First Nick Cohen in The Guardian, and now Paul Berman in Dissent posing as "left-wing" supporters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of human beings. Berman's apologia is not as sleazily dishonest as Cohen's, but in some ways it is worse because it is less brazen. (The giveaway, I suppose, is that Berman is being cited with approval by right-wingers who are besides themselves with pleasure at this display.)
Berman purports to give "six reasons" why "people on the left have been unable to see the antifascist nature of the war...." In the process, he manages (a) never to state any actual reason why those on the Left opposed the war, and (b) to attribute to the Left views no one on the Left holds. (Perhaps Dissent is hoping to be taken over by The New Republic?)
Berman: "The left doesn't see [this is a meritorious anti-fascist war] because...George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'"
Leiter: Bush is an unusually repulsive politician (though one might think "unusually" as a modifier of "repulsive politican" doesn't make sense), but Berman would be hard-pressed to prove that anyone opposed the war for that reason. Of course, if what is really meant, is that Bush & co. are "repulsive" because of the track record of so many members of this Administration in the support of brutal tyrannies (including Saddam's), then that is relevant: why would anyone with even a superficial familiarity with the history of conduct by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al.--not to mention the more general track record of the U.S. in such matters--trust them with a "war of liberation" anywhere?
Berman: "The left doesn't see because a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't. This is an attitude that, sixty years ago, would have prevented those same people from making sense of the fascists of Europe, too."
Leiter: Who thinks this? People on the left think, based on evidence, that the United States is causally connected to many problems in the world, including Saddam's reign of horror in Iraq (though the French and British deserve at least as much if not more credit for this episode in the annals of human misery). And people on the left think, based on evidence, that individuals in the present administration have been complicit in villainy here and abroad, and thus should not be trusted with anyone's "liberation." (On both points, see the links, above.) But no one needs to hold a silly view like the one Berman attributes to the left in order to be opposed to the war in Iraq.
Berman: "Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn't do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less!"
Leiter: No principled opposition to the invasion of Iraq depends on such a silly view.
Note where we are: three grounds for opposition to the war have been stated; none are the actual grounds of opposition given by any of the most articulate critics of the war. This is quite an intellectual display, isn't it? No wonder Berman has proved so popular with right-wingers.
Berman: "The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs."
Leiter: This kind of racist claptrap about Arabs is common on the right, to be sure, but not on the left, and certainly not as grounds for opposition to the war.
Berman: "The old-fashioned left used to be universalist-used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. They thought this was especially true for people in reasonably modern societies with universities, industries, and a sophisticated bureaucracy-societies like the one in Iraq. But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude? By the way, you don't hear much from the left about the non-Arabs in countries like Iraq, do you? The left, the real left, used to be the champion of minority populations-of people like the Kurds. No more! The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left-except for a few of us, of course."
Leiter: Same.
Berman: "Another reason: A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition-that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else."
Leiter: Transparently irrelevant to opposition to the war in Iraq.
Berman: "The left doesn't see because a lot of people are, in any case, willfully blind to anti-Semitism in other cultures. They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it. And so, people simply cannot detect the fascist nature of all kinds of mass movements and political parties. In the Muslim world, especially."
Leiter: How did the invasion of Iraq help stop the spread of Islamic fascism and anti-semitism, as opposed to fueling it? Iraq was, after all, the most secular of the major Arab states, one in which, for example, women enjoyed far greater legal, political, and economic status than, say, in such staunch U.S. allies as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
I've read other pieces by Paul Berman that suggest he is not as thoroughly morally and intellectually corrupt as this pathetic display would suggest--but that makes it all the more disappointing that, on this issue, he should be such a morally depraved buffoon. In Berman's world, "an anti-fascist war" is one whose consequence is the ending of a fascist regime. Berman shares that view, oddly, with Stalin (is Stalin Berman's ideal "man of the left"?). One might have thought, though, that a genuinely antifascist war was determined both by its motives and aims and its actual consequences. If there is really an educated person on the planet who believes these were the motives and aims of the Bush Administration--staffed as it is by long-standing friends of fascist tyranny--I should be quite surprised. I suspect even Paul Berman can't believe that. And the consequences of this war--other than the tens of thousands killed and maimed by this "anti-fascist" effort--are so far indeterminate: Iraq is still under military rule, still in the grips of deadly armed conflict, still without democracy, and on the cusp of civil war.
Meanwhile, Paul Berman, safe from bombs and bulletts, chides the left for not being totally suckered as he was.
UPDATE: Another philosopher (Chris Young, a grad student at Cornell) tackled Mr. Berman's "dialogue" awhile back here.
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