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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
An important liberal thinker argues that Islamic fundamentalism is the new face of fascism. But his faith in the Bush administration as a force for freedom is naive.
Mar 25, 2003 | Of the many strange moments since Sept. 11, 2001, perhaps the most surreal was Dan Rather's recent interview with Saddam Hussein. Here we have the dictator challenging George W. Bush to a debate and bragging about receiving 100 percent of the vote in the last election. And here we have America's quintessential establishment journalist, unfailingly polite and even deferential, reminiscing about his last interview with the dictator a decade ago, asking him about the logistics of his debate proposal, and inviting him to say a few words in English.
"Where is Oriana Fallaci when we need her?" I muttered, recalling the classic interview in which the redoubtable Fallaci got Henry Kissinger to describe himself as a cowboy. Afterward, Rather was duly criticized by his peers for not challenging Saddam more aggressively. But the issue was not just Rather's passivity. It was his obliviousness to the nuttiness of the encounter, based as it was on two absurd premises: that it is possible to have a reasonable conversation with a mass murderer and that something of value could be accomplished in an interview that Saddam had decreed would be taped and reviewed by his people and only then handed over to CBS. The pervasive subtext of the conversation was Rather's awe in the presence of power, his self-congratulation at being allowed in this rarefied company, and his determination to say nothing that would jeopardize such access in the future. Clearly it had escaped him that the only reason for interviewing a perpetrator of crimes against humanity is to provoke him, through confrontation or manipulation, into revealing something of who he really is.
"There are no gas chambers. This is a lie." "So, Mr. Hitler, do you speak any English?" Jeez!
This incident does not appear in Paul Berman's new book, but it's a study in Berman's theme: the denial built into liberal rationalism and materialism. "Terror and Liberalism" contends that Islamic fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein's Baath socialism are morally, ideologically and historically continuous with the totalitarian movements of the 20th century; that fascism and communism both fed on liberals' resistance to comprehending the irrational nature of those movements; and that the same blindness is rampant today. The subject of Berman's critique is liberalism in the broadly philosophical rather than specifically political sense, a worldview that underlies a range of political positions from the French socialists' opposition to World War II and ultimate collaboration with the Nazis to the anti-interventionism that currently dominates the European and American left to the foreign policy "realism" embraced by European governments and our own diplomatic establishment.
Basic to this worldview, Berman notes, is the belief that people act rationally in their self-interest. It assumes that political conflict is about a clash of interests -- about military power, or class struggle, or territory, or oil. When apocalyptic mass movements commit violence, it must be in response to grievances: exploitation by the rich, domination and humiliation by the powerful. Violence that makes no sense in those terms -- if it's aimed at random civilians, or Jews, or women who show their faces in the street; if it's suicidal as well as murderous -- only shows that its perpetrators are unhinged by oppression. In those circumstances, the irrational is rational. But totalitarian movements, Berman argues, do not fit this liberal calculus; they are wholly pathological, a nihilistic romance with death.
In tracing the origins of this pathology, Albert Camus' "The Rebel," published in 1951, is Berman's touchstone. For Camus, the human impulse to rebel takes a sinister turn, beginning with the French Revolution and flowering with 19th century romanticism: "The love of freedom and progress" becomes "weirdly inseparable from a morbid obsession with murder and suicide." This obsession finds its way into anarchist and socialist revolutionary movements in Russia, Europe, America. A variant of it crops up in European colonialists in Africa, with such insane events as the Belgian massacre of the Congolese. Ultimately it converges with mass movements of the right and the left. Somewhere along the way, the impulse to rebel has been harnessed to its seeming opposite, the ideal of submission to an all-embracing authority: "the total state, the total doctrine, the total movement." (The word "totalitarianism" is Mussolini's.) And this frenzy of absolutism is directed, above all, against liberal tolerance and pluralism. In this anti-liberal crusade Berman discerns a modern acting-out of the Armageddon myth: The people of God are under siege -- from within by the corrupt city dwellers of Babylon, from without by the minions of Satan. After a war of extermination against the evil forces, the people of God, in their purity, will reign.
