Left in Dark Times A Stand Against the New Barbarism

by Lévy, Bernard-Henri; Moser, Benjamin

• ISBN13: 9780812974720
• ISBN10: 0812974727
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-13
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Summary

In this unprecedented critique, Bernard-Henri L vy revisits his political roots, scrutinizes the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those on the horizon, and argues powerfully for a new political and moral vision for our times. Are human rights Western or universal? Does anti-Semitism have a future, and, if so, what will it look like? And how is it that progressives themselvesuthose who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascismuhave now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes: an unthinking loathing of Israel; an obsessive anti-Americanism; an idea of toleranceo that, in its justification of Islamic fanaticism, for example, could become the cemetery of democracieso; and an indifference, masked by relativism, to the greatest human tragedies facing the world today? At a time of ideological and political transition in America, Left in Dark Times articulates the threats we all faceuin many cases without our even being aware of ituand offers a powerful new vision for progressives everywhere.

Author Biography

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker. He was hailed by Vanity Fair magazine as “Superman and prophet: we have no equivalent in the United States.” Among his dozens of books are American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications throughout Europe and the United States. His films include the documentaries Bosna! and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo. Lévy is co-founder of the antiracist group SOS Racism and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One



And Upon This Ruin . . .

Why didn’t I vote for Sarkozy?

Why was I so profoundly convinced, then, that it was literally impossible for me to vote for that man?

First of all, some of the reasons concerned things I knew about him, things that many voters would soon discover.

A kind of feverishness that seemed incompatible with the job.

An indifference to ideas, a cynicism, that has led to incredibly brutal flip-flops on certain important matters (Russia, for example).

An ability to live in denial, which we would see during his grotesque and devastating reception of Colonel Gadhafi in Paris.

The pragmatism—a better word is opportunism—we saw soon after his victory, when, like a kid set loose in a candy store and told: “Here you go! It’s all yours! It’s free! Take what you want!,” he literally took it all, working his way through every bin, snatching up all the most desirable items. The icon Kouchner. The wise Védrine. The knights of Mitterrand’s Holy Grail, whom, when Sarkozy was a young minister, he confessed to admiring. Totems of the Left. Literary and show business legends. Who’s the patron saint of the Socialists? Blum? Then bring me Blum! The Christ of the Communists? Guy Môquet? Then bring him to me—not, of course, Guy Môquet himself, the seventeen-year-old Resistance hero killed by the Nazis, but his last, beautiful, heartbreaking letter to his parents! And the queen of today’s victims? Who wears the dark crown of contemporary suffering and martyrdom? Ingrid Betancourt, you say? Then go fetch them right away, the Betancourt family, and bring them to my palace!

I didn’t deny that all this could have its good sides. Nor that, precisely because of his appetite, Nicolas Sarkozy might have some surprises up his sleeve. All I knew was that he had a strange and worrying way of operating. I also knew that he had an almost deformed memory. People usually have a memory. It can be complex, contradictory, paradoxical. But it’s their own. It is, in large part, the foundation of their identity. Sarkozy, however, is a hijacker of other people’s memories. He lays claim to everyone’s memory, which finally means he has no memory of his own. Our first memory-free president. The first of our presi?dents to wish all ideas well, because he really is indifferent to them. And that is why, if one man in France today incarnates—or claims to incarnate—that famous “post-ideological age” in which I cannot bring myself to believe, then it is Nicolas Sarkozy, sixth president of the Fifth Republic.

None of that subtracts, I repeat, from the charm of his character. Nor, once again, from my personal liking of him. But that was the first group of reasons that prevented me from supporting him.

a second group was more essential.

Because it had to do with my very being, with my fundamental political identity—something in me bolted at the double idea: first, of rushing to the rescue of someone who I guessed was going to win anyway (Ah! The defectors already rushing in! All the flatterers, the followers, of whom you could say, as of Juvenal’s courtesan, that no cheese can make them retch!); and second, equally, of not voting, as I have for my entire life, for what is known as the Left.

A reflexive vote?

Mechanical?

Had my thinking really become so Pavlovian that, as I’d just said to him, the Left was my family and you don’t betray your family?

There was probably some of that.

And that’s exactly what I say when, a few days later, questioned by a French weekly embarking on its umpteenth report on the “rightward drift” of French intellectuals,1 I remarked that “I belong to the Left out of orientation and almost genetically; the Left is my family an

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Excerpted from Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism by Bernard-Henri Levy
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