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I want also to say something about the divisions within Islam. I do agree with my colleague and old friend Ben Barber that the issues are more complex than simply an opposition between secularists and fundamentalists. I am involved with an ongoing group called the Malta forum, a group of American and Arab and Muslim intellectuals which grew out of a statement, a document issued by some of us on the eve of the war in Afghanistan. It was called "What we're fighting for." Michael Walzer and I wrote the section of the statement on the just war tradition and were in turn responded to by something like ninety Saudi intellectuals. The debate, or exchange, was published all over the Arab world and covered in all of the leading pan-Arab dailies, and this led to further series of ongoing meetings. These conversations are difficult and complicated, but one of the things I learned is that you have first of all the secularists, those whose views about political life derive from their having been in Paris and studied certain kinds of Marxism. But there are also those who see themselves as simply trying to be faithful Muslims but disagree vehemently with Taliban-type fundamentalism. In fact they don't even like the word fundamentalism because they think you can be a kind of fundamentalist or at least devout Muslim without at all embracing extremism, where the goal is to see sharia law applied in the most brutal and uncompromising way. So their view is that if you divide this discussion up into the secularists and fundamentalists, the vast majority of Muslims are going to get lost in the shuffle, because they belong to neither of these camps. Much of this has been eye opening for me, and I now see more clearly that the more one knows, the more difficult it is to make any grand generalizations about these things. That's one reason I admire so much what Lévy has done, because he's trying to avoid the huge abstractions and really just reminding us on-goingly about the ways in which particular persons have their lives torn apart and yet are striving, under circumstances we can scarcely imagine, to try to keep a certain hope alive.
Jackson Lears: It's always hard to talk about evil and such without yielding to huge abstractions, and of course, like others here, I admire precisely the kind of particularity and immediacy that Lévy has given us in his work, not to mention the honesty and genuine passion. But I find also the kind of abstractions that the author himself would like if possible to avoid. Consider, for example, the references to so-called Pavlovian pacifism and to Islamo-fascism. Let me try to look at these terms, first by invoking, not for the first time here, Augustine, who was the inventor of original sin. His conception of original sin is a profoundly internal and psychological one, which builds upon a sense of one's own perverse alienation from the good, from god, from the goodness of god's creation. To be possessed of this conception is part of a profoundly serious spiritual discipline against self-righteousness, as Kit Lasch used to say, and this discipline can be found in some of the most profound American Christian thinkers of the 20th century, such as Martin Luther King. And I would argue that a good deal of the pacifism (the pacifism that is worth taking seriously at any rate) is not dismissible as Pavlovian but is in fact Augustinian and is rooted in, as King's was, a spiritual discipline against self-righteousness, a realization that all of our actions are in fact tainted by the evils of self-regard and self-celebration and arrogance. What the Augustinian conception of evil does is to allow us to avoid the dangers of projection. Evil is not always something that's "out there" in this abstraction or this ideology or even this impalpable movement such as Islamo-fascism, but it's in here as well in my own breast, and it's the knowledge that it's in here that tempers, one hopes, the response to evil when we see it in others. This causes a more considered response than we get in those who promote a militant crusade against the evil other.
But the other thing that disturbed me in the Pavlovian pacifism versus fascism scenario that was outlined is that it recalls some of the most duplicitous, bogus and misleading historical analogies that have been invoked in the last quarter century by leading American neoconservatives who began by labeling plans to get out of Vietnam as a Munich-like policy of appeasement and have pursued this same formula right up to the present moment. In his brilliant book, The Arrogance of Power, which has its 40th anniversary around now, by the way, Senator Fulbright says there are certain words that cause American policy makers to break out in spots and so have to be avoided, kept at bay, with voodoo drums if necessary, and one of those words is appeasement. One can hardly count the number of times that word was invoked in defense of, as apology for, the long and bloody war that was conducted in Vietnam. Why couldn't we negotiate with the Viet Cong? Because it would have been another Munich; it would have been appeasement, right? And now, when we historians and others thought that we had complicated some of those ideas sufficiently, so that our public discourse would no longer be tainted by the same kinds of bogus historical analogies, we see that they are back with us again.
Islamo-fascism. Let's think hard about the coinage and probe it, as Ben Barber suggested we do. It's deeply problematic, after all, and misleading, and dangerous. And we need to remember that, I think, when we think about evil, and axes of evil, and crusades against evil, and who we are, and the spiritual discipline recommended by Augustine and others.
Boyers: I would like to return to those black holes, so-called, in BernardHenri's formulation, because of the absence of informing ideas and grand narratives that typically underwrite the struggles taking place in other more familiar countries. When I was reading the compelling pages on Burundi and Sri Lanka I couldn't help wondering whether the experience of human beings caught up in other struggles at other times in other places has been so very different. My sense is that very often the experience of ordinary human beings caught up in war is the experience of chaos. The experience of fighting without knowing why one is fighting. Of being enlisted in an action that one cannot really account for. When I worked for the War Resisters League in the 1960's, counseling young men who wanted to resist the draft and avoid going to fight in Vietnam, one question we were instructed to ask was: can you explain the terms of the conflict that you think you despise and deplore? And almost invariably the answer we got from college students, from college graduates, from young men with graduate degrees, was no, I really don't have much of a sense of it one way or the other. And I had to think on those occasions that all of those people who were actually fighting and risking their lives had even less of a notion of what they were enlisted for. And once on the ground and fully involved in the fighting, whatever notions they went in with tended to evaporate, so that in the end, after three months or six months in those killing fields, these people lost any sense at all of what they were about. And so, reading Levy, I couldn't help wondering whether those black holes are really, in terms of the experience of people on the ground, so dramatically different from what we find in other places.
Barber: Just as a footnote to that I think of John Keegan's The Face of Battle and several other recent studies of war, which report that even in wars that have a master narrative, when you ask the soldiers what they're fighting for, they haven't the slightest idea of what a narrative might be and in the end say the only reason they're fighting is to protect their buddies in the platoon. I think you're on to something very important, Bob.
Elshtain: No doubt Bob and Ben are right about most soldiers caught up in a battle, but I think the question should be whether it's possible for people when they're not in the immediacy of battle to think about what they're doing in a way that is compelling and has some wider coherence. I'm pretty sure that the soldiers I went and studied, American soldiers in WWII, had some sense of the wider issues. Beyond that, consider that when we think about war we have tended to think of conflicts between entities that we call states, identifiable territories fighting each other. The presumption is that the people in each of these places has some sort of attachment to a coherent place. You speak the language, you know the lore, the history, you have a stake in whether your place continues to be a place or not, and I think that gives some sort of meaning and purpose that perhaps is not articulable at every moment in a conflict but is meaning and purpose nonetheless. But then you read a document put out by a Council on Foreign Relations commission called to look at genocidal conflicts and you find an interesting statistic, namely, that out of something like 104 identifiable conflicts since the end of the Cold War (a conflict is designated as a fight of some kind that has left at least 50 people dead), only four have been identified as being between nation states. So what you have going on in these black holes is conflicts between little fragments of states, or situations where you don't have a state at all and there's no recognizable sense of battle lines and home fronts. All you have is just utter caprice and chaos and the nihilistic edge that Lévy vividly conveys. And in that sense these conflicts do depart rather strongly from our usual war narratives. I was struck in this regard by one observer who noted how hard it is to think in these black holes as a citizen, not to think about ethnicity but about the responsibilities of citizens, and that was a powerful reminder of what an extraordinary achievement the modern constitutional state is, where you can have people from many different backgrounds who identify themselves as citizens. In the black holes the conflicts have a very different character.
Carolyn Forché: I'm very taken with Lévy's account of categories of war: wars that had meaning once but have lost meaning; wars that had meaning once but have lost that and now have a new meaning, as in the example of South Sudan, where a war which was once fought as a proxy war in the east-west configuration is now about the appropriation of oil resources and nothing more than that; wars without meaning except that of power struggle or theft, as with the example of Colombia; and finally wars that have bidden farewell to every kind of meaning, as in Burundi. What I am interested in knowing more about is this last category of meaninglessness. I would like to understand what Lévy perceives to be the role of diamonds, cocaine, and oil, international arms manufacturers and distributors and so on, in these various kinds of wars. I want to know more about how he imagines the architects of these particular conflicts, the powers behind them, the conditions that give rise to them and the decisions that are made that allow them to be interminable. I think what distinguishes the wars that he writes about from other wars that we've alluded to on this panel is that the wars he writes about are still going on, they are interminable, they show no signs of stopping; the world does not show any interest in intervening, so that the hopelessness Lévy perceives and writes about so eloquently is characteristic of these black holes.
Lévy: So many things have been said. Some of which I agree with, though I will stress the disagreements. About Iraq: let's be clear. I was from the first day, and before that, opposed to the war. I was in Pakistan when the war was waged and I really thought that it was the most stupid war, directed against the most stupid target, especially if the real aim was to fight terrorism.
I also condemn the crimes of America, as other have done. Abu Ghraib is a crime. Guantanamo is a crime. I went to Guantanamo for American Vertigo, to see it with my own eyes, and for me it is an abjection; it is unworthy of a democracy. But as big a crime as Guantanamo is, I would not compare it with the crimes of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Nor with the crimes of those who in a blind way target civilians as civilians in a completely nihilistic war. American jails cannot be compared to the jails of Saddam Hussein.
About evil. Radical evil: Baudelaire said that politics should be the recognition of radical evil. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud says that you cannot have politics if you don't begin with the recognition that evil is everywhere, in the heart of each of us, something that is the most shared of our characteristics. And I agree on that. But should recognition of the radical evil that is in the heart of each of us prevent us from fighting against evil? Should that recognition paralyze us? The fact that there is a little fascist who perhaps sleeps in the depths of each of us should not prevent us from fighting the awakened fascist which is sometimes in front of us.
About the present: Islamo-fascism. Maybe the word was invented by the neo-cons, I am not a neo-con and I think they're wrong on most points, but I must say that the concept of Islamo-fascism doesn't shock me. Why shouldn't there be fascism in the Islamic world? Why should they be protected from this category of politics? It happened in Europe and it can happen outside of Europe. You can see for yourself how elements of fascism translate themselves into new forms and speak other languages. You can see this in the Baathist party of Saddam Hussein, in some Shia groups in Lebanon, and elsewhere. There is no ontological or metaphysical protection against Islamic fascism. So the concept of Islamo-fascism does not shock me. When you see in some Muslim countries people who are in favor of the submission of women, the extermination of Jews, and the hatred of liberty you have the three red lights of the old fascism. When I see in Pakistan or in Egypt people who think that women have to be humiliated, that Jews have to be converted or killed, why should I not call these currents of thought fascist? Fascism is not exclusive to Europe.
About the Islamic world, and the idea of a war of civilization internal to Islam: Maybe it is too simple an idea. It has to be more sophisticated. I maintain it though. I maintain it because to me America is not the center of the world. Europe is not the center of the world. The destroying of the twin towers was a horrible crime, but it is not my main concern. When I look at the crimes of Islam, I try to take the point of view of the Islamic societies themselves. I try to see the problem of Islam from the point of view of the Algerian women who are eviscerated, killed, their babies killed in front of them by the home-grown jihadists. And I try to see from the point of view of the Pakistanis. When you go to Pakistan you see that there are some people who believe in freedom of thought, who believe that women have the right to unveil their faces; that a woman has the right to look at a man who is not her husband. But you also have people who believe that a woman who dares to look at a man who is not her husband must be burned. Crimes of honor. In Pakistan, in Algeria, also in Egypt, you have a war between these people. And it is a war that is fought with blood. When the great Egyptian writer Mahfouz dared to say that he had another vision of Islam and referred to schools of Islam of the 11th and 12th centuries, where the Koran was a sacred book but people also read many other books, his life was threatened and he was attacked. Because he said the spirit of Islam did not prevent the devout from reading other books and women had the right to be unveiled, and so on. And so you have a fight. You have a terrible battle. We had our September 11th and the 4,000 victims. But in Algeria, in Sudan, in Pakistan there are hundreds of thousands of victims of the war inside Islam between two different conceptions of Islam. It does not mean I throw stones at those Muslims who are faithful. Of course not. Please. I just think that today you have a fight between those who believe that their faith and the conception they have of the faith must be imposed by force and those who believe that what they call secular Islam exists. You can't seriously say that there is no fight. Ask the question to a democrat in Pakistan or Algeria, and you will see that from their point of view of course the struggle exists. And it is a struggle between two civilizations. We had this in Christianity a few centuries ago. And now we have to support those in Islam who fight for a secular conception like what exists in this country, with all religious sects equidistant from the point of power.
About black holes now. It is true, I agree, that if you see the story from the point of view of the soldier, maybe all wars are sort of black holes. And when you read the war literature of the First World War, when you read testimonies of simple soldiers, you see that their experience is the same as the experience of a fighter in Angola. This I agree with completely. And yet, when you go into the causes and conditions you see that the differences are more important. Yes, you have to see what are the forces working for these wars, and ask who benefits. And you have to ask if democracy might be the sort of medicine we need to stop these terrible wars. But what I call black holes are peculiar. As I have said, no political factors can give a good account of them. Of course you can say oil, of course you can say weapons, but in Burundi, for example, there are no resources to speak of, no mines, no diamonds, no oil. The fight is going on just to share the nothingness. The fires are burning and burning and there is nothing left in the land. So you have to take into account the nihilistic aspect of such a war. In some cases, as in Sudan, you can explain part of what is happening as oil related, but when you go there you see that the conflict has broken away from the cause, that people are fighting there not for anything in particular. You have to take this dimension, which is the source of my own confusion, into consideration. And if you don't, you take the risk of feeding what I would call a conspiratorial conception of the world, which is a mistake. I don't think we can say that the genocide in Rwanda was launched by an elite that wanted to control and concentrate the power. The violence was much more widespread than it would have been in that case. It's not at all clear that there was an elite with specific targets, with a motivation and with a plot. The mystery of the genocide of Rwanda is that it goes beyond this sort of political explanation. It was to a large extent ungoverned genocide. 800,000 victims in a very short time. With machetes. Not with gas chambers, not with industrial extermination. That is the mystery of this nihilism, which no political explanation can really comprehend.
By contrast, take the war of which we hear most in the world today, the war between Israelis and Palestinians. It's a horrible war. For 30 years I have fought for the resolution of this war. But in this war each of the two sides has a face, has a name, each of the dead has a grave. And has a place in the world. And has a funeral. And is sometimes the object of a memorial. The black holes are exactly the contrary of that. There you have victims without number. Victims without faces. Graves without names. Merely death.
One last point about America, to answer Ben Barber. You are right to say that intellectuals in politics are not always a success. You don't have to go so far as the Taliban to see this, you can go to my country, in France, where the involvement of intellectuals in politics was so often a disaster. Nevertheless, if you tell the whole story, I'm not sure that the picture is so disastrous as it can seem. If you try to see the history of Europe and withdraw from it the role of intellectuals, I deeply believe that you see a picture that would have been even darker than it was. Consider the history of the Spanish Civil War. Or the resistance to fascism and Communism. The resistance was powered by dissidents many of whom were intellectuals. Or look at the Algerian War. In France, the entire political class and certainly the democratic majority were in favor of that war and wanted to hold on to its colony. Who was against that war? Who were the first to utter words of resistance? Were they not intellectuals? Not so clear to me, then, the balance between the bad and the good there. And in America, I am sorry to say, where the neo-cons have done so much harm, I don't see why leftist intellectuals without access to Fox, CNN, or even CBS, have not made more petitions, demonstrations, have not spoken out more loudly together against the death penalty. Why is there not in America cover story after cover story saying that the death penalty is a dishonor for American democracy and that Creationism is crudity, stupidity? Where is the fight for enlightenment? This should be an affair of the intellectuals.
There are, I know, many exceptions. Like Jean, I admire Michael Walzer. But three years ago we had in Dissent magazine a strange debate about torture. Are there circumstances in which torture can be justified? And the strongest words of principle against torture were uttered by a man who is not of your family or mine but a conservative, a Republican named McCain. Why should that not be the job of the great leftist intellectuals of this country? And you know there was a time in America, when I was a young man, when Martin Luther King, a sort of intellectual, took the lead on such issues. And there were others.
Lears: First of all I wanted to thank Bernard for writing that piece in The Nation because it inspired me to bang out two polemical essays right away. I took very much to heart what he said there. But let me very briefly get back to fascism: I distrust the word because I think it conjures up false historical analogies and inspires some people to feel that there ought to be a worldwide war for democracy. There are of course specific instances where Islamic fundamentalists romanticize violence, engage in anti-Semitic rhetoric and call to mind fascists of the 1930's. I don't deny that. Nevertheless I think that rhetorical use of the word to legitimate current policies is a sign of sloppy thinking. It offends my sense of historical particularity, and I want to tell one quick story to make my point. There is a famous and maybe even apocryphal quote from the 1930's populist politician from Louisiana named Huey Long: "When fascism comes to America it will come in the guise of anti-fascism." I always thought old Huey might be on to something. I've been thinking about that more lately. But I decided to google that quote and the first entry that came up was from Pat Buchanan's political group which used Long's words to criticize political correctness in the American university. You know everybody wants to be against fascism, and so it's a word that often tends to stop thought rather than start it, it seems to me.
Forché: An audience member, a colleague, has passed me a slip of paper requesting that I ask Bernard-Henri about when intervention is legitimate. Why should the United States, for example, have the power to say "these wars are ok, but these wars are not ok?"
Lévy: For me, the question Cain asked God is helpful here. Am I my brother's keeper? That is what he asked. I think we are our brothers' keepers.
Audience member: But don't conceptions of evil vary from one country to another? How can we know that what seems intolerable for us will seem intolerable for others?
Lévy: I think you know that a Rwandan looking at the Tutsi cut into pieces by a Hutu has the same definition of evil as you have. If you go to Pakistan and look at a case where I was involved very closely, and see an actual woman burnt alive and humiliated and killed, the fact that she belonged to a different culture does not make the burning less terrible. I would say that you have the right to intervene because you are her sister. And because in spite of the difference of cultures there is a unity of concern, which is the very basis of our struggle, for example, against racism. Why are you antiracist? Because you believe as a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim that there is a unity that requires you to fight racism when it strikes your neighbor. It is in the name of that same unity that you have the right and the duty to be concerned about the situation in Rwanda or Burundi.