Posted on 02/13/2006 6:35:54 AM PST by Valin
Translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell.
Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.
I know, of course, that the term "left" does not have the same meaning and ramifications here that it does in France.
And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European sense.
But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.
And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side--to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American "left" lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. The 60-year-old "young" Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the "enemy," staring in disbelief when I say I've spent quite some time exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: "If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know"; the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: "to raise more money"; and then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals--I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called "American Empire" (the denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to say).
For an outside observer it is passing strange, for instance, that a number of progressives needed, by their own admission, to wait for Hurricane Katrina before they got indignant about, or even learned about, the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty blighting American cities.
For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas, it is simply incomprehensible that more voices weren't raised long ago, in the name of no less than the force of "the Enlightenment," to denounce the ridiculous fraud of the anti-Darwinian supporters of "intelligent design."
And what about the death penalty? How can it be that there isn't yet, within the political parties, especially the Democratic Party--which everyone knows will never budge on the question without decisive internal pressure--a trend of opinion calling for the abolition of this civilized barbarity?
And Guantánamo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in Central Europe, those areas where the rule of law no longer applies? I know, of course, that the press has denounced them. I know you have journalists who, in a matter of days, accomplished what our French press still hasn't finished forty years after our Algerian War. But since when does the press excuse citizens from their political duties? Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag--or even Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner (with whom I disagree on most other grounds) on this vexed and vital issue? And what should we make of that handful of individuals who, after September 11, launched the debate about the circumstances in which torture might suddenly be justified?
And I'm not even talking about Bush. I won't even mention Bush's gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, except for the sake of assembling the conclusive evidence. I know, of course, that you denounce him--but mechanically, I am almost tempted to say ritualistically. And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon because he had spied on his enemies and lied. They impeached Clinton for a venial lie about inappropriate conduct. How is it, then, that it took so long to draw a parallel between those lies and a lie about which the least you can say is that its consequences were anything but venial? How is it that so few "public intellectuals" have been found, within the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy, who can bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?
Some will retort that the "public intellectual" is a European specialty, that we shouldn't blame Americans for their infidelity to a tradition that is not their own. What do such killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of The Crucible? Or of that golden age of civil rights awareness, when great writers enunciated what was right and good and true?
Others will object that the massive, resounding mobilization of civil society is not an American custom. All you need to do to convince yourself of the untruth of this is remember the 1960s and the movement for civil rights, then for the rights of minorities in general, which were the honor of the country and did not stem, let it be emphasized, from any of the major political parties.
Still others will wax ironic about the disease of writing up petitions, a French specialty, warded off by American pragmatism. Here the objection is more serious; and I know the fatuity that can exist in the mania for nonstop political engagement in the name of myriad causes--but aren't you afflicted, my American friends, with the radically opposite sickness? Hasn't the ethics of sobriety won once too often, with you, over the ethics of conviction? And how could one not yearn for a petition that would address our common nausea when faced with the spectacle of a diabetic, blind, nearly deaf old man, pushed in his wheelchair to the San Quentin execution chamber in California?
I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the country is waiting for this. Everywhere, in the innermost reaches of America, you can meet men and women who hope for great voices capable of echoing their impatience in a momentous way. If I were an American writer, I would try to ponder the lessons of the totalitarian century and those of democracy, Tocqueville-style, all at once, in the same breath, and with the same rigor.
An article written by an idiot, to an entire party of idiots.
Hey! Ho! The wicked Left is dead!
Paging Howard Dean...please pick up the red courtesy phone!
The title of this should be: "Vapid! Vapid! Vapid! Ministrating Homolies to Al Gore Zombies"
Hhhhhuuuuhhh????
I wonder if this guy got some comeuppance during the recent riots in France? It doesn't sound like they have much to feel superior about.
Poor left is even getting dissed by the French now.
Maybe the French creep hasnt heard from Susan Sontag (the execrable anti-Western anti-American female version of Noam Chomsky) because she recently died.
Or is he too busy fondling what remains of the American "left" to check the obituaries???
Much flurry, signifying nothing.
I agree with you :)
"Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left."
Semi-Comatose American Left...
Will someone post the picture of the frog wearing a beret and puffing on a Gauloise?
Leftists are Americans? Who knew.
What this Euro-idiot doesn't seem to grasp is that if the "American left" really told people what they believed and what their goals were, they would never win another important election, including Lord Dog Catcher.
Their timidity and vacuousness is not a result of their having no values, but is actually the result of having to hide their real values while still attacking their opponents, lest they be found out. Unlike Europeans, a majority of Americans DON'T LIKE LEFTISTS, and WON'T VOTE FOR THEM. It's really no more complicated than that. The Euro-leftists are "braver" than their American counterparts simply because they can often win elections by telling people what they really think. The Dems don't have that luxury, and haven't since Vietnam.
How low the mighty have fallen.
I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the country is waiting for this.
I believe he is mistaken and the last few elections demonstrate this. But I hope the American left continues on.
"And how could one not yearn for a petition that would address our common nausea when faced with the spectacle of a diabetic, blind, nearly deaf old man, pushed in his wheelchair to the San Quentin execution chamber in California?"
And in typical leftist fashion, ignore the victim he brutally murdered.
Re what Frenchie said "What do such killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of The Crucible?"
Here's some history The Nation will never publish ...
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European sense.
But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.
No,we have a left and a center. </sarcasm>What we have, of course, is a left which calls itself "objective journalism," and what that left calls a "right" which would be entirely happy not having to concern itslef with such things as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And would now be able to do so, if not for the Jimmy Carter left which pulled the plug on the Shah of Iran and gave North Korea uranium.
"For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas..."
The struggle between total communism and national socialism. That is his "battlefield of ideas". What a putz!
In the end, it comes across as a mildly poetic rant by a self-proclaimed "intellectual", filled with grandiose-sounding phrases, liberally sprinkled with the catch phrases most often found in the current Liberal talking points.
Like cotton-candy, it boils down to a small, sickenly-sweet morsel, that is nutritionally worthless, overpriced, and not really good for you anyway.
Yawn
Who is Bernard-Henri Lévy and why should I pay any attention to his drooling blather?
If you took away vituperation against Bush, we would only hear crickets from the Left.
couldn't have said it better myself.......
Only one answer, however, is required.
BECAUSE LIBERALISM'S FOUNDATIONAL TENETS ARE ALL LIES.....lies which are proven as such by daily events.
Example: "tax cuts will harm the economy". The verdict is in, folks, this is a lie!
Another example: "Katrina exposed that the government ISN'T DOING ENOUGH for poor people". Katrina exposed that what we all winced at was GOVERNMENT CREATED!
Etc., etc., etc.
The American Left may be considered comatose perhaps. It is more accurate to say that it is vacuous.
The European "intelligensia" is hubritic, blinded by denial, pretentious, and shallow, possibly as vacuous as the American Left.
The American Heartland is healthy, alive, vital, awake, energetic, optimistic, ascendant, and ripe with new ideas. It is the world's best hope. Its value is apparently lost on Lévy (who can't even see through the flimsy Democrat-propaganda catchphrase "Bush lied" and certainly can't be expected to see deeper truths right before his eyes).
Europe has no equivalent of the American Heartland.
And the European leadership is as comatose as the American Left.
I won't even mention Bush's gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,
Because there weren't any "gross lies", and even most Democrats understand that hey, Just about every reputable source thought there were WMD in Iraq. Not just that, but the final chapter on WMD has just started to be written, hold that thought....
And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon because he had spied on his enemies
Is that about the wire tapping? Either this Euro doesnt understand Watergate (Nixon went after his POLITICAL enemies, not terrorists), or he is simply equating these wiretaps with something nefarious. If thats the case, I'd like to point out to mr. Euro that many European countries have laws which allow the governments to do things that would have made J. Edgar Hoover salivate!
What a toon the writer is! The left can't call for the "abolution of this civilized barbarity" because they'd have to call for the "abolution" of baby killing too. And that's something they will never do because they need to keep killing kids for the votes. Because without the votes of the "pro choice" morons the Democrats would be in worst shape.
All head... no beer.
Thanks for the enlightenment.
I should have known.
Yes! It is all very clear now. Go LEFT Democrat Party Critters! Go Left, and if that does not work, go MORE Left! I have seen the future and it is for the Democrats to move FARTHER to the Left! Your future is not Hillary and Howie Dean, it is Nader, Kuncinach and Mikey Moore!! Left ward HO!
Yet a resounding silence from the Euro-American left when an old crippled Jewish man was pushed to the railing on a hijacked cruise ship and killed by a Islamo Fascist Terrorist during the 1980s. When the Left expresses as much concern about the murder of innocents as they do for the punishment of the guilty, they will be intellectually credible. Until that time they are nothing but amusing psuedo-intellectual twits.
Go rail against LePen or something...
"For an outside observer it is passing strange, for instance, that a number of progressives needed, by their own admission, to wait for Hurricane Katrina before they got indignant about, or even learned about, the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty blighting American cities."
I wonder how come no journalists have ever written how the war on poverty has cost America billions of dollars and is rampant in Blue Cities of Blue States and controlled by Democrats.
All the old left relics are dying off. Even their funerals are disgraceful. And they wonder why people walk away and ignore them?
One can only hope the american left listens to this kind of advice and comes out and tells the American people just what it is they stand for. Oh please, Oh please, Oh please??????
We should kill them the French way....let them expire in the heat while we go on "Holiday".
They don't think "their message is getting out". Let's help them with this. It's charity work I don't mind doing. How about you?:):)
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