait from a secular Arab invasion, attempted to rescue the Muslims
of Mogadishu from a famineŠthe list went on.American history was not without spot or stain, but if Osama
bin Laden was on the 11th of September attempting to avenge Wounded
Knee, or My Lai, or the sundry injuries the Palestinians have suffered at the
hands of American proxies, he'd kept it to himself. Although it seemed
grotesque, bin Laden, vexed not least by Ataturk's abolition of the Caliphate--in the early 1920s--had commissioned mass murder in Manhattan late in
2001. Mary Beard and her
friends, who were not in any simple sense strikingly stupid or villainous
people, could not imagine the real.
Berman argues that Breytenbach mistook the Israelis for a
would-be Herrenvolk (his own usage), and
Saramago mistook Jenin for Auschwitz, for the same reason that an earlier
generation of the Left mistook the Gulag for a tough-minded version of the New
Jerusalem, and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution for more of the same; for
the same reason that Noam Chomsky, after failing to discredit the horrific
reports coming out of Cambodia, settled for conflating Pol Pot with Suharto.
For Berman, Chomsky is the most indefatigable example of the type:mad rationalists, people who lack the
courage to imagine the real.
Terror and Liberalism attempts a lot in a short book.Berman very quickly anatomizes
totalitarianism, locates some of its roots in European Romanticism, traces a
genealogy, and extends that genealogy to include the progenitors of what has
come to be called Islamo-fascism: to Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb, and Michael Aflaq.He insists on the inevitable link
between totalitarianism and terror.
There is much to argue with, and much to commend. Alas, the book has received the
treatment one might have anticipated:
a protracted and spiteful attack in The Nation, one enlivened by a defense of Chomsky's take on Pol
Pot (a stirring display of Kadavergehorsamkeit in the face of an awful lot of real corpses), and
what looks like a subtler bit of malice by the New York Times, where the book was assigned to the managing editor
of Commentary, who (between
sneers) damned it with very faint praise.
One suspects that the
Commentary fellow was animated by more than
mere tribalism. On occasion,
Berman seems to suggest that Islamo-fascism may be more of a threat to Muslims
than it is to us, and that we owe a duty of solidarity to its chief
victims. This is not (to say the
least) a popular line on the Right, where enlightened self-interest apparently
remains a sufficiently radical notion to elicit howls of rage at
newly-idealistic neo-cons, at least from the paleo-cons and the senior
survivors of the first Bush Administration. Berman also suggests that a political campaign against Islamo-fascism
must be fought on the classic liberal ground of human rights and feminism.These tones presumably grate on an ear
trained at Commentary, where
affectionate institutional memory presumably stretches back to the days when
Mrs. Kirkpatrick was solidarizing with Argentine generals given to vivisecting
nuns with chain-saws. Berman
is uneasy about the durability of the neo-con commitment to human rights for
Middle Easterners. His Times review suggests that he is right.
|