BHL and the French Left

Christopher Hitchens reviews Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, in this week's NYT book review. BHL is an interesting character, one of those rare European leftists who has grown disillusioned with the European left. Hitchens says that "If you wanted to sum up his political outlook in a phrase, you would find yourself borrowing Orwell's remark that it's not enough to be antifascist; one must also be in principle antitotalitarian. BHL, according to Hitchens, "insists" that the left "renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you." So here is one more example of the politico-philosophical evolution of the generation of 1968.

Adam Kirsch also reviews the book here in the New York Sun. Some money quotes:

Gone, he writes, are the left's inspiring and necessary ideals: its universalism, its love of justice, its sympathy with the oppressed, its commitment to truth-telling. In their place is a toxic brew of hatreds: of America, conceived as the imperial culprit behind all the world's crimes; of Israel and the Jews, who now occupy the same place in the left's demonology that they once held for the nationalist right; even of liberalism itself. Mr. Lévy compares the left — especially, but not exclusively, the French left — to a decomposing body, whose process of decay is releasing noxious pathogens...

...There is, first of all, the left's hatred of liberalism — the idea and the very word, which is anathema in French politics. This looks paradoxical to Americans, who are used to associating the word "liberal" with the left wing of the Democratic Party. But in Europe, liberal still carries its original 19th-century meaning as the philosophy of individual freedom; and this freedom, to the French left, is nothing but the Trojan horse of an all-devouring capitalism...

Mr. Lévy offers the best summary I have seen of [the left-wing] worldview, which can be glimpsed in the works of many influential left-wing philosophers and journalists. "We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey — a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world — and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former." After reading "Left in Dark Times," it is impossible to deny that the left, whatever its past glories — and Mr. Lévy remembers them all, from the Dreyfus affair to the events of 1968 — is now a danger to truly liberal values. A danger, despite its decrepitude: for as Mr. Lévy says, "even when they're not in charge of anything, ideas are what, for better or worse, drive, and allow us to change, the world."