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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
French provocateur Bernard-Henri Lévy on how the left is being destroyed by tolerance -- and why Europeans love Obama.
By Beth Arnold
Read more: France, Books, John McCain, Politics, Liberals, Interviews, Government, Philosophy, Authors, Books Interviews, Barack Obama
Photo courtesy of Random House
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Oct. 20, 2008 | PARIS -- Since he began his career 35 years ago, self-described leftist, philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy has never been caught without a cause or opinion. He has flamboyantly articulated these in more than 30 books (including the much discussed "American Vertigo"), countless television appearances, articles and even films that he’s written, produced, directed and/or narrated. Lévy is a kind of intellectual Robin Hood, going where there is totalitarianism and/or war. He has been a passionate advocate of Bosnia, smuggled himself into Darfur to report on the Sudanese genocide and followed the perilous trail of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl into Pakistan to write the New York Times bestseller "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?"
Lévy is a showman -- his narcissism is legendary -- which adds fuel to the fire of his critics, who accuse him of lacking original ideas. Known in France as BHL, Lévy is his own wildly successful brand. He wears the mantle of polarizing intellectual quite happily along with made-to-measure clothing from French house Charvet, which also made shirts for JFK and Marcel Proust. He was recently quoted in the New York Times' T Magazine men’s fall fashion supplement saying he had no interest in his bespoke apparel or even talking about it -- though he had clearly agreed to this fashion profile, which was set in Bosnia, where he was screening two documentaries he had shot there and attending a children's festival partly financed by his family foundation.
At home in France, Lévy is treated as something of a god (which is not lost on him), known for his good looks and family wealth as much as for his intellectual output. It doesn't hurt his glamorous profile that he is married to provocative actress and singer Arielle Dombasle, who is sometimes uncharitably compared to a Barbie doll. The couple share an apartment with a chic address on the Left Bank, a house in the South of France and a Marrakech palace.
Lévy’s latest literary publicity blitz coincides with the publication of his newest book, "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism."
Lévy answers the door to his Paris apartment himself, a tall, lanky man wearing his signature white shirt, unbuttoned almost to the navel, underneath a sleek suit. In his large, blond-wood-paneled office, there is an enormous metal sculpture of a man’s head with a panel opening half of it. Inside, the figure is empty -- the complete opposite of the man who owns him.
The subtitle of your new book is "A Stand Against the New Barbarism." Can you explain what you mean by that?
What I mean by the new barbarism is great ideas having bad effects. Great ideals turning out to be the stem cell of big crimes, big injustices, unfairnesses, brutality and so on. The barbarism 30 years ago when I wrote "Barbarism With a Human Face" was Marxism, which pretended to be a fight in favor of justice, social equality, freedom, eradication of slavery, and which was exactly the contrary. And you have today a new barbarism in the case of these women and men who pretend to fight in favor of tolerance, in favor of anti-imperialism, in favor of anti-colonialism, and actually plead for slavery of the women, massive violation of human rights. Or when they don’t plead for that, they tolerate them, refuse to denounce them.
You have a new mechanism today ... for example, where in the name of anti-Americanism the crimes in Darfur are not denounced. The crimes in Bosnia were accepted. And so many wars in Africa or elsewhere are just forgotten.
Are there specific kinds of people you’re talking about?
Those, for example, who pretend to be anti-mondialist ... I don’t know if you have this in America? Anti-mondialists fight against globalization. Anti-globalization ... They are the dark side of the left of today.
Now, in my family, which is the left progressive camp -- in this family, I observe that there is a tendency which can reach the same results ... the same blindness of the right. The same indifference to the real suffering of the real people, and so on and so on.
So you are saying that you believe the left can end up committing the same sins as the right? Because I think in the United States we have been fighting for tolerance in so many ways -- tolerance for gays, civil rights ...
These battles, of course, you fought. I fought ... And it is won. It is achieved. Barack Obama being a candidate for the presidency and maybe -- I hope -- elected means that the fight is won, more or less. Frankly a country where racism is sued in front of lawyers, a country where the women won the power of preventing discrimination and so on, this is great. This is a huge cultural revolution, which America led.
But in the name of tolerance there can be also some crimes -- not committed but veiled ... For example, those who tell us that we have to be tolerant of the radical Islamist movements. Those who tell us that being tolerant means trying to understand their reasons and their justifications. Those who tell us that, about women, to veil the face of a woman is just a customary habit, which we Westerners are not allowed to judge according to the standard of human rights. This is a very bad thing.
This idea that every habit should be respected, every custom should be accepted because it belongs to a whole and that if we take a piece, we break the whole -- this is one of the counter-effects of tolerance. And you have in America a lot of people who said, why should you ask the Indian people to resign the pattern of the castes that belong to their culture? Why should you oblige this or that tribe, people in Africa, to resign the excision of the clitoris of the little girl? It belongs to their culture ...
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