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Liam O Ruairc • 25 March 2006
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Bernard-Henri
Levy (often referred to by his initials BHL) is
a sort of French Kevin Myers. He is presented by
the media as a "new philosopher"(1)
whose life long project is the critique of "totalitarianism".
But no philosophers worthy of the name take him
seriously.
For
example, Gilles Deleuze characterised Levy's work
as "shallow" and accused him of dissolving
philosophy into a "marketing product"(2).
BHL's former teacher Jacques Derrida did not want
to have anything to do with him.(3)
It
is difficult to find someone who takes Bernard-Henri
Levy's books seriously because they are well-known
for their crude analysis, major factual errors and
extraordinary pretensions. The right-wing writer
Raymond Aron wrote of Levy's book L'Ideologie
Francaise that:
"an
author who readily employs adjectives like 'infamous'
or 'obscene' to characterise people and ideas invites
the critic to apply the same standards to him. I
will resist this temptation as much as possible,
although Bernard-Henri Lévy's book presents
some of the defects which really annoy me: the blister
of the style, the pretension to attribute merits
and demerits to people whether alive or dead, the
pretension to recall to an amnesic nation the accursed
share of its past, arbitrarily interpreted quotations
detached from their context."(4)
One
historian listed some of the major factual mistakes
he found in Levy's book Le Testament de Dieu.(5)
Readers of the book of Genesis will be surprised
to learn that according to Levy, original sin happens
on the seventh day of creation (p.238), Sophocles'
Antigone produced in Athens in 442 before Christ,
was according to BHL written in the 5th century
after Christ (p.87), various texts written between
the first century before Christ and the first after
are dated from somewhere towards the end of Roman
era -that is three or four centuries too early (p.79),
Robespierre who set up the cult of Supreme Being
is accused to have "murdered the one and sovereign
god" (p.106), two texts of 1818 and 1864 are
according to Levy not only "more or less contemporary"
but the first one is responding to the second (p.42),
finally when he is not writing pure inventions about
Stalin (p.23), he mentions (p. 278) Himmler's deposition
to the Nuremberg trial (lasted from 20 November
1945 to 30 September 1946) - it must have been his
ghost as Himmler had committed suicide on 23 May
1945.
Levy's
books on totalitarianism make Karl Popper's The
Open Society and Its Enemies or Georg Lukacs'
The Destruction of Reason look like models
of objective and reliable scholarship. If no serious
scholars take Levy's work seriously, his success
comes from the extraordinary coverage he receives
from his friends in the media, television in particular.
Levy has some very powerful friends and backers
in the business, political and media worlds; and
in return champions their interests. (6)
Central
to his status of 'media celebrity' are Levy's public
interventions. Trying to emulate his personal hero
Andre Malraux, BHL has travelled the world promoting
various crusades against 'totalitarianism'. For
years, his main target was the world communist movement.
He was not just championing 'dissident' writers
such as Soljenitsyne or Sakharov. In the name of
anti-Sovietism, he sponsored various 'freedom fighters'
such as the Contras in Nicaragua; and in March 1985
wrote to the US Congress pleading for nothing less
than a US military intervention in Nicaragua and
asking it to renew its financial support to the
Nicaragua resistance against the 'totalitarian'
regime of the Sandinistas.(7)
It wasn't the first time (nor the last) that Levy
was pleading for military intervention: he had already
asked Western governments in 1981/1982 to intervene
in Poland in support of the Solidarity movement.
Despite
the end of actually existing socialism, Levy is
still pursuing his anti-communist crusade. In 2001,
he travelled to Colombia and wrote a series of articles
blaming the totalitarian FARC for the vast majority
of conflict related deaths despite the fact that
of the 40 000 killed over the last ten years, the
state is to blame for 80%, insurgents being responsible
for 8000 deaths.(8)
Minimising
or turning a blind eye to the violence of the forces
fighting 'totalitarianism' is another hallmark of
Bernard-Henri Levy. His series of articles on the
recent civil strife in Algeria -praised by various
newspapers close to the state - was full of mistakes,
approximations and silences. While very vocal about
the atrocities committed by the 'totalitarian' islamists,
on the state violence (summary executions, torture,
disappeared etc) he remained silent.(9)
Levy
may now claim that Islamism is the new totalitarianism,
but that was not always the case. Since 1979, BHL
has been very open about his admiration for the
Afghan 'freedom fighters' against Soviet 'totalitarianism';
the Afghan Mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud
in particular. A few years ago, Levy returned to
war-torn Afghanistan to interview Massoud, that
"enlightened Muslim and democrat". Levy
forgot to mention in his articles that when Massoud
controlled Kabul, there were public hangings, cutting
off limbs, and limitation of women's rights.
"One
can understand that Massoud, in a desperate military
position is looking to Western support, but it is
regrettable that a writer with a leading media profile
(Afghanistan, after Bosnia and Algeria, always with
the same disastrous results) agrees to play the
fellow traveller of an islamist movement."(10)
Levy
has attempted to portray his interventions as being
full of dangers and himself as some kind of hero
taking major risks when this clearly was not the
case. In a famous incident in his film Bosna!
Levy was acting as he had been caught under heavy
sniper fire in Sarajevo when it subsequently turned
out that the whole thing had been staged for the
film.
Bernard-Henri
Levy remained little-known in the English speaking
world until 2003, when he published Who Killed
Daniel Pearl?, an account of his efforts to
track the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl who had been murdered by Islamists
in Pakistan. A critic in the New York Review
of Books pointed that whatever Levy's pretensions
to original investigative journalism and novelistic
prose, the book was deeply flawed and riddled with
major factual errors. It is worth quoting that review
at length, as it identifies all the problems critics
had found with Levy's work for almost three decades:
"Although
attempting to create a new literary form-what Lévy
calls a romanquête-mixing reportage with John
Berendt - or Truman Capote-like novelization, it
is apparent from its opening pages that with Pakistan
Lévy is way out of his depth.(…) The
book's principal problem is the amateurish quality
of much of Lévy's research. (…) More
importantly, Lévy quickly shows that he is
deeply ignorant of South Asian politics. (…)
More seriously, there are numerous occasions where
Lévy distorts his evidence and actually inverts
the truth. (…) Lévy's misuse of evidence…
is revealing of his general method: if proof does
not exist, he writes as if it did. (…) Lévy
presents a series of elaborate and unprovable conspiracy
theories. (…) Throughout his book Lévy
shows an intermittent disdain for Islam, and something
approaching hatred for Pakistan. (…) The problem
with Lévy's wholesale denunciation of Pakistan
and its inhabitants is that it gives a portrait
in which there is no room for subtlety and nuance.
(…) Most ludicrous of all is the self-portrait
of the aspiring James Bond figure BHL draws of himself
as he casts himself as the hero of his own spy story.
(…) It is an alarming reflection of how widespread
is the ignorance of Islam in general and of Pakistan
in particular that only one of the many reviews
of the book that I have seen in the US, by a Pakistani
writer, has called attention to BHL's errors and
elisions, or even bothered to note his disturbing
expressions of contempt for ordinary Pakistanis.
If Islamic terrorism is to be defeated, its causes
and terrorists themselves must first be clearly
and objectively understood. Instead, Who Killed
Daniel Pearl? is not only an insult to the memory
of a fine journalist who refused to accept the sort
of crude ethnic stereotyping that Lévy indulges
in, and who was notably rigorous in checking his
facts. It also shows the degree to which, since
September 11, it has become possible for a writer
to make inaccurate and disparaging remarks about
Muslims and ordinary Pakistanis as if it were perfectly
natural and acceptable to do so."(11)
No
one in France has been surprised by BHL's intervention
in the Danish cartoons controversy. His intervention
was entirely consistent with his life-long agenda
of self-promotion.
REFERENCES
(1) On the topic of the 'new philosophers, see Dominique
Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy since
the mid-1970s, London: Verso, 2001.
(2) Gilles Deleuze, A propos des nouveaux philosophes
et d'un problème plus général,
Minuit 2, 1977. He also added : "Plus
le contenu de pensée est faible, plus le
penseur prend d'importance, plus le sujet d'énonciation
se donne de l'importance par rapport aux énoncés
vides. "
(3) Philippe Cohen, BHL: une biographie,
Paris: Fayard, 2005
(4)
The translation has not the same punch as the original:
"Un auteur qui emploie volontiers les adjectifs
infâme ou obscène pour qualifier les
hommes et les idées invite le critique à
lui rendre la pareille. Je résisterai autant
que possible à la tentation, bien que le
livre de Bernard-Henri Lévy présente
quelques-uns des défauts qui m'horripilent
: la boursouflure du style, la prétention
à trancher des mérites et des démérites
des vivants et des morts, l'ambition de rappeler
à un peuple amnésique la part engloutie
de son passé, les citations détachées
de leur contexte et interprétées arbitrairement.
" (L'Express, 7 février 1981.)
(5) Pierre Vidal Naquet, Letter to Le Nouvel
Observateur, 16 June 1979
(6) For a list of some of those friends and backers,
see Serge Halimi, Cela dure depuis vingt-cinq ans,
Le Monde Diplomatique, Decembre 2003
(7) Serge Halimi, BHL: 'Romanquete' ou mauvaise
enquete?, Le Monde Diplomatique Decembre
2003
(8) Maurice Lemoine, Desinformation-Spectacle: La
Colombie Selon Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Monde Diplomatique,
Juin 2001
(9) Nicolas Beau, Les generaux d'Alger preferent
un reportage de BHL a une enquete internationale,
Le Canard Enchaine, 14 Janvier 1998
(10) Gilles Dorronsoro, BHL en Afghanistan ou Tintin
au Congo? Le Monde 22 Octobre 1998
(11) William Dalrymple, Murder in Karachi, The
New York Review of Books, December 4 2003. Levy's
subsequent reply to Dalrymple's review "exhibits
exactly the same mix of errors, prejudice, and lack
of precision that so flaws his book." Cfr.
Murder in Karachi: An Exchange, The New York
Review of Books, February 12 2004
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There
is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word
so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to
the lake of fire upon hearing it.
- Frank Zappa
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