"ENORMOUS ABSENCE"

THE ANTI-ANTI-AMERICANS: A summer of obsessions in France. (ADAM GOPNIK, 2003-09-01, The New Yorker)

“Anti-Americanism in France is always a magnet for the worst,” Bernard-Henri Lévy said one evening in July. He was sitting in the study of his apartment on the leafy Boulevard Saint-Germain, and even for a casual meeting he wore, as he has done in public for thirty years, an elegant uniform of black suit and open white shirt, the collar lapping over his lapels. B.H.L., as everyone calls him, who remains one of the central media figures in France, has had a great critical success with a book entitled “Qui A Tué Daniel Pearl?” (“Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”), which is, in a way, the most vivid and intensely realized of all the “pro-American” texts. It is an inquiry into the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan last year of the Wall Street Journal reporter, and will be published next month in English by Melville House Books. Unapologetically personal, the book recounts B.H.L.’s own investigation in Pakistan and India, and also in America, with sidelights on his previous campaigns in Bosnia and Bangladesh. One reason for its success in France is that it is written almost in the tone of what the French call a polar, a noirish police thriller, full of one-sentence paragraphs and portentous cliff-hangers (“He was the man who knew too much. But what did he know?”). It also attempts, on a deeper level, to paint a character portrait of the man who did kill Danny Pearl, or, at least, arranged his kidnapping: Omar Sheikh, the Islamist who was convicted in Pakistan last year. Like Mohammed Atta, he turns out to be not a barefoot wild-eyed Mahdi but a child of the West, London-raised and educated—the New Naipaulian Man, lost between two cultures, enraged at the West and mesmerized by a fantasy of Islam, only now armed with a total ideology and an A-bomb.

On a third level, “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” is a demonstration piece, a deliberate embrace by a French intellectual of an American journalist, and a book that insists that the death of an American journalist (and one who worked for the Wall Street Journal, at that) was as important for France as for America. B.H.L.’s purely political, or forensic, conclusion is that it is naïve to speak of Al Qaeda as an independent terrorist organization. At most a band of Yemenis and Saudis, the Al Qaeda of American imagination and fears—the octopus of terrorism capable of bringing tall buildings down in a single morning—is largely controlled by the Pakistani secret service, he says, and he concludes that Pearl was kidnapped and murdered with its knowledge. Pearl was killed, B.H.L. believes, because he had come to understand too much about all of this, and particularly about “the great taboo”: that the Pakistani atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who intend to use it someday. (He writes that Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the cleric whom Pearl had set out to interview when he was kidnapped, far from being a minor figure, is one of Osama bin Laden’s mentors and tutors and has a network in place in the United States. John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper, Lévy claims, in a detail that, if not unknown, is unpublicized in the United States, had transferred from the Nation of Islam to Gilani’s sect shortly before he began his killing spree.)

The essential conclusion of this central Parisian thinker and writer is, therefore, not that the American government ought to be more conciliatory toward the Islamic fundamentalists but that our analysis of the situation and its risks is not nearly radical enough. “I am strongly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I’d seen in Pakistan,” Lévy said. “Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher--an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical--he’s just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon.”

The relentless first-person address of Lévy’s new book has been mocked--“Tin-Tin in Pakistan”--but its egocentrism feels earned, and even admirable. There are three kinds of writers addicted to the first person: the kind whose “I” remains a pillar of self-reliance, supporting the text (Camus and Bruce Chatwin are both masters of this sort); the kind whose “I”s magically become “you”s (Montaigne, Thurber); and then a third, rarer kind (Mailer, Malraux), whose insistent “I”s somehow become an extended and inclusive “we,” and who, through sheer lack of embarrassment about their own self-dramatization, end up enacting the dream life of their generation. B.H.L. is, or has become, in his last three books, a writer of that kind, and of that stature.

“The real issue, which the Americans don’t see, is that the Arab Islamist threat is partly manageable,” he went on. “One can see solutions, if not easy ones, to the Israeli-Palestinian question, to the Saudi problem. The Asian Islamist threat, though, is of an entirely different dimension. There are far more people, they are far more desperate, and they have a tradition of national action. And they have a bomb. Even North Korea is less dangerous than Pakistan--a Stalinist country with a defunct ideology and a bomb is infinitely less dangerous than a country with a bomb and a new ideology in the full vigor of its first birth. That is the real nexus of the terrorism, and fussing in the desert doesn’t even begin to address it.

“The French opposition to the war was opportunist in part, rational in part, but mostly rooted in a desire not to know. What dominates France is not the presence of some anti-Americanism but an enormous absence--the absence of any belief aside from a handful of corporatist reflexes. This whole business with the intermittents is typical: it’s corporatism pursued to the point of professional suicide. All that we have to replace it with is the idea of Europe; so far, we have overcome romantic nationalism, but we have nothing left to replace it with.”

What's important to recognize is how seductive that absence of any belief at all is. The ceaseless pleading for toleration and "respect for other cultures", the hysterical baying when George W. Bush refers to evil, and the opposition to the display of the Ten Commandments, all have their sources in this notion that if only we had no core beliefs ourselves we'd be able to get along with everyone. The problem, in the first instance, is that your own lack of beliefs is never a guarantee that the next person you meet won't have something he believes in, quite possibly something antithetical to your interests. Secondly, even supposing that we achieved the epoch where all men let each other "do their own thing", no one is willing to live for long with their neighbors doing things they find repellant. What sounds warm and fuzzy in theory turns untenable when you're supposed to ignore things like, just for example, female circumsicion or sati (widow burning); or, in France's case, something rather less objectionable like the wearing of headscarves. It turns out we all do believe things after all, and believe them strongly enough that we're willing to say that others should adhere to them, no matter how much conflict that causes. Witness the willingness of those who wished we believed in nothing to try to force absence on the people of Alabama.


MORE:
Western culture is superior (Mona Charen, August 19, 2003, townhall.com)

To say that Western culture is superior is not to say that any particular person living in the West is superior to any person living elsewhere. That would be ridiculous. But it is equally ridiculous to deny that the moral standards, customs and beliefs of the West contribute to fairer and far more humane societies than are found elsewhere.

We are now engaged in a mission to remake the Middle East -- to introduce democracy, the rule of law and religious pluralism. But as we undertake this task, which would be extremely difficult under the best of circumstances, we are hampered by the fact that a sizeable minority of our own people does not believe at all that our way is better. They, in fact, regard the very suggestion as obscene. Any shortcomings of more primitive societies, when they are acknowledged at all, are blamed on others, usually on us.

Feminists who are quick to file lawsuits for even the smallest slight in this country are strangely reluctant to make common cause with women in nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Why? Is it because championing those women would imply that Western society -- which feminists have so long derided as sexist -- is far better than any others when it comes to the treatment of women?

Is it really arrogance, as the liberals would have it, to believe that the system and the culture we've inherited is superior to others? Or is it ingratitude to deny it?

The Angry Man (Phyllis McGinley 1905-78)

The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street--
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled “Tolerance.”

And when I asked him why he strode
Thus scowling down the human road,
Scowling, he answered, “I am he
Who champions total liberty--
Intolerance being, ma’am, a state
No tolerant man can tolerate.

“When I meet rogues,” he cried, “who choose
To cherish oppositional views,
Lady, like this, and in this manner,
I lay about me with my banner
Till they cry mercy, ma’am.” His blows
Rained proudly on prospective foes.

Fearful, I turned and left him there
Still muttering, as he thrashed the air,
“Let the Intolerant beware!”

MORE:
-Phyllis McGinley (Academy of American Poets)
-Phyllis McGinley Papers (Syracuse University Library )
-STAMP: Phyllis McGinley Posted by Orrin Judd at August 25, 2003 5:23 PM