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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Paul Berman, one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East.
Mar 22, 2003 | On Sept. 11, Paul Berman, political and cultural critic and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968" watched from his roof as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. That day, Berman says, he "woke up" to the threat of what he calls Islamic totalitarianism. Berman lives in Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue where a Yemeni cleric was recently convicted of funneling $20 million to Osama bin Laden.
During the last year and a half he has picked his way through the Islamic bookstores in his neighborhood, hunting down volumes by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual whose "In the Shade of the Qur'an" is the groundwork for Islamic fundamentalism. Berman finds Qutb's analysis of the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern society "rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt." Qutb's work also convinced Berman that in Islamism we face a threat not unlike such 20th century totalitarian movements as fascism and communism. Berman feels similarly about Baathism, the nationalist ideology of Iraq's ruling party.
In fact, Berman believes that Islamism and Baathism emerged from the same great rift in liberal society, the First World War. "Terror and Liberalism," Berman's bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.
The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America's New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration -- actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns "we will pay for it" -- he thinks it was also dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world.
We spoke with Berman in New York, before and after bombs started falling on Baghdad.
Had you been interested in Islamism and Baathism before Sept. 11?
No. Yes, in a general way, but I hadn't paid special attention to it. Then it became obvious to me on Sept. 11 that the giant screw-up by the FBI and the CIA and the Pentagon was also a giant screw-up by the journalists and intellectuals and everyone else. We too hadn't been paying attention.
Why do you think it was easy for all of these people to miss the idea, which becomes the central argument of your book, that these Arab movements are extensions of totalitarianism?
A lot of people have misunderstood the nature of Islamism for a whole series of reasons. The biggest and most important of those reasons is Eurocentrism, which prevented people from looking at these movements at all. And the Eurocentrism has a flip side, a soft-headed multiculturalism in which movements in other parts of the world are regarded as hopelessly and wonderfully exotic and not to be judged or analyzed. In the last 20 years literally millions of people have been slaughtered by these movements and the wars they've begun. All of this has received a shockingly small amount of attention.
Another reason that these movements have received very little attention has to do with anti-Zionism, the true origin of which is anti-Semitism, the assumption that the Jews are the center of the world and therefore the center of the world's evil. So the problems of the Muslim world in the Middle East can be located in the tiny issue of a border dispute in a place the size of Connecticut. Across the world people are convinced of this. It's a preposterous idea, but this idea is really widely shared. Anybody who holds this idea therefore has carte blanche to ignore the fact that the Iran-Iraq war killed a million people or that Islamism in the Sudan has killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people, or that 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria.
So you're saying that we're likely to ignore these forms of Islamist violence because we're consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
No, I've outlined three reasons. These series of attitudes have flowed together to make it respectable or normal for intellectuals and journalists to pay no attention at all to these vast tragedies deploying across huge parts of the world. Only when these vast tragedies came and hit us in the face did a lot of people wake up. Among those people was me.
Does this also have to do with this idea that we think history ended in 1989?
Yes. It absolutely does. This is part of the Eurocentrism. We imagine that because the Cold War ended in Europe that the whole series of struggles that began in Europe with the First World War and then went through the different totalitarian movements -- fascist, Nazi and communist -- had finally come to an end. Many people were so caught up in the more or less victory of liberal democratic ideas and institutions that there was a tendency to imagine that problems in other parts of the world were just going to be regional problems that really weren't deeply going to affect us. All that was a scandalous delusion.
And in fact you're arguing that Islamism and Baathism grew out of the First World War in the same way that communism and fascism did?
It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock -- eternal and perfect.
These new ideas were in a sense utopian, but they were also very bloody. Behind all the movements that made these proposals was a pathological fascination with mass death. Mass death was itself the principal fact of the First World War, in which 9 or 10 million people were killed on an industrial basis. And each of the new movements proceeded to reproduce that event in the name of their utopian opposition to the complexities and uncertainties of liberal civilization. The names of these movements varied and the traits that they displayed varied -- one was called Bolshevism, and another was called fascism, another was called Nazism.
So you're saying these movements are similar to Islamism and Baathism, but on a very deep level. You're drawing specific parallels -- what are they?
At some very deep level all these movements were the same -- they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.
My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse. Mussolini staged his march on Rome in 1922 for the purpose of creating a perfect totalitarian society that was going to be the resurrection of the Roman Empire. In 1928, in Egypt, just across the Mediterranean, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed for the purpose of resurrecting the ancient Caliphate of the Arab empire of the 7th century, likewise with the idea of creating a perfect society of modern times. Although these two movements were utterly unalike, there was some way in which they were alike.
Fascism in Italy came to power in 1922 and it remained in power until it was overthrown by the Americans and the British. Islamism came to power in various places, beginning in 1979 with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Baathism is yet another variant of the same thing, and probably in the next few days it will, in Iraq, be overthrown by the same Americans and British who overthrew Mussolini.
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