DEBRIS:

Who Is Regis Debray? (JAMES TARANTO, February 24, 2003, Opinion Journal: Best of the Web)

He complains that "the new world of President Bush, postmodern in its technology, seems premodern in its values." What he means is that whereas Bush and those simple-minded Americans use outmoded terms like "evil" when referring to a genocidal dictator, "Europe"--meaning France--"now knows that the planet is too complex, too definitively plural to suffer insertion into a monotheistic binary logic: white or black, good or evil, friend or enemy." Debray characterizes any discussion of good and evil as "fundamentalist," in contrast with Europe's "secular vision of the world." [...]

"Europe has learned modesty," Debray says--an odd assertion coming from a country currently strutting around the world stage pretending it is still a great power. In truth, what "Europe" has learned is not modesty but a facile relativism. Yes, America is moralistic, and that's hard to stomach for a country with France's history of colonialism and collaboration. (So you think it was evil for the French to deport Jews to Nazi Germany? Hey, quit being such a fundamentalist!) Yet to deny the existence of evil in the face of Saddam Hussein's atrocious human-rights record is not so much sophisticated as jaded.[...]

Who is this Régis Debray, anyway? The Times describes him as "a former adviser to President Francois Mitterrand of France, . . . editor of Cahiers de Mediologie and the author of the forthcoming 'The God That Prevailed.' " But a 1995 Wired magazine article tells a more, shall we say, interesting story:

"Twenty-seven years ago, French radical theoretician Regis Debray was sentenced by a Bolivian military tribunal to 30 years in jail. He had been captured with the guerrilla band led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Fidel Castro's legendary lieutenant. Released after three years, largely because of the intervention of compatriots such as President Charles de Gaulle, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Debray returned to writing. (His 1967 Revolution in the Revolution is considered a primer for guerrilla insurrection.) He spent five years in the early '80s as a special advisor on Latin American relations to French President Francois Mitterrand."

So this defender of reason, this proud opponent of "fundamentalism," spent the 1960s as an acolyte of Che Guevara and an author of a manual for revolution. Mightn't the Times' readers have wanted to know a bit of this background?

We linked to Mr. DeBray's column this weekend, but actually only made it through the first three sentences. Meanwhile, folks elsewhere have done a great job exposing what a whackjob this guy is. I do have one problem with Mr. Taranto's essay: he seems perplexed by the notion that a belief in good and evil is antithetical to secularism and that, in the eyes of the secularist, adherence to morality makes one a de facto fundamentalist. It's hard to place Mr. Taranto on the conservative spectrum, but he seems more libertarian than cultural conservative--at any rate, it's surprising he's unfamiliar with what's a rather well understood phenomenon: the secular Left no longer has any intellectual access to the concept of evil. Moral relativism is not a coincidence but an inevitable outgrowth of secularity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 25, 2003 12:25 AM