The Real Oppression of Our Time

On the day after the most recent Iraqi elections, I went to speak with the writer Paul Berman in his downtown Brooklyn apartment. I settled down on his couch, and Berman offered me the last of his coffee as I asked about his role advising the director Stephen Gaghan on the script for the recent film Syriana, a conspiratorial political thriller set in the Middle East.

Before the tape started rolling, we talked about the film and an article that had appeared in the paper that day by the writer Clifford D. May, a conservative who accused the film of simpleminded anti-Americanism. May wondered why the director hadn't paid more attention to the work of Berman, a writer Gaghan professes to have read and admired.

A conservative chiding a Hollywood director for not having learned enough from a liberal: it says something about Berman's unique position in American letters.

Of the small group of left-wing advocates for the invasion of Iraq, Berman, a long-time editor at the esteemed socialist magazine Dissent and a distinguished historian, is probably the best known and most respected. His introduction to a wider readership began a month after 9/11, when he published the first in a series of essays culminating in the 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism. They were his attempt to explain the meaning of the attacks and the nature of the attackers. The violence of that day, he argued, was not the result of Islam's inherent murderousness or a calculated response to American policies, but the reemergence in an unexpected corner of totalitarianism.

Berman wanted to demystify Islamic fundamentalism by peeling off its exotic desert skin and exposing the genetic traits-monism, utopianism and apocalyptic fervor-that branded it as part of the 20th century's lineage of totalitarianism.

In the book's first chapter, he laid out what he considered to be the failures of both the realist and neoconservative visions for policy and why he could support neither. Still, to say that Islamists were of the same ilk as Nazis-and then to actually support an American war-was too much for many on the left, and the attacks weren't long in coming. Usually, the argument was that you couldn't really be a leftist and on the same side as the U.S. government. Accordingly, Berman was either an outright neoconservative, or one who just hadn't admitted it to himself yet. His political credentials and progressive language were just the coating he applied to make the imperialist pill easier to swallow. 

In Power and the Idealists, published to wide acclaim last year (Bill Clinton is said to be among its admirers), Berman tells the story of the European activists and intellectuals known as the '68ers for their role in the student demonstrations and uprisings of that year. It begins as an account of Joschka Fischer, a former radical who rose through Germany's Green Party to become the country's foreign minister. In the 1960s, Fischer and his comrades struggled with the legacy of Nazism and determined to resist all forms of authoritarianism and oppression, which they found in German capitalism, European nationalism and American militarism. The belief that resistance demanded transcending ethical restraints led to an escalating violence that included association with terrorists like Baader-Meinhof and Black September. Ideals hardened into ideologies that justified the murder of Jews in the name of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, ruthless death squads in Latin America, and other acts of revolutionary blood lust. The conscious among them realized that something had gone wrong.

In the period of reckoning, when the crimes of the '68ers have become apparent, Berman introduces the philosopher Andre Glucksman and Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders. Glucksman proposes to abandon of the grand ideologies that invariably employ more gravediggers than proletarian workers in favor of what he calls "a humanism of bad news." It leads to a notion of the sovereignty of the victim, a right of the suffering to be helped that doesn't observe national borders. In action Kouchner embodies this spirit. Refusing to wait until all the political and diplomatic questions are resolved, he travels around the world to find the sick and lessen their suffering.

Those who broke out of their moral narcissism to realistically confront the problems of power and suffering created what Berman sees as the '68ers' greatest legacy-the liberal interventionism of the 1990s. Here the narrative returns to Fischer, head of a party founded on pacifism that, due to his efforts, supported the NATO intervention in the Balkans. Kosovo was the seeming culmination of everything the '68ers struggled to get right. But the story does not end so neatly. Iraq found old comrades, dedicated to many of the same ideas, on opposite sides of a new conflict.

NEW YORK PRESS: Although Fischer is billed as the protagonist of Power and the Idealists, Kouchner seems to be the book's real hero. He reminds me of the doctor from Camus' The Plague, in that he doesn't wait for the final answers before he tries to help the suffering.

PAUL BERMAN: The great step that Kouchner is taking is away from grand ideological structures towards simpler, more straightforward questions: "How do you help people? Can you actually do something?" And he arrives at the answer that you can.

It's true that Fischer is the ostensible hero, but the book is something of a literary experiment. It has a sly quality; everything that happens is not entirely what it seems to be. As the book advances the hero is not Fischer, it's Kouchner. But at the very end the hero is neither Kouchner nor Fischer, but a kind of abstraction. The hero is an abstract collectivity, which is what I'm calling the spirit of 1968, by which I mean a very particular definition of the generation of 1968. It is something larger than an individual person-it's a kind of human motivation, and how it develops as we grow older.

The absolutely crucial thing to understand about Dr. Kouchner is that his grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, and it takes 200 pages in the book before it reaches this point because the book is digging deeper and deeper into the motives and emotions that impel people. And the book is about what you do with this fact that your grandparents were killed in Auschwitz-or, regardless of what your own family's experience had been, the fact that this kind of suffering takes place.

Can something as abstract and personal as this spirit of resistance ever be the organizing principle behind a political movement?

If the book shows anything at all, it's how unreliable from a strictly political point of view is this concept of resistance. You could begin with this point of view that, morally speaking, it's incumbent upon us to resist absolute oppression, but having made that decision, it might not help you at all in analyzing politically who are the true oppressors, what is the real oppression, what is the best way to resist it. What you see in the book is a picture of the left from the 1950s and 1960s, when serious people-and I take everybody in the book seriously-were floundering in their efforts to answer these questions, and coming up with answers that are really wrong unto insanity.

Some of them, in their effort to be resistors, end up the allies of oppression, even anti-Semitic murderers. In trying to oppose the kind of Nazism that existed in the past-because something like Nazism is an eternal possibility-some of them end up being Nazi-like, and there is a shocked realization on the part of other people that this is happening, that this can easily happen, that a left-wing resistance movement can turn into its opposite.

The whole notion of resistance and making a moral commitment to be on the side of the oppressed is a very tricky, dangerous notion. Some people might look at it and conclude that these kinds of ideas are just too dangerous to touch at all. That's not my own view. In the book I've described the struggles of various people I admire and respect to arrive at a lucid view of what is extreme oppression, and what is the right way to struggle against it.

I think some people have arrived at a lucid view, and above all they've done this by trying to strip away the delusions of ideology, the blindnesses that come from having an all-encompassing worldview. Some of it was conducted by philosophers like Glucksman, some by activists like Kouchner and some by politicians like Joschka Fischer. In the end, I think that the people I'm discussing all arrive at intelligent and admirable views, even though they're not in agreement with each other. I can respect their differences; they all seem to be responsible, admirable people. Certainly a lesson of the book is that you can't just take some ism for yourself and think that your problems are at an end. You can be pretty much guaranteed that if you're following the dictates of an ism, sooner or later you are going to be disastrously wrong.

Is liberalism unique for conceding its own limits and acknowledging that it can be wrong?

Liberalism offers a check against this kind of error, because liberalism by definition wants to be pragmatic and rational and therefore question itself, but in its self-questioning it can be very unsatisfying by leaving unanswered some fundamental questions. Liberalism can lead to a certain kind of smugness about how we're right and everyone else is wrong, and therefore can produce its own vast crimes.

You can't understand totalitarianism without understanding that some of the totalitarian criticisms of liberalism were right. If that weren't the case, totalitarian movements wouldn't be as powerful as they have repeatedly proved themselves to be. Liberalism itself is not a fail-safe guarantee. It leads us to question ourselves, and one of the things we should question is liberalism.

Can anti-totalitarianism ever be a real force on the left again, or will these ideas be confined to clusters of freethinkers and iconoclasts?

I regard myself as of the left, and my complaint about a great many other people on the left is that they are stuck in the past. They are seeing events now through lenses that were ground in the 1960s, and lenses that were ground in the 1960s were partly derived from lenses that were ground in the 1930s that were partly derived from lenses ground in the 19th century.

There's a way today in which there's nobody more conservative than a standard leftist. My argument is that a standard leftist is someone to be avoided at all costs. I'm in favor of unstandard leftism, or anti-standard leftism. That ought to mean asking oneself these very fundamental questions, which the people I write about in Power and the Idealists are asking themselves, that have to do with this question of resistance-"What is the real oppression of our time?" Not what some ism tells us is the oppression of our time, but what is actually happening, who are the people that are actually suffering, and can something actually be done to help them?

What I know from having published Terror and Liberalism is that all over the world there are people who share the ideas in that book. There is a kind of sleeper political tendency that could be conjured into existence. You're talking about clusters, but these clusters exist in every country, and I've been in touch with them. There is a kind of hidden continent of an alternative political view that exists. The great disappointment is that Tony Blair hasn't articulated it better than he has. Bush has made things very confusing by using some of the language that this new tendency would use, but in a very disappointing way, because he talks the talk but he doesn't walk the walk. He combines some of these principles with other principles that are dreadful and have nothing to do with a renovated left.

I get accused all the time on the left of not being any different than Bush and the neocons, but that's not true because I think I've laid out some alternative principles that are very different. In Terror and Liberalism I called for a third force or a new radicalism, and that's asking people to step forward and offer an alternative to Bush and the neocons on the right wing on the one hand, and the antique or conservative left on the other hand. I have to admit I haven't gotten very far with that.

If this third force or new left did emerge, could it fight a war and hold on to its high-minded principles?

Of course there are always strategic considerations that have to be acknowledged, and of course sometimes you have to make a pact with the devil. Nobody in his right mind wants to turn against Musharraf in Pakistan right now-that would turn the place over to the most dangerous people. But if you are doing things that contradict your own principles, you should be lucid about it and not deceive yourself or the public. Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan is doing an intelligent thing by courting some of these warlords instead of going to war with them and driving them into the hands of the Taliban.

But there's a second thing that has to do with torture. There's something that I find repulsive about the atmosphere in Washington and a certain kind of neoconservative or right wing impulse. On the American right you actually have a cult of the ruthless, an excitement for ruthlessness. We could see this back in the '80s in American policy in Central America and elsewhere, and we see it now. The symbol for this is surely John Negroponte, who was responsible for a lot of dreadful things in Central America in the '80s.

So, yes, sometimes you have to be realistic and take strategic considerations into account and not act on principle at every step, but you should be lucid about it. However, what we're seeing in Washington has nothing to do with what I just said. There's this cult of the ruthless, and that's why the issue of torture has become so prominent. The Bush administration has got the whole world talking about torture and this is really insane on their part. This whole struggle that we're involved in is never going to be solved by torture, it's going to be solved by a war of ideas. We have to present liberal principles as something that can attract millions of people who might otherwise be attracted to Islamist radicalism or Ba'athist radicalism. We have to convince people to change their ideas from these kinds of demagogic, apocalyptic and paranoid ideas that lead to mass slaughter. In order to do that, we have to get rid of torture and ruthlessness, and be able to appeal as much as possible to the rule of law and liberal principles. Bush has the whole world debating how evil is the United States because it's torturing people, instead of having the whole world debating how evil is Islamist radicalism because it's slaughtered millions of people. Because of this, we need a new movement on the left. Instead we have a lot of people on the left who. instead of joining this sort of thing, are just folding their arms and saying, "Well, the United States is bad."

Given the apparent success of the elections and the high Sunni turnout, would you still say that the invasion of Iraq was a tragedy from the start? If so, were the blunders unique to the failings of this administration or are they the type that occur in all wars?

I'm still hoping that things in Iraq will turn out well. I think there's a reason to continue fighting, and I sympathize and am in total solidarity with those Iraqis who are trying to create a democratic Iraq. I do think the war has been a tragedy from the start because of the blunders, and these blunders in fact are something special.

There were a lot of people saying all along before the war got going that Bush was going about it badly, and I was one of those people. The world has a fair amount of experience now in how to intervene in some horrendous place, and we had a principal experience of this recently in Kosovo and Bosnia. There are a lot of technical lessons that were drawn from that, like how many soldiers you need per thousands of people in the civilian population. There's an actual science of this. It's not just guesswork.

The Bush administration did not profit from these lessons because intellectually they've had nothing to do with-and wanted nothing to do with-the Balkans intervention, and that was just stupid and ideological and sectarian on their part. They needed to recognize that they had decided to abandon the principles of the Republican right wing and to embrace the principles of interventionist liberalism. Therefore, if they could only have had the intellectual courage to say, "Yes, we changed our minds," they could have turned to the liberal interventionists and said, "OK, how do you go about doing this sort of thing?"

You had people like Kouchner running around Washington trying to tell them how to do it, and there were ways to do it, and of course if they were going to do it right, it would have looked different from the start. The arguments about why to invade would have been different, the politics of it would have been different. It would have been possible to get a lot more public support all over the world for it if they had raised questions of tyranny and human rights. Even the military matters would have been different, because they would have had to recognize that this was going to be an exercise in the thing that they were opposed to-nation building-and that nation building was going to require far more troops than they provided, and was going to require a different way of acting in every single respect.

General Shinseki is obviously the military hero of the Iraq War of 2003, and he was the military hero because he got fired for saying what was true. According to Bush, some 30,000 Iraqis have been killed-not mostly by us, but we exposed the Iraqis to these attacks from the people who are their enemies and are our enemies, and this has been really criminal. This is a repeat of Bush senior's crimes from 1991, when we asked the Iraqis to rise up, and then allowed them to be slaughtered. Every aspect of it had to be different from what they did. We would have needed different political preparation-higher taxes, more allies, help from the UN, all of which was possible, which is why my loathing for Bush is limitless.

But still, the fighting is going on. The people who conclude, "Bush has blundered, therefore I don't want anything to do with it" ought to remind themselves that Bush blundered from day one. He wasn't taking bin Laden seriously; he blundered on September 11th; he blundered on September 12th when he allowed the bin Laden family to leave the country. He made a million blunders. But just because Bush has gone about things idiotically doesn't mean that we should abandon the struggle.

How much of Islamism is a version of modern totalitarianism, and how much is particular to the historical and religious development of Islam?

Of course there are ancient strands that lead to this sort of thing, just as there are in Christianity. Christianity, after all, has a dreadful history of participating in crusades, witch burnings, anti-Semitic pogroms, massacres and all kinds of things like that, and Islam has that too. On balance, Islam's record has never been as bad as Christianity's, so if Christianity has been by and large able to reform itself, so should Islam.

Christianity's real reformation in regard to this stuff is not the Reformation conducted by Luther in the 16th century-it's the modern, liberal self-reformation that's taken place in the 20th century: debates within the Catholic Church, many efforts to be self-reflective among currents of Protestantism and so forth. If modern Christianity has been able to, I don't see why modern Islam should be unable to participate in this same debate. Dangerous movements of our time have some ancient roots, and that has to be identified, but the crucial thing is not to get mesmerized by the ancient roots but to see that there also modern roots, because insofar as these thing have modern roots we ought to be able to grapple with them. Somebody who has become a Ba'athist or Islamist is also somebody who might be able to repudiate Ba'asthism or Islamism, just as somebody who had become a Maoist fanatic might later have repudiated it and become an upstanding liberal. One of the candidates for the prime ministership of Iraq in the elections is a guy who went through all these things. He was a Maoist and now he's an Islamist, and we're hoping that this is a guy that might have liberal principles too. And why not?

Any closing remarks?

My fondest dream would be to discover that the book is being read by people otherwise not interested in the political questions it raises. It really sinks or swims depending on its strength as a very complicated narrative. I think it has a certain emotional force, and the unfortunate fate that afflicts anyone like me is that if you write a book about political topics, it gets consigned to political discussion, and the literary aspect gets shunted aside.

Because he works for the government, the writer is using the pen name Stephen Malone.