Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007
Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Andrei Markovits Why Europe Dislikes America Thomas Cushman Anti-Americanism as Totem Norman Geras On International Law David Zarnett Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution Irfan Khawaja On The Reluctant Fundamentalist Marko Attila Hoare The Left and ‘Fascism’ Dick Howard Hannah Arendt and Us Claude Lefort Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism Ladan Boroumand Interview / Human Rights and Democracy in Iran Also Ghosh, Cohen, Brivati, Townshend & more |1|
Founder & Editor Alan Johnson Editorial Assistant Peter Stanley Advisory Editors: Gerard Alexander Michael Allen Paul Anderson Jane Ashworth Harry Barnes Paul Berman Jean Bethke Elshtain John Bew Brian Brivati Joshua Cohen Nick Cohen Marc Cooper Thomas Cushman Jonathan Derbyshire Robert Fine Eve Garrard Norman Geras Linda Grant Johann Hari David Hirsh Christopher Hitchens Marko Attila Hoare Quintin Hoare Micheline R. Ishay Faleh A. Jabar Oliver Kamm
Sunder Katwala Irfan Khawaja John Lloyd Denis MacShane MP Branka Magaš Kanan Makiya Chibli Mallat Brendan O’Leary Jon Pike Barry Rubin Khalid Salih Martin Shaw John Vail Bert Ward Francis Wheen Barry Winter Sami Zubaida Address Democratiya c/o Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, suite 2008, New York, NY 10025. Email
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Democratiya was founded in 2005 as a free quarterly online journal of social democratic and antitotalitarian politics and culture. 16 issues were published before Democratiya merged with the American democratic left magazine Dissent in Autumn 2009. To access the Democratiya archive please visit the Dissent website.
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2005 Founding Statement Democratiya aims to contribute to a renewal of the politics of democratic radicalism by providing a forum for serious analysis and debate. We will strive to be non-sectarian and ecumenical, and our pages are open to a wide range of political views, a commitment to pluralism reflected in our advisory editorial board Democratiya believes that in a radically changed world parts of the left have backed themselves into an incoherent and negativist ‘anti-imperialist’ corner, losing touch with long-held democratic, egalitarian and humane values. In some quarters, the complexity of the post-cold-war world, and of US foreign policy as it has developed since 9/11, has been reduced to another ‘Great Contest’: ‘The Resistance’ (or ‘Multitude’) against ‘Imperialism’ (or ‘Empire’). This world-view has ushered back in some of the worst habits of mind that dominated parts of the left in the Stalinist period: manicheanism, reductionism, apologia, denial, cynicism. Grossly simplifying tendencies of thought, not least the disastrous belief that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ are once again leading to the abandonment of democrats, workers, women and gays who get on the wrong side of ‘anti-imperialists’ (who are considered ‘progressive’ simply because they’re anti-American). We democrats will fare better if we are guided by a positive animating ethic and seek modes of realization through serious discussion and practical reform efforts. Democratiya will stand for the human rights of victims of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. We will be, everywhere, pro-democracy, pro-labour rights, pro-women’s rights, pro-gay rights, pro-liberty, pro-reason and pro-social justice. Against anti-modernism, irrationalism, fear of freedom, loathing of the woman, and the cult of master-slave human relations we stand for the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Democracy, even for the ‘poorest he’. Liberte, egalite, fraternite. The rights of man. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those precious ideas were rendered the inheritance of all by the social democratic, feminist and egalitarian revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No one left behind. No one. We are partisans and artisans of this fighting faith and we pit it against what Paul Berman has called ‘the paranoid and apocalyptic nature of the totalitarian mindset’. © Democratiya
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DEMOCRATIYA 9 Summer 2007 Contents Alan Johnson | Editor’s Page
6
Andrei Markovits | Why Europe Dislikes America
12
Thomas Cushman | Anti-Americanism as Totem
23
Sanjukta Ghosh | Feminisms in India
33
Peter Tatchell | Gay Pride in Moscow
40
David Zarnett | Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution
43
Irfan Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist
54
Nick Cohen | Orwell in Tribune
67
Brian Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide
73
Norman Geras | Deficits of International Law
87
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Peter Ryley | Miall on Conflict Resolution
97
Oren Ipp | Elster on Transitional Justice
100
Marko Attila Hoare | Framing the Balkan Wars
109
Jules Townshend | Ronald Dworkin on Democracy
118
Dick Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution
122
Michael Ezra | Arendt in New York
141
Claude Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism
166
Robert Fine | Three Comments on Claude Lefort
187
Ladan Boroumand | Interview / Democracy in Iran
192
Letters Page | Rayyan Al-Shawaf and Noga Emanuel
217
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Editor’s Page Alan Johnson ‘My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease,’ wailed the British novelist Margaret Drabble in 2003. Jean Baudrillard, the late French postmodernist philosopher, writing in Le Monde, also settled on the image of possession to capture his response to 9/11. ‘How we have dreamt of this event … How all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic ... It is they (the terrorists) who acted, but we who wanted the deed.’ The political right, of course, can also be anti-American. As Timothy Garton Ash has observed, ‘To the [French] Gaullists, America is a culture so self-evidently moronic that only stumptoothed inbred Appalachian lardbutts could possibly fall for it.’ Sophistication is no barrier to the prejudice. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought Americans ‘had no passion, hardly speak at all, never caress one another, care about nothing, and are lazy.’ Andrei Markovits has written a landmark book about European anti-Americanism, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, and we are pleased to reproduce some extracts with the kind permission of Princeton University Press. Thomas Cushman reviews Uncouth Nation, and explores the idea that anti-Americanism is nothing less than a totem, a symbolic emblem of the European tribe: ‘what Markovits wants us to know is that [US] actions do less to produce anti-Americanism than to mobilise a deep-seated and obdurate cultural discourse which is latent within European culture and which functions to forge the very cultural dispositions of Europeans themselves.’ Sanjukta Ghosh reviews Feminism In India, an anthology of feminist essays edited by Maitrayee Chaudhur which traces the history of feminism from colonial times to contemporary India and explores the variety of Indian feminisms and their theoretical trajectories. Ghosh has a warning: ‘a return to “tradition” paradoxically might also limit efforts at liberation because it re-inscribes an essentialist, absolute and fixed notion of culture and tradition,’ while ‘goddess-inspired Hindu feminism … has not only marginalised and alienated women in minority communities, but has also opened by possibilities of further exploitation of these very communities by the Hindu Right and the demarcation of more restrictive and repressive cultural lines.’
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Johnson | Editor’s Page Democratiya advisory editor Peter Tatchell was assaulted in Moscow recently as he supported the city’s Gay Pride March. We publish his keynote address to the Moscow Pride conference on 26 May 2007 and wish him a speedy recovery. David Zarnett examines the late Edward Said’s influential analysis of the Iranian Revolution as ‘a locus of some key errors – of denial, evasion, and abstract categorial thinking immune to the facts – that led to such a gross miscalculation on the part of so many American Leftists.’ Zarnett critiques the Saidian approach to Middle East politics as unable to comprehend ‘the primary motives of these actors or to grant them an autonomy outside the categories of “orientalism” or “blowback”’ and he concludes, with Kanan Makiya, that ‘in the face of immense cruelty directed towards actual Arabs and Muslims, the Saidian intellectual can be curiously silent.’ Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist has attracted worldwide attention. Irfan Khawaja offers a brilliant and iconoclastic reading that challenges those reviewers who ‘seem to have read it in remarkably similar ways – as a “cautionary” tale about how “we” create “their” rage.’ Khawaja, suggests that it be read differently: ‘as an exploration of how “they” produce their own rage, often out of the commonplace disappointments of ordinary life.’ Khawaja also argues that the novel can be read ‘for how mindless attachments to such confected identities as “Muslim sensibility,” “Pakistani nation” and “People of the Indus River Basin” serve to distort history, deny agency, and produce self-deception, envy, and selfcontempt. On this reading, the novel is less a mirror than it is a window, and what it shows the reader is depressing, but decidedly not the reader’s problem.’ ‘The outstanding example of the dissident intellectual who preferred above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth,’ was Christopher Hitchens verdict on George Orwell. Who keeps Orwell’s flame alive in Britain today? Hitchens, of course, is now an American. He introduces himself to US audiences with the words ‘My Fellow Americans,’ having attended his citizenship ceremony on Jefferson’s birthday with Ayaan Hirsi Ali as his guest. (We should note that she has been driven from Europe to take refuge in the uncouth nation.) Observer columnist (and Democratiya advisory editor) Nick Cohen reviews Orwell in Tribune: ‘As I Please’ and Other Writings 1943-7, an ‘intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection’ of Orwell’s Tribune columns, put together by ex-Tribune editor Paul Anderson. This issue contains four pieces that explore ongoing debates about genocide, humanitarian intervention conflict resolution and transitional justice.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Brian Brivati examines Martin Shaw’s new book What is Genocide?, reading Shaw’s suggested new definition critically in the light cast by Raphael Lemkin’s pioneering work in the 1930s and 1940s (which Brivati reconstructs to great effect) and by the lessons of the enormities of the recent past. Norman Geras in a talk to the conference ‘Solidarity and Rights: The Euston Manifesto one year on,’ held on 30 May 2007, argued that ‘although peace is an opposite of war, war is not the only opposite of peace. Today more than ever, a just international juridical system, and a peace movement supporting it, need to integrate this insight, by aiming to place the prohibition on aggressive war within an effective set of restraints and remedies against states that do violence to their own peoples.’ In this regard, he considers four deficits of international law. Peter Ryley reviews Hugh Miall’s Emergent Conflict and Peaceful Change which studies the dynamics of peaceful conflict resolution as a necessary part of social change using game theory and systems theory to identify the factors that inhibit the incidence of war. Ryley argues the book is valuable but flirts with what he calls – in a striking phrase redolent of C. Wright Mills notion of ‘crackpot realism’ – that ‘crackpot pacifism’ of our times that ignores oppression, excuses violence, and seeks to rationalise away genuine threats through wishful thinking. Oren Ipp, an organiser in the Kabul office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, reviews Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy, a collection of essays on the role of transitional justice in democratic transitions, edited by Jon Elster. The book explores ‘how and why democratising countries, from the post-World War II era to the present, have chosen to deal with their respective pasts.’ Ipp discusses how we might choose a path to provide justice without destabilising or undermining the transition to democracy. He helpfully draws out some general principles of transitional justice from Elster’s case studies. By returning again and again to the lessons of the Balkan wars of the 1990s Marko Attila Hoare’s Democratiya essays have mapped with precision and style several of the tropes of a liberal-left that has ‘lost its way.’ Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia by Ivo Zanic is ‘a brilliant study of how motifs drawn from the common post-Ottoman cultural heritage of Serbs, Croats, and Muslim were manipulated in an often contradictory manner by politicians and warlords from all three nationalities for the purposes of self-legitimisation and
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Johnson | Editor’s Page nationalist mobilisation during the 1990s.’ But Hoare argues that the political misuse of symbols and signifiers was not the preserve of the warring nationalists of the region. It was during those wars that the Western Left honed the technique of evoking ‘elements of a beloved ideological heritage’ in order to sell ‘anti-imperialism.’ Fascist dictatorships become ‘regimes independent of the West’; their domestic opponents become ‘stooges of imperialism’; genocide becomes simply ‘atrocities’; supporting international action against fascism or genocide is ‘imperialism’; even denouncing fascism or genocide is ‘media demonisation’ or ‘diverting attention from Iraq/Israel.’ Insistence on supposedly ‘correct’ terminology slips easily into moral relativism. Jules Townshend reviews Ronald Dworkin’s essay Is Democracy Possible Here? Dworkin thinks a ‘yahboo’ discourse has polarised US politics and contends that Republicans and Democrats, and their respective supporters, would stop talking past each other if only they both realised that they shared a common ground: the two principles of human dignity. That every human life is intrinsically and equally valuable, and that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realising the value of their own life – the former principle often associated with the Left, the latter with the Right – is offered as a kind of ‘Third Way’ in political philosophy. Townshend is unpersuaded that this is a useful way to do political philosophy. Besides, he argues, ‘the kind of egalitarianism [Dworkin] advocates is limited to offsetting the luck of the genes or the vagaries of the market, rather than the systemic biases of class and imbalances of bargaining strength that even Adam Smith recognised.’ We learn from Carole Angier’s biography of Primo Levi of the fragile stability (or ‘metastability’ as the Chemist has it) of all living things. Levi stretched the idea, as was his wont, to the social world, writing, ‘All of mankind today [is] condemned and accustomed to living in a world which seems stable and is not, in which awesome energies (and I am not speaking only of nuclear arsenals) sleep a light sleep.’ Dick Howard’s essay contains much of this temper as he considers the living thing that is the American Republic. If we are to follow Franklin’s instruction and ‘keep it,’ Howard argues, we need the kind of grown-up political thinking and wary appreciation of the intractability of the specific ‘problems of our age’ that Hannah Arendt demonstrated in On Revolution. By returning to her reading of the American Revolution, and of the founding of the Republic, Howard believes we might come to understand that ‘The problem is not the goals of the neo-conservatives; the problem is their political naiveté which forgets the interconnectedness of thought
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 and event, authority and action, politics and possibility. Neo-conservatism is an anti-political politics that lives in an eternal present – which is one reason that the Americans were so unprepared once their victorious arms fell silent.’ In autumn 1963, a public meeting sponsored by Dissent took place at what Irving Howe later described as ‘the seedy Hotel Diplomat’ in midtown Manhattan. The topic was Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. The passions that raged that night formed part of what Anson Rabinbach has called ‘the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning the Holocaust that has ever taken place.’ In a detailed piece of historical scholarship Michael Ezra reconstructs the dispute and assesses ‘the Eichmann polemics.’ We are delighted to publish ‘What is totalitarianism?’ by the French social and political theorist Claude Lefort, as well as a critical response, ‘Three comments on Lefort,’ by Robert Fine. Lefort once summed up his own project as ‘interpreting or reinterpreting the political with a view to addressing the questions that arise from our time.’ It is this quality that Fine identifies as the ‘crucial contribution of theorists of totalitarianism to contemporary social theory … they confront what Hannah Arendt called “the burden of events” in history.’ In short, the antitotalitarian writers stared into the abyss and, as Arendt put it, neither denied its existence nor submitted meekly to its weight. Not coming back empty-handed from hell, the antitotalitarians offer us – to borrow a phrase from Lionel Trilling that I picked up from Gertrude Himmelfarb – ‘the elements that are wanted’ in so much political theory, if we can only learn how to look. A student of Claude Lefort, Ladan Boroumand, is the subject of the Democratiya interview. She is research director at The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. Boroumand discusses her upbringing in Iran in a prominent family of the liberal opposition to the Shah, her experience in Paris as a student where she met and tried to question Khomeini, and as a witness to the revolution in Tehran. She talks movingly about her disillusionment with the Islamic Revolution, and about the ‘encounter with evil’ when her father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, a leader of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, was assassinated in Paris on April 18 1991. She discusses her political ideas, which have been developed in studies of both the French and the Iranian Revolutions. La Guerre des principes (1999) is an important study of the tensions between the ‘rights of man’ and the ‘sovereignty of the nation’ during the French Revolution (a theme also central to Dick Howard’s essay in this issue).
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Johnson | Editor’s Page In a series of influential articles Boroumand has identified a lineage running ‘from the guillotine, and the Cheka to the suicide bomber’ and the interview explores this controversial idea. Prospects for both the Iranian reform movement and for a reformation of Islam are discussed, as is the work of Omid, a human rights and memory project of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation.
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Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America Andrei Markovits Editor's Note: We are pleased to make available extracts from Andrei Markovits' Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton University Press, 2007). This book has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany, has praised its 'deep insights into anti-Americanism in Europe today' while Michael Walzer has summed up its achievement thus: 'Andrei Markovits does three things in this excellent book: he provides an account of the historical and contemporary forms of European anti-Americanism (and of its close relative, anti-Semitism); he analyzes the roots and causes of this phenomenon; and, best of all, he gives us a running critique of the frequent silliness and malice of the anti-Americans and of their role in fashioning a certain kind, which is not the best possible kind, of pan-European politics.' These extracts – part of the Preface and the Introduction – are reproduced with the kind permission of, and are copyrighted by, Princeton University Press. Preface (extract) (…) Lastly, there is yet another personal dimension informing this book and project. It pertains to my life-long affinity with the democratic left in Europe and the United States. There can be no doubt that anti-Americanism has become a kind of litmus test for progressive thinking and identity in Europe and the world (including the United States itself ). Just as any self-respecting progressive and leftist in Europe or America, regardless of which political shade, simply had to be on the side of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism have become the requisite proof of possessing a progressive conviction today. In making this comparison I am not trying to equate the morality of these two tests of progressive character – on the contrary. The high moral legitimacy that support for the Spanish Republic enjoyed on the part of the European and American Left at that time is something that in my view neither anti-Zionism nor anti-Americanism can claim. This example of the interwar-era Spanish Republic merely serves to illustrate the
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Markovits | Why Europe Dislikes America similarly potent and almost universal mobilizing power of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism for today's Left. In the 1930s it was impossible to be regarded as any kind of leftist without having supported the Spanish Republic (with the exception – briefly and after the fact – of those Stalinists during the Hitler-Stalin pact who toed the Comintern line chastising anti-Franco activists as 'premature antifascists'); today it is hard to be accepted as a leftist by other leftists without antiAmericanism and anti-Zionism. Over the last 35 years, a steady anti-Americanism and an uncompromising anti-Zionism which surely not always but most definitely occasionally borders on the anti-Semitic, have become key characteristics that both divide and determine political identity absolutely. They are 'wedge issues' – clear articles of faith or 'deal breakers' – whose importance overshadows, and even negates, many related components of the 'clusters' that characterize such an identity. I can explain this using myself as an illustration: I am an advocate of affirmative action in all realms of public life; a supporter for decades of numerous civil rights organizations, who is in favor of complete equality for women and discriminated ethnic groups, especially blacks, in the United States; I am an opponent of the death penalty; I favor legally recognized marriages for gays and lesbians; I support the right of all women to complete and exclusive autonomy over their bodies, in other words, the right to an abortion; I support unrestricted stem cell research, an issue on which the European Left incidentally shares views that are far closer to those of the much-hated George W. Bush than they are to mine; I favor the Kyoto Climate Protocol and the International Criminal Court, the Ottawa Conventions on the ban of land mines and the International Biological Weapons Convention; I do not want prayers in public schools and oppose charter schools; I favor strict gun control laws and – as an animal rights activist – oppose hunting for sport; I have always supported trade unions in their difficult struggles, always favor increases in the minimum wage, have never broken a strike or crossed a picket line, even when I did not agree with the striking union's demands; I welcome the legalization of marijuana, advocate a more just and socially conscious health care system, desire progressive taxation and a much greater role for the public sector in economic matters; I am a decisive opponent of subsidies for rich American (and European) farmers, deride the exclusivity and price gouging of the pharmaceutical industry, oppose the trafficking in women and the exploitation of children, and am appalled by the erosion of civil liberties in the United States as well as by the shameful situation in Guantanamo and the outrageous abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. I have been a committed supporter of American and German labor, and have been a student and partial, if often critical, admirer of European social democracy and its Green offspring.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 In terms of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, I have always supported the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state and have held views that have been akin to the Israeli peace camp's. I have regularly condemned and opposed certain measures of American foreign policy, regardless of which party needed to be held responsible (whether the Vietnam policy of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson or the Iraq policy of Republican George W. Bush), and I have therefore – as should be obvious from the above list – positioned myself quite clearly on the left side of the political spectrum in America (and Europe as well). Yet I am increasingly avoided by leftists on both sides of the Atlantic owing solely to the two wedge issues mentioned above. As a reaction against this, I find myself having withdrawn from the established American and European lefts in whose presence I feel increasingly misplaced. I am not writing this to elicit sympathy for my increasing political marginalization but rather to make a point of how central anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism have become to virtually all lefts on both sides of the Atlantic – and beyond. Introduction Any trip to Europe confirms what the surveys have been finding: The aversion to America is becoming greater, louder, more determined. [1] It is unifying West Europeans more than any other political emotion – with the exception of a common hostility toward Israel. In today's West Europe these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes. They constitute common fare among West Europe's cultural and media elites, but also throughout society itself from London to Athens and from Stockholm to Rome, even if European politicians visiting Washington or European professors at international conferences about anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are adamant about denying or sugar-coating this reality. There can be no doubt that many disastrous and irresponsible policies by the Bush administrations, as well as their haughty demeanour and arrogant tone, have contributed massively to this unprecedented vocal animosity on the part of Europeans toward Americans and America. George W. Bush and his administrations' policies have made America into the most hated country of all time. Indeed, they bear responsibility for having created a situation in which anti-Americanism has mutated into a sort of global antinomy, a mutually shared language of opposition to and resistance against the real and perceived ills of modernity that are now inextricably identified solely with America. I have been travelling back and forth
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Markovits | Why Europe Dislikes America with considerable frequency between the United States and Europe since 1960, and I cannot recall a time like the present, when such a vehement aversion to everything American has been articulated in Europe. 'There has probably never been a time when America was held in such low esteem on this side of the Atlantic' wrote the distinguished British Political Scientist Anthony King in The Daily Telegraph on July 3, 2006, summarizing a survey that revealed a new nadir in the British view of America. No West European country is exempt from this phenomenon – not a single social class, no age group or profession, nor either gender. But this aversion and antipathy reaches much deeper and wider than the frequently evoked 'antiBushism.' Indeed, I perceive this virulent, Europe-wide, and global 'anti-Bushism' as the glaring tip of a massive anti-American iceberg. Anti-Americanism has been promoted to the status of West Europe's lingua franca. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and during the dispute over NATO's 'Dual Track' decision (to station Pershing and cruise missiles primarily in Germany but in other West European countries as well while negotiating with the Soviet Union over arms reduction), things were different. Each event met with a European public that was divided concerning its position toward America: In addition to those who reacted with opposition and protest, there were strong forces in almost all European countries who expressed appreciation and understanding. In France, arguably Europe's leader over the past fifteen years in most matters related to antipathy toward America, the prospect of stationing American medium-range missiles, especially if they were on German soil, even met with the massive approval of the Left in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This distinguished the French Left, arguably among the most ardently antiAmerican protagonists anywhere in contemporary Europe, from all of its European counterparts. That America's image was far from hunky dory in the Europe of the mid-1980s but still far exceeded its nadir reached since 9/11 and the Iraq War is attested to by the following passage from a Pew Survey: The numbers paint a depressing picture. Just a quarter of the French approve of U.S. policies, and the situation is only slightly better in Japan and Germany. Majorities in many countries say America's strong military presence actually increases the chances for war. And most people believe America's global influence is expanding. The latest survey on America's tarnished global image? No, those numbers come from a poll conducted by Newsweek . . . in 1983. The United States has been down this road before, struggling with a battered image and drawing little in the way of support even from close allies. But for a variety of reasons, this time it is different:
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 the anti-Americanism runs broader and deeper than ever before. And it's getting worse. [2] To be sure, as this study will be careful to delineate, opposition to U.S. policies in no way connotes anti-Americanism. But even in the allegedly halcyon days of pre1990 West European–American relations, a palpable antipathy to things American on the part of European elites accompanied opposition to policies. However, the climate between then and now has changed fundamentally. The fact that European elites – particularly conservative ones – have consistently been antiAmerican since 1776 is one of this book's central themes. But as of October 2001, six to eight weeks after 9/11 and just before the impending American war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a massive Europe-wide resentment of America commenced that reached well beyond American policies, American politics, and the American government and proliferated in virtually all segments of Western Europe's publics. From grandmothers who vote for the archconservative Bavarian CSU to thirty-year-old socialist PASOK activists in Greece, from Finnish Social Democrats to French Gaullists, from globalization opponents to business managers – all are joining in the ever louder chorus of the anti-Americans. The 'European street' has been more hostile to America than ever before. For the first time, antiAmericanism has entered the European mainstream. [3] If anti-Americanism has been part of the condition humaine in Europe for at least two centuries, it has been since 9/11 that the rise of a hitherto unprecedented, wholly voluntary, and uncoordinated conformity in Western European public opinion regarding America and American politics occurred. I would go so far as to characterize the public voice and mood in these countries as gleichgeschaltet, comprising a rare but powerful discursive and emotive congruence and conformity among all actors in state and society. What rendered this Gleichschaltung so different from those that accompany most dictatorships was its completely voluntary, thus democratic, nature. Especially leading up to and during the Iraq War, there appeared an almost perfect concordance among a vast majority of European public opinion, the European 'street' by way of the largest demonstrations in European history, the media, most political parties, and many – if certainly not all – European governments. Western Europe spoke loudly and passionately with a unified voice that one rarely, if ever, encountered in such openly contested pluralist democracies. The Bush administrations' policies have catapulted global and West European antiAmericanism into overdrive. But to understand this 'overdrive,' we need to analyze
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Markovits | Why Europe Dislikes America the conditions under which this kind of shift into high gear could occur. This book is intended to make such a contribution. Its aim is to show that the West Europeans' unconditional rejection of and legitimate outrage over abusive and irresponsible American policies – not to mention massive human rights violations a` la Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA cells, and others of such ilk – rest on a substantial sediment of hatred toward, disdain for, and resentment of America that has a long tradition in Europe and has flourished apart from these or any policies. Here, in short, is the book's overall argument: Ambivalence, antipathy, and resentment toward and about the United States have comprised an important component of European culture since the American Revolution at the latest, thus way before America became the world's 'Mr. Big' – the proverbial eight-hundredpound gorilla – and a credible rival to Europe's main powers, particularly Britain and France. In recent years, following the end of the Cold War and particularly after 9/11, ambivalence in some quarters has given way to outright antipathy and unambiguous hostility. Animosity toward the United States migrated from the periphery and disrespected fringes of European politics and became a respectable part of the European mainstream. These negative sentiments and views have been driven not only – or even primarily – by what the United States does, but rather by an animus against what Europeans have believed that America is. AntiAmericanism has been a core element, indeed at times a dominant one, among European elites for centuries. The presidency of George W. Bush, the American response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and Bush's unilateral decision to commence the war against Iraq all led to a dramatic increase in hostility to the United States in Europe's 'respectable' opinion. Moreover, for the first time since World War II, long-standing elite resentments against the United States fused with popular sentiments to create a kind of political and cultural perfect storm: Short-term crises brought long-standing antipathies to the surface. While the politics, style, and discourse of the Bush administrations – and of George W. Bush as a person – have undoubtedly exacerbated anti-American sentiment among Europeans and fostered a heretofore unmatched degree of unity between elite and mass opinion in Europe, they are not anti-Americanism's cause. Indeed, a change to a center-left administration in Washington, led by a Democratic president, would not bring about its abatement, let alone disappearance. Chapter 1 features my definition and conceptualization of anti-Americanism. In particular, I argue that anti-Americanism constitutes a particular prejudice
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 that renders it not only acceptable but indeed commendable in the context of an otherwise welcome development in a discourse that favours the weak. Chapter 2 presents some historical features of European anti-Americanism in order to demonstrate that all of its present components have been alive and well in Europe's intellectual discourse since the late eighteenth century. In particular, this chapter highlights how integral and ubiquitous the anti-American tropes about Americans' alleged venality, mediocrity, uncouthness, lack of culture, and above all inauthenticity have been to European elite opinion for well over two hundred years. Chapter 3 features a bevy of examples from many walks of life that highlight the pervasive and quotidian nature of anti-American discourse among European publics. I have collected all my examples from areas outside of what one would conventionally associate with politics precisely to demonstrate that the European animus against things American has little to do with the politics and policies of the Bush administration – or any other administration, for that matter – and is alive and well in realms that prima facie have few connections to politics. I consider many examples from diverse topics, such as language, sports, work, higher education, the media, health, law and the judicial system, and miscellaneous items (the presence of Halloween, for instance) in seven West European countries to demonstrate that the antipathy toward America and things American reaches much beyond politics and the discourse of one or two countries alone. By analyzing a bevy of newspaper and magazine articles from the 1990s, I hope to demonstrate that the presence and passion of anti-American discourse among Europeans much preceded the administrations of George W. Bush. The West European media report almost nothing that they associate with America in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner. Most things engender a palpable tone of irritation, derision, annoyance, dismissal. Terms such as 'Americanization' and its equivalents – 'American conditions, ' for example – have in the meantime assumed an exclusively pejorative connotation in present European discourse. They have become a Schimpfwort, a derogatory term for anything that one wants to discredit and stigmatize even if the issue at hand might have little to do with the real existing America or its conditions. To show that these prima facie innocuous put-downs of American things (so what if one dislikes the alleged 'Americanization' of cricket, of political correctness, of spelling, of antismoking laws, of family life, of business practices) do cumulatively constitute a palpably negative whole, I then proceed to summarize in chapter 4 the
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Markovits | Why Europe Dislikes America findings of some key surveys of the recent past that leave no doubt that a majority of Europeans have come to dislike America, if not with massive passion, then surely with a tangible opinion that matters politically. Anti-Semitism is the subject of chapter 5. Rather than viewing this chapter as an in-depth analysis of anti-Semitism in contemporary Western Europe, I devote attention to this phenomenon solely because anti-Semitism has consistently been such an integral part of anti-Americanism and because the virulence in the hostility to Israel cannot be understood without the presence of anti-Americanism and hostility to the United States. Thus, I see my presentation of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism as a subset of my larger discussion of anti-Americanism. AntiSemitism's connection to anti-Americanism appears to be empirically forceful and compelling if conceptually far from necessary or stringent. The same pertains to the relation between anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli policies, even Israel's existence as a state. While opposition to Israeli policies and to Israel's existence are in and of themselves far from being anti-Semitic in any conceptually stringent manner, both do in reality – and despite protests to the contrary – often include anti-Semitic tropes and moments. These, in turn accompany anti-Americanism. In this syndrome, Israel, due to its association with the United States, is eo ipso perceived by its European critics as powerful, with both being mere extensions of one another. Being an American ally and also powerful in its own right renders Israel an obvious target on the part of most European critics who oppose both power in general and American power in particular. But there must be something else at work here as well, because America has many other powerful allies that never receive anywhere near the hostile scrutiny that Israel confronts on a daily basis. No European academic has attempted to boycott British – or for that matter Spanish or French – universities because Britain, Spain, and France are American allies that happen to be very powerful and can easily be construed – certainly from the logic of the sanctity of national liberation that has been so central to the Left since the late 1960s – to occupy foreign land in Ulster, the Basque Country, or Corsica, respectively. So it is not only because Israel is an American ally and powerful that it has so massively irked European elites and publics for decades. Clearly, the fact that Israel is primarily a Jewish state, combined with Europe's deeply problematic and unresolved history with Jews, plays a central role in this singularly difficult relationship. Since this issue invariably accompanies European anti-Americanism and Europe's irritations with America, it had to be considered in this book.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 In chapter 6, I conclude my study by arguing that Europe's anti-Americanism has become an essential ingredient in – perhaps even a key mobilizing agent for – the inevitable formation of a common European identity, which I have always longed for and continue to support vigorously, though I would have preferred to witness a different agency in its creation. Anti-Americanism, I argue, has already commenced to forge a concrete, emotionally experienced – as opposed to intellectually constructed – European identity in which Swedes and Greeks, Finns and Italians are helped to experience their still-frail emotive commonality not as 'anti-Americans' but as Europeans, which at this stage constitutes one sole thing: that they are 'nonAmericans.' Anti-Americanism will serve as a useful mobilizing agent to create awareness in Europe for that continent's new role as a growing power bloc in explicit contrast to and keen competition with the United States, not only among Europeans but also around the globe. Anti-Americanism has already begun to help create a unified European voice in global politics and will continue to be of fine service to Europe's growing power in a new global constellation of forces in which an increasingly assertive Europe will join an equally assertive China to challenge the United States on every issue that it possibly can. Thus, I argue, for the first time in anti-Americanism's two-century existence among Europe's elites – hitherto particularly pronounced among its cultural and conservative representatives – antiAmericanism has now assumed a 'functional' role of mobilization and in politics. It now matters because it might in fact affect things. Or to use the language of the social sciences: Anti-Americanism in Europe has begun to mutate from the world of having been almost exclusively a 'dependent variable' to becoming an 'independent' one as well. Two important qualifications need mention as this introduction's closing thoughts. First, anti-Americanism in Europe has always been accompanied by an equally discernable pro-Americanism, which, though less apparent these days, has far from disappeared. From America's 'discovery' by Europeans, it has consistently embodied for them simultaneous opposites: heaven and hell; a desired panacea and a despised abomination; utopia and dystopia; dream and nightmare. Surely, any analysis of Europe's relations with America, or a comprehensive assessment of how Europeans viewed America over the past 250 years, would necessarily have to include proAmericanism alongside anti-Americanism. But that is not my project here. I am not weighting European anti-Americanism vs. European pro-Americanism in this book. Of course there were eras in European history during which it could easily be argued that pro-American sentiments outweighed anti-American ones. But even during these times – such as after World War II and during the height of the
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Markovits | Why Europe Dislikes America Cold War – anti-Americanism never disappeared from European discourse and sentiment. This book is not about the history of European-American relations, nor is it an account of how Europeans perceived America over time. Instead, it focuses solely on the very real phenomenon of the persistence and current accentuation of an antipathy that – I believe, as have others – is worthy of an expose´ all its own. While any analysis of the relation between Gentiles and Jews would, by necessity, have to include philo-Semitism alongside anti-Semitism, I believe that the study of the latter all its own is valid. The same pertains to racism. Surely, any solid treatise of relations between or among different ethnic groups or races necessitates a presentation of all aspects of these relations, both positive and negative. However, a study solely of the negative and pejorative – i.e., racism – remains valid in and of itself. The same pertains to a study of anti-Americanism. Second, this book deals exclusively with the countries of 'Old Europe,' featuring Germany and Britain in particular, with France accorded solid attention as well, and complemented with examples from Spain, Italy, Austria, and Portugal (as well as Greece in chapter 5). Obviously, the Scandinavian and Benelux countries would have been worthy of consideration, but a cursory acquaintance with their views of America allows me to believe that the results presented here would not have been noticeably different. This would not have been the case with Ireland's inclusion since a strong pro-American sentiment continues to prevail on the levels of both elite and mass opinion in that country. However, the book's most serious shortcoming in my view is its complete exclusion of Eastern Europe because all indications point to the strong fact that my findings there – in terms of both the present and the past – would have been diametrically opposite to the ones I encountered in the western half of the continent. In addition to purely pedestrian reasons for this omission, which pertain to my ignorance of any East European language beyond Hungarian and Romanian, and lack of temporal and monetary resources, one methodologically sound argument might at least partially justify this restricted presentation of Europe: Eastern Europeans' overwhelmingly positive views of America stem largely from their having perceived the United States as their sole ally against the much-despised Soviet Union. Thus, for this study, the comparability of contemporary anti-Americanism in France, Germany, and Britain is much more conceptually stringent and theoretically compelling than it would be with Poland, Hungary, and Romania thrown into the mix since all the countries considered in this study have furnished, in a political, economic, cultural, and – except Austria – military alliance with the United States, what was once known as 'the West.' [4]
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007
Andrei Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Notes
[1] By using the term 'America' and 'American' throughout this study to denote the political entity of 'The United States of America,' I beg the indulgence of all readers who reside north or south of the respective borders of the United States and are thus, of course, 'American' though not citizens of the United States. I am using the concepts 'America' and 'American' not in their wider and more accurate geographic meaning but in their much more commonly used manner as representing one country, the United States of America. But particularly in a work on 'antiAmericanism,' I feel justified in doing so since the term itself has always applied 'exclusively to the United States and not to Canada or Mexico or any other nation in the New World. Many who complain bitterly that the United States has unjustifiably appropriated the label of America have nonetheless gladly allowed that anti-Americanism should refer only to the United States.' James W. Ceaser, 'A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism,' The Public Interest, Summer 2003, pp. 3 – 18. Nobody in Europe, with the exception of German speakers, refers to U.S. citizens regularly as 'U.S.-Americans' or has routinely added the qualifier 'U.S' to virtually anything American; not even the French talk about 'EU-Américains.' I will address this particular German neologism when discussing concrete examples of recent anti-Americanism in Germany later in this book. [2] The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 'Anti-Americanism: Causes and Characteristics,' The Pew Global Attitudes Project (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2003), p. 1. [3] Glenn Frankel, 'Sneers from Across the Atlantic: Anti-Americanism Moves to W. Europe's Political Mainstream,' Washington Post, February 11, 2003. [4] Austria's entire post-World War II existence has been anchored in its bloc-free neutrality, which means that the country has explicitly not entered into any official political and military alliance with the United States. Still, there can be no question that by dint of its strong cultural ties to Germany and Western Europe, and – above all – by virtue of its capitalist economic structure, Austria's neutrality was equidistant from East and West in name only. The realities on the ground placed Austria squarely in the camp of the West and thus the Europe closer to the United Sates than to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
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Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America
by Andrei Markovits, Princeton University Press, 2007, 275 pp.
Thomas Cushman Introduction Most Americans, who have travelled to Europe, regardless of their political sympathies, race, class or gender, will be all too familiar with the topic of this wonderfully readable, sociologically powerful, and courageous new book by Andrei Markovits. The following scenario might be familiar to some readers: you are at a conference in Europe and you are sitting in a café with your European colleagues. The topic of America comes up. It could be politics, or culture, the behaviour of the Bush administration or the recent successes of a string of very bad movies. Or, it could be praise of someone or something, a political leader or a very bad movie which is critical of the United States. Based on past experience, you sense beneath the veneer of civility what is to come. You pre-emptively opine that you don’t speak for all Americans and that in general you most likely share the perspective of your liberal-minded interlocutors. To no avail, though. Soon the delivery of the questions ramps up, each member of the group sustaining and supporting each other member’s lines of attack. Why is your president prosecuting a foolish war? Why won’t the US sign the Treaty of Rome? Why does America not realise the dangers of global warming and sign the Kyoto protocols? Why does America consider itself exceptional and resist civilised European ideas of cosmopolitan citizenship? Soon, such seemingly reasonable questions descend into more general and even essentialist forms: why are Americans so violent? Why does America insist on war when the rest of the ‘world community’ dreams of perpetual peace? Why are Americans so stupid so as to elect George Bush as president not once but twice? A German whose father was an SS officer, a Frenchman whose uncle was a Nazi collaborator, or a Briton whose grandfather massacred Boers in South Africa might ask these questions, incidentally. And they might be asked on European soil, of which George Orwell once said that not one grain was unstained by blood. Soon, you feel as if you are on trial, and you have become, despite all efforts to the contrary, the totem of your ‘people’ around which those present have now
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 become a collective ‘other,’ united if even for a brief moment by the evil spirits they have conjured for the occasion. You either profusely apologise to your colleagues for being an American and express shame, regret or self-loathing and in this case you may maintain some of your standing among them. Or you just go quiet and hope that the whole set of issues will just go away, in which case you are guilty of complicity qui tacit consentit – ‘he who is silent consents.’ Or you fight back, acknowledging the criticisms of your country, but defending other aspects of your own society. And if you choose this latter course, you will invariably be labelled as that which your European interlocutors need for their own sense of self-identity more than anything else: an ugly, uncouth American. Anti-Americanism, with its infinitude of ethnographic mutations, is omnipresent in Europe: in the high halls of academia, in the corridors of power, on the channels of the mass media, street and marketplace, cafes and barrooms, and in the home. As Markovits notes, it is ‘a generalized and comprehensive normative dislike of America and things American that often lacks distinct reasons or concrete causes. Anti-Americanism has all the tropes of a classic prejudice.’ (p. 17). What is most important about anti-Americanism, for Markovits, is that it is an undifferentiated feeling (or what Todd Gitlin refers to as ‘an emotion masquerading as an analysis’) which may be related in some vague way to what America does, but is actually quite independent of that: it is an essentialist discourse which, at its very core, seeks to fix the meaning of ‘America’ and its society and culture in a negative way. Although Markovits doesn’t exactly put it this way, it might be said that, conceptually, America is a kind of vessel which is engorged with socially constructed myths of evil. And it is this shared appreciation of these myths of American evil – its impurity and dangerousness – which acts as a cultural integument holding Europeans together in spite of their quite radical differences and their savage and bloody past. This is the underlying theme of this important new book. Markovits provides us with an in-depth examination of this most enduring and important cultural phenomenon. While it is a global phenomenon, Markovits focuses primarily on anti-Americanism in the countries of Western Europe, in particular in Great Britain, Germany, and France. His task is a contrarian one, since most intellectuals and scholars share a certain proclivity toward anti-Americanism, ranging from a weak form of distaste for America and its culture to a hatred which is unequivocally and unabashedly essentialist and even racist. Among global liberal elites, an attitude of disdain of America is de rigueur and even necessary for admission to the status groups of the cultural elite. And so to write critically of anti-Americanism is, in
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Cushman | Anti-Americanism as Totem a sense, at least from the standpoint of the intellectuals, subversive. In this light, Markovits’s book is a welcome breath of fresh air, for rather than subject himself to the stultifying and conformist force of anti-Americanism, a force which leads many American anti-Americans into a position of isolated self-loathing and cynical bitterness, Markovits goes on the offensive. The result is a powerful critical historical analysis of Europe’s most deep-seated prejudice. America: The Antonymous Other In an opening chapter, Markovits explores the history of European anti-Americanism and notes that ‘an era never existed [in European history] in which European intellectuals and European elites – viewed the United States without a solid base of resentment or better, ressentiment. Accompanying this resentment, one will usually find envy, jealousy, hatred, denigration, as well as a sense of impotence and repressed revenge. Add to this the ingredient of schadenfreude, and this resentment becomes part of a potent mixture of simultaneous feelings of inferiority and superiority.’ (pp. 18-19). The value of Markovits’s account is that he demonstrates an unbroken line of anti-Americanism which has existed since the colonisation of America, intensified during and after the foundation of the republic, and reached its current apogee with the development of the global American empire. From the very beginning, especially among the cultural elites of the countries which were carving up the new continent, America was constructed as a dark and savage place – in Markovits’s terms, an ‘antonymous other’ used as a constant measure of European cultural superiority. Markovits is keen to show us throughout the book that America has constantly served the function of the cultural ‘other,’ the profane force against which a sacred and superior ideology of Europeanism was hammered out. Markovits skilfully excavates the historical discourse of anti-Americanism and shows convincingly that a sense of America as savage, barbaric, vapid, hollow, degenerate and completely lacking in virtue was a fundamental staple of the most prominent European intellectuals and spilled over into European societies at large. Markovits’s archaeology of European anti-Americanism is indispensable to understanding contemporary patterns of anti-Americanism. Sociologically, the data which Markovits presents make an excellent case for taking cultural continuities seriously. Cultures, especially those as strong as the culture of anti-Americanism, persist over the longue duree of history, embedded even within rapidly changing societies, providing the tools which people use to forge and legitimate their own projects
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 and agendas. One would imagine that the almost atavistic tribalism of Europeans, crystallised in an ideology of ‘Europeanism,’ ought to have dissipated with the advent of modernity and the recognition that, despite their differences, Western liberal democracies were united by a common culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Long after the fascists were defeated, anti-Americanism remains alive and well – a deep vein of sentiment and an extremely powerful independent force shaping social outcomes. Run! The Americans are Coming! Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book is Chapter Three, provocatively entitled ‘The Perceived “Americanization” of All Aspects of European Lives: A Discourse of Irritation and Condescension.’ In this chapter, Markovits notes that anti-Americanism is not in any meaningful sense an analytical discourse but an independent force which ‘serves the purpose of confirming and mobilising preexisting [European] prejudices.’ While American actions can bring about spikes in the expression of anti-Americanism, what Markovits wants us to know is that these actions do less to produce anti-Americanism than to mobilise a deep-seated and obdurate cultural discourse which is latent within European culture and which functions to forge the very cultural dispositions of Europeans themselves. In this chapter, Markovits outlines the discourse of the threat of Americanization in Europe. He notes that the term ‘Americanization,’ throughout western Europe, is always a negative one, to use a German word, a ‘Schimpfort (swear word), used frequently by the Right, Left, Center in economics, politics, culture, the social world…’ (p. 85). This chapter brilliantly illustrates just how pervasive negative sentiments about America are in the countries of Western Europe. With his intimate knowledge of European affairs, Markovits is able to extract out the best and most telling examples. My personal favorite, not in the book, is Harold Pinter’s ‘poem,’ God Bless America. Here they go again, The Yanks in their armoured parade Chanting their ballads of joy As they gallop across the big world Praising America’s God.
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Cushman | Anti-Americanism as Totem The gutters are clogged with the dead The ones who couldn’t join in The others refusing to sing The ones who are losing their voice The ones who’ve forgotten the tune. The riders have whips which cut. Your head rolls onto the sand Your head is a pool in the dirt Your head is a stain in the dust Your eyes have gone out and your nose Sniffs only the pong of the dead And all the dead air is alive With the smell of America’s God. Pinter, presumably not on the strength of this effort, was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature and his Nobel Lecture was nothing but a prolonged and vicious attack on the US and the UK. The most telling thing about this sordid political spectacle is not to be found in the ramblings of Pinter himself, but in his selection as the Nobel Laureate by the Nobel Committee, the crème de la crème of the European cultural elite. It was a deliberate act of resistance against the ‘evil’ empire and its crassness was only matched by the sheer banality of Pinter’s utterances. There is no sphere of society that European cultural elites have not identified as being overtly threatened by the insidious process of Americanization. Markovits focuses on such spheres as language, sports, law, crime, mass media and shows how cultural elites define a ‘European’ identity for these spheres not by celebrating the positive European qualities which would inflect these spheres with ‘European-ness,’ but by stressing the negative American qualities which have an almost magical power to pollute and destroy authentic European values and ways of life. In each case, whether it be the purity of the French language or the integrity of British soccer (excuse me, football), the quality of the workplace in Germany, or the value of higher education, American culture is an omnipresent and omnipotent force which possesses the capability to rend asunder anything that it comes into contact with. As an American, I found myself quite impressed by my nation’s power to wreak havoc on the world. Nothing is safe from us, it seems. Markovits notes that when he was in Europe in the summer of 2003 there was a great heat wave. He heard
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 constantly that the hot weather was a result of the American refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. So, he notes, even the weather is corrupted by American culture. Twin Brothers: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism One of the most welcome chapters in the book is Chapter 5, in which Markovits discusses the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. This is an especially important chapter given the present demonisation of Jews and specific actions against Jews in Europe, especially in France. Markovits concurs with André Glucksmann that the two cultural forces are actually ‘twin brothers.’ Anti-Semitism has a much longer history that anti-Americanism, but what it shares is its quality as a powerful cultural force which remains latent within cultures, waiting, as we see with anti-Americanism, to be activated for a variety of purposes. This argument, which gives culture its due as a causative force in history, is reminiscent of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s argument about the power of eliminationist anti-Semitism in German culture which drove Germans to commit mass murder of the Jews. Markovits outlines the long and sordid history of anti-Semitism in Europe, and one comes away from this sophisticated and original chapter (perhaps the most original chapter in the book) with the knowledge that Europe – the supposed guardian of the Enlightenment and civility – has more often than not served up the most violent and hateful episodes in human history. Later on in the book, Markovits presciently observers that the history of European hate, violence, squalor, injustice, and genocide is rendered invisible to the anti-American ideologists of Europeanism by transposing that very history on America and Americans. Thus, anti-Americanism involves not just a deceptive social construction of the other, but a self-deceptive social construction of European identity and self-hood as well. While anti-Americanism has certainly not had the same outcomes in terms of suffering and mass death as anti-Semitism, Markovits convincingly demonstrates that there is an enduring linkage between the two. The durability and intensity of these ‘twin brothers’ is an indication that one of Europe’s great flaws is its ability to hate and to hate unequivocally and absolutely. Ironically, I can think of no corollary sentiment in America toward Europe: with the exception of the occasional ‘Fuck France’ bumper sticker from the early days of the Iraq war, my ethnographic sense tells me that Americans are more or less indifferent to Europe, and if anything rather well disposed to travel there and celebrate its charms. This indifference, of course, most likely serves to fuel further anti-Americanism, for nothing breeds resentment
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Cushman | Anti-Americanism as Totem so much as when the most powerful pay little attention to those who think they are the most important. European Totem and Civic Religion Markovits primary explanation for the deep and enduring anti-Americanism he has uncovered is that it provides a basis for a common identity among a diverse group of nations which constitute Europe. While anti-Americanism always existed in individual countries, it is now even more useful as Europe seeks to define itself as a supranational entity. America is, in Markovits’s terms, Europe’s ‘antonymous other’ which is absolutely crucial for the formation of a European ‘self.’ Interestingly enough, those Europeans who define their societies and their selves in relation to it, notes Markovits, rely on the same kind of logic displayed by Samuel Huntington in his clash of civilisations theory (and they do this at the same time that they decry the latter for its lack of complexity, say, in understanding relations between the West and Islam). In the last chapter, Markovits draws on Hannah Arendt’s powerful critique of the dangers of post-war pan-European nationalism, which she quite rightly predicted would rely on the development of ‘Europeanism’ built to a large extent on a socially constructed edifice of anti-Americanism. Arendt, according to Markovits, very early on in the post-war period recognised that European identity would come at the expense of America. In the last chapter, Markovits offers a functionalist explanation of anti-Americanism, and it is, indeed, worthwhile to think of this phenomenon in Durkheimian terms as a kind of ‘civil religion’ with its own myths, rituals, high priests and worshippers. Markovits astutely notes that the mass demonstrations in Europe which took place in the days preceding the Iraq war were mass rituals of a new identity, a European identity. These collective rituals took place, however, within a Europe in which most heads of European states supported the coalition war in spite of, and in direct contradiction to, the wishes of their people. In Western Europe, only the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium, Greece and Luxembourg opposed the war, a fact which, when told, generally flummoxes those who insist that the entire ‘world community’ was against the war and, therefore, against America. Interestingly enough, only Jose Maria Aznar of Spain could be said to have lost his job over the war and the same people who had been part of the collective apoplexy over the war regularly returned their pro-American leader-poodles to power in popular votes. So while it is right to specify, as Markovits does, that anti-Americanism is a kind of ‘independent
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 variable’ which affects and shapes social outcomes, one has to be a bit wary about attributing it more power than it actually has. Markovits’s functional theory of anti-Americanism is an excellent starting point, but does not exhaust the theoretical possibilities for thinking about why antiAmericanism persists as it does in the modern world. This is not a criticism, per se, since the book opens the way for a wide range of new interpretations and future research. Among the most important questions that are not raised, but ought to be explored in future works are: how is anti-Americanism transmitted across time and space in Europe seemingly outside of the influence of any specific historical events (that is, how does it reproduce itself as a cultural discourse)? While it is tempting to rely on the most parsimonious explanation, the kind of functionalist explanation offered by Markovits, one of the most striking characteristics of anti-Americanism appears to be its ‘autopoietic’ quality. At times, it appears as a self-reproducing, self-contained cultural system of myths, values, and ideas which does not rely on the specific actions of individuals or historical events, but is, rather, a juggernautlike Ding an Sich to which even those Europeans who revel in it are ultimately held hostage. Also, one of the most curious aspects of anti-Americanism is not addressed by Markovits, that is the coexistence of negative anti-American sentiment with positive pro-American sentiment. It appears that most of the world is not strictly anti-American (although the negative sentiment may win out), but has a kind of schizoid relationship to America, sometimes hating it, sometimes loving it, but in any case conflicted about it. Everyone likes to bash America, but everyone wants to go there as well. Everyone disdains the influence of American culture, but only the most puritanical of Europeanists can actually resist its charms. It is vitally necessary to understand this dualistic love-hate relationship of the rest of the world with America. Markovits’ stellar, finely researched and written account will take its place in the emergent canon of important works by other prominent intellectuals on the phenomenon of anti-Americanism. It is on par with the path-breaking works by Russell Berman, professor at Stanford University and editor of Telos, and Paul Hollander, the Hungarian émigré scholar who has devoted his entire life to the study of the fundamentally irrational forces of political pieties and whose foundational works on anti-Americanism have become classics in that subject. Markovits deserves praise and support for daring to take on the topic of anti-Americanism, for challenging the orthodoxy of anti-Americanism and exposing its irrationality, cultural essentialism, and raw reductionisms. Like other dissidents on the left who
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Cushman | Anti-Americanism as Totem criticise the left, Markovits will be labelled an ‘American apologist’ (even though he takes pains to distinguish a rational critique of certain aspects of American culture and politics from an irrational one) and will be accused of ‘moving to the right’ for daring to expose the vicissitudes of this most elemental of left-wing pieties. Yet, such outcomes are the price of challenging orthodoxy, and the real value of Markovits book lies not in its appeal to traditional, conservative, patriotic American critics of Europe, but in its appeal to thinking and reflective people who have generally considered themselves left of center, but who no longer wish to hide their own prejudices, biases, and hypocrisy from themselves.
Thomas Cushman is an advisory editor of Democratiya. He is a Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College, USA, and Editor of The Journal of Human Rights. His edited collection, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (University of California Press, 2005), was reviewed in Democratiya 1.
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a journal of politics and ideas
Feminism In India
Maitrayee Chaudhuri (Ed.), Zed Books, 2005, 359 pp.
Sanjukta Ghosh While Western feminists and Western theoretical models of feminism have done a commendable job of deconstructing several age-old binaries that have characterised dominant philosophical and political thinking on gender, what is remarkable is the continued existence and even valorisation of the dichotomy of the West and ‘the Rest’ in their discourse. Readers on feminist theories, even if they claim to give ‘multicultural’ or ‘global’ perspectives on women’s studies, are still dominated by Western debates and taxonomies. Feminist perspectives from the global South, if included at all, are usually relegated to one chapter. The implication is that there is uniformity or even agreement on what feminism means in these very diverse cultures of the global South. Different geographies and histories are conflated until difference is lost and one ‘third world feminism’ becomes interchangeable with another, collapsing into one theoretical model the multiple struggles of very different women under very different conditions. Even in collections that forefront non-Western feminisms, the incredible range, complexities and contested nature of ‘feminisms’ within different national histories is reduced to a singular unitary voice. Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s collection Feminism in India challenges this reduction of local feminisms. [1] Tracing the history of the concept of feminism from colonial times to contemporary India, the anthology explores the infinite variety of Indian feminisms and their theoretical trajectories. As Chaudhuri says in her painstakingly thorough and methodical introduction, the articles chosen for inclusion outline the contours of feminist thought in India and its development into, if not one coherent framework, at least a dialogic body of work. The taxonomy of feminist theory usually deployed in the West delineates the categories of liberal, Marxist, socialist and black feminisms. Feminist writings in India can neither be pigeonholed into these categories nor be seen to follow the same developmental paths. Yet there has always been a continual engagement with Western theoretical positions not least because people in India have always lived in a world informed by Western reformist ideas such as liberalism and feminism. Thus, Chaudhuri rejects claims that feminism in India has been a Western import. Rather, she says, ideas about women’s rights and gender construction have always been
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 debated in India, but differently. Though there has been a great degree of variance in this theorising both historically and within different women’s social movements today, one aspect that runs through all the work is the fact that feminism in India has always had to negotiate around and distinguish itself from Western discourses. As scholars and activists from different parts of the global South have argued, nonWestern writers may choose to engage with non-Western thought and praxis. But no such choice exists for those working and writing in the peripheries given that, to use Arundhati Roy’s felicitous phrase, we are all subjects of empire (Roy 2004). Hence, Chaudhuri flatly states ‘There is no turning away from our engagement with the West’ (p. xix). This assertion is used by Chaudhuri to justify her inclusion in the anthology of writings from the late nineteenth-century onwards. Because feminism as we know it today, she argues, is a product of the modern entity of nation and nationhood, and because colonialism recast many of India’s traditional hierarchies, she excludes any pre-colonial writing on gender from the text. This is one of the few flaws in this otherwise significant anthology. As Tharu and Lalita’s landmark collection of women writings in India (1991) has shown, there was a prolific exchange of ideas about gender construction and gender norms well before the late 1800s when Tarabai Shinde is supposed to have penned ‘A Comparison of Men and Women.’ Shinde’s essay, included in the second section of Chaudhuri’s book, is remarkable for its discussions of the construction of gender norms as a radical critique of patriarchy. Seen as India’s pioneering feminist literary critic, Shinde draws links between colonialism and the commodification of women’s bodies. In contrast to this polemical piece from an upper-caste Hindu woman is the position of the Oxford educated Parsi Christian reformer Cornelia Sorabji who saw education as the main means by which social transformation of women could be undertaken. Despite her legal training as a barrister in England, Sorabji argued that it was not law but education that could be the panacea sought by reformers attempting to end the practice of child marriage. The third essay included in this section is by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali Muslim writer, very popular in her time. Her ‘Sultana’s Dream’ is a feminist utopia which envisions a world where women are in charge of the public sphere. All three essays in this section work as significant counter-narratives to Orientalist historiography which posited brown women in the colonies as helpless and ignorant. The third section of the book takes up the double engagement with national identity and the woman question. It is through reading the selections included here that one
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Ghosh | Feminisms in India can surmise the difficult choices facing women during the period of the nationalist struggles: whether or not to join the national movement; whether or not to support freedom of religion or freedom of women – issues seen as antithetical to one another. Rather than give contemporary commentaries on nationalist texts, Chaudhuri lets historical documents speak for themselves. The 1931 ‘Karachi Resolution’ on what ‘swaraj’ or ‘self rule’ in free India would entail, reads more impressively than the U.S. Bill of Rights. However, the gender issue is still marginalised as evidenced by the fact that only one of the resolutions expressly mentions protecting women’s rights (as part of workers’ rights). The 1947 report on ‘Women’s Role in a Planned Economy’ is accompanied by a contextualised commentary by Leela Kasturi who lays out in great detail the lines along which a post-colonial India would dedicate itself to women’s freedom and equality in a plural, multi-religious, multicultural society. Property rights, alimony, custody rights, and child maintenance were all detailed in this remarkable document. The largest and the most mainstream women’s organisation in India at this time was the All India Women’s Conference. Founded in 1927, it was many-layered and always attempted to reflect the regional diversity of the movement. Chaudhuri’s own chapter on the contentious nature of the debates within this organisation reveals the complexities of the roles women played in the task of nation building. What would constitute the nation? What would be the role of women in independent India? What would the role of women be in the process of nation-building itself ? These discussions were fraught with divisions that spoke to religious, caste and other fissures within Indian society. If feminist writing during twentieth century colonial India was characterised by societal hierarchies and a need to demarcate an Indian identity, feminist debates in post-colonial India dealt with ways in which feminist politics was practised. A section on ‘Feminism in Independent India’ includes some seminal essays that have interrogated both the connections and divergences within Left politics and feminist politics on issues such as agrarian land reform and workers’ rights. Well known contemporary feminist thinkers and organisers like Gail Omvedt and Ilina Sen reiterate the need to re-theorise the fundamental causes of women’s oppression in post-independent India. The sometimes complete disenfranchisement of the rural poor raises fundamental questions about gendered power relations in society. Sen’s essay also discusses some of the Indian women’s movements much celebrated in the West such as the environmental movement called ‘Chipko’ and the labour and cooperative credit movement called SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Association). Both these and other struggles challenged the fundamental tenets of the national developmental policy which was predicated on rapid industrialisation at the expense of communities whose lives and livelihoods depended on land and forests. These readings show that since independence much feminist activism and theorising has been geared at developing alternatives to existing state policy and redefining the enfranchisement and empowerment of women. But what about the poorest sections of the society – the ‘dalits’ (called the ‘untouchables’ in Western scholarly and popular writings)? The last essay in this section shows that the language of class cannot be ignored in any discussion of gender. Sharmila Rege concentrates on non-brahminical reconceptualisations of the feminist agenda in contemporary India. Her urging to reformulate the purely upper-caste historiographies could lead to more nuanced and dialectical understanding of gendered India. While this section is the thinnest, comprising only three essays, it is perhaps the richest for anyone wishing to learn about the key debates and concerns of grassroots feminist organising in contemporary India. This section of the book alone provides an excellent overview of the multiplicity of voices that introductory texts on global feminism ignore. Surprisingly, the next section of the book – ‘Challenges to Feminism’ – dealing with the impact of the politics of the Hindu Right, the Hindutva movement and of globalisation, is the least nuanced and least satisfactory section of the anthology. Many of the five essays in this section deal with concerns of post-structuralist feminists, namely representations of gender and the gendered subject positions manufactured through available popular discourses. Women’s studies and economics volumes have documented well the ways in which financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have actively appropriated and exploited both the language and agenda of feminism to further their goals of privatisation and marketisation. In reference to India, global economic policy documents have linked women’s development and the nation’s development in such a way that women are constructed as ‘good’ subjects because of their thrift and diligent labor. This, by contrast, pits them against those deemed ‘bad’ subjects by these international ‘aid’ agencies, namely their unruly men. This subject position created by discourses emanating from globalisation does not just interpellate rural women but also urban upper-class women, who are
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Ghosh | Feminisms in India seen as liberated only if and when they entire the global market system as highlyindividualised conspicuous consumers. Whether analysing the huge upsurge in public discourses selling the idea of beauty queens as liberated empowered femininity, print ads that co-opt the language of radical feminism or magazine editorials that equate modernity with conspicuous consumption, the selections all demonstrate the cooptation of the language of feminism by mainstream media and the coordinated backlash against genuine feminist positions. While the readings of popular vernacular press are useful in understanding how globalisation and its offer of a particular model of modernity are negotiated by women in contemporary India, I would have preferred the inclusion of at least one article based on reception studies or audience analysis. In other words, the issue of globalisation of culture is not just a matter of academic interest. It has impacted in real terms the ways in which women construct a political identity using cultural icons. How has the puncturing of cultural boundaries affected this process? How are hybrid identities disrupting the search for a peculiarly and specifically ‘Indian’ feminist identity? The impetus for the whole volume seems to be dictated by this search for the Indian roots of feminism and the possibilities of an ‘authentic’ or ‘indigenous’ feminism. The first and last sections of the book take up these concerns in innovative ways. While the essays in the opening pages of the book lay out the basics of feminism demonstrating the extent of feminist commitments in India and the need for the theorisation of sexuality within feminist formulations, they also provide an understanding of the ‘anti-feminist’ position and the reluctance of a vast number of Indians to use the ‘F-word.’ Madhu Kishwar’s landmark essay ‘Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist’ is just one voice in the struggle for an indigenous feminism that has raged on in India from the colonial times. The woman question in India historically has always been linked to anti-imperialist struggles whether for nationhood or an ‘authentic’ Indian identity. Much of theorising of Indian feminism has articulated the national question with the ‘sanitised’ image of Hindu upper-caste women. The construction of a nationalist rhetoric that erased internal differences has been tantamount to emptying India’s history of all its internal conflicts. ‘It is at once a claim for a distinct non-Western identity and a brushing away of internal differences,’ Chaudhuri asserts (p. xxi). In fact one of the most significant contributions of feminist theorising in the last two decades in India has been a sustained critique of essentialist notions of both the Indian nation and woman. This quest for indigeneity has opened up political
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 possibilities to engage with tradition and that are antithetical to fundamentalist assertions. In the last section of the book, Vidyut Bhagat explores the concept of tradition and she uses Marathi folklore to open up radical possibilities for the future of Indian feminism. Her essay, useful as it is, reminded me of Frantz Fanon’s warning that a return to ‘tradition’ paradoxically might also limit efforts at liberation because it re-inscribes an essentialist, absolute and fixed notion of culture and tradition. This caution is perhaps also expressed by Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan in her essay on goddess-inspired Hindu feminism. As she says, this tradition has not only marginalised and alienated women in minority communities, but has also opened by possibilities of further exploitation of these very communities by the Hindu Right and the demarcation of more restrictive and repressive cultural lines. All the essays in the opening and last sections speak to each other, contesting the assumptions of each writer in a truly dialogic way. The end result is a nuanced conceptualisation of Indian feminisms. As Oyeronke Oyewumi has written in the context of African feminisms, much critical writing by feminist scholars from the global South has been appropriated and tokenised in Western academia (Oyewumi 2003). She and many others have pointed out that this ‘objectification’ is predicated on the silencing of third world voices in the articulation of their own realities; this despite the proliferation of ‘multicultural,’ ‘multiracial’ and ‘transnational’ sections in women’s studies and feminist anthologies. Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s collection deconstructs this objectification of ‘third world’ feminisms and reconstructs a plural, contradictory, complex notion of what feminist paradigms mean in India. The anthology demonstrates that the heterogeneity of Indian experience and the ever-changing gender relations has necessitated the articulation of multiple feminisms and multiple theoretical frameworks striated with common concerns. These formulations have developed and transformed over time in response to the material realities of daily conditions of existence, ideological sensitivity to gender issues, the linguistic and political competencies, and historical events. Given that the articles are written, not by U.S.-based scholarly academics writing about India but, by activists and thinkers grounded in India and involved in its myriad feminist political battles, this book should be seen as a definitive work on gender scholarship in India.
Sanjukta Ghosh teaches in the Communication Department and in the Women’s Studies program at Castleton State College. Her forthcoming book examines representations of South Asians in the American media.
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Ghosh | Feminisms in India References
Oyewumi, Oyeronke 2003, ‘Introduction: Feminism, Sisterhood and Other Foreign Relations’ in African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood edited by Oyeronke Oyewumi. Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press. Roy, Arundhati 2004, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita (eds) 1991, Women Writing in India Volume I: 600 B.C to the Early Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Notes
[1] A reprint should rectify some editorial failings. Several citations were missing in the bibliographies, especially in the introduction; some sentences were cut off midway in articles that had been excerpted for this collection, and a subject index should be provided.
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Moscow Pride Conference: Opening Keynote Speech Peter Tatchell Editor’s Note: Gay human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell gave the opening keynote speech at the Moscow Pride conference on 26 May 2007. Around 20 lesbian and gay campaigners were arrested. Many were abused, threatened and assaulted. Peter Tatchell was one of more than a dozen Gay Pride participants who were beaten by gangs of neo-Nazis, nationalist extremists and Russian Orthodox fundamentalists, with the apparent collusion of the Moscow police and Russia’s elite anti-riot squad, the OMON. For information about Peter Tatchell’s campaigns: http://www.petertatchell.net. Greetings! I bring you a message of comradeship and solidarity from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) human rights organisations OutRage! in London. Your struggle is our struggle. The quest for queer freedom is an international quest, in Russia and in all countries. Gay and lesbian liberation is for all peoples everywhere, not just for some. We cannot accept dignity and rights for queers in Western Europe to the exclusion of queers in Eastern Europe and Russia. We are in this fight for freedom together. As long as gay people in Russia are not accepted and respected, we are all diminished in all parts of the world. We are diminished regardless of whether we are gay or straight. An attack on one is an attack on all. When gay rights are suppressed, it is a loss to the whole democratic and human rights movement. Conversely, when lesbian and gay people win victories, it is a victory for all lovers of freedom and liberty.
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Tatchell | Gay Pride in Moscow The advance of LGBTI human rights strengthens every struggle for freedom, justice and equality. It expands the democratic space for us all. This is why it is so important that the LGBTI human rights movement is not separate from the broader human rights movement, but part of it. It is sad to see some human rights activists here in Russia distance themselves from the LGBTI human rights campaign, and from this weekend’s bid to stage the Moscow Pride march. When human rights activists pick and choose which freedoms to defend, they undermine and compromise the whole human rights agenda. Human rights are universal and indivisible. That is why I stand shoulder-to-shoulder not only with the Russian LGBTI movement and the organisers of Moscow Pride, but also shoulder-to-shoulder with the human rights activists campaigning to bring justice to the killers of Anna Politkovskaya and other murdered journalists; those campaigning to end the war and torture in Chechnya; and with campaigners against the harassment of environmental activists and the victimisation of democracy activists, like Garry Kasparov. These different struggles are essentially all the same: they all concern the defence of democracy and human rights against an increasingly authoritarian Russian State and Moscow City Government. The ban on Moscow Pride is one aspect of a much wider attack on civil society and human rights. In this context of generalised repression, unity and solidarity are the key to winning all these different freedom struggles. Alone and divided we are weak. Together and united we are strong. The ban on Moscow Pride is evidence of a flawed and failed transition from communism to democracy.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Russia’s President and Moscow’s Mayor are dragging the country back to autocracy. The right to hold a Moscow Pride march is not just an issue of gay rights, it is an defence of freedom of expression for all Russians, gay and straight. The fundamental issue is the right to protest. Together with others, LGBTI people are in the frontline of the struggle to defend the right to freedom of speech and assembly. We carry the torch of freedom for every Russian of whatever sexuality. Here, this weekend in Moscow, we carry freedom’s torch today and we will carry it in the streets of Moscow tomorrow – and beyond – until the rights of LGBTI Russians are won and respected. My message to President Putin and Mayor Luzhkov is this: Queer freedom has been long delayed but it cannot be denied. Spacibo (thank you).
Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner and left-wing member of the Green Party.
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Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution David Zarnett The Iranian revolution was not only a godsend for those Muslims who identified with its cause, it was also a blessing for those among the American Left who saw it as a significant blow against the evil American Empire. For them it was a nonviolent resurgence of the oppressed of the Third-World, noble and progressive in its cause and buoyed by its religious character. Richard Falk in The Nation wrote ‘the religious core of the Khomeini movement is a call for social justice, fairness in the distribution of wealth, a productive economy organized around national needs and simplicity of life and absence of corruption that minimizes differences between rich and poor, rulers and ruled.’ [1] The fears expressed by Iranian leftists and feminists were an exaggeration and not worthy of pause or consideration. That Tehran’s bookstores were selling books once banned by the Shah and that newspapers were engaging in lively political debate was sufficient proof that the inherent progressive forces of the revolution would prevail. ‘Whatever the future course of this remarkable revolution,’ Kai Bird wrote in The Nation, ‘the spring of 1979 is budding with hopes of broader freedoms and economic well-being for the Iranian people.’ [2] What led so many on the left to predict utopia in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah? This essay will seek part of the explanation in Edward Said’s influential analysis of the Iranian Revolution. It is a locus of some key errors – of denial, evasion, and abstract categorial thinking immune to the facts – that led to such a gross miscalculation on the part of so many American Leftists. Said’s analysis negated two realities. The first reality was the one reported by the mainstream American media. One assumption that underpinned Said’s analysis was that the media’s portrayal of the revolution must be inherently wrong and that the truth must lie in a ‘counter-narrative.’ [3] That Said was neither an expert on Middle Eastern politics nor the history of Islam; that he knew little of the Shah or Ayatollah Khomeini beyond what an informed layman would have known; and that he did not read or write Farsi, makes his utter conviction concerning the inaccuracy of the media’s portrayal all the more indicative of his method of analysis and thought. The second reality that Said negated was the words written and spoken by Ayatollah Khomeini, notably in Velayat-e Faqeeh (Islamic Government), and the
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 clues they provided for the future path of the Iranian Revolution. Khomeini’s belief that the Jews were bent on world domination and that Shari’a law would create an ideal society was purposefully kept out of Said’s analysis. This same approach was taken by Richard Falk who dismissed Khomeini’s writings as having little significance because they were ‘disavowed by Khomeini’s closest advisors.’ Instead Falk saw it more appropriate to rely on Khomeini’s utterances to Western visitors and journalists claiming that the earliest critics of Khomeini were simply supporters of the Shah and nothing more. [4] Said’s analyses of the revolution are found in four articles written between 1979 and 1981 [5], and can be divided into two phases. In the first phase, writing in Time Magazine in April 1979 and the Columbia Journalism Review in March/April 1980, Said rejected both the portrayal of the revolution as Islamic and what he saw as the demonization of Khomeini. The second phase writings – The Nation in April 1980 and Harper’s Magazine in January 1981 – register that much of the pro-revolution American Left were coming to terms with the harsh reality of Iran under Khomeinism. In this phase, Said changed the subject: his analysis shifted away from Khomeini and focused predominantly on the US media’s portrayal of the revolution. Denying Reality The revolution in Iran thrust ‘Islam’ into mainstream discourse in America. From his residence-in-exile in Neauphle-le-Chateau on 12 January, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini stated that the ‘struggle will continue until the establishment of an Islamic Republic that guarantees the freedom of the people, the independence of the country, and the attainment of social justice.’ [6] A few months later, in his hometown of Qom, Khomeini declared the establishment of the Islamic Republic, calling on the new government to ‘enact Islamic justice under the banner of Islam and the flag of the Qur’an.’ [7] These statements received much publicity and Khomeini’s words were widely circulated through major news outlets. Taking its cue from Khomeini’s rhetoric, the American media began to portray the revolution as religiously inspired, which gave rise to a concerned debate about the implications of this new political ideology rooted in Islam. Specifically, Khomeini’s declaration to establish an ‘Islamic Republic’ begged the question of what such a polity would look like. The Washington Post predicted a political catastrophe based on a reading of excerpts of Khomeini’s Velayet-e Faqeeh. [8] The Associated Press and Time followed suit. (the cover of Time Magazine of 16 April, 1979 read: ‘Islam: The Militant
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Zarnett | Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution Revival.’). In the pages of the New Republic, Michael Walzer, in an article Said specifically attacked, depicted Khomeini as a clerical fascist and wrote of the need to ‘remind ourselves of the power of one religion still capable of generating great zeal among large numbers of its followers.’ [9] In Foreign Affairs, where the early analysis had generally minimized the role of Islam in the revolution [10], William Quandt depicted Khomeini as more concerned with the ‘Great Satan’ than with the significant and numerous domestic problems plaguing post-Shah Iran. Similar to Walzer, Quandt noted that ‘one of the questions that surrounded the Iranian Revolution from its onset was whether Khomeini and his Islamic Republic might signal a new resurgence of Islamic feeling and solidarity that would affect other Islamic nations, especially those in the Middle East.’ [11] After his years of research and writing for his book Orientalism (1978), Said thought he knew exactly what was going on. His analysis of systematic Western mis-perceptions of Islam – orientalism – was to be vindicated by a stinging critique of this orientalist discourse about the Iranian revolution. His critique would draw heavily upon his earlier writings. In a 1976 review of The Cambridge History of Islam (1970), edited by Said’s arch-nemesis Bernard Lewis, Said described this widely respected book as an anti-Islamic diatribe void of ‘ideas and methodological intelligence.’ [12] In Orientalism, which reproduces this review of History almost verbatim, Said emphasised that the work’s central point revolves around the question of what defines the Muslim human experience: ‘Orientalism, however, clearly posits the Islamic category (over the socio-economic category) as the dominant one, and this is the main consideration about [History’s] retrograde intellectual tactics.’ [13] In other words, to an orientalist, Muslims were only Muslims and not economic, political and rational beings, so their revolutions could not be rational political acts. Using P.J. Vatikiotis’ Revolution in the Middle East and Other Case Studies (1972) as a benchmark, Said explained that the orientalist perceived an Islamic revolution as an act born out of ‘a bad kind of sexuality (pseudo-divine act of creation), and also a cancerous disease.’ [14] Analysing Bernard Lewis’s contribution to Vatikiotis’ work, Said wrote that the message one gets on the nature of an Islamic revolution ‘is excitement, sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty – nothing more.’ [15] Accordingly, Islamic revolutions were not the drastic social upheavals that were the French and Russian revolutions. Instead, they were the product of parochial worldviews. They were not rooted in political grievance for the sake of betterment and improvement of society but rather were minor fluctuations in an all-together
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 static and backward civilization. Since America inherited these reactionary assumptions from the British and the French, Said was hostile to any depiction of the Iranian revolution as ‘Islamic’ in American mainstream discourse. Said’s first article on Iran, ‘Islam, Orientalism and the West: An Attack on Learned Ignorance,’ appeared in Time Magazine on 16 April, 1979. Rehashing many of the same points he made in Orientalism, Said zeroed in on the phenomenon that concerned him the most: the reliance of experts and pundits on an abstract and essentialist view of Islam to explain all events in the Middle East. The politics of Algeria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran were all (mis)understood as an expression of a shared ‘Islamic mind.’ [16] What irked Said most was the idea that the Iranian revolution symbolized a ‘Return of Islam.’ Contrary to how the media reported it, Said saw the Iranian revolution as unrelated to Islam. The real roots of the revolution, and of resentment towards the West throughout the Middle East, he thought, lay not within Islamic culture or society but rather Western treatment of the region: ‘If Iranian workers, Egyptian students, Palestinian farmers resent the West or the U.S., it is a concrete response to the specific policy injuring them as human beings.’ Attacking what he saw as the quintessential American mindset, Said asked ‘will it not ease our fear to accept the fact that people do the same things inside as well as outside Islam, that Muslims live in history and in our common world, not simply in the Islamic context?’ [17] Accordingly, argued Said, Khomeini should be viewed neither as the symbol of a resurgence of a new political Islam nor as an irrational and crazed religious figure, but rather as a part of ‘a long tradition of opposition to an outrageous monarchy.’ Denying all that was unique, and uniquely dangerous in the Ayatollah, Said described Khomeini as an oppositionalist leader like any other driven by rational and universal political concerns. Therefore, the description of Khomeini as a clerical fascist was not only misguided and ignorant but also anti-Islamic and orientalist, producing ‘fearsome caricatures’ of Muslims. [18] An over-emphasis on the Islamic inspiration in Khomeini negated the influence that American foreign policy had on his ideas and his feelings of resentment. In this light, the Iranian revolution is not Islamic but political. According to Said, the media, bolstered by a cabal of academics, were denying Muslims their humanity and implying that they have no understanding of democracy, seeking only ‘repression and medieval obscurantism.’ [19] Reluctant to engage critically with the writings and speeches of Khomeini – for this would show that Khomeini’s drives were also Islamic, repressive and medievalist – Said’s main ‘arguments’ were in fact assertions and regressed into a
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Zarnett | Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution simple counter-narrative based on a series of categories, rather than a reality-based rebuttal of conventional wisdom. In ‘Iran and the Press: Whose Holy War?’ which appeared in the March/April 1980 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, Said criticized the negative coverage of Khomeini. As the revolution progressed, Said observed, ‘Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s image and presence took over the media, which failed to make much of him except that he was obdurate, powerful and deeply angry at the United States.’ [20] But, as in his previous article, Said did not provide counter-evidence to the media’s characterization of Khomeini. His only proof was his own theory: if the media was inherently fearful, ignorant, and hostile to Islam than it must be portraying Khomeini incorrectly. Said believed that the media’s misrepresentation of Khomeini was due to ignorance: ‘why did no reporter seem to avail himself of crucial material contained in the Summer 1979 issue of Race and Class – for example, the material on Ali Shariati, an Iranian friend of Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who with Khomeini was the major influence on the revolution?’ [21] This point raises two important questions. First, if Said had versed himself in Iranian revolutionary ideology as he demands of journalists reporting and writing on Iran, why did he not once cite the writings of Shariati or Khomeini and pass on any of this required information to his readers? Second, if Khomeini is indeed a ‘major influence on the revolution,’ is it not understandable to be deeply concerned with Khomeini’s political agenda considering the ideas and political programme presented in his major work Velayat-e Faqeeh? Even if Hamid Algar’s translation of Velayat e-Faqeeh was not yet available to Said at the time of writing this article – Algar’s work first appeared in 1981 – the Washington Post published excerpts in February 1979, making its core ideas widely accessible. Perhaps it was for this very reason – that it was published in a mainstream media outlet – that Said, and many others who believed Khomeini to be a progressive, failed to take into consideration Khomeini’s own words. Said’s defence of Khomeini came at a time of mounting evidence against him and his leadership. Even The Nation, who early in 1979 was committed to viewing Khomeini as a progressive, was beginning to realize their error in judgement. [22] Still clinging to its optimism about the revolution, The Nation asked its readership not to associate the current human rights violations under Khomeini with the revolution itself. [23] Said, however, was distinct in this regard and did not budge from his position – his hostility to the media threw off his moral compass. Reports
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 of human rights abuses, executions, and violent atrocities committed by Khomeini and other Iranians in the name of the revolution were greatly exaggerated for obvious reasons: ‘More important, reporters and editors have clearly favoured stories reporting atrocities, executions, and ethnic conflict over those of the country’s extremely fluid, actually quite open, political struggle…If aggressive hyperbole is one journalistic mode commonly used to describe Iran, the other is misapplied euphemism, usually stemming from ignorance, but often deriving from a barely concealed ideological hostility.’ [24] Evading Reality Eventually, under the weight of growing criticism of Khomeini by members within his own leftist milieu, Said succumbed to reality. But he did not shift to take a strong stance against Khomeini nor write urgently and in detail about the atrocities being committed. Instead, Said evaded reality by focusing on the US media’s characterization of the Iranian revolution as ‘Islamic.’ This marked the start of a second phase in Said’s writings on the Iranian revolution. In his article, ‘Islam Through Western Eyes,’ published in The Nation in April 1980, Said does show that the excesses of Khomeini are no longer defensible: ‘What is the Islamist apologist to say when confronted with the daily count of people executed by the Islamic Komitehs or when – as reported on September 19, 1979 by Reuters – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announces that enemies of the Islamic revolution would be destroyed?’ [25] However, his primary argument is that the revolution’s excesses can not be explained simply by invoking the all-encompassing adjective of ‘Islam.’ He attacked the American obsession with Islam arguing that ‘no nonWestern realm has been so dominated by the United States as the Arab-Islamic world is dominated today.’ [26] America lacked sympathy for Islam: ‘in the United States, at least, there is no major segment of the polity, no significant sector of the culture, no part of the whole community capable of identifying sympathetically with the Islamic World.’ [27] And because of this hostility, figures like Khomeini typify an Islamic world seen as being ‘populated by shadowy (although extremely frightening) notions about jihad, slavery, subordination of women and irrational violence combined with extreme licentiousness.’ Conversely, Anwar Sadat was fashioned in the media as the ideal Muslim ‘whose remark that Khomeini was a lunatic and a disgrace to Islam was repeated ad nauseam.’ [28] Therefore, Said thought, American perceptions of Islam were defined by American interests. When American interests are not at stake, Islam was of little concern but when these
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Zarnett | Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution interests were challenged it was because the all-encompassing Islamic menace reared its head. In this case, Said emphasized the dangers of associating events in Iran to Islam because this approach would negate the nature of the American presence in the region and the legitimate and intense political grievance it creates. Lacking an appreciation for complexity and nuance, Said countered the media’s narrative by denying the Iranian revolution an Islamic quality entirely. But as the late Malcolm Kerr once wrote: ‘Does Said realize how insistently Islamic doctrine in its many variants has traditionally proclaimed the applicability of religious standards to all aspect of human life, and the inseparability of man’s secular and spiritual destinies? What does he suppose the Ayatollah Khomeini and Muslim Brotherhood were all about?’ [29] ‘Inside Islam: How the Press Missed the Story in Iran,’ was published in Harper’s Magazine in January 1981. A critique of ‘The Islam Explosion,’ by Michael Walzer, it provides a particularly clear example of Said’s method. Said asserted that ‘Walzer has convinced himself that when he says the word Islam he is talking about a real object called Islam, an object so immediate as to make any mediation of qualifications applied to it seem supererogatory fussiness.’ [30] However, Said’s charge that Walzer saw Islam ‘as a single thing’ simply misrepresents Walzer. Contrary to Said’s charge, Walzer warns his reader against conflating Islam into a single entity and insists on the need to consider local conditions when interpreting conflicts throughout the region. [31] More importantly, and again characteristic of his style of argumentation, Said does not refute Walzer’s argument with a counterargument but with only a swift waving of his hand. What we can see clearly now is that – and note this is an inversion of Said’s narrative of ‘orientalist’ western intellectuals – while Walzer takes heed of what Muslims in the Middle East are saying, Said ignores them. Said’s analysis marginalized Khomeini in two ways. First, when defending Khomeini, Said showed no understanding of the major themes that were at the centre of many of the Ayatollah’s writings and lectures. In effect Said ignored Khomeini’s ideas. Second, when Khomeini could no longer be defended, Said resorted to simply bracketing his existence and preeminent role in the new Iranian state. In 1982, Said, alongside Richard Falk, personally endorsed a public statement by the ‘The Emergency Committee for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights in Iran’ which, while lambasting the Iranian regime for its human rights abuses and antidemocratic practices, curiously makes no mention of Khomeini. [32] And it was
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 in a 1984 eulogy of the French post-modernist Michel Foucault, who had a great influence on Said, in which he dedicated only a few sentences to the philosopher’s very public endorsement of Khomeini and his revolutionary politics that was by no means marginal to his intellectual career, as Said himself admits. [33] It is not surprising that Said came to a gravely mistaken conclusion of a watershed event in the modern Middle East. His argumentation was not based on expertise or a careful consideration of the evidence available but on the theoretical category of ‘orientalism.’ His out-of-hand rejection of the media’s characterization of the revolution as ‘Islamic’ resulted from his apriori hostility to all American mainstream media discussions of Islam. His method blocked a more nuanced approach that might have seen the Islamic and the political dimensions of the revolution. It would have served Said well to consider one of George Orwell’s dictums: ‘Just because you read something in the Daily Telegraph doesn’t mean it’s wrong.’ Said’s disastrous method was used by others at the time. Most notably, in 1979 Princeton Professor Richard Falk ‘regarded Khomeini’s leadership, on the whole, positively’ and did not believe ‘it was a foregone conclusion that Khomeini would throw his support behind the clerics.’ [34] Such a astonishing error could only come from the wilful denial of the reality of Khomeini’s Islamic Government whose title and content made crystal clear his political intentions. [35] To ignore this work is analogous to trying to understand Adolf Hitler without reading Mein Kampf, or Sayyid Qutb without reading In the Shade of the Qu’ran, or Niccolo Machiavelli without reading The Prince. Disparaging those who took heed of Khomeini’s words, Falk believed that ‘those who prophesized calamity’ were driven by ‘proShah sympathies, or Western biases,’ and ‘wanted to discredit the revolution by every means possible.’ [36] The method – linguistically dense, impressively ‘theoretical’ and ‘militant’ but in fact crude and reductive – continues in use today, and it has bled alarmingly from the academy to the mainstream. Those chanting ‘We are all Hiz’ballah’ in Trafalgar Square; those glorifying Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah as a progressive ally; those arguing that Osama Bin Laden and his followers, like the 7/7 bombers, will be contented with the establishment of a Palestinian state; those claiming that Iraqi suicide bombers will cease their atrocities once America and Britain withdraw, all utilize a Saidian approach to Middle East politics that fails to comprehend the primary motives of these actors or to grant them an autonomy outside the categories of
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Zarnett | Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution ‘orientalism’ or ‘blowback.’ The irony is that while Said made his career criticizing the West for denying Muslims or Arabs their own fully autonomous existence, his own thought – as Kanan Makiya has pointed out [37] – contributed to that very denial. Through the distorting lens of ‘orientalism’ key Muslim and Arab personalities and movements are routinely denied their identity, their words are ignored, and an alternative and self-serving image is thrust upon them (and us). The result, as Kanan Makiya’s seminal book catalogued, is that in the face of immense cruelty directed towards actual Arabs and Muslims, the Saidian intellectual can be curiously silent.
David Zarnett is a postgraduate student at King’s College, University of London. References
Algar, Hamid 1981, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, Berkeley, California, Mizen Press. Bird, Kai 1979, ‘The Iranian Referendum,’ The Nation, Vol 228, No. 12, 31 March. Bruce, Judith 1979, ‘Distorted Images,’ The Nation, Vol. 228, No. 20, 26 May. Cohen, Nick 2007, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, London, Fourth Estate, London. Falk, Richard 1979, ‘Iran’s Home-Grown Revolution,’ The Nation Vol. 228, No. 5, 10 February. Falk, Richard 1982, ‘The Sidetracking of a Revolution,’ The Nation, Vol. 234, No. 4, 30 January. Kerr, Malcolm 1980, ‘Orientalism, Review,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 544-7. Makiya, Kanan 1993, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and The Arab World, Penguin. Makiya, Kanan 2006, ‘Putting Cruelty First: An Interview with Kanan Makiya,’ Democratiya 3. Emergency Committee for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights in Iran 1982, ‘Organizing Statement of the Emergency Committee for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights in Iran,’ The Nation, Vol. 234, No. 4, 30 January. Quandt, William 1979, ‘The Middle East Crisis,’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 540-62. Rouleau, Eric 1980, ‘Khomeini’s Iran,’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 1, (Fall 1980), pp. 1-20. Said, Edward 1976, ‘Arabs, Islam and the Dogmas of the West,’ New York Times Book Review, 31 October. Said, Edward 1979, ‘Islam, Orientalism And the West: An Attack on Learned Ignorance,’ Time Magazine, 16 April. Said, Edward 1980a, ‘Islam through Western Eyes,’ The Nation, Vol. 230, No. 16, 26 April. Said, Edward 1980b, ‘Iran and the Press: Whose Holy War?’ Columbia Jounralism Review, 18:6, pp. 23-33. Said, Edward 1981, ‘Inside Islam: How the Press Missed the Story in Iran,’ Harper’s Magazine,
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 January. Said, Edward 1984, ‘Michel Foucault, 1927-1984,’ Raritan, Vol. 4, No 2. Said, Edward 2003 [1978], Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. The Nation 1979, ‘The Senate and the Ayatollah,’ Editorial. Vol. 228, No. 21, 2 June. Walzer, Michael 1979, ‘The Islam Explosion.’ The New Republic, 8 December. Washington Post 1979, ‘The Darker Forces of Islam: The Vision of Ruhullah Khomeini,’ 15 January.
[1] Falk 1979, p. 136.
Notes
[2] Bird 1979, p. 322. [3] This assumption also appears in Bruce 1979, p. 589. [4] See Falk’s 1982 Nation article in which he argues (p. 105.) ‘The critics of Khomeini supported their arguments with some controversial texts drawn from his lectures while he was in Iraq. Their tone and contents were disavowed at the time by Khomeini’s closest advisors and seemed more than offset by the Ayatollah’s own clarification of his position to visitors and journalists.’ [5] Said (1981) dealt with the Iranian Revolution, however much of its content is taken directly from these four articles. [6] Algar 1981, p. 247. [7] Algar 1981, p. 267. [8] Washington Post, 1979. [9] Walzer 1979, p. 21. [10] Rouleau 1980, pp. 1-20. [11] Quandt 1979, p. 545. [12] Said 1976, p. 4. [13] Said 2003 [1978], p. 305. [14] Said 2003 [1978[, p. 313. [15] Said 2003 [1978], p. 315. [16] Said 1979, p. 16. [17] Said 1979, p. 16. [18] Said 1979, p. 16. [19] Said 1979, p. 16. [20] Said 1980, p. 23. [21] Said 1980, p. 33. [22] Bird 1979, p. 321. [23] The Nation 1979, p. 621. [24] Said 1980b, pp. 29-30. [25] Said 1980a, p. 488. [26] Said 1980a, p. 489.
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Zarnett | Edward Said and the Iranian Revolution [27] Said 1980a, p. 490. [28] Said 1980a, p. 490. [29] Kerr 1980, p. 545. [30] Said 1981, p. 27. [31] Walzer 1979, p. 20. [32] Organizing Committee for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights in Iran 1982, p. 110. [33] Said 1984, pp. 9-10. [34] Falk 1982, p. 104. [35] Algar 1981, pp. 42-43. [36] Falk 1982, p. 104. [37] Makiya 1993, Makiya 2006.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist: a Novel by Mohsin Hamid, Harcourt Inc, 2007, 184 pp.
Irfan Khawaja I. Since 9/11, Americans have desperately wanted, or at least have claimed to want, to understand the workings of ‘the Islamic fundamentalist mind.’ Nothing seems more inscrutable to them than the sense that someone out there could so dislike them as to want to kill them on principle. ‘Why do they hate us?’ as the old chestnut goes. One answer points us in the direction of the fundamentalists’ grievances, another in the direction of the fanatical dictates of their religion. But are these mutually exclusive options? And are they exhaustive of the options? It’s safe to say that no one in American political discourse has answered these questions in a fully satisfactory way, and that on the whole, Americans have given up trying. And so the wars against terrorism continue without resolution against a series of unidentifiable and seemingly incomprehensible enemies. This combination of despair, incomprehension, and intellectual lassitude explains why Americans are, par excellence, suckers for attempts to ‘explain’ Islamist fundamentalism by way of intellectual short cuts. And Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, offers up just the sort of short cut that an American could love: the opportunity to emote one’s way to understanding. Hyped to the maximum on both sides of the Atlantic as well as on the Indian subcontinent, the book hit number one on the Barnes and Noble bestseller list soon after its U.S. publication, and has come to be regarded by critics as offering an authoritative account by a self-styled insider of Muslim resentment for America: a ‘brief, charming and quietly furious novel’; a ‘seething commentary on America’s reputation in the non-western world’; an ‘act of courage’ that tells us ‘things that no one wants to hear’; a work ‘that gives us an uneasy shift of perspectives, a moral disquiet remembered beyond the last page…’; ‘a superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation’; a ‘delicate meditation on the nature of perception and prejudice’; ‘a deeply provocative, excellent addition to the burgeoning sub-genre of September 11 novels’; ‘a delicately thrilling novella that leaves our ears ringing when we close the book’; and so on. [1]
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Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist II. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is, as its subtitle makes clear, a novel, so it makes sense to begin by considering the story it tells. As it happens, the novel is structured as a story within a story, and thus ends up telling two of them. In the ‘outer’ story (so to speak), a young Pakistani man named Changez [2] meets an unnamed American in a tea cafe, or chai-khanna, in the old Anarkali section of Lahore, and proceeds to offer up an unsolicited autobiographical monologue, recounting his days a few years back in America. The much-heralded ‘tension’ of this aspect of the novel consists in the fact that, for the most part, Hamid deprives the reader of information about the identity or intentions of the American listener. The American could with equal plausibility be a tourist wandering through inner city Lahore, or (given certain clues about him) a CIA assassin dispatched to kill Changez. Likewise, we get no information about Changez’s intentions for the American listener; Changez might want to chat with the American, or want to behead him. The reader is supposed throughout the novel to be suspended between the most benign and most sinister interpretations of the interaction between the two of them, something that Hamid takes to mirror relations between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ The ‘inner’ story of the novel consists of Changez’s brief autobiography as told in his monologue with the American. In outline at least, the story is fairly straightforward: Changez goes to America in his college years to make a success of himself, and seems at first to become a success. Along comes 9/11, which changes everything. Gradually both 9/11 itself and the American reaction to it awaken Changez’s hitherto latent Islamist-nationalist sympathies. After a while he comes to the resentful realisation that life in America has made him a traitor to his identity, and made him a mercenary for American interests. And so he abandons his ostensibly successful American life, returning to Pakistan to use the imperialist’s tools to dismantle the house that American imperialism has built. A not-quiteconsummated love affair with a pampered Manhattanite named Erica adds some psycho-sexual masala to the tale. Unfortunately, neither story really works: the outer plot is too implausible to be credible, and the inner plot is too banal to be interesting.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 To believe the outer plot, we have to believe one or both of two preposterous things: (a) that Changez is in danger of being killed by the American and/or (b) that the American is in danger of being killed by Changez. To credit the ‘Changez-in-danger’ scenario, the reader has to bring himself to believe that the CIA would send an assassin to the Anarkali bazaar to assassinate an insignificant (if portentously bearded) tea-drinker whose most significant revolutionary activity consists of some anti-imperialist number-crunching in the Finance Department of the local university. This scenario might approach believability if Hamid had prepared us somewhere in the book to think of Changez as the South Asian equivalent of Che Guevara, but he doesn’t. Changez is a Princeton-educated bourgeois financial analyst with precisely the soul of a Princeton-educated bourgeois financial analyst, and Hamid gives us no reason for taking seriously the idea that the American government would want such a person dead. Nor – and I say this as a fairly enthusiastic proponent of targeted killing – can I think of a reason that would do the trick. In any case, on strictly logistical grounds, if the CIA wanted to assassinate Changez, wouldn’t the more plausible scenario be one in which it got a Pakistani quisling to do the job? To credit the ‘American-in-danger’ scenario, we have to bring ourselves to believe that an insignificant number-crunching tea-drinker in the Anarkali bazaar might well turn out to be an American-murdering terrorist. On this scenario, Changez, wounded late in the book by a comparison of himself to an Ottoman mercenary (p. 151), makes a miraculous overnight transformation from resentful Princetoneducated bourgeois financial analyst to purveyor of revolutionary violence. So a smart guy with an Ivy League degree and a promising career haunts the chaikhannas of Anarkali, lying in wait for hapless American tourists, plying them with tea and kebabs in order to behead them on the darker corners of Mall Road. Sorry, I don’t buy it. I suppose that we’re to be reminded here of the murder of Daniel Pearl, but nothing in the book prepares us to think of the American as a Daniel Pearl figure or of Changez as akin to Pearl’s murderers, Omar Saeed Sheikh and Khaled Sheikh Muhammad. Daniel Pearl was a well-known journalist on the trail of a hot story, but nothing about the unnamed American suggests Pearl’s intelligence or passion. Omar Saeed Sheikh and Khaled Sheikh Muhammad were religious fanatics with lifelong histories of violence, but Changez appears not to have a religious bone in
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Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist his body, and the closest he comes to violence in the novel is an abortive fist fight over a racial slur. This is simply not the material of a credible murder plot. If the outer plot is preposterous, the inner plot, by contrast, is entirely believable. It isn’t hard to imagine a young man’s coming to the United States from Lahore to study at Princeton, experiencing a bit of alienation from America while identifying with New York (i.e., Manhattan), falling in love with a lithe but troubled girl named Erica, getting a high-powered job in the financial sector, watching 9/11 on TV, and confronting his ethno-tribal demons as a result. In fact, that could be the story of any of my Pakistani cousins – or, frankly, any foreigner here for the first time on a student visa. [3] But a story that banal can scarcely bear the thematic weight that Hamid places on it. What’s left of the book beyond its rather meager plot is an extended quasisociological character-study of Changez. Though he doesn’t end up doing very much, Changez is, to Hamid’s credit, a coherent and interesting character, at least in terms of what he unwittingly reveals about himself. What makes him interesting, however, is not the frightening glimpse he gives us into the dark soul of the Islamic fundamentalist, but the revulsion he produces as a recognisable instance of the contemporary South Asian elite, clawing its way to the top of the global economic order while trying desperately to pledge allegiance to the delusional pieties of ethno-religious solidarity. III. At first glance, perhaps, the character of Changez seems sufficiently reasonable and likeable to qualify as a candidate for the reader’s sympathy. He is bright, articulate, cosmopolitan, intelligently hedonistic, and without the slightest tinge of religiosity, fanaticism, or bigotry. But these somewhat superficial traits tend to conceal a set of deeper and more unsavory ones, namely the ones that actually constitute his character. From the very opening of the novel, we confront in Changez a man whose articulate cosmopolitanism masks an overwhelming narcissism, obsession with status, and sense of superiority to almost everyone around him. By page 3, we learn that Changez came to the U.S. to attend university at Princeton; his first moments at Princeton inspire in him ‘the feeling that my life was a film in which I was the star and everything was possible.’ This narcissistic admission, revealing both for its
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 pomposity as well as for its detachment from reality, sets the stage for the obsessively invidious comparisons that follow. Whenever Changez compares himself to the people around him in America – and he can’t stop – he comes invariably to the conclusion that he is in some way superior to them: more intelligent, harder working, thriftier, pluckier, and better at working in a hierarchical setting; also, more gracious, more reserved, more polite. It’s an incongruous set of traits, at once bourgeois and aristocratic: the cosmopolitan gentleman as go-getter. But Changez conveys it best: Princeton students were ‘clever,’ he says, but he was ‘something special,’ like ‘a perfect breast, if you will – tan, succulent, seemingly defiant of gravity …. ‘(p. 5). Changez is candid about the class origins of his self-image, which he puts as follows: Our situation is, perhaps, not so different from that of the old European aristocracy in the nineteenth century, confronted by the ascendance of the bourgeoisie. Except, of course, that we are part of a broader malaise afflicting not only the formerly rich but much of the formerly middle-class as well: a growing inability to purchase what we previously could. Confronted with this reality, one has two choices: pretend all is well or work hard to restore things to what they were. I chose both. (pp. 10-11) The key to this choice, I think, and to Changez’s character generally is his tacit understanding of the point of his efforts. Fundamentally (so to speak), hard work is for him neither a means of promoting one’s own hedonistic pleasures, nor an end in itself. It’s a redemptive exercise – a way of restoring ‘things to what they were.’ The ‘things that were’ are as unreal as their time and location. What Changez seems to have in mind by ‘the way things were’ is a very rosy, hazy, and protean conception of a collective past – implicitly, one gathers, a cross between the Mughal Empire and the Muslim caliphate. So it is that Changez feels mortification when it’s discovered that he needs a menial part-time job at Princeton to make ends meet (pp. 8-9), preferring to comport himself in public like a ‘young prince, generous and carefree’ (p. 11). And so it is that he conceives of Lahore, the easternmost city in Pakistan, as ‘the last major city in a contiguous swath of Muslim lands stretching west as far as Morocco,’ and as standing at the eastern edge of the Muslim ‘frontier’ (p. 127). This is a conception that might make sense to a caliph, but makes no sense today: its conception of ‘contiguity’ makes a unity out of things fractured; its conception of ‘frontier’ relegates Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta to the status of wilderness.
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Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist Unsurprisingly, Changez’s desire to return to an imagined past is facilitated by the resolution to pretend to accept the realities of the present. The pretense produces disorientation, and the disorientation in turn produces resentment and shame. Thus on his first day of work at Underwood Samson, a New York-based financial firm, Changez begins by describing his ‘sense of wonder’ at his new workplace. The sense of wonder quickly gives way to an invidious comparison that strikes down his ethnic pride: ‘Their offices were perched on the forty-first and forty-second floors of a building in midtown – higher than any two structures here in Lahore would be if they were stacked one atop the other …’ (pp. 33-4). What might otherwise be a neutral architectural fact (wouldn’t the broadest structures in Lahore be broader than the broadest two structures in midtown Manhattan?) becomes an occasion for envy, shame, and the reflexive assertion of collective identity: Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed. (p. 36) The resentment and shame Changez feels is on behalf of an entirely notional, indeed preposterous sense of affinity with a civilization to which he could not possibly have any real connection. There is no sane sense in which the contemporary denizens of Lahore are the same ‘people of the Indus River basin’ as those to whom Changez refers, hence no sane way of making sense of the ‘we’ that facilitates Changez’s resentment. Nor is there any coherent way of thinking of oneself as a member of the civilization of the ‘Indus River basin’ and thinking of Lahore as the boundary of a ‘frontier’: Lahore (sort of ) marks the eastern boundary of Pakistan, but the Indus River basin proceeds well past that boundary into India. Changez, then, is not just the victim of a notional identity, but of multiple and conflicting ones. As he moves through life, when he does move, he cannot help but think of himself as a member of some ‘we’ – but he cannot, for that, seem to settle on one ‘we’ to adopt, or even a consistent set of them. He is, at different times in the novel, a Third Worlder, a Muslim, a Pakistani, a member of the Indus River Basin Civilization, a New Yorker, and a Princetonian. Even his acts of rebellion and
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 assertion (e.g., growing a beard) are expressions of collective identity – Changez-asMuslim rebelling against America. What he cannot seem to be is an individual sans collective descriptor: Changez. This ad hoc appropriation of collective identities produces an unstable mix of superiority and inferiority complexes, as well as power and powerlessness. On the one hand, it mitigates Changez’s sense of inferiority by making him part of something larger than himself; he draws power from the fact that he is not merely an individual making his way in the world but a member of something larger and more significant – an ethnicity, a nation, a religion, a culture. On the other hand, this very conception of power enervates him because it is the source of his obsession with invidious comparison-making. He feels resentment at American achievement to the extent that he insists on viewing that achievement from the perspective of some anti-American collective whose identity he tries on. But he feels selfcontempt when he realizes that he is not in fact a genuine member of the entities, like Pakistan, to which he professes attachment (pp. 128-9). The ugliest (and by intention the most dramatic) manifestation of Changez’s character is his expression, on watching the 9/11 attacks on television, of a profound sense of schadenfreude at the spectacle: I stared as one – and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased… I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees. (pp. 72-3) Hamid eventually has Changez try to rationalize his reaction to 9/11 by way of a juvenile set of political ‘grievances.’ Yes, my musings were bleak indeed. I reflected that I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country’s constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East, and now Afghanistan: in each of the major conflicts that ringed my mother continent of Asia, America played a central role. (p. 156)
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Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist If there is a consistent principle behind this set of grievances, it is the propensity to individuate events by reference to specifically American involvement, subtracting all other agents and factors from the description. For Changez, the troubles in Vietnam, Korea, the Taiwan Strait, the Middle East, and Afghanistan all began with American involvement there; nothing pre-existed that involvement and no other historical fact is relevant. It does not occur to Changez to imagine that anyone but America could have ‘ringed my mother continent of Asia’ (any more than it occurs to him to question the compatibility of simultaneous allegiance to Pakistani, Muslim, Indus River, and Asian identities): a solid ring of communist regimes around Mother Asia is simply to be taken for granted, like jasmine in the night air. There was, in other words, no communist insurgency in Vietnam, no communist invasion of South Korea, no Chinese aggression against Taiwan, no Soviet instigation of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In this universe, American action takes place in a vacuum that effaces all other agents. This attitude becomes particularly poignant where Pakistani actions are involved, as it is in Changez’s comments about the U.S. attack on Afghanistan after 9/11. ‘Afghanistan,’ Changez complains to the American, ‘was our friend, a fellow Muslim nation besides, and the sight of what I took to be the beginning of its invasion by your countrymen caused me to tremble with fury’ (p. 100). Changez’s ‘fury’ wipes out the preceding sixty years of Afghan-Pakistani relations, and with it, the preceding decade of Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan. It allows him to forget that it was Pakistan that supported the Taliban, Pakistan that secured al-Qaeda’s military base there, and Pakistan that was thereby complicit in al-Qaeda’s actions there. It also allows him to forget that it was al-Qaeda that declared war against the U.S. from Afghanistan as early as 1996, and allows him to ignore the American negotiations between 1998 and 2001 intended to resolve the al-Qaeda problem and avert military action. [4] Changez’s denial of Pakistani agency takes on a particular intensity in his hostility for India (so much for his solidarity with the ‘people of the Indus River basin’). Readers will perhaps remember the India-Pakistan hostilities of late 2001 and 2002, initiated by an Islamist terrorist attack in December 2001 on the Indian parliament (the Lok Sabha). While refusing even to stop and think about the possibility of Pakistani complicity in the Lok Sabha attack (p. 126), Changez manages to construe the hostilities in paranoid fashion as an Indo-American conspiracy against Pakistan, with India as the aggressor and America as accessory.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 I wondered, sir, about your country’s role in all this: surely, with American bases already established in Pakistan for the conduct of the Afghanistan campaign, all America would have to do would be to inform India that an attack on Pakistan would be treated as an attack on any American ally and would be responded to by the overwhelming force of America’s military. Yet your country was signally failing to do this; indeed, America was maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favored, of course, the larger and – at that moment in history – the more belligerent of them. (p. 143). Changez engages here in what we might call self-removal: having identified himself with Pakistan and with Pakistani victimization, he subtracts Pakistan’s actions from his narrative, thereby absolving it of responsibility for anything it could have done, and absolving himself of the need for a bit of intellectual honesty. Pakistani actions simply drop out of his narrative as though they had never happened. That act of dropping-out ends up, in a perverse way, of being a kind of self-effacement: having identified his own self with ‘Pakistan,’ Changez ends up having to preserve Pakistan’s innocence and its sense of grievance by effacing its history, and in a sense, effacing his own identity. Changez’s propensity for self-removal in the political context parallels the same propensity in his personal life. This comes out vividly in one of the least-commented on but most revealing scenes in the book, involving Changez’s relationship with his girlfriend Erica, herself still grieving the loss to cancer a year earlier of a previous boyfriend, Chris. In my bed she asked me to put my arms around her, and I did so, speaking quietly in her ear. I knew she enjoyed my stories of Pakistan, so I rambled about my family and Lahore. When I tried to kiss her, she did not move her lips or shut her eyes. So I shut them for her and asked ‘Are you missing Chris?’ She nodded, and I saw tears begin to force themselves between her lashes. ‘Then pretend,’ I said, ‘pretend I am him.’ I do not know why I said it; I felt overcome and it seemed, suddenly, a possible way forward. ‘What?’ she said, but she did not open her eyes. ‘Pretend I am him,’ I said again. And slowly, in darkness and in silence, we did. (p. 105) The ‘way forward’ comes to Changez, characteristically, through an act of pretence allied to one of self-removal. If the 9/11 schadenfreude scene is (supposedly)
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Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist motivated by a perverse sense of political grievance, this scene seems to be motivated by Changez’s Zelig-like desire to be anyone and anything for someone who, as far as characterization is concerned, is herself a non-entity. For the romance that Changez has with Erica is at once puzzling and vacuous: nothing much happens in it, and the reader gets no sense of what Changez sees in Erica or vice versa. Later on, Changez tells the American listener that his relationship with Erica ‘convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be’ (pp. 173-4). But the trouble with Changez is precisely his consistent refusal throughout the novel to be an autonomous agent. What autonomy he had is, like so much of his life, merely a pretence. If there is any point of contact between Hamid’s ‘reluctant fundamentalist’ and the insanities of Islamic fundamentalism, that failure is the sum of it. IV. I’ve offered an account of Changez’s character that is, I hope, faithful to the book, but also conveys how repulsive an individual he is. One of the puzzles of this novel, however, is Hamid’s verdict on Changez. Hamid has insisted in interviews that (superficial similarities aside), [5] Changez is not an autobiographical character and not one with whose views he entirely sympathises. He can (Hamid says) ‘understand’ Changez without being or agreeing with him. Fair enough. But having said that, I can’t quite imagine that Hamid created Changez simply to be an object of revulsion. He has said in interviews that he wrote the book to ‘provoke’ readers and give them a worthy ‘interlocutor.’ He’s also suggested that that the novel might represent ‘a divided man’s conversation with himself.’ But I am not sure how worthy an interlocutor Changez is, and if the novel represents ‘a divided man’s conversation with himself,’ it might be nice, when Hamid sounds off in non-fiction contexts, to tell us which man is doing the talking. For an example of what I have in mind, consider Hamid’s remarks about the book in a recent newspaper interview: To a certain extent, America feels it lacks an interlocutor. Who the hell do you speak to on that side? I suppose you could say there are narratives of people who have left that world. Well, but the ones we do read, the people who out of
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 their personal history should have some Muslim sensibility, are now almost solely people who have chosen – often through the result of very unfortunate circumstances – to utterly reject that aspect of themselves. Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie stories – it’s the We-Hate-Islam-Muslims… They’re loved. Because wow, now we can get the real view: We don’t just hate them, they hate themselves! And I think that’s the problem, that’s the challenge. [6] Is this Hamid-as-Hamid or Hamid-as-Changez? The breathtaking malice, ignorance, and self-importance of this assertion could as easily have come from the fictional character as from the real-life author. Indeed, it could with ease have come from the quasi-racist asseverations of fundamentalist authors like Mawdudi. [7] Hamid’s claim here is identical to the one at the centre of Changez’s collectiveidentity delusion: the sheer fact of being born to Pakistani and/or Muslim parents, he implies, saddles one with a quasi-genetic Muslim identity, and this identity confers moral obligations to one’s ethno-national Significant Others. To reject this identity is thus pathology, tantamount to self-rejection and self-hatred; presumably mental health requires us to trade in our autonomy for a collective ethno-religious identity, however ill-defined, irrational, or envy-ridden. This conception leads seamlessly to Hamid’s degrading self-description of his task as a writer: to slander those who disagree with him as ‘self-hating Muslims,’ thereby convincing the nonMuslim ‘world’ to ignore them and take him to be the Authentic Voice of the East. There is, to put it bluntly, something nauseating about Hamid’s success at this task. In a recent interview with Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Hamid says, ‘The novel is not supposed to have a correct answer. It’s a mirror. It really is just a conversation, and different people will read it in different ways’ (Solomon, 2007). Unfortunately, so far, the book’s readers seem to have read it in remarkably similar ways – as a ‘cautionary’ tale about how ‘we’ create ‘their’ rage. I suggest that it be read differently: as an exploration of how ‘they’ produce their own rage, often out of the commonplace disappointments of ordinary life. I suggest that it also be read for how mindless attachments to such confected identities as ‘Muslim sensibility,’ ‘Pakistani nation’ and ‘People of the Indus River Basin’ serve to distort history, deny agency, and produce self-deception, envy, and self-contempt. On this reading, the novel is less a mirror than it is a window, and what it shows the reader is depressing, but decidedly not the reader’s problem. It is instead the problem of those who regard collective identity as an ineradicable ‘aspect of themselves.’
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Khawaja | The Reluctant Fundamentalist That may not have been the reading intended by the author, but it is, I’d wager, as good a reading as any he did intend. It is, in any case, what I personally would describe as ‘the real view.’ [8]
Irfan Khawaja is instructor of philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. His essay ‘A Philosopher’s Rejection of Islam’ appeared in Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, Edited by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, 2003. References
Al-Azm, Sadik J. 2004, ‘Time Out of Joint: Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination,’ Boston Review, 29, 5, accessed online at:
. Al Azm, Sadik J. 2005, ‘Islam, Terrorism, and the West,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 25, 1: 6-15. Foley, Dylan 2007, ‘An Other Voice of America: Speaking Volumes,’ Star-Ledger, 22 April, 6. Jaffrelot, Christophe (ed) 2002, A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, London: Anthem. Mawdudi, Abul Ala 1986, Towards Understanding Islam, New York: Best Worlds. Rashid, Ahmed 2000, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven and London: Nota Bene Books. Salih, Tayeb 1997, Season of Migration to the North, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Solomon, Deborah 2007, ‘Questions for Mohsin Hamid,’ New York Times Magazine, 15 April, accessed online at: .
Notes
[1] For reviews of the book, visit Hamid’s website, accessed online at: . [2] Hamid’s decision to use the name ‘Changez’ represents a minor mystery of the novel. ‘Changez’ is the Urdu pronunciation of the name ‘Genghis,’ as in Genghis Khan. Given the historical associations of Genghis Khan with the catastrophic destruction of Baghdad, one might have thought that Muslim parents would shy away from naming their children after him, but that’s not so: though a relatively uncommon name (as compared, say, with ‘Irfan’ or ‘Mohsin’) there are ordinary Pakistanis named ‘Changez’ and even ‘Changez Khan.’ In interviews, Hamid seems to have denied that his use of the name has any significance, but given its relative atypicality, that’s hard to take at face value. [3] This is probably the place to note some significant similarities between Hamid’s background and my own. Hamid was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, studied at Princeton (graduating in 1993), worked in the financial sector in New York City, and now lives in London. Though I was born and raised in the United States, my extended family is from Lahore; I studied at Princeton (graduating in 1991), now work at the City University of New York, and live just outside of
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Manhattan. Evidently Hamid and I overlapped at Princeton for two years without having met one another. [4] For the standard account of Pakistan-Afghan relations in the past decade, see Rashid 2000, ch. 14, and Jaffrelot 2002, ch. 6. [5] Both were born in Lahore, both went to Princeton, and both worked in the financial sector in New York City. [6] Foley 2007. It’s worth noting that the topic of Muslim schadenfreude at 9/11 has been discussed in detail prior to and independently of Hamid; see Al Azm 2004 and 2005. Hamid appears unaware of the fact that his book bears a striking resemblance in structure and theme to Tayeb Salih’s classic novel Season of Migration to the North (Salih 1997), first published in Sudan in 1966. [7] Thus Mawdudi 1986, p. 6 (italics in original): ‘The Arabic word for disbelief is kufr, which literally means ‘to cover’ or ‘to conceal.’ The man who rejects God is called a concealer (kafir) because he conceals by his disbelief what is inherently in his nature and what is embalmed within his soul. For indeed, his nature is instinctively imbued with ‘Islam.’ His whole body, every cell and each atom, functions in obedience to that instinct…. But the vision of this man has been blurred, his common sense has been befogged, and he is unable to see the obvious. His own nature has become hidden from his eyes and he thinks and acts in complete disregard of it. The real truth has become separated from him and he gropes in the dark – such is the nature of disbelief.’ [8] Thanks to Carrie-Ann Biondi and Alan Johnson for helpful editorial suggestions.
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Orwell in Tribune: ‘As I Please’ and Other Writings 1943-7 by George Orwell (Compiled and edited by Paul Anderson), Politicos, 2006, 401 pp.
Nick Cohen In 1946, George Orwell described a man who is …thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income-tax demand printed in red. Needless to say, this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent with a note suggesting that they ‘ought to go well together.’ They arrived four days ago, but for forty-eight hours the reviewer was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a resolute moment he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Cross Roads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (this one 680 pages and weighs four pounds), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down, probably included by mistake. His review – 800 words, say – has got to be ‘in’ by midday tomorrow. This was self-portrait, but only a partial one. Orwell could invoke the wretchedness of the jobbing writer because he was churning out an astonishing amount of
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 journalism for poor-paying magazines in the Forties. But, and to an equally astonishingly degree, he wasn’t producing hack work but essays on a vast range of subjects at a literary and intellectual level so consistently high no one who writes for a living can look on them without a spasm of envy. Peter Davison’s The Complete Works of George Orwell runs to 20 volumes. While Orwell was writing his pieces for Tribune, he was also finishing Animal Farm, starting to think about 1984, handing in arguments and reviews for British and American papers – and coping with a dying wife, an adopted son and his own TB while he was about it. [1] Printing a writer’s every word isn’t always a kindness, and not all Orwell pieces stand the test of time – or even the test of his own time. But to read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local. The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson’s intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer. The Canadian anarchist George Woodcock, an occasional adversary but firm friend, said that ‘he could always find a subject on which there is something fresh to say in a prose that, for all its ease and apparent casualness, was penetrating and direct.’ Anderson adds that ‘it is difficult to think of a writer before or since’ who could move from toads spawning in spring to lonely hearts ads via the decline of English murder from the days of Crippen. Yet Orwell’s talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers. Little magazines usually appear and vanish without anyone beyond their unpaid contributors caring. The few whose names still reverberate captured a spirit of their time and stood for something bigger than their tiny circulations. Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the Forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life. (I say ‘Tribune was’ as if it were dead. The paper survives, but only in the sense that a geriatric in a coma survives.) Along with far more leftists than sympathetic historians like to remember, it went along with the Nazi-Soviet pact. When the Second World War began, it was effectively on Germany’s side and endorsed Communist Party line that the real enemies were Winston Churchill and the Labour Party rather than Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The board purged the fellow travellers in 1940, and for the rest of the decade Tribune was free to discuss the radical ideas that
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Cohen | Orwell in Tribune would make up a part of the programme of the 1945 Labour government, while, unusually for mid-20th century socialists, retaining a well-warranted suspicion of Stalin and his apologists. Orwell had a natural home. Conservative-minded readers attracted to this book by Orwell’s celebrations of Englishness or attacks on communism will learn that, despite everything, he was a man of the Left, who believed that British socialism was desirable and inevitable. The idea that the world would turn against central planning and nationalisation was as beyond him as the idea that it would turn back to them is beyond us. The only definition of a great writer that makes sense is that readers of all temperaments can appreciate his or her work, so the admiration of conservatives is a compliment to Orwell. But however many multitudes he contained, and however loudly the Tribune circulation manager protested about the left-wing readers who cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, Orwell remained close to his audience. He shared their broad principles and they understood his references. The common bonds of a small world helped Orwell. Writers and broadcasters in the mass media can never match his fluency, even if they had his talent, because they have to write at the pace of the slowest reader and break up their arguments with clunking explanations. (I fully expect to one day have an editor tell me that I can’t say ‘Shakespeare’ but must add in parenthesis ‘the famous 16th and 17th century playwright and poet for Stratford-upon-Avon near Coventry in Warwickshire’ in case someone somewhere doesn’t grasp the reference.) By contrast, writers tied to a small group of readers are like old friends, or at least old acquaintances, and can dispense with the formalities and get down to business, as Orwell did with relish. The Tribune columns show that ‘St George,’ the patron saint of English decency, was nowhere near as saintly as John Major and Simon Schama like to imagine. He conducted a running row with the readers about their humanitarian objections to the RAF killing women and children in bombing campaign against German cities. ‘Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?’ he asked. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words ‘civilian bombing’ will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as ‘We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic.’ Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front. After receiving a ‘number of letters, some of them quite violent ones’ he continued: Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air raids, either ours or the enemy’s. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war while wanting to preserve the kind of society that makes war inevitable. To which the only response is that different societies and ethical systems have usually held the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. They may be hypocritical, there may be no moral difference between killing a conscripted solider and defenceless woman, but the alternative is war without limit, which the 20th century saw enough of to know that it is worth ‘squealing against.’ Even when you instinctively know Orwell is wrong, you cannot deny his strengths, the chief of which is intellectual honesty. No English writer is less concerned about giving offence, as the above passages demonstrate. Not in the showy and superficial manner of bourgeois baiting modern hack – who merely bends the knee to the new establishment when he spatters his copy with obscenities – but in the way of all true radicals who think it their job to tackle comfortable illusions, and are faintly surprised when their readers complain rather than thank them. (In his biography, DJ Taylor describes how Orwell could never understand why authors whose books he had criticised resented him thereafter.) It’s not what you think but how you think, as they say, and dissidents facing systems and oppressions that Orwell never conceived have always admired his willingness to confront what he called the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his day. If a believer in human freedom wants to make an argument that may send him to prison in a dictatorship, Orwell is on his side. If, in a democracy, a writer has an idea he knows his editors will hate, his colleagues will hate and his readers will hate, the ghost of Orwell will never urge caution. Simultaneously opposing fascism, communism and colonialism required nerve, and although this isn’t a political collection in the main there’s one political essay on the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, which I’ve never seen reprinted, that shows him at his anti-totalitarian best and speaking to our time.
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Cohen | Orwell in Tribune Whenever you protest today about the willingness of modern liberals to excuse, go along with or turn a blind eye to the Islamist far right, you are told, in outraged tones, by the BBC, Prospect and all the rest of them that it’s only a handful of Trotskyists around the Socialist Workers Party and Livingstone who have flipped across the political spectrum. Liberal politicians and intellectuals – such as themselves – remain as virtuous as always, and to say otherwise is a gross calumny. Much the same was said in the Thirties and Forties, only then the apologists for the liberal mainstream declared that treacheries of the age were the sole responsibility of the Communist Party. Orwell would have none of that. When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city he protested ‘against the mean and cowardly attitude’ of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die. What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of leftwingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not ‘Is this policy right or wrong?’ but ‘This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?’ And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power. Today, you don’t hear a single voice raised in protest about what al-Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the Left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian Revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 History is not repeating itself therefore, but taking a turn for the worse. Nevertheless, Orwell’s parting message from 1944 to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals remains as true then as now. Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.’
Nick Cohen is a columnist at The Observer. He is the author of Pretty Straight Guys, a book about Britain under New Labour. A collection of his journalism, Cruel Brittania: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous, was published by Verso in 1999. His best-seller What’s Left? How The Liberals Lost Their Way (2007) was reviewed in Democratiya 8. He is an advisory editor of Democratiya. Notes
[1] In 1981, Gore Vidal began a celebrated attack on New York Jews who went along with homophobic and misogynist conservatives with ‘George Orwell remarks somewhere that you cannot say anything for or against the Jews without getting into trouble.’ ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,’ I felt when I read it, but have never been able to find the quote. (Vidal’s ‘George Orwell remarks somewhere’ was not a help.) However, writing in Tribune in 1944, Orwell said: ‘There are two journalistic activities that will always bring you a come-back. One is to attack the Catholics and the other is to defend the Jews,’ which is also true and well put, but not a sentiment likely to appeal to Mr Vidal.
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What is Genocide?
by Martin Shaw, Polity, 2007, 222 pp.
Brian Brivati Martin Shaw’s new study, What is Genocide, addresses the question: ‘how should we understand the idea of genocide?’ He offers a new definition of genocide which he claims represents a return to the spirit of Raphael Lemkin’s original formulation of the concept. Shaw states: ‘The book argues that genocide studies have lost some of the central insights of their founding thinker, Raphael Lemkin.’ [1] In order to recover Lemkin’s original meaning, Shaw argues, the idea of genocide needs to be vigorously conceptualised through sociological methodology. He offers a new definition of genocide and I will return to it towards the end of this essay. For the moment, however, let us consider Shaw’s argument that the major problem with the idea of genocide in the contemporary world is the way it is conceptualised. I will argue in this review that, despite some extremely valuable insights and analysis, Shaw’s articulation of the major problems with current definitions of genocide is flawed. Definition, in the social science sense of this term, i.e. conceptualisation, has never been the central difficulty the idea of genocide raises. Moreover, ‘genocide studies’ as a field, which is in its infancy, has seen a remarkably rich conceptual debate. Such debates, have not, it is true, yet settled around either a return to some sort of founding doctrine or a new conception of genocide. The old definition has not been successfully transcended by a new synthesis. The debate has not ‘settled’ because it does not need to. The problems genocide presents to the world are not primarily problems of definition but problems of prevention and punishment. The political difficulty of defining an event as genocide, for example in Rwanda, was not caused by our inability to understand what the term genocide referred to. The problem was with the implications for action that an acceptance of the fact that the events in Rwanda constituted genocide would have entailed. The problem of prevention was ever thus. On Lemkin In 1947 Raphael Lemkin looked back to the moment, in 1933, when he first articulated the concept that would later become the term genocide and, later still, the basis for the first Convention of the United Nations in the field of Human Rights:
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 The question arose whether sovereignty goes so far that a government can destroy with impunity its own citizens and whether such acts of destruction are domestic affairs or matters of international concern. Practically speaking, should the moral right of humanitarian intervention be converted into a right under international law? If the destruction of human groups is a problem of international concern, then such acts should be treated as crimes under the law of nations, like piracy, and every state should be able to take jurisdiction over such acts irrespective of the nationality of the offender and of the place where the crime was committed. In line with this thought the present writer submitted a proposal to the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law held in Madrid in 1933 to declare the destruction of racial, religious or social collectivities a crime under the law of nations (delictum iuris gentium). There was envisaged the creation of two new international crimes: the crime of barbarity, consisting in the extermination of racial, religious or social collectivities, and the crime of vandalism, consisting in the destruction of cultural and artistic works of these groups. The intention was to declare these crimes punishable by any country in which the culprit might be caught, regardless of the criminal’s nationality or the place where the crime was committed. This proposal was not accepted. [2] The style of the quotation above is typical of Lemkin’s prose – clear and precise but with barely concealed outrage and passion. The content of the quotation is important for understanding the nature of the concept of genocide, its origins and the fundamental challenges and problems that we face with the crime today. Lemkin’s original formulation of the crimes that would become genocide was submitted as a proposal to the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law held in Madrid in 1933. It followed the massacre in Iraq on 7 August 1933 of the Assyrian population of the town of Semile. This massacre evoked memories of the Armenian massacres during the First World War and inspired Lemkin to propose that: Whosoever, out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity, or with a view to the extermination thereof, undertakes a punishable action against the life, bodily integrity, liberty, dignity or economic existence of a person belonging to such a collectivity, is liable, for the crime of barbarity, to a penalty of . . . unless his deed falls within a more severe provision of the given code. Whosoever, either out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity, or with a view to the extermination thereof, destroys its cultural or artistic works, will be liable for the crime of vandalism, to a
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Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide penalty of . . . unless his deed falls within a more severe provision of the given code. The above crimes will be prosecuted and punished irrespective of the place where the crime was committed and of the nationality of the offender, according to the law of the country where the offender was apprehended. [3] So, Lemkin at first proposed the crime of ‘barbarism’ and a separate crime of ‘vandalism.’ The crime of barbarity entailed the attempt to exterminate a racial, religious or ‘social collectivity,’ through killing but also action against ‘bodily integrity’ i.e., rape, ‘liberty’ i.e., the creation of concentration camps, ‘dignity’ i.e., laws which stigmatised certain identities within a polity and ‘economic existence’ i.e., the ability to earn a living. The crime of vandalism consisted of the destruction of the cultural and artistic works of a group i.e., the burning of books. It is a macabre irony that Lemkin’s 1933 articulation of the concept of genocide predicted almost perfectly the policies the Nazis would enact against the Jews in the decade that followed. As the Nazis’ regime developed, Lemkin, who was a leading Polish Jurist, developed his thinking on the nature of the crimes he then termed barbarism and vandalism. Writing in the journal of the United Nations in 1946 he reflected on the policies of the Nazis, not just in the period of the war itself but in the run up to the war between 1933 and 1939. In this phase of the regime the assault on rights directed against the Jews and others by the Nazis was based on the crime of vandalism as much as on the crime of barbarism. These assaults then radicalised into the destruction of the ‘national-biological power of the neighbours of Germany so that Germany might win a permanent victory, whether directly through military subjugation or indirectly through such a biological destruction that even in the case of Germany’s defeat the neighbours would be so weakened that Germany would be able to recover her strength in later years.’ [4] For Lemkin this destruction of a people was not confined merely to killing but encompassed acts to prevent life such as forced abortions and sterilizations and acts that could endanger life; for example, artificial infections, working to death in special camps, deliberate separation of families for depopulation purposes. Etc. But Lemkin argued that, awful as such crimes are in and of themselves: ‘All these actions are subordinated to the criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human group. The acts are directed against groups, as such, and individuals are selected for destruction only because they belong to these groups.’ [5] This, he argued, was different from other kinds of extreme violence by states and was a new category of crime. This crime needed a new word to describe it.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 As we will see a little later, Martin Shaw argues that armed force is central to what the definition of genocide should contain. Lemkin here seems to support this view as he is giving priority to the destruction of life. Nevertheless, we should notice that Lemkin instantly adds to this the word ‘cripple.’ For Lemkin, then, the newness of the crime that he would call genocide was not merely the destruction by armed force of a human group – a description central to Shaw’s characterisation of Lemkin’s perception of genocide – but the crippling of the life of that group by a range of actions not all of which would result in death. As Lemkin put it: ‘… mass murder does not convey the specific losses to civilization in the form of the cultural contributions which can be made only by groups of people united through national, racial or cultural characteristics. The evidence produced at the Nuremberg trial gave full support to the concept of genocide! However, the International Military Tribunal gave a narrow interpretation of its Charter and decided that acts committed before the outbreak of the war were not punishable offences.’ [6] Sir Hartley Shawcross and others agreed with Lemkin’s view that ‘Had the Tribunal punished such acts a precedent would have been established to the effect that a government is precluded from destroying groups of its own citizens.’ [7] In his study of the Axis policies of occupation, in which he first defined and articulated the crime of genocide, Lemkin stated clearly that: ‘genocide is a problem not only of war but also of peace.’ [8] But the crimes of the Nazis in peace did not feature at Nuremburg. When Lemkin’s book on Axis Occupation policies was published in 1944, it contained a chapter on the crime of genocide. Early reviewers picked up on the nature of the crime that Lemkin had described. The massacres, the forced labor, the separation of families, the deprivation of free movements – all these discriminations practiced upon the Jews constituted part of a movement designated by Lemkin as ‘genocide,’ a name which he believes should be used to denote something which has gone much farther than the old political and cultural denationalization policies familiar to historians, for ‘genocide’ has embraced political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral practices. [9] Another reviewer noted that genocide, as Dr. Lemkin explains, signifies: a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the
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Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide groups themselves. After analyzing the German techniques of genocide carried out in the political, social, cultural, economic, and other fields in the occupied countries, Dr. Lemkin concludes that the enemy has embarked upon a gigantic scheme to change, in favor of Germany, the balance of biological forces between it and the captive nations for many years to come. For all the acts committed by the German occupying forces in the occupied countries, Dr. Lemkin holds the entire German people responsible, with which this reviewer, on the basis of his own work in the field, fully agrees. As Dr. Lemkin forcefully points out, ‘The present destruction of Europe would not be so complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely its plan, participated voluntarily in its execution, and up to this point profited greatly there from.’ Furthermore, the author rightly emphasizes the significant fact that ‘The German techniques of exploitation of the subjugated nations are so numerous, thoughtful and elaborate, and are so greatly dependent upon personal skill and responsibility that this complex machinery could not have been successful without devotion to the cause of the persons in control’ (p. xiv). He therefore urges ‘that the considerable number of Germans responsible for the carnage and looting should be punished or reduced to a condition in which they may not again be dangerous to the social order and international peace’ (p. xii). [10] Both reviewers are clear that the nature of the crime being described is wideranging, encompassing both peace and war, entailing many actions short of murder and carried out by a broad cross section of a society. Following the publication of this study, Lemkin, by now in the United States, prepared a resolution for the newly formed United Nations general assembly. The preamble to the resolution echoed the theme that had first been introduced in the 1933 submission to the Madrid conference – the destruction of racial, religious and national groups both in the sense of their physical destruction and the destruction of their cultural identity. It stated that genocide was ‘a denial of the right of existence to entire human groups in the same sense as homicide is a denial to an individual of his right to live.’ The resolution went on to call on the UN ‘to declare genocide an international crime, to insure international cooperation in its prevention and punishment; and to recommend that genocide be dealt with by national legislation in the same way as other international crimes such as piracy, traffic in women and children, and others.’ [11]
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Lemkin’s resolution was sponsored at the second part of the first session of the General Assembly at Lake Success by Cuba, India and Panama. It was adopted as Resolution 96 (I) on 11 December 1946. The Economic and Social Council instructed the Secretary General to prepare a draft convention on genocide which should be considered by the Commission on Development and Codification of International Law. The General Assembly, at its second session, reaffirmed the former resolution by Resolution 180 (11) of November 21, 1947, and requested the Economic and Social Council to continue the work. The Council later appointed an Ad Hoc Committee, composed of the representatives of only seven Members, to draft a convention. The Ad Hoc Committee met from April 5 to May 10, 1948. It abandoned the former draft and adopted a proposal by China l2 as the basic text. This Committee unanimously adopted a draft convention and transmitted it to the Council. By Resolution 153 (VII) of August 26, 1948, the Council decided to transmit the draft convention to the third session of the General Assembly. On 8 December 8, 1948, this Committee adopted the draft resolution. The next day the General Assembly rejected several Soviet amendments and adopted the resolution with the annexed convention, as submitted by the Sixth Committee, and two accompanying resolutions. The vote was 55 to 0, no abstentions; Costa Rica, El Salvador, and the Union of South Africa were absent. [12] In the debates that followed, discussion quickly turned to the problem of enforcement. While, as Kunz put it, genocide by a state against its own citizens ‘was morally condemned, it was generally recognized that a state is entitled to treat its own citizens at discretion and that the manner in which it treats them is not a matter with which international law, as such, concerns itself.’ In describing the very first debate on the genocide convention, the real problem surfaced right away. In considering humanitarian intervention and intervention to prevent genocide, a central plank after all of the convention as drafted, ‘there is general agreement that, by virtue of its personal and territorial supremacy, a state can treat its own nationals according to discretion.’ The main texts of international law backed up the limited scope of support for the notion of humanitarian intervention. Kunz argued that: …in the previous editions of Oppenheim the view was expressed that ‘whether there is really a rule of the Law of Nations which admits such intervention may well be doubted.’ Lauterpacht, in the latest edition, also recognizes that states had a disinclination to take responsibility for a humanitarian intervention and that, on the other hand, it has been abused for selfish purposes.
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Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide Kunz concludes, somewhat optimistically, that the Convention, ‘therefore creates in this and other points new law binding only on the states which have ratified it.’ The innovations in the Convention as originally drafted went further. ‘The crimes referred to in Article II and III which hitherto if committed by a government in its own territory against its own citizens, have been of no concern to international law, are made a matter of international concern and are, therefore, taken out of the ‘matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State,’ of Article 11, paragraph 7 of the United Nations Charter.’ Although only contracting parties can invoke Articles VIII and IX of the Convention, United Nations organs are called to intervene.’ Kunz concludes, writing in 1949: ‘This confirms our construction of the Convention. Individuals are criminally liable for genocide in a domestic court under domestic law, but they are not internationally liable. States alone are, under the general conditions of state responsibility, internationally responsible, but under international law, not under criminal law; only this international state responsibility includes – and here lies the innovation – genocide committed by a state against its own citizens. Article VIII gives to any contracting party the right to call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of the crimes named in Articles II and III.’ [13] The only problem is that no state has ever succeeded in doing so. Despite this potential innovation – the response to which I will explore in a moment – debates gradually watered down the convention. The jurist, Kunz writes, borrowing the words of the Belgian philosopher of law, Jules Dabin, ‘is primarily an artist of definitions; and good definitions are in no field more essential than in criminal law.’ Article 11, giving the definition of genocide, is, therefore, ‘the heart of the convention. The Sixth Committee decided on a definition by way of enumeration. The five types of acts enumerated cover physical and biological genocide.’ Gradually these types of genocide were amended. Mental harm was diluted. Then all forms of cultural genocide were eliminated from the convention. [14] There then followed the elimination of the protection of political groups from the scope of the convention. The American Bar Association responded to this development with a ringing condemnation: ‘The excluded groups are the only ones that are presently in the process or common danger of extermination. Compromise on a matter of principle is tantamount to abandoning the principle.’ [15] The American Jurists’ assault on the Convention was wide ranging. They attacked the basic principles on which
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 it was drafted and the possibility of it being enforced. [16] They argued that the convention would fail to prevent a repetition of the crimes of Nazi Germany because its approach ‘is that of individual crime and not of persecutions instigated by governments…It foresees the eventual establishment of an international court, but for the purpose of trying individuals.’ The failure at the heart of the convention was the inability of the United Nations assembly to face up to the protection given to genocidal states by the limits of the legal remit of the prosecution dimension of the convention, let alone the prevention ambition. Mass killing could only take place with the approval of governments. The crime of genocide referred to acts affecting many thousands. Therefore the crimes which the convention is designed to prevent and to punish, can only take place with the considerable mobilisation of the state – a point Lemkin was at pains to stress in his study of the Axis Occupation policies. How, the Bar Association asked in 1949, ‘can it be expected that a government engaged in such a policy will voluntarily turn over its officials or citizens to any other government or international court for punishment for carrying out that policy? To take the accused by force would require an act of war. The Genocide Convention is an attempt to carry over into time of peace the so-called Nuremberg principle under which captured enemies were held personally liable for acts of aggression and crimes against humanity; but the Nuremberg Tribunal had the physical custody of the persons whose condemnation was demanded.’ The US lawyers were also highly critical, as mentioned above, of the selectivity of the groups covered by the terms of the convention: ‘The Convention is selective among the groups it would protect in whole or in part. Those singled out for preferred consideration are national, ethnical, racial and religious groups “as such.” Political and economic groups were apparently not considered as needing or worthy of protection.’ They concluded that ‘The Genocide Convention as submitted would not apply to many such cases. The Soviet Government and its Communist satellites, should they accept the Convention, which they have not done up till now, may liquidate property owners and others who believe in private enterprise on the ground that they are political enemies of the state and therefore are not covered by the Convention.’ [17] The Convention, eventually signed by 41 states and ratified by 133 around the world, was a watered down version of Lemkin’s original conception of the crime of genocide. It was more limited in scope and did not take into account the
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Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide destruction of the cultural identity of a group during peacetime and extent to which political groups could be included. It was true to Lemkin’s vision in the sense that, in contrast to the American Bar Association, he believed in the possibility of extending international law to encompass this new crime and for this crime to be based on the bringing of charges against an individual. Though he was unsatisfied with this he did not propose the end of national sovereignty. On Shaw Martin Shaw’s arguments need to be considered in this context. Shaw’s central argument (which could have been stated in a long article and is stretched and repeated in book form) needed saying and he says it, several times, extremely well. There is a need to recover aspects of Lemkin’s original concept of genocide. We do not require a plethora of terms for the types of mass killing that take place but we do need a proper use of the term genocide. We need better answers to the questions of which groups are defined by the convention and how the convention can be made to operate. On this later question, which surely matters above all others, Shaw has little constructive to say. Where he is much more convincing is presenting the idea that we should look at genocide from a social group perspective and exam the ‘conflict structure’ of the context in which genocide takes place, seeing this as a relationship which is two-sided rather than a one-sided relationship in which the victims are killed by the perpetrators. Thinking about genocide in this way is useful but Shaw takes it too far. He wants us to abandon the idea that genocides are one-sided conflicts between unarmed groups and militarised ones. Even if the victim group does fight back against overwhelming odds and with the certainty of destruction, as in, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto, Shaw wants us to think about this as a power relation in which force on both sides can be compared. Shaw also argues that few genocidists set out to kill all members of the victim group. [18] Shaw argues this position because he sees one of the main problems with the genocide studies field – dominated as he sees it by lawyers and historians [19] – spends too much time thinking about the intentions of the perpetrators and the meaning of their actions. The problem with Shaw’s approach is that it does not match the facts of at least two of the most clear-cut cases of genocide of the last century – Hitler’s war against the Jews and the Huti genocide against the Tutsi. In these two cases there is no problem of definition and no one denies that what happened was genocide. Few writers on these two genocides would suggest that the power relationship between the two
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 was balanced enough to describe the conflict as being anything other than onesided. Even fewer would suggest that the genocidal intent was anything other than to kill all members of the victim group wherever they could be found. The heart of understanding genocide is to move beyond Shaw’s formulation – ‘…the killing of all members of any large-scale group is inconceivable; some will always survive, either by losing their group identity or by moving beyond the reach of genocidal power.’ [20] Such killing is not inconceivable to the genocidists and that is why so much attention has been paid to trying to understand them. Grasping the audacity of their intent is central to an understanding of the nature of genocide compared to other kinds of repression. Despite my reservations about the ramifications of some of Shaw’s arguments, Shaw has presented a new definition of genocide that, is worth taking seriously even if we do not adopt it. His definition is: Genocide is a form of violent social conflict, or war, between armed power organisations that aim to destroy civilian social groups and those groups and other actors who resist this destruction. The type of action carried out needs also to be defined. So he defines genocidal actions as: Action in which armed power organisations treat civilian social groups as enemies and aim to destroy their real or putative social power, by means of killing, violence and coercion against individuals whom they regard as members of the group. The strength of Shaw’s new definition is that it emphases that genocide is not outside normal social phenomena – or indeed history – and that it is a form of conflict and war. Its first main weakness is that it attempts a ‘radical break with the ideas of ‘one-sidedness’ and ‘helplessness.’ And it also stresses that genocide, even in peacetime, is a form of war. There are problems with both these last two features. The one-sidedness thesis is flatly contradicted by evidence from important cases. The argument about genocide being a feature of war is already generally accepted. How best to evaluate the usefulness of Shaw’s definition? Let us compare Shaw’s definition with the text of the main elements of the genocide convention as it was eventually passed.
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Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide The first article of the convention states that: ‘The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.’ This article conforms to Lemkin’s view that the crimes of the Nazis before 1939 should be included and is clearly stated. The acceptance that genocide can be a feature of peace as well as war is not clearly stated in Shaw’s definition though it is mentioned in his elaborations of the definition. [21] This is major issue of contention. What is a ‘time of war’ and what is a ‘time of peace.’ In terms of the operation of international law and the force of jurisdiction differences in these states of affairs matter in terms of law and reality. The current case in Darfur is of course a case in point. The government of Sudan is not at war but neither is it a state at peace. Moreover, acts by a state in terms of social and cultural groups have never been seen as part of the genocide debate. They are, however, central elements in the study of the possibility of prevention. Acts against political, ethnic or national groups before conflict begins are recognised as being signposts on the road to the physical destruction of those groups. Identifying actions against specific groups that go outside human rights norms, and then stopping governments from extending them, are vital parts of prevention. Prevention is given equal weight in the formation of this article in the convention. In these respects the existing definition in the convention is actually truer to the spirit of Lemkin’s intent and potentially more useful in terms of prevention than Shaw’s definition. The second article states that in the ‘present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’ This is the ‘definition by way of enumeration.’ The problems with the enumeration we have already discussed. Political groups are excluded. Lemkin’s hope that cultural assaults could be included was rejected. The much debated ‘mental harm’ clause survived. But here again the meaning is quite clear and the intention of the Article transparent. Even the omissions do not detract from the potential of the Article and the definition is clear and in many ways clearer than Shaw’s definition and closer to Lemkin’s intent. Having established the nature of the crime, the Convention sets out the acts that will be punished (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide. It then defines who will be held accountable in Article 4. Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. This definition of crimes and those responsible has no ambiguity about it and because it is designed to be connected to actions is clearer and more analytically useful than Shaw’s definition, especially when this is read without the elaboration. The rest of the Convention goes beyond definition and deals with the real nature of the problem with genocide. These are the key Articles: Article 5. The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III. Article 6. Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction. Article 7. Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force. Article 8. Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III. Article 9. Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the
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Brivati | Lemkin and Shaw on Genocide other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute. We know what the crime of genocide is. We know who commits it. We know who the victims of the crime are. We know who the bystanders are. We have seen it too often since 1945 not to be pretty good at recognising it, though it can always be debated. Shaw has taken on one of the vital debates about definition in his book by ensuring that the one-sidedness of the conflict does not present an obstacle to defining acts as genocide. He does this because of Darfur and the violence from the rebel groups against government forces. The problem with this is that the victims in Darfur are not the rebel groups, some of whom have now been joined by Arab tribes, but the civilian populations of the African villages that have been attacked. Those fights are one-sided, even if the overall conflict is not. Shaw’s intentions are noble but not necessary. Clearly the events in Darfur meet the definition of genocide in the convention and even more those of the original writings of Lemkin. The problem is translating what we know about this crime and its occurrence into prevention. On this question Martin Shaw takes us no further and his purpose to be fair was not to do so. He set out to enrich our conceptual thinking about genocide and he has done this. But definition and conceptual thinking about genocide have never really been the problem. The frustration is that we have known the major problem since the Convention was drafted. Let me repeat the words of the American Bar Association from 1949: ‘How can it be expected that a government engaged in such a policy [genocide] will voluntarily turn over its officials or citizens to any other government or international court for punishment for carrying out that policy?’ The question the world faces is not ‘What is genocide?’ The question is ‘How do we prevent Genocide?’ Martin Shaw’s takes us a little closer to being able to think better about genocide, and his book will be near the top of my reading lists for that reason, but it takes us no closer to answering the real question.
Brian Brivati is Professor of Contemporary History at Kingston University. An advisory editor of Democratiya, his new book The End of Decline: Blair and Brown in power will be published in September 2007. He is a member of the Iraq Commission, an independent, cross-party group tasked with producing a blueprint for Britain’s future commitment to Iraq.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 References
Finch, George A., 1949, ‘The Genocide Convention,’ The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 732-8. Horniker, Arthur Leon 1945, (review) Military Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 69-73. Kunz, Josef L 1949, ‘The United Nations Convention on Genocide,’ The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 738-46. Lemkin, Raphael 1944, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lemkin, Raphael 1946, ‘The Genocide Convention,’ Journal of the United Nations, No. 41. Lemkin, Raphael 1947, ‘The Crime of Genocide,’ The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 41, No. 1. pp. 145-151. Mander, Linden A, 1945, (review) The American Historical Review, Vol. 51, No. 1. pp. 117-120. Shaw, Martin 2007, What is Genocide?, Polity: London.
[1] Shaw 2007, p. 4
Notes
[2] Lemkin 1947. [3] Lemkin 1947, p 146. [4] Lemkin 1946, p. 52. [5] Lemkin 1946, p. 52. [6] Lemkin 1946, p. 52. [7] Lemkin 1947, p. 148. [8] Lemkin 1944, p. 93. [9] Mander 1945, pp. 117-20. [10] Review by Arthur Leon Horniker in Military Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Spring, 1945), pp. 69-73. [11] Lemkin 1947, p. 149. [12] Kunz 1949. [13] Kunz 1949, p. 746. [14] Kunz 1949, quoting Oppenheim-Lauterpacht, International Law, Vol. I (7th ed., London, 1948), p. 583. Cf., also, ‘ N e i propri territori la libertd di ciascun Stato B illimitata verso I propri cittadini sccondo il diritto internaaionale generale,’ in G. Balladore Pallieri, Diratto Internaaionale Pubblico (5th ed., Milan, 1948), p. 382. and Oppenheim-Lauterpaclit, op. cit., p. 279. [15] Kunz 1949, p. 746. [16] All quotes from the American Bar Association from Finch 1949. [17] Finch1949, pp. 732-738. [18] Shaw 2007, p. 108. [19] Shaw 2007, p. 37-96. [20] Shaw 2007, p. 108. [21] Shaw 2007, pp.155-6.
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Deficits of International Law Norman Geras I approach my theme here today indirectly. [1] In his book Just and Unjust Wars, adapting a remark of Trotsky’s about the dialectic Michael Walzer proposes the aphorism ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’ War is a scourge and a horror, and most of those whom it involves it draws in against their will. Hence the ambition, the age-old ideal, of a world at peace. Those of us who share a commitment to a just and more or less stable system of international law attach great weight, consequently, to the outlawing of aggressive war. That, however, is only one side of the story. It cannot be the whole of it. For although peace is an opposite of war, war is not the only opposite of peace. If we want to create a peace movement – a genuine peace movement with influence and moral standing across the planet – we need an understanding of international law that has thoroughly internalized this imbalance. Consider a simple dictionary definition of ‘war.’ Here is what the Shorter Oxford gives: ‘The state of armed conflict between nations or states; armed hostilities between nations or states, or between parties in the same nation or state...’ Between parties in the same nation or state. Let us press upon this aspect of the meaning. Most of you will probably think at once of civil war, to which indeed the definition applies. But now consider a famous passage from chapter 13 of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes: ‘Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.’
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 My interest here is in the ‘tract of time’ and ‘disposition’ aspects of Hobbes’s line of thought, as he reflects on the lawless violence characterizing the pre-political state of nature. As you know, his own formula for securing internal peace was sovereign authority. But unless such sovereign authority is limited and just, for those subject to it can itself be a source of intense forms of oppression, backed by the threat of violence and, as needed, actual violence. To this what Hobbes says about both time and disposition applies in full measure. I allude, by way of example, to the country of my birth, Zimbabwe – a country brought to ruin by those who govern it, its people hungry and abject, and the full brutality of the state deployed against them and against every sign of political opposition. I do not, for my part, call this state of things war. In the paradigm meanings it isn’t – even though we may sometimes speak loosely of regimes being ‘at war’ with sections of their own people. But to call the condition of Zimbabwe today a condition of peace would be a cruel joke. The words of Tacitus are apt: ‘They make a wilderness and call it peace.’ The point I’m perhaps labouring here was made more than thirty years ago in an essay by Alexander Solzhenitsyn entitled ‘Peace and Violence.’ He wrote: ‘The “peace-war” opposition embodies a logical fault. The whole of the thesis is opposed to only a part of the anti-thesis. War is a mass phenomenon – concentrated, clamorous and clear-cut, but it is by no means the only expression of unceasing world-wide violence. The logically balanced and genuine moral opposites are peace-violence.’ Again, later in the same essay: ‘To achieve not just a brief postponement of the threat of war, but a real peace, a genuine peace erected on sound foundations, it is necessary to fight the “quiet”, hidden forms of violence no less fiercely than the “noisy” kinds. The aim must be not only to stop the rockets and cannons, but also to set the limits of state violence at the threshold where the need to defend society’s members ceases [my italics]. The aim must be to outlaw from the human condition the very idea that some are permitted to use violence regardless of justice, law and mutual agreements.’
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Geras | Deficits of International Law That is my theme here this afternoon. If I may repeat: although peace is an opposite of war, war is not the only opposite of peace. Today more than ever, a just international juridical system, and a peace movement supporting it, need to integrate this insight, by aiming to place the prohibition on aggressive war within an effective set of restraints and remedies against states that do violence to their own peoples. We are not at square one. The world has already come some way in this regard. After the horror of what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe – in the ghettos, the shooting pits, the death camps – was exposed, the principle was formally established by the Nuremberg Trials that there are constraints upon what governments may permissibly do to people under their jurisdiction. This was established, be it noted, as a legal principle, a principle of international law – although not de novo. The idea had had a long pre-history within the traditions of moral, political and legal thought. But here it became, officially, part of the law of nations, and was backed up by an actual juridical process (whatever the shortcomings of this may have been). The Nuremberg Trials announced that state sovereignty was no longer sacrosanct, that there is an international code of law, and states themselves can be in violation of it. As importantly, the beneficiaries of this normative constraint upon the conduct of governments were not primarily other governments, other states, but individuals. As it was expressed by Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom at Nuremberg: ‘[I]nternational law has in the past made some claim that there is a limit to the omnipotence of the state and that the individual human being, the ultimate unit of all law, is not disentitled to the protection of mankind when the state tramples upon his rights in a manner which outrages the conscience of mankind... [T]he right of humanitarian intervention by war is not a novelty in international law – can intervention by judicial process then be illegal?’ That the individual human being – ‘ultimate unit of all law’ – is not disentitled to the protection of mankind is a radical principle indeed. I say the world has come some way, and this fact should not be minimized; but neither should it be exaggerated. After World War II there was a public rhetoric of ‘never again,’ a rhetoric that is periodically revived in the face of some new
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 horror. I don’t think it is unduly cynical to suggest that it is a rhetoric that should be abandoned for the time being. For the reality has been not one of ‘never again,’ but rather of ‘always once more.’ In Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Darfur, the murderers go to work, and the international community that is the putative guardian of international law fails to react or it reacts too slowly. Here one could say – and it would be true – that responsible moral criticism should not abstract from the realities of politics, diplomacy, statesmanship and what have you, which form the context of preventative action. Still, in what follows I want to highlight some of the ways in which the normative progress since World War II that I’ve just registered has been deficient; to highlight how the core value which Sir Hartley Shawcross emphasized at Nuremberg is in fact multiply compromised and betrayed by the concepts and the realities of the international legal system we presently have. I go on to deal with four deficits of international law. 1. Crime against humanity Let us examine, first, one of the fundamental concepts covering international political crimes, the concept of crime against humanity. The definition of this offence, whether in law or philosophically, is not without its problems; yet it is a common theme in the international law literature – indeed almost a truism of this literature – that the offence is intended to cover the most egregious violations of human rights. So: murder, extermination, enslavement, severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, rape, persecution, enforced disappearance of persons, apartheid – you get the picture. The picture you get is, however, complicated by the fact that, in the legal definition of the offence there is a threshold requirement, before a violation of whatever the relevant rights gets to count as being a crime against humanity. From the Nuremberg Charter to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court this requirement has been embodied in the qualification ‘committed against any civilian population,’ or ‘when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.’ I think there are sound pragmatic reasons for having such a threshold of scale, as things presently stand. The first is a presumption that small-scale versions of these
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Geras | Deficits of International Law crimes do not generally need the intervention of the international community since they fall within the province of domestic law and would usually be dealt with under this. Second, even where they are not, right now the international community and its recognized courts could not realistically handle every case of individualized or small-scale (even if egregious) rights violation across the planet. But these pragmatic considerations shouldn’t define the boundaries of the offence as such. For if they do, it has the result that smaller-scale instances of states violating the most fundamental human rights will not count as being in breach of international law. In such cases the principle enunciated by Sir Hartley Shawcross – that the individual human being is not disentitled to the protection of mankind – goes by the board. Individuals are so disentitled, unless they are part of a sufficient mass of victims. The threshold in question is a threshold of inhumanity. Better that the law should incorporate smaller-scale examples within the definition of the offence, while recognizing that, for time being, these cannot always be pursued. 2. Humanitarian crisis Here’s a second such threshold and, as I contend, deficit of international law. It was argued for in connection with the Iraq war by people – including Kenneth Roth on behalf of Human Rights Watch – opposed to the idea that military action in Iraq for regime change purposes could be defended as a form of humanitarian intervention. The argument in a nutshell – one regarded by many as authoritatively delineating the proper legal threshold for humanitarian intervention – is that for such intervention to be justified there has to be an imminent or ongoing humanitarian crisis, involving mass killing – killing if not of genocidal scope, then at any rate on a very large scale: massacre, mass death through famine, or the danger of such. Now, in view of how things have turned out in Iraq following the US-led military intervention and occupation – a spiralling human catastrophe – many of you may be inclined to endorse this threshold requirement without more ado. But it needs to be defended not only for the case in which intervention has (as we know here) failed, but for the case also where it might have a chance of succeeding. Any projected intervention on humanitarian grounds has obviously to try to justify itself in light of its probability of success. It’s a separate question, however, what the
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 scale of atrocity and inhumanity is that makes this calculation of likely success or failure a live issue. My own view is that setting the threshold so high that Saddam Hussein’s regime fell on the ‘safe’ side of it, setting it at the level of immediate humanitarian crisis in the meaning I’ve already indicated, sets it too high – by accepting a level of state criminality that makes a mockery of the idea of international law as a real force constraining governments. I don’t mean to reopen the arguments over the Iraq war, which are by now familiar to us all; I will only say therefore, in support of the more general argument I’m making, that Saddam’s regime had been responsible for two genocides – against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs – and according to Human Rights Watch’s own estimates was responsible for the deaths and disappearances of more than a quarter of a million people. Although by early 2003 the rate of killing in Iraq had ‘ebbed,’ in Kenneth Roth’s unintentionally brutal way of putting it, the Baathist regime was one of the most murderous on the planet. In the words of Peter Galbraith: ‘In a more lawful world, the United Nations, or a coalition of willing states, would have removed this regime from power long before 2003.’ If the threshold for humanitarian intervention is set by humanitarian crisis (in the meaning of that term which I’ve given), this means that the sovereignty of a regime that has just perpetrated, just finished perpetrating, a genocide but is no longer doing so is to be respected. It means that the sovereignty of a regime which over an extended period murders and tortures large numbers of people but never on a scale you could describe as genocidal, never on a scale such as to precipitate a general humanitarian crisis, likewise is to be respected. It means that the sovereignty of a regime that presides over people starving to death through its own misrule is to be respected. An international system that accommodates such things cannot lay claim to providing the framework of a ‘lawful world,’ of laws meriting support because they secure peace for the peoples of the world. Here it might be argued – as Roth did argue for Human Rights Watch in January 2004 – that the threshold I’m discussing applies only to humanitarian military intervention; but the perpetrators of state crimes may still be brought to justice after the event. I don’t belittle the importance of this. Dispensing justice is a necessary part of an effective international juridical system. But that doesn’t address the issue of prevention, which is an equally necessary part of a system of law. Punishing the
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Geras | Deficits of International Law perpetrators after the event doesn’t change the fact that, left standing, regimes of the kind I’ve just sketched remain legitimate actors within the system of states. Can I prescribe an alternative threshold to that of immediate humanitarian crisis? I don’t pretend this is easy to do, but the difficulty isn’t mine alone; it’s integral to the issue, and so I’m not embarrassed by it. Here, in any case, is what I have tentatively proposed by way of a more defensible threshold for humanitarian intervention. This threshold is reached in two sets of circumstances: (a) Where a state is on the point of committing (or permitting), or is actually committing (or permitting), or has recently committed (or permitted) massacres and other atrocities against its own population of genocidal, or tendentially genocidal, scope. (b) Where, even short of this, a state commits, supports or overlooks murders, tortures and other extreme brutalities or deprivations such as to result in a regular flow of thousands upon thousands of victims. Anyone is free to try to improve upon the proposal. 3. Genocide The third deficit concerns the prevention of genocide. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,’ with the acts in question including ‘(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part...’ By Article 1 of the Convention the signatory nations ‘undertake to prevent and to punish’ this ‘crime under international law.’ It is estimated that more than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur and two million have fled their homes. Two years ago a UN report found that ‘killing of civilians, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement [were taking place] throughout Darfur.’ The report, however, stopped short of calling this a genocide, even though
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 there is substantial evidence of the Sudanese government orchestrating and participating in these crimes – as, indeed, a more recent UN enquiry has found. But the panel reporting two years ago said there wasn’t decisive evidence of a policy to commit genocide, of intent to destroy a population group. This prompts the question, for me, whether both prevention and punishment should be covered by the one definition of genocide. So far as punishment is concerned, the prosecution of individuals has to be governed by standards of proof of the most robust kind, and therefore intent must presumably be construed in the strictest way, to establish – ‘mens rea’ – that those responsible at government level had a deliberate genocidal purpose. But if proof of this order – which can be established only by a legal process, often long and drawn-out – is also made a condition of the prevention of genocide, then the definition of genocide is in danger of serving as a barrier to action, which it was surely not supposed to be. For, in these circumstances, even with all the material elements of the crime apparently present, and some possibility (to put it no more strongly) of intent as well, the UN Convention cannot be held to apply without rigorous legal-type proof. If even Darfur cannot be thought to demand a preventative intervention by the international community in light of the law on genocide, then that law not only doesn’t protect individuals in small numbers, it doesn’t protect them in large masses either. And it certainly doesn’t secure them peace. 4. Legality and politics The fourth and last deficit I want to deal with is more quickly explained. It concerns not normative definitions (of crime against humanity, the threshold for humanitarian intervention, genocide), but the politics of the global community. Whatever may be happening in some given country and to some very large number of people, and however ghastly it may be, if China (or that could be France, or the US) has a mind to block concerted international action via the UN, then there will be no action. If, as is now often said, because of the Iraq war there is no stomach internationally for further interventions; or if a key player in a given region – think of Thabo Mbeki for South Africa and vis-à-vis Zimbabwe – plays the role of protector to a criminal regime, there will be no action. I am not so naïve as to imagine the possibility of a juridical system altogether free from external political influences. However, what we have here is a system of wouldbe law that is so thoroughly enmeshed in the interplay between major political
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Geras | Deficits of International Law forces and actors as to lack any substantial degree of independence such as is surely necessary for it to function as a legal system.
* I wind up now. In December 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty – an independent body, but working in support of the UN – published its report, in which it said (amongst many other things): ‘The Security Council should take into account in all its deliberations that, if it fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action, concerned states may not rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of that situation...’ In September 2005 the UN General Assembly adopted a document (the ‘outcome document’) which included the... ‘... unambiguous acceptance by all governments of the collective international responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; [and] willingness to take timely and decisive collective action for this purpose, through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to do it.’ This, of course, is a pronouncement, and no more than a pronouncement, until we see what actually comes of it. But in any case the issue it puts before us, and which is before us even without the pronouncement, is this. What do we do when states or those within states commit crimes against humanity on a large scale? Hilary Benn recently answered the question by saying in effect: we strive for a multilateral approach, with the legitimacy of a reformed UN. OK, call that the ideal answer to the question. But now suppose that, in a particular, terrible case – of Rwandatype proportions – his answer isn’t effective; no multilateral action to halt an ongoing slaughter or genocide occurs in fact. Is there then a right of humanitarian intervention that may be exercised unilaterally by a self-selecting individual state or group of states? It might be said that to allow such a right is to create a space for the powerful, for states who might have other interests at stake in intervening. This is true. On the
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 other hand, to deny the same right is to say that in the face of anything whatsoever – crimes against humanity on however large a scale, genocide – the victims have no recourse and no hope. Pending the time when effective and putatively legitimate multilateral mechanisms of protection have come into existence, nothing may be done to save those being murdered. It isn’t an easy choice structure but it’s there, out in the real world. Defining an ideal answer is important, yet it doesn’t establish that that answer is always available. I began with a quote from Michael Walzer and will end with another. In an interview not long ago he said: ‘It is a good idea to strengthen the UN and to take whatever steps are possible to establish a global rule of law. It is a very bad idea to pretend that a strong UN and a global rule of law already exist.’ From what I’ve said here I think it’s clear enough that our world is still a very long way from those conditions of peace spelled out 30 years ago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: that the limits of state violence be set at the threshold where the need to defend society’s members ceases; that we outlaw from the human condition the very idea that some are permitted to use violence regardless of justice, law and mutual agreements. Where there is state lawlessness there is no peace, and the victims of such lawlessness are entitled to seek what help or escape they may, and others to provide it. That is why the tasks of a global peace movement go beyond the prevention of aggressive war.
Norman Geras is an advisory editor of Democratiya. Professor Emeritus in Government at the University of Manchester, his books include The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (1976), Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (1995), and The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (1998). He blogs at http:// normblog.typepad.com/normblog/. Notes
[1] This is the text of a talk at the conference ‘Solidarity and Rights: The Euston Manifesto one year on,’ held on 30 May 2007.
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Emergent Conflict and Peaceful Change by Hugh Miall, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 206 pp.
Peter Ryley Miall’s subject is ‘emergent conflict’ i.e. conflict resulting from social change. The book tries to analyse why some changes lead to violence and others do not and seeks to find ways in which change can be managed peacefully. Emergent conflict is a dynamic process through which material and cultural division assumes the form of violent conflict as small changes ignite processes of polarisation, threat and escalation, and the struggle for power. The author uses game theory and systems theory to understand emerging conflict. This is most effective when he uses quantitative analysis to identify the factors that prevent war. Prosperity and democracy appear to be real ‘preventors of war,’ at least with other democracies. Stable governance, human rights, economic development, international organisations, and ‘security communities’ all inhibit the incidence of war. All contribute to what he refers to as the ‘liberal peace.’ In the light of current events, one proposition in particular leaps out at the reader. Miall asserts that there is a high probability of civil conflict associated with what he calls ‘anocracies’; ‘… countries which have a transitional form of government between autocracy and democracy … are more prone to civil wars than established democracies or autocracies’ (pp. 112-13). How one wishes that this observation had been uppermost in the minds of the planners of the post-war settlement in Iraq. But Miall’s rational choice approach often results in a somewhat reductionist approach. Take this example. For example, in the case of trench warfare of 1914-18, the German and French soldiers who refrained from shooting at one another or deliberately shot wide may have seen each other as members of a temporary group constituted by being together in a similar predicament in the trenches. The soldiers on each side shared an interest in avoiding attacks on the other, since this would bring down attacks on themselves. (pp. 72-3) More likely, the soldiers saw themselves as members of a permanent group – humanity – and were wrestling with their moral consciences in the midst of horror,
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 rather than calculating a rational exchange. Though Miall does acknowledge the complexity of human motivation, by seeking the ‘root causes’ of conflict in rational material interests he flirts with apologism. He certainly seems to have seems to have ingested the relativism of some of the anti-war activists and their abandonment of liberal values. Though he has engaged with the work of the research community, Miall has not considered the arguments of the anti-totalitarian left. He writes: With the Copenhagen conditions for accession, and the promotion of EU models of human rights and governance, Europe became an active centre for the further consolidation and expansion of ‘the liberal peace.’ Yet this came at a cost. The intrusion of Western democratic models and market conditionality into Eastern Europe proved disastrous in the case of the former Yugoslavia, and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo were a searing reverse. (p. 109) Here, EU concepts of human rights rather than Serb imperialism caused genocide in the Balkans. Elsewhere, preposterously, the propaganda ploys of anti-western authoritarians are lauded as models of peaceful engagement. Miall praises a 1998 call by the then Iranian president Khatami for a Culture of Dialogue, based on knowledge about others, tolerance, and respect. Khatami, of course, headed a regime that denied women even the most basic equalities, persecuted homosexuals, tortured and executed its opponents, and which had a deep-rooted anti-Semitism at the heart of its ideology. At the height of the Cold War, the radical U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills developed a critique of what he called ‘crackpot realism.’ His argument was that the apparently hard-headed realism of military planners and politicians was, in fact, quite insane and based on their own inability to understand the complexity of conflict. War was the great intellectual simplifier and an alternative to the altogether more tricky activity of thought. No one could accuse Miall of avoiding complexity but he flirts with that ‘crackpot pacifism’ of our times that ignores oppression, excuses violence, and seeks to rationalise away genuine threats through wishful thinking. Miall’s book is about the dynamics of peaceful conflict resolution as a necessary part of social change. He offers sobering and valuable critiques of both the prevailing ‘liberal peace’ as ‘a peace at home combined with an easy willingness to use armed force abroad, a peace that protects the prosperity of millions of people
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Ryley | Miall on Conflict Resolution at the expense of the destitution of other millions’ (p. 111) and of the careless and rushed promotion of democracy-reduced-to-elections, which, ‘outside the borders of the liberal peace,’ can be a ‘stimulus to wars’ (p. 108). However valuable these insights are, ‘emergent conflict’ can also throw up pathological movements with a worship of violence and a desire for war that is impervious to reason. Whilst peaceful political and social engagement and institution building can undermine the support for such movements, it may still be necessary to fight them. Miall is to be commended in his attempt to find alternatives to the undoubted horrors of modern warfare. He is surely right when he concludes, ‘Peaceful change is possible … in the context of an emancipatory world politics’ (p. 174). But an emancipatory politics may not be always be able to avoid the projection of force.
Peter Ryley works in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Hull and blogs at Fat Man On A Keyboard.
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Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy Jon Elster (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2006, 352 pp.
Oren Ipp I. Afghanistan’s struggle to emerge from nearly three decades of war and establish peace and order is one of the most watched democratic transitions in the world today. Observant onlookers may have noticed something that has the potential to jeopardise this process and undermine democracy for decades to come: the new government’s apparent unwillingness to address the country’s turbulent past. The National Assembly of Afghanistan is in the process of passing legislation providing blanket amnesty for the warlords, communists, and Taliban commanders who terrorised the country for almost a generation. In doing so, the new democratic government may be undermining its own legitimacy and antagonising large parts of the population. By dismissing the expressed wishes for justice and retribution of the Afghan people – who were maimed and abused, whose entire families were killed, and whose homes were destroyed – the new government has created for itself another obstacle in its transition to democracy. Afghanistan is not the first country to face the difficult task of coming to terms with its own recent history. Nascent democratic governments often strive to distance themselves from the past; unlike Afghanistan, however, most appear to recognise the need to deal with the past in order to move forward. For countries with histories of war, authoritarianism, and human rights violations, ensuring a peaceful and democratic future requires addressing past abuses. In their transition to democracy, governments must also decide how to deal with those of the old regime who violated people’s rights – including public officials, bureaucrats, administrators, and armed groups. Victims may also demand compensation, and governments must determine what compensation, if any, is appropriate. The challenge lies in choosing a path that provides justice without destabilising or undermining the transition to democracy. Swift and severe punishments may undermine democratic principles, but relying on the rule of law may be slow and allow perpetrators to go unpunished. How countries attempt to achieve this balance is the subject of Jon Elster’s edited volume Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy.
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Ipp | Elster on Transitional Justice Elster’s collection of essays seeks to understand the role of transitional justice in democratic transitions by examining how and why democratising countries, from the post-World War II era to the present, have chosen to deal with their respective pasts. The case studies include the transitional justice processes in Western Europe after the defeat of the Nazism; in Argentina and Chile after the period of military domination of politics during the 1970s and 1980s; in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism; and in South Africa at the end of the apartheid era. Most of these case studies concentrate on retribution – seeking justice against wrongdoers – rather than reparation – compensation for property lost and rights violated. The case-study authors set out to explore the reasons why particular regimes chose particular transitional justice processes, the internal and external constraints inherent in each process, and the results of the chosen process on democratic transition. There is a plethora of instruments and mechanisms for administering transitional justice, ranging from legal measures such as criminal trials and administrative sanctions, to extra-legal measures such as commissions and public exposure. As the case studies in this edited volume demonstrate, no two countries have undergone the same process. Different countries present different circumstances and contexts for transitional justice: some face great internal constraints such as a lack of qualified human resources, and the absence of the culture of rule of law; others face external constraints such as issues of international geopolitics or the involvement of international courts. The choice of transitional justice mechanism, given the unique set of constraints and limitations facing each new democratic government, is bound to influence a country’s transition to democracy. Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy shows that transitional justice is inherently a political process, one that is primarily focused on advancing the country’s democratic transition and protecting the health and unity of the nation, rather than meting out punishments to perpetrators of past abuses and compensating their victims. Thus, it appears that the success of a particular transitional justice process should not be assessed based on the number of offenders executed or imprisoned but on its relative ability to enable an environment for democracy to flourish. For example, in what is widely recognised as a successful transitional justice process, post-apartheid South Africa progressed toward reconciliation and democracy without prosecuting very many offenders. Argentina, on the other hand, brought many senior military officials to justice, but the country’s transition to democracy is still far from complete.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Elster’s collection of articles provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the transitional justice processes in over a dozen countries over the past half-century. As an edited volume, however, it falls short: The whole is, in fact, not greater than the sum of the parts. The editor fails to draw out a set of ‘lessons learned’ – conclusions and recommendations based on a comparative look at the case studies – that could help guide current and future transitions to democracy. Governments and supporters of countries currently undergoing democratic transitions are left wanting for concrete guidance on how to address issues of transitional justice given their particular constraints and circumstances. By leaving it up to the reader to sort through the extensive detail in search for commonalities and guidelines, Retribution and Reparation is likely to exclude from its readership practitioners and those engaged in transitional justice ‘on the ground,’ limiting itself to a largely academic readership. The book also fails to provide clear insight into the longer-term effects of different transitional justice processes on democratic transitions. Most of the case-study chapters focus on the specifics of the process itself, forgetting that the edited volume intends to combine the twin issues of transitional justice and democratic transition. II. Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy comprises over a dozen case studies. The first group of chapters examines the transitional justice process in Germany and German-occupied countries after 1945. These essays consider the challenges faced by Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands in designing and implementing transitional justice processes. In ‘Transitional Justice in Divided Germany after 1945,’ David Cohen provides a comprehensive overview of the transitional justice processes that took place in East and West Germany after the end of World War II. He offers a chronological account of the different mechanisms employed – Allied trials, de-Nazification efforts, German trials – as well as the processes undertaken by each of the occupying powers (the U.S., France, Russia and Britain). He concludes that the Allied transitional justice process was successful, although not necessarily in the way it was intended: de-Nazification in the late 1940s was largely a failure, as the 1950s witnessed the return to politics of many former Nazi officials. Nevertheless, Cohen points out, the process helped the Allies achieve their political objectives, which
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Ipp | Elster on Transitional Justice were at the core of their transitional justice processes: stigmatising the Nazi regime, reinforcing the rule of law, and uncovering the truths about the abuses that took place during the war. The Russians too were driven by political objectives, wanting retribution for the betrayal and severe losses at the hands of the Nazis and seeking to consolidate communist rule in East Germany. With the onset of the Cold War, both the Allies and the Soviet Union were successful in using transitional justice as means to achieve their own political objectives. Henry Rousso’s ‘The Purge in France: An Incomplete Story’ offers great insight into the costs and benefits of purging Nazi collaborators from public life in France after WWII, its overemphasis on statistics notwithstanding. According to Rousso, the purge first sought to provide security in France by eliminating collaborators of the occupation; the purge was also designed to serve as an outlet for those calling for a violent response to the occupation, and to legitimise the new regime. When selecting a mechanism for transitional justice, the new government faced a common dilemma: the need to carry out a process strong enough to appease those seeking harsh retribution, but balanced so as not to deprive the country of the economic and administrative human resources necessary for reconstruction. Ultimately, the government prioritised the reconstruction effort, purging collaborators from the political sphere but largely avoiding the economic and administrative sectors, and offering amnesty only five years after the liberation. In ‘Political Justice in Austria and Hungary after WWII,’ Istvan Deak outlines the limited success of transitional justice in each country. In both countries, international actors guided the process, and prosecution and punishment of war criminals and collaborators gradually lost political and moral significance. Austria’s acceptance of democracy, along with a shortage of professionals, drove the Allies to begin rehabilitation of former fascist officials as early as 1948. In Hungary, the transitional justice process was influenced by Russia, and prioritised eliminating democrats and other enemies of the new communist regime over the purge of former fascists. In ‘Dealing with the Past in Scandinavia: Legal Purges and Popular Memories of Nazism and WWII in Norway and Denmark after 1945,’ Hans Fredrik Dahl describes how in Denmark and Norway legal transitional justice measures relate to the public memory of the war. According to Dahl, both countries sought immediate and thorough retribution as a means of developing a national narrative of the war; this narrative, particularly in the case of Norway, would ‘nourish popular
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 memories of the war without interference from rival versions of those out of line with the majority opinion.’ The author explains why the two governments chose such severe transitional justice mechanisms – for example, the reinstatement of the death penalty – but is less explicit in linking these mechanisms to either country’s transition back to democracy. ‘Belgian and Dutch Purges after World War II Compared,’ by Luc Huyse, provides a thorough and insightful comparison of the post-war purges and subsequent reintegration processes in Belgium and Holland. The two countries adopted similar approaches to the elimination of Nazi collaborators, with comparable accomplishments, but they differed significantly in the success of their reintegration policies. Both governments recognised the importance of reintegrating former collaborators, and initiated reintegration through the removal of sanctions and the reinstatement of civil rights. Holland was eventually more successful in its resocialisation efforts, relying on a tradition of non-political administrative agencies, than was Belgium, where the issue was politicised and played into historic political divides. The second group of case studies focuses on more recent transitions. In ‘Paranoids May Be Persecuted: Post Totalitarian Transitional Justice,’ Aviezer Tucker examines transitional justice processes in post-totalitarian transitions to democracy, drawing on examples from East and Central Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. Tucker discusses the many variables at play in such transitions: constraints on political decision-makers (human resources, time, and information); stakeholder interests (inherent desires of the nomenklatura, dissidents and members of the new regime); targets for sanctions (residents, collaborators, confidants, contacts); and the types of sanctions to employ (individual and collective criminal sanctions, administrative sanctions). Transitional justice processes in post-totalitarian contexts are further complicated, Tucker argues, by a weak or absent civil society, a lack of alternative elites, and a compromised judiciary. He concludes that the success of the democratic transitions in East and Central Europe during the early 1990s was less a function of transitional justice legislation than it was a result of the balance of power between the old (post-communist) and new (non-communist) political elites. In countries, such as Czechoslovakia, where that balance weighed on the side of the new democratic regime, the transitions were more successful. Carlos H. Acuna’s essay, ‘Transitional Justice in Argentina and Chile: A NeverEnding Story,’ clearly demonstrates the impact that transitional justice processes
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Ipp | Elster on Transitional Justice can have on the transition to democracy. In Argentina, the new government was lenient toward the human rights violators of the former military regime, but the existence of an independent judiciary and active political parties and civil society ensured a fairly severe transitional justice process. In Chile, the armed forces resisted attempts to bring human rights violators to justice by institutionalising amnesty for themselves. As a result, the democratic transitions of Argentina and Chile differ significantly. For example, in Argentina, the military budget is controlled by parliament, the Ministry of Defense is led by civilians, and the legal mandate of the armed forces is to prevent foreign aggression; while in Chile, the armed forces has its own budget and the constitution reserves the right for the military to ‘guarantee law and order,’ opening the door for continued military interference in political affairs. Acuna is one of few authors in this edited volume who clearly illustrate the linkages between transitional justice and the prospects for consolidating democracy. In ‘Transitional Justice in the German Democratic Republic and in Unified Germany,’ Claus Offe and Ulrike Poppe offer an intriguing example of the influence of external forces on transitional justice and the road to democracy. Initial legal sanctions in the form of criminal prosecutions against communist collaborators met with little success; this spurred the emergence of alternative transitional justice instruments, such as the German Bundestag’s Commission of Inquiry and the Gauck Agency, charged with overseeing the publication of records kept by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security. The transition to democracy in East Germany, the authors highlight, was entirely driven by West Germany in an attempt to ensure a smooth unification process. As a result, East Germany avoided many of the challenges to transitional justice common in other countries: there was no dearth of qualified professionals in the economic or administrative arenas, the country was not facing a major reconstruction effort, and the judiciary and administration did not obstruct the process. In his essay, ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: Amnesty, The Price of Peace,’ Alex Boraine provides an excellent account of the transitional justice process in post-apartheid South Africa. According to Boraine, the new government made a strategic decision to focus the transitional justice process on reconciliation, aiming to lay the foundation for a peaceful, democratic South Africa. Thus, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not created as a venue for the country to dwell on the past, but rather as a tool for coming to terms with the present and the future. The Commission provided ‘the possibility of truth relating to victims and perpetrators, the restoration of dignity for victims and survivors, a limited amnesty,
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 and a search for healing and reconciliation’ – thereby creating an environment of coexistence, where past abuses could not be denied and violations of human rights would no longer be tolerated. Boraine argues that the success of this transitional justice mechanism helped propel the country’s transition to democracy. Though the title of the volume is Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy, most chapters focus almost exclusively on retribution. Only two authors, Tyler Cowen and Aviezer Tucker, discuss in detail the issue of reparation as a component of transitional justice. They both highlight the difficulties, and to some extent undesirability, of providing compensation to victims of war crimes and rights abuses. Tucker outlines the constraints that governments face in addressing rectification: shortage of human resources; the inherent weakness of new democratic governments; and constraints on time, money and information. An additional burden is the choice that governments face in terms of what losses should be compensated – liberty, job and career, educational opportunities, property, civil rights – and the procedure for rectification – judicial procedures through courts or extrajudicial through special commissions. Cowen goes a step further and makes a case for limited reparation, arguing that the value of compensation is too difficult to determine. He also suggests that restitution is often pursued as means for victims to ‘become whole again,’ something that material compensation cannot achieve regardless of its value. III. As a whole, Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy only implicitly explores the relationship between transitional justice and the resulting democratic transition. All case-studies detail the context, mechanisms and outcomes of transitional justice in their respective countries of focus; few, however, explore the impact that the given transitional justice process had on the country’s transition to democracy. The reason for this may be, at least in part, that in many of the countries studied the transitional justice process had little to do with the emergence of democracy. Post-WWII Western Europe was merely re-establishing democratic governance, not transitioning to democracy. Transitional justice does not appear to be a pivotal factor in that context. For example, whether the death penalty in Norway was reinstituted to eliminate Nazi collaborators, or how extensively it was used for that purpose, had limited impact on the country’s path back to democracy. While the case studies from Western Europe provide interesting examples of approaches to transitional justice, their inclusion in a volume on transitional justice
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Ipp | Elster on Transitional Justice in the transition to democracy is questionable given how qualitatively different their experiences were from those countries transitioning from authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Some of these pages would have been of better use if allocated to discuss transitional justice as it happened in Cambodia, Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Further, most of the authors place great emphasis on chronicling the number of individuals sanctioned, imprisoned, or otherwise held to account through transitional justice processes. More time is spent detailing the specifics of each process than examining their role in the transition to democracy – which is, after all, the stated goal of the book. Thus, the forest is somewhat lost for the trees. The volume as a whole would have benefited greatly from a concluding chapter, drawing out the lessons learned and formulating some guidelines for current and future transitional justice processes. What mechanisms have proved most successful overall? Which approaches work best in countries where the rule of law is weak? Which measures, if any, should be avoided in all contexts based on historical experience? For those trying to make sense of Afghanistan’s democratic transition, for example, a few clear pointers would have been useful. The Afghan context presents a wide variety of challenges for democracy and the administration of transitional justice: deep ethnic cleavages continue to influence every aspect of political life; three decades of war and brain drain has created a lack of qualified professionals; the court system is nonfunctional, there is no rule of law, and the culture of impunity is dominant. Although the government announced the establishment of the ‘Action Plan of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation’ in 2005, recent developments in parliament threaten to undermine, or make irrelevant, these plans. Nevertheless, people want justice – they want their suffering to be recognised, they want to see the perpetrators punished. In a country with such a complicated and violent past as Afghanistan, how should the government redress past abuses while maintaining stability and peacefully reintegrating both the victims and the perpetrators of abuse? For Afghanistan, and other transitioning democracies, a few general principles of transitional justice can be drawn from Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy. First, new governments should not underestimate the importance of establishing a process for transitional justice – even if ultimately few perpetrators are legally sanctioned. Providing a process for people to learn about the past, for truth
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 to be discovered and for acknowledging the suffering of the victims, is crucial for society to begin to leave the tragedies of history behind. Such a process also serves to establish the new government as a standard bearer of democracy and the rule of law. Ignoring the need for transitional justice may undercut the legitimacy of the new government and weaken popular support for democracy. Second, a successful transitional justice process does not necessarily require individuals to be imprisoned or eliminated from public life; more important is that it enables an environment for national reconciliation. In Afghanistan, where many known human rights abusers now occupy important government offices, a wholesale ‘purge’ would neither be feasible nor desirable. A justice mechanism along the lines of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be more appropriate for creating the conditions for healing to begin.
Oren Ipp is senior program manager for the Kabul office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a nonprofit organisation working to strengthen and expand democracy worldwide.
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Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia by Ivo Zanic, Saqi Books, 2007, 566 pp.
Marko Attila Hoare In the propagandist’s kitchen, an ideological heritage is like a cupboard full of ingredients. The chef selects a different combination of ingredients from his or her cupboard, depending on what kind of dish he or she is preparing. Similarly, a propagandist draws on different elements of an ideological heritage, depending on what political purpose a particular speech or text is intended to serve. Just as a chef sees no contradiction in preparing a roast leg of lamb one day and a vegetarian dish the next, so the propagandist may see nothing wrong in conjuring up entirely contradictory messages using different ingredients from the same heritage. A century ago, the heretical left-wing agitator Georges Sorel noted that simple symbols counted for much more in the realm of political mobilisation than did correct theory. Sorel consequently rejected the often dry-as-dust Marxist theorising of his generation of socialists in favour of an appeal to phenomena that, he considered, might strike more of a chord with the masses – nationalism and anti-Semitism. That Sorel’s politics were cynical and destructive – he was one of the intellectual fathers of fascism – does not diminish the perceptiveness of his observation: in propaganda, symbols with emotional content count for more than correct reasoning. Today, much of left-wing politics involves a battle over symbols and signifiers in which intellectual rigour is largely abandoned. Ivo Zanic’s book Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia, is a brilliant study of how motifs drawn from the common post-Ottoman cultural heritage of Serbs, Croats, and Muslim were manipulated in an often contradictory manner by politicians and warlords from all three nationalities for the purposes of selflegitimisation and nationalist mobilisation during the 1990s. Yet it is a study that will be of wider interest for anyone wishing to understand the politics of symbolism and the manipulation of ideological heritages.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Those of us with a background in left-wing activism will be familiar with the concepts against which our left-wing heritage has traditionally been defined: ‘imperialism,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘anti-Semitism,’ ‘Stalinism,’ ‘genocide,’ and so forth. Inevitably, there is much disagreement, both on the Left and among scholars, over what these things actually mean. Notoriously, it has proved impossible to find consensus among scholars over the meaning of ‘fascism’; whether it is more right-wing or left-wing in character; whether it is revolutionary or conservative; whether ‘Nazism’ forms a sub-set of it or whether Nazism and fascism are fundamentally different phenomena; and so on. Inevitably, different people mean different things when they talk about ‘fascism.’ Yet it is a sign of the degeneration of much of left-wing politics in recent years that frequently much more energy is expended in disputing what ‘fascism’ is than in actually combating the phenomena so described. This has much less to do with an insistence upon intellectual rigour than with a simple struggle for possession of the ‘fascism’ signifier. A couple of examples may serve to illustrate the point. A few years ago, the present author attended an anti-war meeting in Cambridge where Tariq Ali was speaking. Ali made the audience laugh with his description of Western leaders’ supposed abuse of the Nazi analogy, saying something along the lines of ‘they told us that Galtieri was Hitler, that Saddam was Hitler, that Milošević was Hitler and that Bin Laden was Hitler, but surely, they cannot all have been Hitler?’ This speech came to mind some time afterwards, when I read an editorial about the government of postSaddam Iraq by Susan Watkins, Ali’s partner and political fellow-traveller, entitled ‘Vichy on the Tigris’ (Watkins 2004). It is, in theory, possible that the Ali-Watkins household is fundamentally divided over the appropriateness of using the Nazi analogy in propaganda, or that Ali and Watkins are in agreement, but feel there are sound intellectual reasons for considering that it is Bush, rather than Galtieri, Saddam or Milošević, who is Hitler. But at the risk of being accused of unwarranted cynicism, I should suggest that a third explanation is more likely. Or consider the case of Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), whose best-known blogger Richard Seymour, self-named – in apparent unawareness of the concept of irony – ‘Lenin,’ recently took issue with those of us who characterised the regime of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia as ‘fascist.’ To do so, Seymour told us, ‘degrades the very concept of fascism.’ Meanwhile, the SWP runs a front organisation called the ‘AntiNazi League’ (ANL), which regularly portrays the British National Party (BNP), not merely as ‘fascist,’ but as ‘Nazi.’ In every possible respect – authoritarianism, rejection of democratic practice, territorial expansionism, incitement of populist
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Hoare | Framing the Balkan Wars chauvinism, continuity with actual pro-Nazi groups from World War II and actual employment of mass violence against ethnic minorities – the Milošević regime scored higher on the ‘fascist’ scale than does the BNP. Yet it is the ‘Nazi’ BNP which provokes SWP supporters to organise rallies, at which ‘Nazi scum – off our streets!’ is screamed at tiny or non-existent BNP gatherings, while the same SWP supporters will favourably compare the ‘not-even-fascist’ Milošević regime with the supposedly ‘real’ fascists who are, apparently, to be found nowhere outside the white populations of the liberal-capitalist West. Seymour writes of Milošević’s Serbia that ‘a state with an elected government, legal opposition parties, independent trade unions, and opposition demonstrations permitted could not be characterised as fascist, for all its brutality.’ This glowing portrayal of democracy under Milošević can be compared with the description in Robert Thomas’s Serbia under Milošević: Politics in the 1990s: ‘More importantly the new ‘pluralist’ system had not effected a separation between the state and the party… The SPS [Socialist Party of Serbia] remained interconnected with all the main institutions of the state. The state media in particular remained faithful to the party line, and was a key element in the Socialist election victories from 1990 onward… The formal structures of parliament were effectively a hollow shell. Real power was located with the Serbian President [Milošević] and in the politicaleconomic bureaucracy.’ (Thomas 1999, pp. 422-23). Lenard J. Cohen, in Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević has described Milošević’s system of rule as a ‘soft dictatorship’ (Cohen 2002, pp. xiv-xv). Robert J. Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism has described Milošević’s regime as the ‘functional equivalent’ of a fascist regime (Paxton 2004, p. 190). Seymour’s portrayal of the Milošević regime as democratic, therefore, is at variance with the interpretation of serious scholars. Yet it may be a necessary misrepresentation for the activist of an SWP that allied with the supporters of Milošević over Kosovo in 1999, as more recently with the supporters of Saddam and Zarqawi over Iraq. Naturally, the SWP reserves the ‘fascist’ label for those it demonstrates against, even if they are remarkably similar in character to those it demonstrates alongside. Nevertheless, its efforts at manipulating the ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazism’ signifiers for the sake of its political tactics of the moment would appear justified in their own terms: pinning the ‘Nazi’ label on the BNP, the ANL was in 1993 able to organise a mass demonstration at Welling, East London, tens of thousands strong, to protest the election of BNP candidate Derek Beackon to a council seat in Tower Hamlets. This may be compared with the tiny or non-existent demonstrations that have greeted
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. That the extermination of tens or hundreds of thousands of people might objectively be more worthy of organised opposition than the peaceful local-election victory of a far-right candidate in a single council seat is, in this context, irrelevant – what counts is who carries the ‘fascist’ label and who does not. This is why some members of the Left have devoted particular energy to denouncing the term ‘Islamofascism’ when applied to Muslims who rail against the Jews, incite chauvinism and violence against other ethno-religious groups and seek the establishment of a totalitarian empire or caliphate from which the Enlightenment would be banished. Writing in the Nation, Katha Pollitt complains about the concept of ‘Islamofascism’ on the grounds that ‘Italian Fascism, German Nazism and other European fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s were nationalist and secular, closely allied with international capital and aimed at creating powerful, up-to-date, all-encompassing states’ (Pollitt 2006). Since ‘the worst barbarities of the modern era were committed by the most modern people, I think it is worth preserving “fascism” as a term with specific historical content’ (i.e. one that cannot be applied to Islamic extremists today). Yet it should not be supposed that the irritation that the term ‘Islamofascism’ provokes in some left-wing circles is genuinely the result of their acceptance of the hoary old liberal myth that nationality and religion are wholly separate, and of the resulting misconception that religious fundamentalists are consequently not nationalists and cannot therefore be fascists. Still less is it the result of the wholly erroneous belief that our contemporary Islamists are simply traditionalists, rather than members of a thoroughly modern revolutionary movement. Rather, the term ‘Islamofascism’ is objected to by those who do not wish ever to see a Welling-style mass demonstration against the Islamists take place. This is not a struggle over terminological accuracy, but a struggle to monopolise the right of usage. What can be said of the term ‘fascism’ can equally be said of other terms with symbolic and emotive meaning for the Left. The massive expansion of the world’s population since the days of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci; the proliferation of independent states with their own armies and foreign policies; the mushrooming globally of new political movements that copy the ideologies and practices of those of earlier generations – all would suggest a greater likelihood of instances of fascism, imperialism, genocide and all the other negative phenomena associated with the modern world. Yet much of contemporary left-wing discourse is devoted to trying
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Hoare | Framing the Balkan Wars desperately to restrict the use of such signifiers to a tiny number of ‘traditional’ and ‘safe’ targets: ‘fascism’ to the BNP and the French National Front; ‘imperialism’ to the U.S. and its West European allies; ‘Stalinism’ to the historical supporters of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, 40s and 50s; ‘genocide’ to something that has happened only a couple of times in history – perhaps only to the Armenians in 1915, the Jews in 1941-45 and the Tutsi in 1994. Inevitably, what begins as a supposed insistence on correctness of terminology rapidly descends into denial and apologias for the phenomena in question – leftists who have never lifted a finger to oppose the mass killings in Bosnia or in Sudan will nevertheless devote time and energy to insist that these mass killings are ‘not genocide.’ One might have imagined that such differences over terminology could be set aside in view of the higher cause of actually opposing such mass killings. Yet the attempt to monopolise such signifiers and ensure their ‘correct’ usage inevitably becomes a life-and-death struggle to the part of the Left that would be unable to mobilise, or even to exist without them. In order to avoid being outflanked by heretics who might seek to ‘misuse’ such signifiers, leftists of this kind often feel forced to engage in re-branding exercises that draw upon other elements of the leftwing heritage in their search of suitable euphemisms. Fascist dictatorships become ‘regimes independent of the West’; their domestic opponents become ‘stooges of imperialism’; genocide becomes simply ‘atrocities’; supporting international action against fascism or genocide is ‘imperialism’; even denouncing fascism or genocide is ‘media demonisation’ or ‘diverting attention from Iraq/Israel.’ Thus, insistence on supposedly ‘correct’ terminology slips easily into moral relativism. Ivo Zanic has compiled an impressive array of data and case studies to show how competing regimes and nationalist movements among a group of neighbouring nationalities on the one hand draw upon the symbols and heroes of a common heritage for the sake of their contemporary propaganda and political mobilisation, and on the other switch between identification with different and conflicting aspects of this heritage according to the needs of the moment. This is particularly interesting because these conflicts are played out on the traditional Islamic-Christian borderland of Europe, where the heritage of popular folklore is the product of centuries of Ottoman rule over a religiously mixed population. As Zanic writes: ‘The heroic epic of the Serbs, the Montenegrins, the Croats and the Bosniaks is the only example “among all known literatures” where in the same language… and in the same form, there are songs and poems about the same events and the same
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 persons on both of the belligerent sides – the other side being mainly the Muslim side of the former battlefield.’ (p. 519). Thus, Bosnian Serb and Croat epic poems celebrate the heroics of the hajduks, the Christian bandit-rebels who fought the Ottoman beys and agas, while the Muslim poems celebrate the latter’s exploits against the former – the same characters appearing in both sets of poems, which are simply related from opposing perspectives. If Samuel Huntingdon’s thesis of a ‘clash of civilisations’ had not already been utterly discredited, Zanic’s work would have constituted yet another mortal blow against it. An example of how this heritage was manipulated is provided by Zanic in his account of the evolution of official Croatian discourse during the 1990s. Croatia (as opposed to the Bosnian Croats) had never fallen wholly under Ottoman control, and those portions of it that did, were liberated much earlier than neighbouring Bosnia and Serbia, so Croatia does not have the same folk heritage drawing upon the history of popular resistance to the Ottomans. Yet in the era of Communist Yugoslavia, the authorities identified with the hajduks as early warriors for class and national liberation, and in Croatia, they found a counterpart to the hajduks in the sixteenth-century peasant rebel leader Matija Gubec. Consequently, the postCommunist nationalist regime of Franjo Tudjman rejected Gubec as a positive historical figure, instead choosing to identify with aristocratic heroes of Croatian history such as Ban Jelačić, who resisted Hungarian domination as an ally of the Habsburgs during the revolution of 1848-49. The Croatian Serb rebels who resisted the Tudjman regime in the early 1990s were denounced as ‘hajduks,’ though these rebels themselves readily accepted such a characterisation. Yet when Tudjman’s Bosnian Croat satellites rebelled against the Sarajevo regime of Alija Izetbegović, they themselves adopted the hajduk mantle. Muslims were also capable of presenting themselves as reborn folk heroes and rebels – dissident Muslim warlords such as Mušan Topalović-Caco, Ramiz Delalic-Celo and Jusuf-Juka Prazina, all of whom eventually came into conflict with the Izetbegović regime, portrayed themselves as latter-day noble outlaws in the mould of Robin Hood, much as did their counterparts among the Bosnian Croats – men such as Mladen Naletilić-Tuta, chief of the ‘Convicts’ Battalion’ and a former collaborator of the German Baader-Meinhof group, which itself had sought legitimacy as a force for combating the wealthy. Izetbegović’s rival Fikret
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Hoare | Framing the Balkan Wars Abdić, who led an armed rebellion against Sarajevo in 1993, was portrayed by his supporters as the reincarnation of Mujo Hrnjica, a hero of Muslim epic poetry. As Zanic shows, the readiness of former-Yugoslav politicians and warlords to manipulate the heritage of folklore was not simply cynical, but in many cases genuinely reflected the fact that these individuals instinctively viewed current events through the prism of folk memory. The claim of the Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadžić to be a descendant of Vuk Karadžić, the great Serb linguist and one of the founding fathers of modern Serbia, was rubbished by the Belgrade opposition journalist Milos Vasic during the 1990s, who logically deduced that the two men called Karadžić could not have been related. As Zanic showed, however, in the mental universe formed by the traditional patriarchal world from which Radovan Karadžić stemmed, ‘every clan… considers itself a natural community created by kinship. It is not just a military and a political group but also a kinship unit, and the proof is the legend that all members derive from a common ancestor… According to such criteria, and from such a perspective, it is not just Radovan’s and Vuk’s family, but many others as well, no matter where an individual happened to be born, that are forged into a tight unity’ (p. 372). Zanic’s work helps to explain the mind-set of South Slavic nationalists who portray their conflict with the Bosnian government in Sarajevo as a continuation of the historic struggle against the Ottomans; or who celebrate fugitive war-criminals, on the run from the warcrimes tribunal in the Hague, as romantic heroes. When current politics are automatically interpreted on the basis of popular legend, the borders between fantasy and reality are inevitably fluid. Zanic recounts the darkly comic events surrounding the publication in Sarajevo, on the eve of the recent war, of a satirical article by the independent Muslim youth paper Vox, entitled the ‘Agenda for the Immigration of Bosniaks from Turkey.’ It was presented as a Bosnian parliamentary plan to resettle in Bosnia four million Anatolian Muslims of South Slavic origin, so as to create a Bosnian population of ten million. The purpose of this article was to lampoon both the pretensions of the Bosnian nationalists on all sides, as well as the scare stories that they put about concerning each other’s alleged agendas. But the joke turned sour when activists of Karadžić’s Serb Democratic Party printed hundreds of thousands of copies of the article and distributed them to the Serb population of Bosnia and beyond, presenting it as an authentic document. It was seriously discussed in the media of the Bosnian Serbs and of Serbia as evidence of a Muslim plan to destroy the Serbs: the satirical ‘Agenda’ entirely confirmed the Serb-nationalist paranoid fantasies of the time.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 The ‘Agenda,’ it appears, may have even been used as evidence by Milošević in his negotiations with Tudjman in the spring of 1991, when he attempted to convince his Croatian counterpart that the ‘Muslims’ – both of Bosnia and more broadly of the entire South East European area – were the greatest danger to peace in the region. According to Zanic: ‘At one level… Tudjman was clearly the victim of a contrick on Milošević’s part, although he did not perhaps completely fall for it, at least not at once. But clearly his deep personal animosities toward Bosniaks and Islam in general, and his conviction that, unlike Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia was not an authentic and indigenous political and historical formation, prevented him from rejecting the text as a manifest fabrication.’ (p. 338). Zanic’s book does not discuss the Serb-nationalist fantasies concerning the breakup of Yugoslavia – as the work of dark, Satanic forces including Germany, the Vatican, the U.S. and Islam. Yet such fantasies were themselves the natural product of a mind-set that interprets geopolitical events purely on the basis of ideological preconceptions, rather than of an analysis of reality. This is another phenomenon with which those of us who study the politics of the Left will be familiar. Vocal elements on the Western Left developed their own set of myths about the break-up of Yugoslavia that derived entirely from their paranoia and ideological prejudices rather than from any attempt to analyse reality: that the break-up was engineered by ‘German imperialism’; that reports of Serb atrocities were the work of a Western media conspiracy to ‘demonise the Serbs’; that the Muslims of Sarajevo were besieging and shelling themselves in order to blame it on the Serbs so as to provoke Western intervention; that the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was motivated by an ‘imperialist’ desire to destroy Serbia’s ‘socialist’ industry; and so forth. The most recently popular of these myths is, perhaps, the claim that the U.S. was engaged in transporting Al Qaeda militants to Bosnia to fight against the Serbs. These leftwing myths and those of the Serb – and sometimes Croat – nationalists entirely resembled and reinforced one another. Zanic has provided us with an extremely valuable, well researched study of the role of traditional culture and folklore in determining modern political practice in the former Yugoslavia, rich in evidence and detail. Yet it is a study whose relevance is not limited to the area. People other than South Slav nationalists, in the Western world and elsewhere, can and do interpret contemporary politics solely through the prism of ideological prejudice and dogma fired by emotion and nostalgia. It is the symbolism of phenomena and events, as they evoke connotations with elements of
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Hoare | Framing the Balkan Wars a beloved ideological heritage, that frequently determine the political choices of individuals.
Marko Attila Hoare is an Advisory Editor of Democratiya. Now a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University, London, he is the author of How Bosnia Armed, a short history of the Bosnian Army, published by Saqi Books in 2004. His second book, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943, was published by the British Academy in association with Oxford University Press in 2006. References
Cohen, Lenard J., 2002, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević, Westview Press: Boulder CO. Paxton, Robert O 2004, The Anatomy of Fascism, Allen Lane: London. Pollitt, Katha 2006, ‘The Trouble with Bush’s “Islamofascism,”’ The Nation. Thomas, Robert 1999, Serbia Under Milošević: Politics in the 1990s, C. Hurst and Co: London. Watkins, Susan 2004, ‘Vichy on the Tigris,’ New Left Review 28.
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Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate by Ronald Dworkin, Princeton University Press, 2006, 192 pp.
Jules Townshend This is an interesting and well-written book with a clear argumentative thread: American politics is bedevilled by a ‘yahboo’ discourse that must be replaced by reasoned (liberal) argument. Dworkin thinks the Republicans and Democrats, and their respective supporters, would stop talking past each other if only they both realised that they intuitively agreed on (liberal) fundamentals – a ‘common ground.’ In effect, he thinks that the Right do not have a philosophical leg to stand on. The logic of their position – whether in relation to gay marriage, taxation, torture, security and human rights, the role of religion in political life – contradicts their own cherished (liberal) principles, namely, that every human life is intrinsically and equally valuable, and that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realising the value of their own life (‘the two principles of human dignity’ – the former principle often associated with the Left, the latter with the Right – offering us a kind of ‘Third Way’ in political philosophy). He does admit the possibility the Right might be able to interpret these principles in their own way, but for the most part Dworkin finds it difficult to imagine what a coherent position might look like. The book succeeds within its own terms in exposing the illogicality of rightwing thinking in many areas of policy (if we assume their undisclosed liberal commitments) but only up to a point. We can accept that torture destroys the human capacity to make autonomous decisions about what his/her loyalty and convictions permit them to do (p. 38). We can endorse his argument that a government that denies the right not to be tortured to foreigners contravenes its commitment to upholding human, as opposed to legal rights, which are universal. Equally, preventive detention without trial of suspected terrorists undermines the principle of the equal intrinsic importance of people’s lives. Of issues deemed significant by the religious Right, making gay marriage illegal denies individual responsibility for the shaping of their own lives, based upon self-chosen beliefs and aspirations. As his second principle of human dignity asserts: each has a ‘responsibility to assess and choose ethical values for himself rather than yield to the coercive choices of others’ (p. 76). Although questions of abortion, religious observance and ‘intelligent design’ are
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Townshend | Ronald Dworkin on Democracy also considered by Dworkin, these tend to fall outside his argumentative strategy, based as it is upon showing how the Right contradicts its own tacit commitment to principles upholding human dignity. Things get more problematic when he moves from religion and torture to the economic terrain of taxation. He is able to show convincingly that the Right’s opposition to redistributive measures to help the poor runs counter to treating individuals lives as intrinsically and equally valuable, enabling their lives to ‘go well’ (p. 94). Yet his own theory of distribution attempts to meet both his principles of human dignity, therefore embracing the principle of individual responsibility usually associated these days with right-wing thought. Dworkin offers a simplified version of his hypothetical insurance scheme familiar to his readers, which combines the principle of meeting the welfare needs of the poor by redistribution (equal concern) with the principle of individual responsibility. Thus, he argues for contributions to be a made on a ‘progressive’ basis of ‘ex ante’ equality, putting people in an equal position before good or bad luck makes them unequal. In defining the relevant sort of luck he minimises the significance of gender or class location by attributing inequalities to ‘investment luck’ (investing in the stock market) or training for a career. This was the ‘good part’ of the difference that luck makes in people’s lives (p. 9). Elsewhere he also refers to genetic endowment, accidents and health (p. 107). Those who had made good ‘investment’ choices, the ‘winners,’ would be expected to pay higher ‘premiums’ than the less fortunate in relation to their economic choices, or poor health, accidents and the like (equal concern). However, there could be no ‘ex post’ equality because this would discourage individual responsibility. To achieve equality of outcome irrespective of personal choices would offend his second principle of human dignity. Dworkin thinks that the principle of personal responsibility can only be properly achieved through market capitalism: ‘A community can respect [the requirement of personal responsibility] only if it leaves its citizens very largely free to make their own decisions about work, leisure, investment, and consumption, and only if it leaves fixing prices and wages very largely to market forces.’ (p. 106) Why this should be so becomes apparent a little later: ‘The principle of personal responsibility requires a mainly free-market economic organization so that people one by one, rather than their governments, fix the main structural elements of the economic culture in which they live, including the prices of the different kinds of goods they choose to buy and the rent of their labor they choose to offer. Only in that way can people exercise their responsibility to identify and realize value in their own lives, because only then does the price of what one person buys or produces reflect the value it has for others. Only
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 a wide-ranging economic market respects that imperative of personal responsibility.’ (p. 107) Although Dworkin puts great emphasis on individual responsibility for choosing and realising value in their own lives, his argument in the economic sphere is in reality more utilitarian than Kantian. He formulates his justification of market capitalism in terms of individual responsibility, with the price of what a person buys or produces reflecting the ‘value it has for others.’ This notion of value, to use Marxparlance, is of course exchange value. In other words, we are now entering the world of commodities, the world of instrumental rationality and what C. B. Macpherson famously described as ‘possessive individualism,’ far removed from the ethical realm of the ‘kingdom of ends.’ Unlike self-imposed responsibilities in choosing an ethical code, as say in the religious realm, he effectively allows the economic sphere to impose a responsibility upon individuals to look after their own material well-being. The capitalist market inspired division of labour provides the omni-present, constraining context for individual choices. Such an imposition might seem fair on the basis of some kind of rights and responsibilities doctrine. But would a ‘reasonable’ (and reasoning) person regard it as fair if the disadvantage of their class (or gender) background were not compensated for? Would they think it reasonable that inequalities in bargaining strength in the market (and the ‘coercive choices of others’ that Dworkin refers to in another context) were not properly acknowledged? This kind of questioning is of course consistent with at least one interpretation of his first principle of human dignity of equal concern, and suggests that the market in many respects can devalue a human being, as a mere means to an end, or in denying them for example the possibility of meaningful work. Dworkin’s insurance scheme might sound radical within an American context, but the kind of egalitarianism he advocates is limited to offsetting the luck of the genes or the vagaries of the market, rather than the systemic biases of class and imbalances of bargaining strength that even Adam Smith recognised. In short, on the matter of taxation his abstract formulation of his two principles gets somewhat stretched: equal concern, for whom? Equal concern, in what respect? Individual responsibility for choosing and realising values, in what context? The final chapter, from which the title of the book derives (the ‘we’ is America, of course), also exposes the abstract formulation of his two principles of dignity. He argues that his two principles can help make up the democratic deficit in American politics. Each, he claims, is embodied in what he terms the ‘substantive’ ‘partnership’
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Townshend | Ronald Dworkin on Democracy model of democracy, which sees all citizens as having equal intrinsic worth and involves self-government. This he contrasts to the prevailing majoritarian, ‘procedural’ model that is not a respecter of minorities and entails little meaningful deliberation by US citizens, in his view. In short, Dworkin sees money do all the talking. Accordingly, he makes three proposals, which centre largely on improving the level of political discourse. The first involves making contemporary politics a compulsory part of the high school curriculum which would include a discussion of his two dignity principles as well as the (liberal) classics of western political philosophy. Then he wants publicly financed election TV channels at election times and limitations on campaign expenditure. And finally, he wants to amend constitutional law so that president’s power as commander in chief in war-time is reduced and the power of the Supreme Court expanded so as to prevent the president from curtailing civil liberties of US citizens and the human rights of foreigners. But in order to ensure that ‘ideological judges’ cannot remain in office until they die, tenure should be restricted to fifteen years. There is much thoughtful discussion on the deficiencies of the majoritarian view of democracy and his proposals for reform should not be sneered at. But the question remains as to whether they would actually achieve his dignity principles. Again, his abstract formulations seem to ignore the socio-economic context of the American political system, especially the self-perpetuating nature of political elites related to economic class (and gender) and voter apathy amongst the poorer sections of society. Dworkin has not taken full cognisance of how different the religious, security, economic and political spheres really are, while his abstract liberalism pays little attention to the circumstances in which individual choices are made. Furthermore, the nature of his liberalism means that he only focuses on deliberate harm. He explicitly sanctions US foreign trade policies which have harmed the livelihoods of millions in the so-called ‘Third World’ in contrast to the (deliberately harmed) suspected foreign terrorists who have been tortured and detained without trial (p. 48). In other words, although one can have much sympathy with Dworkin’s aspirations, his attempt to moralise politics within an existing capitalist liberal democracy in which narrow selfinterest predominates, looks unlikely to achieve his partnership model.
Jules Townshend is Professor of Political Theory at Manchester Metropolitan University. His latest book is Key Thinkers: From Critical Theory to Post Marxism (with Simon Tormey), Sage, 2006
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Keeping the Republic: Reading Arendt’s On Revolution after the Fall of the Wall Dick Howard Introduction: From where do you speak, comrade? Two decades after the fall of the Wall seemed to announce – by default, as an unexpected gift – the triumph of democracy, optimism appears at best naïve, at worst an ideological manipulation of the most cynical type. The hope was that the twin forms of modern anti-politics – the imaginary planned society and the equally imaginary invisible hand of the market place – would be replaced by the rule of the demos; citizens together would determine the values of the commonwealth. The reality was at first the ‘New World Order’ of George H.W. Bush; then the indecisive interregnum of the Clinton years; and now the crass take over of democratic rhetoric by the neo-conservatives of George W. Bush. ‘Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains,’ wrote Rousseau at the outset of The Social Contract; how this came about was less important, he continued, than what made it legitimate: that was what needed explanation. So it is today; what is it about democracy that makes it the greatest threat to its own existence? In this context, it is well to reread Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, published in 1963. On returning recently to my old (1965) paperback edition, I was struck by the spare red and black design of the cover, which was not (as I thought for a moment) a subtle allusion to the conflict of communism and anarchism for the realization of ‘true’ democracy, but simply the backdrop against which the editor stressed these sentences: ‘With nuclear power at a stalemate, revolutions have become the principal political factor of our time. To understand them may mean to understand the future.’ Although ‘nuclear power’ clearly referred to the stalemate of the Cold War, it seemed clear that that the ‘revolutions’ were anti-capitalist. Yet, as I began to read that old copy, I was ashamed by both the naiveté and the arrogance – attitudes that often, and not coincidentally, go together – of my marginal comments. Soon enough, alone with myself at my desk, the embarrassment become too great; I decided to order a new copy (2006). When it arrived, I was again struck by its cover, which featured joyfully intertwined clinched fists reproduced from a poster produced during the May ‘68 Paris ‘uprising.’ Having been there, I felt more comfortable for a moment. But then I remembered an oft-repeated question from those times: ‘From where do you speak, comrade?’ The challenge assumed
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution that social class was more important than political action. But the very action of 1968 challenged that gospel [1]. Arendt was not surprised. In ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,’ (1970) she recalled the argument of On Revolution, asserting that ‘[t]his generation discovered what the eighteenth century had called “public happiness.”’ Yet, as she weighed its chances of success, her bitter-sweet and very Arendtian opinion was: ‘[v]ery slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all – in the wake of the next revolution.’ [2] From where, then, do I speak? An American from the Civil Rights generation who went to study in Paris, home of the revolution, but found that the graft didn’t take. A 1967 visit to the student militants who would be central to the Prague Spring made me sensitive to the rhetoric of totalitarianism. [3] The first meetings of the 1968 May movement were a revelation: as if those masters of Marxist nuance – eager to distinguish support for the ‘workers and peasants’ from the broader ‘anticolonial’ or ‘popular struggles of the oppressed’ – had suddenly learned pragmatic English! But anti-totalitarianism was then the monopoly of the right (which explains some of my marginalia: Arendt never identified herself with such partisan political geography). It would take time for me to understand that the need to think politically was not identical to political positioning. That discovery was facilitated by the discovery of Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic. For an American whose dreams had flown to revolutionary Paris, and whose imagination sought an unspoiled Marxism, the American Revolution seemed only a merely political first step toward the social and socialist triumph. That assumption explains others of my misguided marginalia. Together with the critique of totalitarianism, the so-called republican interpretation of America’s self-creation – of which Arendt was not aware when writing her book – suggests the framework for my re-reading of On Revolution. [4] The present exercise in interpretation is guided by the need to understand the political problems of our times. To see how Arendt helps us to think, I begin (i) by looking at ‘Her Problems and Ours.’ What led her to write On Revolution? But also, what questions make us, today, four decades later, receptive to her thought? [5] Does she recognize that beyond the critique of totalitarianism lies the dawning of a new kind of political life, as Jonathan Schell has recently argued? (ii) But the Wall didn’t fall from its own inertia. How can one explain the power achieved by the dissidents who transformed the defense of human rights into a new politics? Arendt’s essay on ‘Civil Disobedience’ was written in a specifically American context; but its lessons point further. It appears that that what seem to be today’s
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 problems may be the result of judgements that are short-sighted because too directly pragmatic; today’s problems may be only a variation on what she calls the ‘problems of our age.’ To clarify the broader picture, it is necessary also to look at the relation of ‘Our Problems and Hers.’ The actuality of Arendt’s judgements turns out to depend on her ability to reactivate philosophical categories that cover over deeper political insight. The very title of The Human Condition indicates that this most systematic of her writings – her answer, many have observed, to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time – indicates that it is not a traditional philosophical investigation of ‘human nature.’ (3) But Arendt is not a philosopher; she wants to understand at once how to think and to think events. The two moments are essential, and they are essentially connected. With regard to the American founding, On Revolution goes far toward realizing the first part of this project – to think; but it falls short of the second goal – to articulate the event in its uniqueness. Returning to the actual American history whose significance Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate will permit a better understanding of the dynamics of democratic politics, then as now. [6] In a democracy, politics and anti-politics compete constantly, the excess of the one calling forth the return of the other in a movement whose instability is the paradoxical root of its own strength. Her Problems and Ours The 1962 Introduction to On Revolution calls attention to the unique relation of war and revolution in the years after World War II. Because war has become impossible in the nuclear age, ‘those who still put their faith in power politics in the traditional sense… and, therefore, in war’ will have mastered an ‘obsolete trade.’ The only remaining justification for war, she continues, is a revolution that claims to defend ‘the cause of freedom.’ But like war, such a revolution would make use of violence, which is the ‘anti-political’ province of technicians, such that its use puts into question the fate of the freedom it professes. This dilemma had been seen already in the 17th century – which, as Arendt notes, had seen its share of violence. It invented the fiction of a pre-political state of nature in order to show that the political realm – which is the locus of freedom – does not emerge simply from the fact of people living together. The political is created; it has a beginning that separates it from pre-political life just as the modern notion of revolution claims to inaugurate a rupture with what preceded it. But this act involves a paradox. The need to break with the past in order to found the new means that the new has no proper legitimacy; its only foundation is the ‘crime’ that destroyed the old order. This was the rock on which the French revolution would come to ruin. In
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution Robespierre’s version, there could be no virtue without terror, but also no terror without virtue – a dilemma that could not be overcome by the rhetorical institution of the Fête de l’Être suprême. At first glance, our contemporary situation could not be more different; the Wall just collapsed, its authority broken, its power shriveled. But there was no revolutionary act, the past faded into nothingness almost before anyone was aware that it had gone. [7] The new order of politics that should have appeared is nowhere to be seen. A revolution without revolutionaries has left a political space without participants. This might have been expected by a philosopher who frequently cited Montesquieu. She liked to recall his account of despotism, whose principle of action is fear – a generalized fear: fear of the state, of one’s fellow citizens, even of one’s self. Such conditions could never create the solidarity needed to found a political society. But despotism will not fall at the slightest breeze; philosophy, even political philosophy, is no substitute for politics. That is why Arendt insisted on the importance of the event, and the need to think it in a way that makes evident its particularity at the same time that she recognized that theory could not predict what that constituent event would be. How, then, can it be claimed that democracy ‘won’ the Cold War? Jonathan Schell’s Introduction to the re-edition of On Revolution makes a provocative proposal. He recalls the ‘epilogue’ to the 1958 re-edition of Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she reflects on the implications of the 1956 revolution in Hungary. He suggests that she never republished this essay because it marked the transition from the bleak pessimism of her account of the totalitarian experience toward the optimism articulated in On Revolution. Schell sees her intuition confirmed by ‘the wave of democratic revolutions’ that he dates from the action and echoes of 1956, rather than the more legalistic Greek, Portuguese and Spanish transitions of the 1970s. In this way, the Hungarian experience represents the first expression of a subterranean wave that began to surface with Polish Solidarnosc, passing to the overthrow of military dictatorship in Argentina and Brazil and then on to the Philippines and South Korea, before returning to the former Soviet Union and South Africa to culminate (provisionally) with the fall of Milošević, the Georgian Rose Revolution and the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. Schell insists on the fact that ‘most’ of these cases looked to the American Revolution rather than to the French model; and that they ‘aimed at establishing conditions of freedom rather than solving social questions.’ Further, ‘[a]ll were largely nonviolent…and most interesting and important, they repeatedly vindicated Arendt’s new conception
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 of power and its relationship to violence.’ [8] Schell grants the importance of a ‘new conception of the social,’ in the form of civil society (a category that ill-fits Arendt’s theoretical framework [9]) as well as a concern with electoral results. Yet, he insists, the similarity of ‘opposition to regimes as disparate as the military rule of southern Europe, the right-wing dictatorships of South America, and the apartheid regimes of South Africa… make one believe that Arendt was right…’ to claim that the ‘signatories of the Mayflower Compact’ had discovered the true grammar and syntax ‘of any action whatsoever.’ [10] However questionable for the historian is the sweeping generalization that sometimes takes its wishes for reality, its theoretical premise suggests why Arendt’s problems help illuminate our own. As she puts it in lapidary form, one cannot say simply that totalitarianism is the problem, the Hungarian workers’ councils are the solution. Rather, she insists, both are a response to ‘the age’s problems.’ [11] And Jonathan Schell rightly insists that these are still with us in what he calls the ‘debate’ over whether ‘the wave of Arendtian democratization [has] run its course.’ [12] What worries him is the current American policy of ‘democratizing other countries by armed force.’ [13] Was not what Arendt had in mind when, for example in The Origins of Totalitarianism she stressed that imperialism is one of the problems to which totalitarianism is a ‘fantastical attempted solution.’ That was surely one reason for her opposition to the American war in Vietnam. Following the same logic, Jonathan Schell hopes that the inversion of the relation between power and violence manifested in the ‘wave of democratic revolutions’ foreshadows a more general reversal of relations between small and great powers. [14] But this hope seems to return to the simple opposition, which Arendt rejected in her first reflection on 1956, where a bad condition that is said to be overthrown by a good alternative. It forgets what Arendt called ‘the age’s problems,’ which are not philosophical or moral but political. It is not enough to say that ‘the United States, in pursuit of its war on terror, is losing track of its founding ideals.’ [15] To understand America’s ‘ideals,’ to which Schell like Arendt appeals, we need to look at its politics. Our Problems and Hers Jonathan Schell’s ‘wave of democratic revolutions’ has been paralleled by what some have called a ‘revolution of human rights.’ The actions of a few dissidents within the former Soviet bloc acquired a political framework when the so-called ‘Third Basket’ of the Helsinki Accords of 1975 (which the Soviets thought of as a victory for their realpolitik as it had been exercised in crushing the Prague Spring,
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution affirming the so-called ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’) made audible and public demands for the protection of human rights. [16] While Hannah Arendt was no longer alive, the arguments she had proposed in her essay on ‘Civil Disobedience,’ written at the height of the protests against the American war in Vietnam, help to explain how and why the assertion of individual rights came to acquire political significance. [17] She first clears away the usual misinterpretation according to which the civil disobedient is not a criminal because he acts in the light of day and because he accepts the consequences of his act, as in the cases of Thoreau or Gandhi. Rather, acting publicly, she points out, means appealing to others, even if the motive for the act may be hidden deep in the privacy of individual conscience. And action that speaks to others presupposes the existence of a basis for mutual understanding that, when awakened, results in collective action. While this could explain the ‘wave of democratic revolutions,’ their success depended also on the fact that the weakened authority of the rulers made them incapable of crushing violently the new politics before it spread (as did the Polish coup d’état of December 1981). This is simply another formulation of the interplay of thought and event, as authority and action form an indissoluble pair. More concretely, what seems to have happened is that the civil disobedience that Arendt sought to understand as the renewal of the particular ‘spirit of American law,’ [18] acquired a power that transcended national boundaries as ‘human rights’ could be appealed to as recognized by international law. The action of the dissidents became unavoidably political at the same time that the Soviet bloc – and what remained of its ideology – lost its legitimacy. But – again! – the simple opposition of black-and-white dissolves the problems that would emerge. After the Fall of the Wall, when neither geo-politics nor leftist hopes for a Third Way could even vaguely justify the denial of rights, the question that worried Jonathan Schell emerged: can rights be imposed at the point of a bayonet? As we saw, Arendt had been aware of the problem already in the Introduction to On Revolution, denouncing it as antipolitical. Although human rights dissidents challenged the residual (‘Westphalian’) notion of national sovereignty on which the old power politics depended, no new analysis emerged to replace it. Intervention in the Balkans could be justified because it was a ‘European’ concern; but Rwanda was left to its sad fate. This absence of political reflection was at least in part the result of a typical misunderstanding that Arendt criticized in ‘Civil Disobedience’: i.e., a liberal individualism whose appeal to rights ignores their political foundation.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 The still-present consequences of this liberal thoughtlessness were suggested recently by Orlando Patterson. [19] Under the title ‘God’s Gift?’ Patterson points out that Americans generally, and the ideologues of the current neo-conservative regime in particular, assume that everyone longs for a freedom whose realization demands only that oppression be lifted. ‘Once President Bush was beguiled by this argument he began to sound like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th century founder of liberalism. In his second inaugural speech, Mr. Bush declared ‘complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom… because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.’ Thus, the president told an Arab-American audience, ‘No matter what your faith, freedom is God’s gift to every person in every nation.’ He drew the implications in another speech that laid out the neoconservative agenda: ‘We believe that freedom can advance and change lives in the greater Middle East.’ It would not be unfaithful to Arendt to suggest that this thoughtlessness – this inability to understand that politics is based on plurality and that it is the result of action by the participants – that is ‘the age’s problem.’ The problem is not the goals of the neo-conservatives; the problem is their political naiveté which forgets the interconnectedness of thought and event, authority and action, politics and possibility. Neo-conservatism is an anti-political politics that lives in an eternal present – which is one reason that the Americans were so unprepared once their victorious arms fell silent. But the thoughtless liberal – or his neo-conservative first-cousin – has a sort of coconspirator: the ‘liberal hawk’ who thinks too much. [20] Formerly on the left side of the spectrum, this anti-political species – for whom Marxism was emphatically not a ‘humanism’ – came to realize finally that the nightmare of totalitarianism is not just a bump in the progress of History toward smiling tomorrows and, enthusiastic as always, jumped on the bandwagon of the campaign for human rights. [21] Having defied both the orthodox left and the pragmatic Realpolitiker, these moralists were not deceived by the bromides of soft-hearted American liberalism; they were certain that they could maintain their independence (and thus their influence) while supporting critically the unilateral war of the neo-conservatives. [22] It now is (or should be) clear that they were wrong – although some still hold to their certitudes, blaming Bush, or Rumsfeld, or simply faulty execution, for the mess in Iraq in the same way that fellow-traveling leftists blamed the ‘cult of personality’ or ‘the bureaucracy.’ However, it would be wrong to throw out the human rights baby with the liberal bath water. Many non-hawk war critics expected the recent report of the independent Baker-Hamilton commission to open a multi-lateral path for
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution the administration to rectify its voluntarism in Iraq. But even if the report were accepted by the president – which has not been the case – one must still ask: is the return to a ‘realism’ proposed by the Wise Men a desirable politics. [23] After all, it was that realism (and those Wise Men) that had led the West to ignore political dissidents, to sacrifice human rights, while practicing the ‘technique’ that Arendt denounced as ‘anti-political’ because it is based on violence rather than persuasion. [24] The ‘liberal hawks’ do not have the answer to ‘the age’s challenges,’ but they do at least pose the question; for they too – are seeking to renew the ideals that found democracy, despite their mistaken choice of allies. On Civil Disobedience In this context, Arendt’s essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ has a political significance that cannot be reduced to the similarities of the American war in Vietnam (which was her referent) and the Iraq dilemma. Her essay calls to mind Benjamin Franklin’s reply to a bystander as he left the Philadelphia Convention: ‘What have you made?’ she asked. ‘A republic, if you can keep it’ was the lapidary reply that anticipated a major theme of American history. Civil disobedience, insists Arendt, becomes necessary only when the challenge to the authority of government results in ‘a constitutional crisis of the first order.’ [25] What constitutes a crisis of authority is both the government’s overreaching of its constitutional powers and a popular refusal ‘to recognize the consensus universalis’ which founds the tacit agreement holding together the plural threads of the republic. Arendt had denounced the excess of government elsewhere; [26] here she stresses the weakening of those voluntary associations whose foundational role in a democracy Tocqueville had underlined. Civil disobedience is ‘the latest form of voluntary association;’ it is a mode of action ‘in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.’ [27] Those traditions are at the basis of a moral consensus; as such, they are profoundly political. As with the above-mentioned paradox of revolution, while the law obviously cannot provide a place for the violation of the law, the contemporary fact that the actions of the disobedients were changing majority opinion ‘to an astounding degree’ suggested to Arendt that their actions fit the ‘spirit’ of American law. But the spirit must become letter. The Supreme Court had refused to intervene in the conduct of the war on the ground that a ‘political question’ belonged to the other branches of government. This seemed to leave only one option: a constitutional amendment transcending the merely liberal guarantees of the First Amendment to actualize the politics whose spirit she had described. [28]
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 The reader of On Revolution will recognize in Arendt’s constitutional proposal themes reminiscent of Jefferson’s idea of a participatory ‘ward system’ that could preserve the spirit of ‘public happiness’ experienced in the American Revolution. Although she insists that civil disobedience is ‘for the most part’ an American tradition, Arendt seems to confirm Jonathan Schell’s intuition when she adds that its necessity stems from a danger imposed by a government that, because it refuses to admit its own limits, ‘has changed voluntary association into civil disobedience and transformed dissent into resistance… [This threat] prevails at present – and, indeed, has prevailed for some time – in large parts of the world…’ [29] Although the ‘large parts of the world’ do not share in the American ‘spirit’ on which her claim is based, her argument here is broader, at once ontological, historical and based on political theory. Thus, the philosopher of The Human Condition stresses the ontological human ability to make promises; the political thinker of On Revolution recalls the historical experience dating from the Mayflower Compact and practiced in the New England townships; while the political theorist underlines the Lockean idea that society is bound together by compacts before it then creates a government. [30] The Lockean vision is the primary justification of civil disobedience because it implies that it is the government that violates the compact; and therefore it is the covenanted society (not an individual disobedient but rather the political power of individuals acting together) that must reassert itself in the face of this abuse. But this argument is only normative; it sacrifices the dynamic element of democracy – which was not, after all, Locke’s still liberal concern. Whatever we may think of Arendt’s solutions, it is clear that her problems are also ours. Her list of misdeeds by the Vietnam-era government ring familiar: an illegal and immoral war accompanied by executive overreach, chronic deception of the public, restrictions on first amendment freedoms, and a government that forgets that the translation of the slogan e pluribus unam is not union sacrée. [31] Why, then, do we not see something like the kind of disobedient action against the Iraq excesses that she supported? Perhaps, as she suggests at one point, the plurality of divergent minds has become an ideological commitment that denies freedom of opinion, replacing political debate by ideological certainty – in the present case, the idea of ‘democracy’ as solving ‘the age’s problems?’ [32] But elsewhere, after admitting, a bit reluctantly, that not everyone needs to participate in, or even be concerned with public affairs, she hopes that a self-selection process that draws out a ‘true political elite in a country’ may produce ‘a new concept of the state. A councilstate….’ [33] And her optimism only seems to fade in her last public presentation, ‘Home to Roost,’ (1975) when she describes a series of disasters in foreign and
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution domestic politics culminating in a ‘swift decline in political power [that] is almost unprecedented.’ The institutions of liberty that have sustained the American spirit may be exhausted after surviving ‘longer than any comparable glories in history.’ Refusing to appeal to the truths of philosophy, [34] she won’t abandon the spirit of freedom. ‘[W]hile we now slowly emerge from under the rubble of the events of the past few years,’ she concludes, ‘let us not forget these years of aberration lest we become wholly unworthy of the glorious beginnings two hundred years ago. When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into some utopias – images, theories, or sheer follies. It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst.’ [35] I have italicized this last phrase for reasons that will become clear in my conclusions. In the end, although she tried to avoid the traps of ontology and its historicist correlate [36] – stressing the diversity of ‘the human condition’ – there is something troubling about Arendt’s constant return to the ‘spirit’ of the American founding. The ‘facts’ on which she laid such great importance play a subsidiary role in On Revolution. As a result, it is difficult to know why the Americans have, or have not, met Franklin’s challenge – ‘a republic if you can keep it?’ Have they, as she at times suggests, fallen victim to the ‘anti-politics’ of the party politicians? Have they, as she often fears, adopted the French revolutionaries’ concern with the social question? Or is there, as I want to suggest, something about the very nature of democracy that constantly threatens it from within even as – for the same reason – it reinforces the power of a democratic polity and of its individual citizens? A closer look at the dynamic history from which Arendt distills the revolutionary ‘spirit’ can help to explain also why Arendt’s problems cast light on our own, and why ours in turn bring out the power of her vision. The ‘age’s problems’ are not defined by a specific historical conjuncture; they belong to an epoch whose decisive mark is that the challenge to maintain a republican democracy is accompanied by the threat of its anti-political reversal. To recognize the two faces of this challenge is a step toward reclaiming the ‘ideals’ that Jonathan Schell worries have been lost. Rethinking the American Revolution Today Despite her rejection of philosophy, [37] Arendt’s stress on the uniquely human ability to covenant, to make promises, and to exchange opinions among a plurality of participants in public life, seems to be based on deep-rooted premises that are constantly present in what she called ‘the human condition.’ Granted, she is not
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 describing the world from the perspective of a monadic subject; plurality, publicity and the fundamental concept of action guarantee a dynamic that makes humans capable of coming together to create a type of power that is distinct from the brute force of dumb nature. But how does this potential to produce the singular events that are the matter for political thought acquire its historical uniqueness? In the American case, an originary moment, [38] the Mayflower Compact, is said to define the ‘condition’ from which emerged the ‘spirit’ that, in its turn, reappeared in the New England townships, in the Revolution, in the 19th century form of associative life described by Tocqueville, and then in the 20th century political action of the civil disobedient – before acquiring, in Jonathan Schell’s argument, a new life in the ‘wave of democratic revolutions.’ Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But: tant mieux! I like this vision. But I’m not sure how it helps to understand either the American Revolution or the way that historical experience illuminates contemporary political problems. It is of course unfair to reduce Arendt’s analysis to a concern with something so vague as a revolutionary spirit. An important thread in her analysis is suggested by her claim that ‘the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.’ [39] This question of sovereignty, which was crucial to the movement that led to each new phase of the revolution, suggests the need to think today about the implications of an event that marked the culmination of the revolutionary wave: ‘the revolution of 1800,’ which brought the republicans of Thomas Jefferson to power. [40] Reflection on that event, in turn, helps to make clear what Arendt might have meant by ‘the age’s problems.’ That, in turn, suggests why her problems illuminate ours just as ours cast light on her own mode of thinking about politics. The American Revolution passed through three phases before its initial impetus was realized (and the classical theory of sovereignty rejected in favor of a republicandemocratic practice). The first period, from 1763 to 1776, posed the question of sovereignty. After the British victory in the Seven Years’ War – called naively by the Americans the ‘French and Indian War’ – the colonists no longer needed the protection of the mother country; but Britain now needed to reorganize relations among the parts of its enlarged empire and to pay the debts it had incurred in the process. This led to a series of measures that, to the colonists, seemed an
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution impingement on their rights and liberties. Often summed up in the lapidary phrase, ‘No taxation without representation,’ the stream of pamphlets produced during these years began with attempts at conciliation only to be drawn, inexorably it seems, to articulate what Tom Paine expressed as simply ‘Common Sense.’ [41] In retrospect, one theoretical argument coupled with practical experience made the rupture seem necessary. On the plane of theory, John Dickinson showed that local self-government implied an imperium in imperio, which was a contradiction in political terms. This logical argument carried weight because practical experiences of self-management, such as the refusal of the Stamp Act or the non-importation actions on the part of the colonies proved that political legitimation from Britain was not needed for the Americans to run their own lives. Thus was born in practice and theory the revolutionary spirit. The new self-understanding won in the first period had to be defended once independence was proclaimed. The war began poorly; in the bitter winter of 1776, at Valley Forge, General Washington ordered that Tom Paine’s new pamphlet, The American Crisis, be read to the troops. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ wrote Paine, as he denounced ‘[t]he summer soldier and the sunshine patriot…’ Political events don’t just happen; individuals participate when they exercise their judgment. [42] Finally, the army held; French help began to arrive. Meanwhile, it remained for the Americans to give themselves new institutions of government. As in the first political phase of the revolution, theoretical reflection joined with practical experience. The theory was condensed in the efforts of John Adams, whom Arendt invokes frequently. But while she rightly stresses his debt to the constitutional schemes of Montesquieu, it is his insistence that government must be a ‘representation in miniature’ of the people whom they represent that became crucial to the development of American political self-understanding. The implication of Adams’ proposition was drawn more sharply by the practical experience of the new state of Pennsylvania. For reasons that were circumstantial, [43] its radical democratic constitution provided for frequent elections, a weak executive, periodic review of all laws by a council of censors among other popular measures. While approximating a direct democracy, this constitution was also a recipe for instability. And although the Pennsylvania model was more radical, both of these constitutions suggested that the Americans’ conception of the sovereignty for which they were fighting was that of a democracy in which the people were full participants. But, when peace was finally made (in 1783), the sovereignty that had been won could not be maintained in the face of post-war economic problems made worse by inter-state rivalries that blocked the functioning of the loosely
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 knitted confederal government. The conception of sovereignty for which they fought needed modification. [44] A new stage in American political thought and practice was reached not only with the constitutional creation of 1787, but also in the process of its popular ratification. As Arendt recognized, the letter of the institution has to be structured in such a way that the spirit that presided at its origin can be maintained (or renewed). The new understanding that emerged in this third phase is presented in the Federalist Papers, which are at once a political act (within the ratification process) and a theoretical self-reflection. Two arguments are crucial; and their relation must be properly understood. The first is Federalist 10, which defends the possibility of a large republic by recourse to the idea that its safety and vitality will be guaranteed by the presence of competing factions. The second is elaborated in Federalist 51, which insists that the safety and vitality of the republic will be guaranteed by the checks-and-balances among the branches of the new government. It would seem that if one of these claims is true, the other is not necessary – or indeed, that if both are valid, the resulting constitution may limit itself too greatly, making swift and decisive action impossible. However, when put in the context of the debate over sovereignty, the two claims are saying one and the same thing: Federalist 10 explains that ‘the’ sovereign people as such does not exist, while Federalist 51 draws the conclusion that any branch of government that claims to incarnate the vox populi is exceeding the power accorded it by the constitution. [45] However, because the constitution both checks and balances the power of a democratic people, there will be present always that dynamic that, beginning already in the first phase of the revolution, seeks to realize its own democratic self-government. The inherent paradox of the American republic is that it solicits popular sovereignty even while making its complete realization impossible. [46] This historical dynamic reached a temporary resolution with the ‘revolution of 1800,’ which marked the first peaceful passage of political power from one party to another. After a bitter campaign foreshadowed by the repressive Alien and Sedition laws (1798) and heated by reciprocal accusations of ‘Monarchism’ and ‘Jacobinism,’ Jefferson assumed the presidency and Adams returned quietly home to Massachusetts. Jefferson’s inaugural Address alluded to the campaign, but insisted that ‘every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.’ [47] It is significant that Jefferson did not mean that party differences would – or could, or should – be abolished. [48] The unity that binds
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution together the republic is what he calls here a unity of principle. The nature of that principle was demonstrated in the second moment of the revolution of 1800, the Supreme Court’s decision in Marbury v. Madison (1803). The court’s ruling can be interpreted as arguing that while Jefferson’s republicans were now the majority, their power remained limited; it is the principles of the constitution that constitute the always present but never fully realized, or realizable, sovereignty of the people. It is the constitution that guarantees that the people are One at the same time that its institutional structure assures that the momentary expression of that unity is realized only through the constant production of difference, debate and deliberation. The ‘revolution of 1800’ is thus an event that is more than an event; it confirms the experience of and reflection on the American revolution and can be taken as the expression of that ‘spirit’ invoked by Arendt. This interpretation of the foundation of American democracy in terms of the problem of sovereignty can be developed further. As a ‘principle,’ sovereignty is symbolic; because it depends on judgement rather than will, its momentary expression is always open to negotiation; it can never be incarnated once-and-forall yet it is the constant presence without which neither a polity nor the individuals that compose it can subsist. More concretely, the history of American democracy can be thought of as the constant competition among institutions that claim to represent the will of the sovereign. The actors in the resulting dynamic process are not only the legislative, executive and judicial branches (and the federal states); new players emerge, be they political parties, groups claiming power through expertise, specialized interests or the inexorable forces of global markets…or the non-violent power of civil disobedients. While one or another institution may come to dominate for a time, it is important to recognize that as long as the principle remains, as long as sovereignty remains symbolic, there will surely emerge others who will contest the legitimacy and dispute the monopoly that is asserted. Rather than a direct democracy in which the sovereign and unitary will of society is expressed in its political institutions – what I have called elsewhere a ‘democratic republic’ – the Americans created what can be called a ‘republican democracy’ whose institutional structure encourages individuals to actively judge among choices available and to participate together in the self-determination that is needed to ‘keep’ the republic they have inherited.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Conclusion These reflections on the historical events of the American Revolution bring us back to what Arendt called ‘the age’s problems.’ Every political actor of course claims that its policies are the incarnation of the united will of the nation and that its platform opens the path to Smiling Tomorrows. But the door to anti-politics is opened if the symbolic – and therefore contested – nature of the sovereign people is reduced to its temporary reality. That is the crucial lesson to be drawn still today from The Origins of Totalitarianism, which can be read as an attempt to think the most extreme expression of anti-politics. The extreme casts light on the everyday; and it underlines the actuality of Benjamin Franklin’s elliptic phrase, ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’ That is why the politics of human rights – as a politics, not as simply the protection of private freedoms (as Arendt rightly noted in the discussion of ‘Civil Disobedience’) – is fundamental to a republican democracy. It is an error to think that the ‘democracy’ that triumphed in 1989 was the solution to the ‘age’s problems.’ Re-reading of On Revolution suggests, rather, that those events make clear – yet again – that democracy is a dangerous game that can easily lose its way when democrats forget how to think, which means to recognize the limits of a political process that is by its very nature unlimited. Just before she insisted that the ‘greatest American innovation’ was the abolition of sovereignty, Arendt cited Montesquieu’s ‘famous insight that even virtue stands in need of limitation and that even an excess of reason is undesirable…’ [49] If too little democracy is certainly a default, the attempt to realize it once-and-for all (by force, if needed) can prove to be a more grievous threat. Those ‘ideals’ that Jonathan Schell wanted us to reclaim have to be understood in this context.
Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His many books include Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (1971), From Marx to Kant (l985), The Birth of American Political Thought (1989), and The Specter of Democracy (2002). He writes frequently in French publications, and is a member of the editorial board of Esprit. His two most recent books are Aux origines de la pensée politique américaine (2004), and La démocratie à l’épreuve. Chroniques américaines (2006). Notes
[1] The Maoists, who if nothing else held faithfully to their theory by deserting the ‘bourgeois’ students to ‘serve the people’ of the proletarian districts, succeeded only in making themselves irrelevant quickly.
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution [2] References are to ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,’ in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 203, 231, 233. [3] I met Michael Denneny, who was then Arendt’s assistant, that same summer. [4] I have written about this interpretation frequently. Most recently, in Aux origines de la pensée politique américaine (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2004) and, in English, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). [5] Need I add that it makes no sense to pretend (as do the neo-conservatives) that Islamism – socalled Islamic Fascism – is structurally identically to the old totalitarianisms? To mention but one crucial difference: there are no fellow travelers claiming that the new faith is in fact the ‘realization’ of the principles of the old order. [6] While recent years have brought an end to the decades during which the non-proliferation regime had at least kept the nuclear genie in its bottle, it would be too great a stretch to try to integrate this development into the framework that animated Arendt’s original reflections in On Revolution. Arendt’s biographer, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has suggested that a new, non passive pacifism could be the adequate political response, generating a new kind of popular power capable of facing up to the dead-weight statist realpolitik. [7] This is of course not literally true, as we were reminded again in December 2006 when the newly named Primate of the Polish Catholic church had to resign his post before assuming it due to revelations about his collaboration with the secret police of the old regime. This was only the most recent demonstration that the past cannot be simply forgotten or willed away. [8] C.f., Jonathan Schell, Introduction to Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), p. xxii. [9] C.f., Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), Chapter 4, ‘The Normative Critique: Hannah Arendt,’ pp. 177-200. [10] Ibid, p. xxvi. [11] Ibid, p. xviii. [12] Ibid, p. xxvi. [13] Ibid, p. xxvii. [14] Ibid., p. xxviii (for these last citations). [15] Ibid., p. xxvii. [16] I n the 1976 elections, both Ronald Reagan (in republican primaries) and Jimmy Carter (the democratic candidate) criticized Gerald Ford for signing the treaty. The New York Times’ obituary for President Ford (December 28, 2006) quotes historian John Gaddis’s 2006 The Cold War: A New History as arguing that it in fact became ‘the basis for legitimizing opposition to Soviet rule.’ Christopher Hitchens (in Slate, December 29, 2006), points out that Ford’s refusal to receive Aleksander Solzenitsyn was a serious blow to Soviet dissidents, while Timothy Noah (in Slate, December 27, 2006) recalls his infamous claim (in a 1976 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter) that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination, calling it ‘the single dumbest thing ever said by a sitting president in my lifetime.’ [17] C.f., in this regard, the seminal essay by Claude Lefort, ‘Droits de l’homme et politique,’ in L’invention démocratique (Paris: Fayard, 1981); English translation in The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). C.f., also Lefort’s essays on Arendt in order to appreciate the coincidence (and difference) of their independently developed arguments. I have discussed these issues raised by Lefort in The Specter of Democracy.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 [18] ‘Civil Disobedience,’ in Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 85. [19] Harvard sociologist Patterson, the author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture published this article as a guest op-ed in the New York Times, December 19, 2006. It is ironic that the first wave of neoconservatives (those of the 1980s) denounced the same naiveté, as Peter Beinart noted in The New Republic ( January 1-15, 2007). Beinart quotes Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous 1979 essay, ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ : ‘No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence.’ Beinart’s point is that the critics of the Bush adventurism are returning to the older ‘reality-based’ position. [20] I have in mind here Arendt’s friend Harold Rosenberg’s description of the Marxist militant as ‘an intellectual who doesn’t think’ because he knows already the necessary course of history and has only to fit the particular events into that pattern. There are former leftist ‘liberal hawks’ such as the Frenchmen André Glucksmann or Bernard Kouchner, or the Anglo-American Christopher Hitchens; and there are liberal ‘liberal hawks,’ such as Peter Beinart and his colleagues at The New Republic. For a discussion of some of the issues, c.f., my review-essay on Paul Berman’s recent book, of which a French version appeared in La république des idées, a German in Kommune, and an English version will appear in Constellations, Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2007. [21] This is more true for the French than the American variant of the species. While the French won rhetorical victories, the Americans made legislative gains. Their denunciation of human rights in the Soviet Union acquired an emotional valorization from association with the Holocaust (which had been absent in the earlier trial of Sinyavsky-Daniel), producing the ‘Jackson-Vanik amendment’ that pressured the Soviet Union to grant Jews the right to immigrate. Although many later neo-conservatives had worked with Jackson, he himself was a staunch, pro-labor Democrat. [22] Did they still remember Lenin’s dictum: critical support is that offered by the rope to the hanged man? Will their support have had a similar effect on their neo-conservative allies? [23] Even more ironic is the way in which opponents of the Iraq imbroglio appeal to the judgement of the generals who have, from the beginning, opposed the policies of Donald Rumsfeld as well as those of Bush-Cheney. That a critical left should base its arguments on the judgement of the military is, to say the least, surprising. [24] On Revolution, op. cit., p. 9. [25] ‘Civil Disobedience, op. cit., p. 89. [26] C.f., for example, her reflections on the Pentagon Papers, ‘Lying in Politics,’ which is reprinted as the first essay in the volume Crises of the Republic which contains also her ‘Civil Disobedience.’ [27] Ibid., p. 96. [28] ‘ The establishment of civil disobedience among our political institutions might be the best possible remedy for this ultimate failure of judicial review.’ Ibid., p. 101. The argument developed here is foreshadowed at pages 83f. It may be worth noting that a District Court has invoked a similar ‘political question’ doctrine in refusing the habeas corpus claim of a codefendant of Saddam Hussein, denying that his being held in US military custody gave him standing for an appeal. C.f. New York Times, December 28, 2006. [29] Ibid, p. 102.
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Howard | Reading Arendt’s On Revolution [30] I noted earlier that Arendt did not know the ‘republican’ reading of the American revolution suggested most powerfully by Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic (in which it appears, for example, that Machiavelli was more important than Locke in the developing American revolutionary thought). I find her reading of Locke problematic, but she reaffirms her claims from On Revolution (pp. 160ff of the 2006 edition) in ‘Civil Disobedience’ (pp. 85ff ). [31] ‘Civil Disobedience,’ op. cit., p. 94. [32] Ibid, p. 98. Arendt’s worry was ideologies such as Maoism, Castroism, Stalinism… but today, on what passes for a Left, the more general form in which protest has tended to ossify is simple anti-Americanism. [33] In ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,’ p. 233. [34] ‘If it is in the nature of appearances to hide ‘deeper’ causes, it is in the nature of speculation about such hidden causes to hide and to make us forget the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are.’ ‘Home to Roost,’ in Responsibility and Judgment,p. 260 (also for previous citation). [35] Ibid., p. 275. The italics are mine, D.H. [36] Every time that we have needed a new theory of politics we get instead a theory of history, she writes – somewhere – in ‘On History.’ [37] For a polemical interpretation, c.f. Miguel Abensour, Hannah Arendt contre la philosophie politique (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2006). [38] I use the concept of ‘origin’ in a specific sense that I illustrate in Aux origines de la pensée politique américaine, op. cit. Its systematic foundation is developed in From Marx to Kant. [39] On Revolution., op. cit., p. 144. The same phrase was cited by Andrew Arato in ‘Banishing the Sovereign? Arendt’s America and Ours,’ presented at Yale University, September 2006. [40] This was the name given it by its contemporaries, although historians have neglected its implication. To my knowledge there exists a single book on the topic, The American Revolution of 1800 by Daniel Sisson (New York: Knopf, 1974). There is no mention in this context of the ward system, of which Jefferson spoke only years later, and in private correspondence. [41] Paine’s best-selling pamphlet appeared in early 1776; for his part, Jefferson denied any originality in his Declaration, which he saw as expressing a shared sense of the colonists. [42] Chief Justice John Roberts has suggested recently that the antagonism between President Jefferson and Chief Justice John Marshall stems from the latter’s ‘ill-feeling…that Jefferson was not at Valley Forge, was not in the fight, and had what Marshall might regard as a somewhat precious attachment to ideas for the sake of ideas…’ Cited in Jeffrey Rosen, ‘Roberts’s Rules,’ The Atlantic, January/February 2007, p. 106. [43] Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony ruled by the Penn family. Those leaders who, in the other colonies, had directed the struggle with Britain had been attempting to give it greater independence by making it a crown colony. As a result, when independence came, they were discredited. An artisan class replaced them in the crucial period of constitution-making. [44] The passage from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution of 1787 – as well as the different institutional forms adopted in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania – should not be interpreted in terms of economic interests. Arendt offers a stinging rebuke to those who follow Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Their insistence on tactics of ‘unmasking’ and denunciations of ‘hypocrisy’ belongs to French-style historiography. C.f., On Revolution, op. cit., p. 89.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 [45] A third argument, that of Federalist 63, could be added to reaffirm the point being made here while raising also the question of representative democracy. That argument concerns the legitimacy of a Senate in a society which has no constituted aristocracy. The justification offered in Federalist 63, which freely admits that American democracy is not direct but representative, depends also on the symbolic nature of the sovereignty that is to be represented by that upper branch of the legislature. For details, c.f., Les origines de la pensée politique américaine, op. cit. [46] That is why, in The Specter of Democracy, I distinguish between the American form of a republican democracy and the French variant that seeks to create a democratic republic in which the society is fully incarnate in a republican political state. Although Hannah Arendt doesn’t use this language, it certainly is not foreign to the theses of On Revolution. [47] Thomas Jefferson, ‘First Inaugural Address,’ in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), p. 493. [48] In fact, with the presidency of the third of the great republican presidents, James Monroe (1816-1824), America entered what was called The Era of Good Feeling, during which party competition had disappeared at the national level. The result was the so-called ‘Corrupt Bargain: by which John Quincy Adams became president. The reaction was not long in coming: the populism that brought Andrew Jackson to power in 1828. [49] On Revolution, op. cit., p. 143.
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The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics Michael Ezra Introduction Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher who had escaped from a Nazi internment camp, [1] had obtained international fame and recognition in 1951 with her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. [2] Feeling compelled to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann (‘an obligation I owe my past’), [3] she proposed to the editor of The New Yorker that she report on the prominent Nazi’s trial in Jerusalem. The editor gladly accepted the offer, placing no restrictions on what she wrote. [4] Arendt’s eagerly awaited ‘report’ finally appeared in The New Yorker in five successive issues from 16 February – 16 March 1963. In May 1963 the articles were compiled into a book published by Viking Press, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. During the Second World War, Adolf Eichmann had been the head of Section IVB-4 in the Nazi SS, overseeing the deportation of the Jews to their deaths. After the war Eichmann escaped to Argentina where he lived under an assumed name. In May 1960, the Israeli Security Service, Mossad, kidnapped Eichmann in Argentina and smuggled him to Jerusalem to stand trial for wartime activities that included ‘causing the killing of millions of Jews’ and ‘crimes against humanity.’ The trial commenced on 11 April 1961 and Eichmann was convicted and hanged on 31 May 1962. Arendt’s Thesis Enormous controversy centered on what Arendt had written about the conduct of the trial, her depiction of Eichmann and her discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils. Eichmann, she claimed, was not a ‘monster’; instead, she suspected, he was a ‘clown.’ He had no ‘insane hatred of Jews’ and did not suffer from any kind of ‘fanatical anti-Semitism.’ She reported Eichmann’s claim that ‘he had never harbored any ill feelings against his victims’ and accepted it as fact. As far as Arendt was concerned, Eichmann simply had ‘an inability to think.’ She concluded: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 terrifyingly normal.’ In a postscript to later editions of the book she added that Eichmann simply ‘never realized what he was doing’ and that his criminal actions were due to ‘sheer thoughtlessness.’ Still more shocking to Arendt’s critics was her discussion of the Jewish Councils ( Judenrat). These Councils were administrative bodies that the Nazis forced the Jews to establish in many occupied countries. The leaders had to follow Nazi orders under threat of immediate execution for disobedience. These orders included providing Jews for slave labour and organising the deportation of Jews to death camps. Although Arendt’s discussion of these Councils took up no more than a few pages, it provoked outrage. ‘To a Jew,’ asserted Arendt, ‘this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.’ The next two sentences proved to be the most controversial: Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people. The Reaction Anson Rabinbach has argued, no doubt correctly, that the controversy surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem ‘was certainly the most bitter public dispute among intellectuals and scholars concerning the Holocaust that has ever taken place.’ [5] The controversy was so intense that Irving Howe, editor of the democratic socialist magazine Dissent, described it as ‘violent.’ [6] Arendt’s friend Mary McCarthy wrote to her in September 1963 stating that the ferocity of the attacks was ‘assuming the proportions of a pogrom.’ [7] Almost twenty years after the book appeared, Howe was able to write: ‘within the New York intellectual world Arendt’s book provoked divisions that would never be entirely healed.’ The Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy was ‘a civil war that broke out among New York intellectuals.’ [8] In Howe’s words, ‘What struck one in reading Eichmann in Jerusalem – struck like a blow – was the surging contempt with which she [Arendt] treated almost everyone
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Ezra | Arendt in New York and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.’ [9] Nevertheless, even those hostile to the book still took Eichmann in Jerusalem very seriously. As Marie Syrkin, the editor of Jewish Frontier explained, ‘The author’s considerable reputation and that of the magazine in which the articles were published unfortunately make it impossible to dismiss her account out-of-hand as a prime example of arrogance and intellectual irresponsibility.’ [10] One of the first counterblasts came in May 1963 when Justice Musmanno wrote a damning indictment in the New York Times Book Review. Given his role in the Eichmann trial, Justice Musmanno was well placed to comment, although he could hardly claim a position of Olympian impartiality. He concluded: ‘The disparity between what Miss Arendt states, and what the ascertained facts are, occurs with such disturbing frequency in her book that it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work.’ [11] Arendt was invited to respond. She argued that Musmanno had distorted her words and attacked the New York Times Book Review for its ‘bizarre’ choice of reviewer. In his rejoinder, Musmanno pointed out that for 32 years he had been a judge and for 18 years had studied documentation on war crimes and crimes against humanity. ‘Miss Arendt,’ he insisted, ‘is not qualified to condemn so crassly the solemn judgment of the highest court of a nation.’ In his original review, Musmanno had raised the following accusation against Arendt: …she says that Eichmann was a Zionist and helped get Jews to Palestine. The facts, as set forth in the judgment handed down by the District Court of Jerusalem, are entirely to the contrary. As far back as November, 1937, after an espionage trip into the Middle East he reported that the plan for emigration of Jews to Palestine ‘was out of the question,’ it being ‘the policy of the Reich to avoid the creation of an independent Jewish State in Palestine.’ Arendt protested that she had not represented Eichmann as a Zionist. Musmanno quoted her again: ‘A certain von Mildenstein ... required him [Eichmann] to read Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism.’
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Many of the critical reviewers saw Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann as a sympathetic one. Her energetic denials left them unmoved. Musmanno, for example, commented: ‘She says that Eichmann was misjudged, misrepresented, misunderstood, that he was victim of “hard luck.” Is that not sympathizing?’ Musmanno’s appraisal alone brought the New York Times Book Review over 100 letters, with the majority defending Arendt and attacking the review. Passions on both sides ran high. ‘Rarely,’ protested one correspondent, ‘can a reviewer have missed the point of a book as widely as Judge Musmanno did.’ Another thought that ‘Judge Musmanno’s rather childish piece clearly showed him to be so vastly inferior to Miss Arendt intellectually that no one of intelligence who read her remarkable book could take him seriously.’ In contrast, another letter stated that ‘Justice Musmanno’s review is a powerful rebuttal of an appallingly ugly and vicious work. Like Miss Arendt, I, too, was at the Jerusalem trial as an observer, but unlike her I came away sick and nauseated by the massive evidence.’ It was even suggested that ‘Miss Arendt’s book should give comfort to Eichmann’s family and his numerous accomplices and be well received in Germany.’ [12] Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor, was in New York giving a speech in May 1963 and went on the attack. According to the New York Daily News, Hausner flew to New York ‘to answer Hannah Arendt’s bizarre defense of Eichmann.’ [13] With specific reference to Arendt, he criticized those who had ‘twisted and distorted’ the facts in the Eichmann trial: ‘There are now some historians,’ he said, ‘fortunately few in number who for one reason or another cruelly and falsely blame the Jews and their leaders for “letting themselves” be slaughtered.’ These writers ‘blatantly distort facts and evidence.’ [14] Marie Syrkin, in The Jewish Frontier, accused Arendt of ‘polemical vulgarity.’ Syrkin ridiculed Arendt’s attack on Zionism: ‘Miss Arendt manages to imply that “Zionists” as such were a privileged group enjoying Nazi favor, instead of being the spearheads of whatever resistance to the extermination program was offered.’ Arendt’s accusation against the Jewish Councils was ‘scandalous.’ Although Arendt was ‘a very gifted writer’ who had ‘brilliant perceptions,’ ‘she takes extraordinary liberties with the record’ and ‘the overwhelming effect of her report is of a blinding animus and of a vast ignorance.’ [15] Syrkin wrote an even more vitriolic review in Dissent where she stated, ‘At the end of the script the only one who comes out better than when he came in is the defendant.’ She concluded ‘As history, Eichmann in Jerusalem is shockingly inaccurate and insofar as her thesis depends
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Ezra | Arendt in New York on the objective marshalling of evidence it is on shaky ground.... the book is a tract in which the author manipulates the material with a high-handed assurance.’ [16] Gertrude Ezorsky, a philosophy lecturer at Brooklyn College, launched an onslaught in the left-wing journal New Politics. Ezorsky questioned Arendt’s argument that psychiatric reports had certified Eichmann as normal: ‘The only certification which the court required was not that Eichmann was normal but that he was legally sane; otherwise they could not have tried him.’ Ezorsky quoted the results of a psychiatric test: the subject was ‘a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill, arising out of a desire for power.’ She concluded, ‘Miss Arendt’s tale that Eichmann was without fanatical hatred of Jews seems initially implausible and turns out to be false.’ She ridiculed the claim by Arendt that Eichmann converted to Zionism forever, by quoting directly from a 1937 report signed by Eichmann on the need to ‘avoid the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.’ Recalling the tricks the Nazis used to mislead the Jews about Auschwitz, she insisted that ‘Eichmann exemplified not the banality, but the cunning of evil.’ As far as Ezorsky was concerned, Eichmann was indeed a ‘monster,’ As for the Jewish leaders: I do not intend to commit an absurdity – parallel to Miss Arendt’s – and claim that all or even most of Jewish leaders in Eastern Europe were heroes. Yet her wholesale damning of Jewish leaders, as Quislings who cooperated in the Final Solution seems willfully ignorant. A glance at the history of modern East Europe Jewry could have warned her against such pronouncements. [17] But Arendt had her supporters. Against Ezorsky, Rutgers philosopher Robert Olson defended Arendt’s argument that Eichmann was not a sadist: ‘if Eichmann was a sadist, his sadism is so atypical that the person who takes it upon himself to prove it has accepted an almost impossible challenge.’ Olson accepted that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, but tried to prove Arendt’s claim that he was not a fanatical antiSemite by defining a fanatic, in part, as someone ‘who acts at considerable risk to his own personal safety.’ Since there was no record of activities by Eichmann that would be a threat to his personal safety and hence he was not a fanatical anti-Semite. However, as Ezorsky hastened to point out, psychiatrists did regard Eichmann as a sadist; Olson, she wrote, was guilty of confusing fanaticism with idealism: ‘A fanatic is someone who tenaciously pursues a goal in blind disregard of its rational basis. While many fanatics have also been idealists, the concepts are not one and the same.’ [18] Another supporter was Stephen Spender, who stated in The New York
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Review of Books that Eichmann in Jerusalem was ‘a brilliant and disturbing study of the character and the trial of Adolf Eichmann.’ [19] In Commonweal, Alice Mayhew thought that overall, Arendt’s study was ‘a genuine achievement.’ [20] The most prominent defender of Arendt’s work was camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim who wrote a positive review for The New Republic. The book’s impact was ‘powerful.’ Bettelheim agreed with Arendt that Eichmann was not an antiSemitic monster and that the Holocaust was not the climax of the long history of Jew-hatred but, in his words, ‘merely one part of the master plan to create the thousand year totalitarian Reich.’ For Bettelheim – and apparently for Arendt – ‘the issue was not Eichmann, but totalitarianism.’ He shared Arendt’s opinion that the Holocaust ‘was not the last chapter in anti-Semitism but rather one of the first chapters in modern totalitarianism.’ On Jewish ‘cooperation’ he stated: No doubt the stories of the ghettos would have been different if most Jews and their leadership had not been more or less willing, out of anxiety, to cooperate with the Germans, if they had not opposed the small minority that called for resistance at all costs, including violent fighting back. No doubt many Jews would have been quicker to support the pitifully small fighting minority had they been told what lay in store for them by Jewish leaders who knew, or should and could have known, what fate awaited them. Many others might have tried to escape. Bettelheim concluded, ‘So while I would recommend this book for many reasons, the most important one is that our best protection against oppressive control and dehumanizing totalitarianism is still a personal understanding of events as they happen. To this end Hannah Arendt has furnished us with a richness of material.’ [21] This review prompted a letter from the writer Harry Golden, who alleged that both Bettelheim and Arendt were suffering from ‘an essentially Jewish phenomenon…self-hatred.’ [22] Musmanno wrote two sequels to his initial review. In the Summer 1963 issue of the Chicago Jewish Forum he poured scorn on Arendt’s claim that Eichmann did not hate Jews: ‘Perhaps she is right’ he stated, ‘because hatred is too mild a term.’ [23]. In the September 1963 issue of the National Jewish Monthly, Musmanno took the opportunity to answer Bettelheim’s accusation that he had misunderstood the trial. He pointed out that he was a Catholic, reiterated his conclusion that Eichmann in Jerusalem ‘contained as many factual errors as there are cinders in a fireplace’
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Ezra | Arendt in New York and he wondered why it should be necessary to debate with people such as Arendt and Bettelheim who ‘wildly proclaim that the Jews should have resisted their murderers.’ He asked ‘What kind of mentality is it that will argue that these naked men, woman and children could in some way have overcome their killers bristling with firearms?’ The position of those that make such an argument was ‘so blatantly foolish that it could not possibly convince even the most unlettered person.’ [24] The Arendt-Scholem Letters In an exchange of letters subsequently published in Encounter, Hannah Arendt’s friend, the scholar Gershom Scholem, accused her of using a ‘heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious tone.’ ‘Your account,’ he wrote, ‘ceases to be objective and acquires overtones of malice.’ Scholem explained why the Jewish critics at least were so upset by the book: ‘In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel: “Love of the Jewish people....” In you, dear Hannah ... I find little trace of this.’ Since the subject was the destruction of a third of the Jewish people, ‘I have little sympathy with that tone – well expressed by the English word “flippancy” – which you employed so often in the course of your book. To the matter of which you speak it is unimaginably inappropriate.’ In the early edition of the book, subsequently changed, Arendt had referred to Leo Baeck ‘who in the eyes of both Jews and gentiles was the “Jewish Führer.”’ Scholem inveighed: ‘the use of the Nazi term in this context is sufficiently revealing. You do not speak, say, of the “Jewish leader,” which would have been both apt and free of the German word’s horrific connotation – you say precisely the thing that is most false and most insulting.’ Scholem went on to accuse Arendt of a ‘demagogic will-tooverstatement.’ He added ‘your description of Eichmann as a “convert to Zionism” could only come from somebody who had a profound dislike of everything to do with Zionism.... They amount to a mockery of Zionism; and I am forced to the conclusion that this was, indeed, your intention.’ Arendt’s reply to Scholem was unapologetic: You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed ‘love’ only my friends and the only kind of love
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect…. I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument. As well as defending herself on other points that Scholem had raised, Arendt elaborated on her view of the Jewish Councils: I said that there was no possibility of resistance, but there existed the possibility of doing nothing. And in order to do nothing, one did not need to be a saint, one needed only to say: I am just a simple Jew, and I have no desire to play any other role…. These people had still a certain, limited freedom of decision and of action. Just as the SS murderers also possessed, as we now know, a limited choice of alternatives. They could say: ‘I wish to be relieved of my murderous duties,’ and nothing happened to them. Since we are dealing in politics of men, and not with heroes or saints, it is this policy of ‘non-participation’… that is decisive if we begin to judge, not the system, but the individual, his choices and arguments. [25] It did not help. The publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem led to the end of Scholem’s friendship with Arendt. [26] The Debate in Partisan Review It was in Partisan Review that the most widely discussed debate by the ‘New York intellectuals’ took place. The literary critic Lionel Abel was invited to open up the discussion, and – as the editors conceded – his article was submitted as a ‘frank polemic.’ [27] Abel launched an outright and full frontal assault on the book. The review was so hostile that William Phillips, the editor, who was a friend of Arendt, sent her a copy with a covering letter that betrayed his embarrassment. [28] Abel accused Arendt of grave ‘faults of omission,’ of ‘frequent misstatements of fact’ and of making a ‘terrible charge against the Jewish leaders.’ On Arendt’s charge of cooperation, Abel declared: ‘One might as well accuse the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima for having made their own deaths possible, since they lived in cities, and cities make the best targets.’ Whilst Arendt said that the Jews would have been better off with no Jewish Councils, Abel points out that in Soviet Russia there was no Jewish Council or leadership as ‘Jewish organizations of any kind had
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Ezra | Arendt in New York been destroyed by Stalin long before the war’; nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. Arendt had not dealt with the killing of Jews in Russia; had she done so ‘she would have had to abandon her whole thesis that so much of the responsibility for the deaths of so many Jews rests finally with their own leadership.’ Arendt’s argument on Eichmann-as-Zionist was ‘completely unconvincing.’ Eichmann ‘comes off so much better in her book than do his victims.’ Arendt argued that when Eichmann said ‘I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction,’ he was suffering from the ‘common vice’ of ‘bragging.’ Abel thundered in response, ‘How many people in the history of the world have ever boasted of having killed five million people?’ The argument that Eichmann was a ‘moral monster’ was ‘valid and intelligent’; ‘How could the man not have been morally monstrous? And all the more a monster if he did not know he was one!’ Moreover, according to Abel, ‘Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann as an insignificant and commonplace official will be seen to be perverse and arbitrary.’ Abel compared arguments used in Eichmann in Jerusalem to her earlier book: Miss Arendt’s book On the Origins of Totalitarianism strongly stressed the impossibility of effective resistance to totalitarian rule.... Every position Miss Arendt maintained in her book on totalitarianism she would today have to retract and deny in order to seriously criticize the decisions made by the leaders of the Jewish Councils between 1941 and 1944. [29] In the following issue, Daniel Bell defended Arendt. He argued that for Arendt, Eichmann was a symbol of a new type of criminal – a criminal that obeys totalitarian laws. Bell accepted the evidence of Abel and other critics that Jews were killed irrespective of what recognized Jewish leaders did or did not do, but nonetheless asked, ‘is it a question of numbers?’ He argued that even if Jewish Councils did not cooperate in some places they did in others and ‘this cooperation was regarded by the Nazis as the cornerstone of their Jewish policy.’ [30] Mary McCarthy then also intervened in Arendt’s defence; but in doing so she opened up a religious divide. She thought Eichmann in Jerusalem was ‘splendid and extraordinary,’ but noted that with few exceptions favourable reviews had been produced by Gentiles and hostile ones by Jews. As far as McCarthy was concerned, the non-Jewish criticisms were ‘special cases’; for example she mentioned that Richard Crossman, the socialist intellectual and Labour party Member of Parliament, who wrote a hostile review for the British newspaper Observer, was a
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 regular visitor to Israel. (That Crossman’s visits were vacations was no obstacle to her argument.) McCarthy dismissed Abel and Syrkin as ‘propagandists.’ She also voiced her suspicions – all too familiar in the context of today’s debates about the demonisation of Israel – of a coordinated effort to conflate criticism with antiSemitism: [Arendt’s antagonists] in private ‘expose’ her as an anti-Semite, and a newspaper story speaks of the wife of an Israeli official who kept calling her ‘Hannah Eichmann’ – by a slip of the tongue of course. Abel’s essay was merely a visible manifestation of this clandestine ‘hate campaign.’ No doubt this Jewish conspiracy was all the more insidious because of McCarthy’s inability to prove its existence. McCarthy referred to Zionism as ‘the Jewish Final Solution’ and defended Arendt against the critics’ major charges. McCarthy felt that Eichmann in Jerusalem had been misinterpreted. Abel was wrong to interpret the conduct of Jewish leaders in terms of duress (‘a man [who] holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill a friend’). McCarthy was indignant: ‘Forces him to kill a friend? Nobody by possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is his own decision ... he is tempting you to kill your friend that is all.’ [31] This objection was, of course, uninformed by analysis of the criminal defence of duress in any legal jurisdiction. But of course it did not end with McCarthy. The following issue of Partisan Review contained over thirty pages of arguments, counter arguments and accusations. Marie Syrkin accused McCarthy of ‘intellectual irresponsibility,’ ‘myopia,’ and (to be ‘charitable’) of ‘ignorance.’ For Harold Weisberg, McCarthy was ‘wholly lacking in charity and almost as much in logic.’ Weisberg preferred the ‘ZionistIsraeli’ view to Arendt’s universalist interpretation of the Eichmann case. Was it not incontrovertible that ‘If the Jews pinned their hopes on “humanity” more of them would be dead and many more would be victims of a variety of anti-Jewish persecutions?’ Others were more generous. The poet Robert Lowell called Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann ‘a masterpiece.’ Arendt’s only motive was ‘a heroic desire for truth.’ Still more effusive was Dwight MacDonald, a former editor of Partisan Review, who found Eichmann in Jerusalem to be a ‘masterpiece of historical journalism’ and also thought that McCarthy’s contribution ‘brilliantly (and sensibly) dealt with Mr.
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Ezra | Arendt in New York Abel.’ For good measure, he added: ‘I have known both Mr. Abel and Miss Arendt for many years, and I must confess that the notion of the former giving lessons in morality to the latter strikes me as comic.’ MacDonald defended McCarthy’s charge that the split was along Christian/Jewish lines and agreed that the divide ‘is even more pronounced in private conversation.’ He commented, ‘the hostile reviews I’ve read do seem motivated less by rationality than by Jewish patriotism – goys [Gentiles] like Crossman and Musmanno might be called Honorary Semites.’ He declared that the hostile reviewers were ‘writing more as Jews than as critics’ and added in a footnote, ‘And as peculiarly organizationminded Jews at that.’ In his rejoinder, Abel dismissed McCarthy’s defense of Arendt on the Jewish leadership as ‘worthless.’ He criticized MacDonald for turning the debate into a ‘barroom brawl’ and noted that ‘he has been unable to advance any argument of his own…. His contribution is to abuse me.... It all comes down finally to calling people “Jews.”’ The last word – and perhaps the most perceptive one – went to William Phillips, who was moved to protest: ‘Particularly depressing is the procession of polemics, with everyone arguing so cleverly, with so much wit and logic, as though those awful events were being used to sharpen one’s mind and one’s rhetoric.’ Claiming that he had ‘actually heard people say Hannah Arendt is worse than Eichmann,’ he thought that reactions to her were ‘excessive.’ But he also regretted that McCarthy and others had chosen to focus on the religion of Arendt’s critics: ‘hunting for “Jewishness” is going too far…. we might recall the days when the question whether someone was Jewish or Gentile was of biographical and not intellectual interest.’ [32] Confrontation in Manhattan If the debate in print in Partisan Review between the New York intellectuals was vitriolic, it was tame compared to what transpired at a public meeting in autumn 1963, sponsored by Dissent at what Irving Howe later described as ‘the seedy Hotel Diplomat’ in midtown Manhattan. Hannah Arendt was invited to participate but never responded. [33] Bruno Bettelheim, whose views were similar, also declined. The distinguished Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg agreed to replace them. The other speaker generally sympathetic to Arendt’s views was Daniel Bell. Opposing
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 them were Lionel Abel and Marie Syrkin. [34] Nearly 500 people crowded into the audience. [35] According to Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (based on a report of the meeting sent to Arendt), Hilberg argued that ‘the European Jews had refused to face the reality of their imminent destruction, that they had not responded actively as they might have.’ [36] Hilberg takes up the story: I was not allowed to finish. A panelist [Lionel Abel] pounded on the table with his fist. His banging, magnified by the microphone, was followed by a cascade of boos. Irving Howe invited the audience to ask questions and make comments. Now one after another individual rose, one to accuse me of sadism, another to read from a prepared written statement challenging my figures on the German dead in the Warsaw ghetto battle, and so on, on and on. [37] Young-Bruehl added, ‘No one from the audience rose to defend Arendt until just after Howe had closed the open discussion, when Alfred Kazin made his first public effort to defend his old friend, only to be ushered out with a roar from Lionel Abel: “Who asked you to come up here? Who asked for your opinion?”’ [38] The editors of Dissent reported: ‘The discussion, from the platform and the floor, was passionate and exciting: one of the most vivid political meetings held in New York for many years.’ [39] The editors were being kind: in the words of another observer, ‘The meeting was, to put it mildly, unruly.’ [40] William Phillips stated that ‘the atmosphere was too excited to permit calm discussion.’ [41] Irving Howe, who chaired the meeting, denied that anyone had been ‘shouted down,’ as Mary McCarthy was claiming, [42] but he subsequently recounted that the meeting was ‘sometimes ugly and outrageous, yet also urgent and afire.’ [43] He admitted that there were also ‘frequent interruptions.’ [44] In fact, Howe was accused by one commentator of ‘gathering a mob’ and staging a ‘lynching.’ [45] Irving Howe reflected on the effect of this meeting in his autobiography: Such controversies are never settled. They die down, simmer, and erupt again. A year after the 1963 debate I ran into Hannah Arendt at a party and stretched out a hand in greeting. With a curt shake of the head and that bold grim smile of hers, she turned on her heel and walked off. It was the most
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Ezra | Arendt in New York skillful cut I have ever seen or received, and I was wounded quite as keenly as she wanted me to be. Four or five years passed and we began to see each other again, talking gingerly about the Vietnam war and the New Left. Finding at least some agreement, we were still bruised, still wary, still – I like to think – sharing a faint glow of residual affection. [46] Commentary and others Elsewhere, Norman Podhoretz carried out ‘A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance’ in a review essay for Commentary, ‘Arendt,’ he complained, ‘is all cleverness and no eloquence.’ He noted that the book ‘is in no sense a work of objective historical research’ and that Arendt’s ‘manipulation of evidence is at all times visibly tendentious.’ Her ‘cavalier treatment of evidence’ created ‘distortions of perspective.’ Podhoretz ridiculed Arendt’s thesis that Eichmann was no fanatical anti-Semite: ‘The man around the corner who makes ugly cracks about the Jews is an anti-Semite, but not Adolf Eichmann who sent several million to their death: that would be uninteresting and would tell us nothing about the Nature of Totalitarianism.’ Her claims about Jewish cooperation were ‘wholly unwarranted.’ He was unwilling to enter into ‘the endless moral debate over the behavior of the Jewish leaders,’ concluding: They did what they did, they were what they were, and each was a different man. None of it mattered in the slightest to the final result. Murderers with the power to murder descended upon a defenseless people and murdered a large part of it. What else is there to say? [47] Irving Howe also wrote an article for Commentary. Protesting that The New Yorker (which ‘has never claimed to be a serious intellectual journal’) did not accept rebuttals or refutations even from highly responsible scholars, he feared that its readers deprived of an opposing view, might actually come to believe what Arendt had written. [48] Konrad Kellen wrote a comparably mild hostile review for Midstream. He argued that whilst Arendt’s book ‘contains a truly extraordinary amount of folly,’ has ‘numerous grievous shortcomings’ and is ‘guilty of many biases,’ nevertheless ‘there is considerable worthwhile matter in it’ and Arendt ‘makes some valid and important points.’ Noting some of the more vitriolic reviews in the ‘super-heated controversy,’
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 and attempting to insert some realism into the debate, he concluded: ‘But let us not lose our heads. Hannah Arendt is not the enemy. The enemy is elsewhere.’ [49] Judaism, the journal of the American Jewish Congress, published two critical responses to Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ernst Simon compared the book to her earlier work and concluded ‘Hannah Arendt would have been well advised to stick to the perceptions in [The Origins of Totalitarianism].’ [50] Alexander Donat argued that the ‘dazzling explosion of fact and insight’ contained in the book ‘cannot obscure the essential vulgarity of the author’s thought.’ Arendt’s thesis that ‘Jewish leaders cooperated with the Nazis in the destruction of their own people’ was ‘a wicked fallacy.’ Her argument about Jewish resistance was ‘in many parts patently false’ and in areas ‘a vicious and irresponsible misinterpretation.’ As for her views on the Jewish Councils, ‘like so many of Miss Arendt’s shocking pronouncements, this one too is based on isolated facts and second-hand sources, and utterly void of any understanding of the historical and factual background.’ [51] The American Jewish Congress also published a pamphlet entitled ‘Arendt Nonsense.’ Its author, the President of the organisation, concluded: ‘Hannah Arendt’s banalities stand as a shocking disservice to scholarship – and to human spirit.’ [52] Morris Schappes was apoplectic in a review of Arendt’s book that extended over three issues of Jewish Currents, the journal he edited. Eichmann in Jerusalem was ‘destructive, mischievous and pernicious’ as well as being ‘full of questionable and already debated judgments and of interpretations that seem quite distorted.’ It was also ‘liberally sprinkled with factual errors, both gross and petty.’ Shappes rebutted Arendt’s denial that Eichmann was a fanatical anti-Semite by citing the testimony of the Nazi Kurt Becher, who as a witness for the defence admitted that ‘Eichmann was a convinced National Socialist and a fanatical anti-Semite.’ Some of Arendt’s narrative was ‘untrue and shocking,’ other parts ‘nonsense.’ Her views included a ‘strange mixture of arrogance and foggy thinking.’ ‘Dr. Arendt is cruelly unfair to prosecutor Gideon Hausner.’ She ‘ignores’ information. She was ‘repulsively contemptuous’ of a witness to the trial. A statement she made was ‘comically astounding.’ Her attempt to discredit the trial was ‘strange and misguided.’ Her picture of ‘vast Jewish criminal collaboration with the Nazis and of almost total Jewish passivity and cowardice’ was ‘exaggerated and distorted.’ Her opinion on the Jewish leadership was ‘downright perverse,’ ‘quite misleading’ and contained ‘unfounded generalizations.’ On Jewish resistance ‘she seems uninformed, not
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Ezra | Arendt in New York having taken the trouble to consider the available evidence.’ Her image of Jews in the Second World War was ‘so patently false that one marvels at the gullibility of those that accept this image.’ ‘It would be charitable to hope,’ Schappes concluded, that Eichmann in Jerusalem was a book that Arendt would ‘live to regret – and to live down.’ [53] Recognizing the extent of the controversy, Louis Harap stated in Science and Society that Eichmann in Jerusalem ‘is no longer just a book: it has become a cause celèbre.’ In his view, Arendt had written ‘an arrogant, perverse book,’ replete with ‘deplorable lapses in scholarship,’ displaying a ‘pervasive and obsessive tendency to generalize beyond the facts’ and committing ‘errors of both omission and commission’ (he provided numerous examples). Harap was so disgusted with Arendt that his final paragraph began: ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem will, however, have certain positive if unintended effects. It will do much to deflate Miss Arendt’s reputation as a profound political thinker.’ [54] All of this led Norm Fruchter, the editor of Studies on the Left, to write an article castigating the critics of a book which ‘questioned the myth of the victim which Jews substitute for their history.’ As for the religious divide over the book: the attempt to see the controversy as a simple Jew versus non-Jew split is inaccurate. One of the crucial divisions maybe between those Jews whose ethnicity is part of their identity, but whose concerns, work, direction and commitment transcends their Jewishness and relates them to a wider community of purpose and value, and those Jews who tend to maintain the traditional myths of Jewish identity, and are more closely connected to Jewish organizations, and seem more rooted in Jewish ambiance. [55] In his rebuttal, Louis Harap argued that the ‘entire thought’ of Fruchter’s piece was characterized by ‘illogic.’ Morris Schappes then denounced Fruchter as ‘uninformed and misinformed’ about Jewish history and accused him of having ‘a position of national nihilism, which is anti-Socialist.’ Schappes was especially critical of Fruchter’s argument that Jewish Socialists who attacked the book had sacrificed their socialism to their Jewishness: Jewish radicals and Socialists developed their own criticism and of Arendt’s book… because they felt that she had maligned and affronted the Jews as a
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 people, that she had stimulated among some Jews a disgust, not with some Jewish collaborators and with some Jews’ weakness, folly or crimes, but with the Jewish people as a whole. Therefore we Jewish radicals and Socialists, because we are no less part of the Jewish people because of our radicalism… felt it our duty to defend the Jewish people against such misrepresentation. The fact that her attack on the Eichmann trial and her false picture of the Jews could be used for its own purposes by the neo-Nazi international added urgency and an edge of wrath to our counterattack. [56] The overseas debate The debate also raged abroad. In Britain, John Gross wrote a review for Encounter. He thought that Arendt had presented ‘an artificial picture of the Jewish Councils’ – ‘a picture that is both inaccurate and curiously unfeeling, and one which cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged.’ He proceeded to provide evidence challenging it. [57] Walter Laqueur, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Contemporary History (Weiner Library) wrote a highly critical review in the Jewish Chronicle concluding that ‘the damage caused by Eichmann in Jerusalem is incalculable.’ [58] Hugh Trevor-Roper, a noted authority on the Third Reich, was full of condemnation in the Sunday Times: Arendt was ‘unbearably arrogant,’ her style both ‘evasive’ and ‘deeply biased’; she was guilty of ‘half truths and loaded language and double standards of evidence.’ [59] The Times Literary Supplement savaged Arendt: ‘the items of evidence with which she constructs “her charge against the Jewish leadership” hardly stand up to examination.’ [60] In the Observer, Richard Crossman thought that Arendt’s thesis on the failure of the Jews to understand the extermination plans of the Nazis was ‘claptrap.’ [61] Prior to publication of the English edition, the scholar Reuben Ainsztein had argued in the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review that Arendt had ‘no excuse’ for the ‘outright distortions’ in her book. Moreover, readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem would find Arendt’s position on the shortcomings of the Eichmann trial ‘quite untenable, if not preposterous’ and would read her words with ‘a feeling of steadily growing unreality.’ [62] The British section of the World Jewish Congress even held a public meeting in London entitled ‘Answering Hannah Arendt.’ Its political director described Eichmann in Jerusalem as ‘an offensive, revolting book.’ [63]
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Ezra | Arendt in New York German critics also had problems with Eichmann in Jerusalem, notably the issue of Jewish resistance and cooperation. In relation to whether the actions of Eichmann and other perpetrators of the Holocaust were normal, one German critic wrote: ‘We Germans have every reason to show discretion in this aspect of the discussion.’ [64] The German publisher told Arendt that a number of bookstore owners were boycotting Eichmann in Jerusalem. [65] In 1966 the French edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem was published and this also met with hostility. Le Nouvel Observateur even published two pages of letters under the headline ‘Hannah Arendt, est-elle une Nazi?’ [66] Jacob Robinson’s refutation of Eichmann in Jerusalem Within a few months of Eichmann in Jerusalem being published, Judge Musmanno had declared, in his review for the Chicago Jewish Forum: Miss Arendt’s book is so kernel-full of hopelessly inexplicable inconsistencies, unutterably illogical utterances and unfathomably preposterous conclusions that one could only wholly cover the absurdities in her book by writing one equally as long to refute it. [67] This was the project undertaken by Jacob Robinson. His book-length refutation of Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in 1965 under the title And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. Extending to over 400 pages it was a comprehensive demolition of her narrative. Miss Arendt does not convey reliable information. She has misread many of the documents and books referred to in her text and bibliography. She has not equipped herself with the necessary background for an understanding and analysis of the trial. [68] From the available documentation, Robinson concluded that far from being banal, Eichmann was a ‘a man of extraordinary driving power, master in the arts of cunning and deception, intelligent and competent in his field, single minded in his mission to make Europe free of Jews (judenrein) – in short a man uniquely suited to be the overseer of most of the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews.’ The statement that Eichmann was not a fanatical antisemite had no foundation. In an interview given in 1957 from his hiding place in Argentina, Eichmann had boasted that his only regret was his failure to massacre all eleven million European Jews. Rudolf Höss,
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 camp commandant of Auschwitz, had confirmed this: ‘He was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew he could lay his hands on.’ In response to Arendt’s criticism of the trial itself, Robinson cited an abundance of legal precedents, including war crimes trials, to show that the Eichmann case had been conducted in accordance with international law. In his discussion of the actions of the Jewish Councils, Robinson used an array of information from memoirs, diaries and monographs in Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew as well as German sources. Arendt had contended that members of the Councils were ‘as a rule the locally recognized Jewish leaders.’ Robinson provided numerous examples demonstrating that even where the Councils had originally consisted of pre-war Jewish leaders, ‘the Germans usually acted according to the principles of negative selection, replacing people of standing with newcomers.’ Consequently, more often than not, the Jewish Councils had been administered by ‘little men’ appointed by the Nazis, rather than pre-war Jewish leaders. Robinson also showed that, although there were inevitably some scoundrels and traitors, Council members were victims, like their fellow Jews; in any case, whether or not a particular Jewish Council cooperated with the Nazis, the result was always the same. Arendt had attempted to substantiate her claim that Jews would have been better off without leadership by asserting that in Belgium there was no Jewish Council and ‘it is not surprising that not a single Jew was ever deported.’ Robinson showed that in Belgium there was a Jewish Council and Jews were deported. Moreover, in Russia, Jews not governed by a Jewish Council were slaughtered even faster than in Poland where there were Jewish Councils. In France, Yugoslavia, Greece and other countries where there were no Jewish Councils, the Nazis still managed to carry out the ‘Final Solution’ effectively. Arendt had claimed, in her letter to Scholem, that Jewish Council members could ask to be relieved of their duties ‘and nothing happened to them.’ The reality, according to a non-Jewish witness of the Cracow ghetto, was that ‘To resign [from the Jewish Council] was equivalent to signing one’s own death sentence.’ [69] Robinson’s critique was devastating. As Ezorsky put it in Dissent: After Robinson’s argument not a single one of Miss Arendt’s main contentions can be credited; and a great many of her minor contentions …
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Ezra | Arendt in New York have also to be tossed out. She was wrong about Eichmann, she was wrong about international law, she was wrong about Jewish leaders, she was wrong about Jewish resistance, she was wrong about Jewish ‘cooperation’ with the Nazis…. She was wrong, wrong, wrong. [70] Robinson’s book, however, read like a lawyer’s brief. As Marie Syrkin pointed out in Midstream: ‘While Dr. Arendt is hopelessly outclassed by Dr. Robinson’s scholarship and command of first-hand sources, he is in turn not a literary essayist of flashing polemical power like Hannah Arendt.’ [71] No-one reading Robinson’s book could have any doubt that Arendt had painted a distorted picture. But I tend to agree with Walter Laqueur, who – despite stating that ‘Dr. Robinson proves beyond any shadow of doubt that Miss Arendt has made literally hundreds of mistakes, has used incorrect statistics, and has quoted out of context’ – found it ‘regrettable that Dr. Robinson’s great knowledge of the period has been employed in a book of comments on another book, rather than in preparation of the major work which is so badly needed.’ (In fairness to Arendt, Laqueur did state that Dr. Robinson was not ‘infallible’ and mentioned that ‘Had Miss Arendt a team of researchers at her disposal they could, no doubt, find mistakes in Dr. Robinson’s book,’ and listed three of those minor errors.) [72] Arendt provided a long response to Laqueur’s review of Robinson’s book. Dismissing the ADL review of her book in Facts as a ‘propaganda pamphlet,’ she concurred with Mary McCarthy that many of the hostile reviews were from the ADL’s ‘mimeographing machine’ of information. She questioned the ‘eminent authority’ of Dr. Robinson, accused him of ‘a truly dazzling display of sheer inability to read,’ and ridiculed him for producing ‘a prime example of a non-book’ which itself contained ‘monumental errors’ – of which she provided two examples. She also suggested that there was a worldwide campaign against her book that involved the Israeli government and a number of ‘powerful’ Jewish organisations. [73] This last claim produced a retort from Laqueur: ‘I think I can assure her that the Elders of Zion are not yet out to get her.’ Conclusion Arendt and her supporters believed that many of the critics had misread, misrepresented, or misunderstood what she was saying in Eichmann in Jerusalem. To a certain extent they may be correct, but it is clear that if so the misinterpretations were widespread and were not confined to the critics. Robert Berman, in a positive
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 review of the book, actually inferred that ‘Eichmann…. rather liked Jews.’ [74] Arendt had said no such thing; nevertheless she was ‘delighted’ with that particular review, ‘the most perceptive and… most intelligent review that appeared.’ [75] Some thought Robinson’s book should have put an end to the debate. Moshe Decter observed in New Politics in 1965, ‘What he [Robinson] demonstrates can be stated very simply: Hannah Arendt is a fraud.’ [76] But the debate did not end. Arendt thesis continues to be discussed regardless of how often it has been discredited. In 2004, David Cesarani published his highly acclaimed biography of Adolf Eichmann. Cesarani was highly critical both of Arendt as a person and as a would-be historian of the Holocaust. But he had to acknowledge that Eichmann in Jerusalem had become ‘one of the most influential books about the Nazi mass murder of the Jews and genocide in the twentieth century.’ [77]
Michael Ezra lives in London. References
Abel, Lionel 1963, ‘The Aesthetics of Evil: Hannah Arendt on Eichmann and the Jews’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXX, Number 2, Summer: 211-30. Ainsztein, Reuben 1963, ‘Eichmann and the Sunday Observer: A Judgment of Hannah Arendt,’ Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, 20 September: 17-19. Anti-Defamation League 1963, ‘A Report on the Evil of Banality: The Arendt Book,’ Facts Vol. 15, Number 1, July-August: 263-70. Arendt, Hannah 1994 (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London: Penguin Books Ltd. Arendt, Hannah 1966, ‘”The Formidable Dr. Robinson”: A Reply,’ The New York Review of Books, Vol. 5, Number 12, 20 January. ‘Arguments: More on Eichmann,’ Spring 1964, Partisan Review Vol XXXI. Number 2: 253-83 Comments by Marie Syrkin, Harold Weisberg, Irving Howe, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Abel, Mary McCarthy and William Phillips. Bell, Daniel 1963, ‘The Alphabet of Justice: Reflections on “Eichmann in Jerusalem,”’ Partisan Review Vol. XXX Number 3, Fall: 417-29. Berman, Ronald 1963, ‘Hostis Humani Generis’, The Kenyon Review Vol. XXV No. 3, Summer 1963: 541-6. Bernstein, Richard J 1996, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bettelheim, Bruno 1963, ‘Eichmann; the System; the Victims’, The New Republic Vol. 148 Issue 24, 15 June: 23-33. Cesarani, David 2005 (2004), Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, London: Vintage.
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Ezra | Arendt in New York Cohen, Richard I, 2001 ‘A Generation’s Response to Eichmann in Jerusalem,’ in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, edited by Steven E. Aschheim, pp. 253-77. ‘Controversy: Eichmann and the Jews’ 1964, New Politics Vol. 3 Number 1, Winter: 62-8. Comments from Robert Olson and Gertrude Ezorsky. ‘Correspondence’ 1963, The New Republic, Vol. 149 Issue 3/4 20 July, 28-31. ‘Correspondence’ 1964, The New Republic, Vol. 150 Issue 14 4 April, 30-1. Crick, Bernard 1997, ‘Hannah Arendt and the Burden of Our Times’, Political Quarterly, Vol. 68 Issue : 77-84. Decter, Moshe 1965, ‘Book reviews’ (untitled) New Politics, Vol. 4 Number 3, Summer, 80-1. Decter, Midge 1982, ‘Socialism & Its Irresponsibilities: The Case of Irving Howe,’ Commentary, 74:6: 25-32. Dissent Editorial Winter 1964, ‘Among ourselves,’ Vol. XI Number 1: 1. Donat, Alexander 1963, ‘Revisionist History of the Jewish Catastrophe: An Empiric Examination’ Judaism Vol. 12 Number 4 Fall 1963: 416-35. ‘”Eichmann in Jerusalem” An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt’ 1964 Encounter Vol. XXII January 1964: 51-6. NB. Scholem’s letter was sent 23 June 1963, and Arendt responded on 24 July 1963. Ezorsky, Gertrude1963, ‘Hannah Arendt Against the Facts’, New Politics Vol. 2 Number 4, Fall 1963: 52-73. Ezorsky, Gertrude 1966, ‘Hannah Arendt Answered’, Dissent Vol. XIII Number 2, March-April 1966: 172-82. Fruchter, Norm 1965, ‘Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity,’ Studies on the Left, Vol. 5, Number 1, Winter: 22-42. Gross, John 1963, ‘Arendt on Eichmann’, Encounter Vol. XXI Number 5, November: 65-74. Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Harap, Louis 1964, (Untitled book review) Science and Society Vol. XXVIII, Number 2, Spring: 223-7. Harap, Louis 1965, ‘Notes and Communications: On Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity’, 1965. Comments from Louis Harap, Morris U. Schappes (and a rejoinder by Norm Fruchter), Studies on the Left, Vol. 5, Number 4, Fall: 52-79. Hilberg, Raul 1996, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee. Howe, Irving 1963, ‘The New Yorker & Hannah Arendt,’ Commentary, 36,4, October: 318-19. Howe, Irving 1968, ‘The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle & A Critique,’ Commentary 46, 4 October: 29-51. Howe, Irving 1982, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography, London, Secker & Warburg. Jewish Chronicle, 17 May 1963, ‘What the critics are saying,’ p. 22. Jewish Chronicle, 1 November 1963, ‘Hannah Arendt’s book attacked’, p. 12. Kellen, Konrad 1963, ‘Reflections on “Eichmann in Jerusalem,”’ Midstream, Vol. 9 Number 3, September: 25-35. Laqueur, Walter 1963, ‘The Shortcomings of Hannah Arendt,’ Jewish Chronicle, 11 October, p. 7 and p. 27.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Laqueur, Walter 1965, ‘Footnotes to the Holocaust,’ The New York Review of Books, Vol. 5, Number 7, 11 November: 20-2. Laqueur, Walter 1966, ‘A Reply to Hannah Arendt,’ The New York Review of Books, Vol. 6., Number 13, February. ‘Letters’ 1966, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 6, Number 4, 17 March. ‘Letters to the Editor,’ 1963a, New York Times, 23 June: 4-5. ‘Letters to the Editor,’ 1963b, New York Times, 14 July: 28-30. Mayhew, Alice Ellen 1963, ‘The Lesson of the “Normal Man” Who Helped Kill Millions,’ The Commonweal, 78, 12 July: 429-30. McCarthy, Mary 1964, ‘The Hue and Cry,’ Partisan Review, Volume XXXI, Number 1, Winter: 82-94. Musmanno, Michael A. 1963a, ‘Man with an unspotted conscience,’ New York Times, 19 May: 40-1. Musmanno, Michael A 1963b, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Critique,’ Chicago Jewish Forum, Vol. 21, Number 4, Summer: 282-5. Musmanno, Michael A 1963c, ‘Did the 6,000,000 Kill Themselves?’ National Jewish Monthly, September: p. 11 and p. 54. Partisan Review 1963, (Editor’s Note, ‘On Eichmann and the Jews,’ Vol. XXX, Number 2: 210. Podhoretz, Norman 1963, ‘Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,’ Commentary, 36, 3 September: 201-8. Prinz, Joachim n.d., ‘Arendt Nonsense: A reply to Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’ New York: American Jewish Congress. Rabinbach, Anson 2004, ‘Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy,’ October, 108 Spring: 97–111. Robinson, Jacob 1965, And the crooked shall be made straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative, New York and London: The Macmillan Company. Sacher, Howard M. 1966, ‘Objectivity and Jewish Social Science,’ American Jewish History Quarterly, September 1965-June: 434-50. Schappes, Morris U 1963a, ‘The Strange World of Hannah Arendt: An examination of a controversial book on the Eichmann case,’ Jewish Currents, Vol. 17, Number 7, July-August: 3-9, 32-4. Schappes, Morris U 1963b, ‘The Strange World of Hannah Arendt: II: Her attack on the Eichmann trial: prosecution, defense and court,’ Jewish Currents, Vol. 17, Number 8, September: 12-22. Schappes, Morris U 1963c, ‘The Strange World of Hannah Arendt: III: Her false-focus on Jewish collaboration, Jewish passivity and Jewish resistance,’ Jewish Currents, Vol. 17, Number 9, October: 14-23. Simon, Ernst 1963, ‘Revisionist History of the Jewish Catastrophe: A Textual Examination,’ Judaism, Vol. 12, Number 4, Fall: 388-415. Spiegal, Irving 1963, ‘Hausner Criticizes Book on Eichmann,’ New York Times, 20 May. Spender, Stephen 1963, ‘Death in Jerusalem,’ The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1, Number 2: 1 June. Syrkin, Marie 1963a, ‘Miss Arendt Surveys the Holocaust,’ Jewish Frontier, May: 7-14. Syrkin, Marie 1963b, ‘Hannah Arendt: The Clothes of the Empress,’ Dissent, Vol. X, Number 4, Autumn: 344-52.
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Ezra | Arendt in New York Syrkin, Marie 1966, ‘Setting the Record Straight,’ Midstream, Vol. 12, Number 2, February: 66-70. The Times, 3 June 1960, ‘Israel’s Right to Try Eichmann – Mr. Ben-Gurion on “Historic Justice,”’ p. 11. Trevor-Roper, Hugh 1963, ‘How Innocent was Eichmann?’ Sunday Times, 13 October, as reprinted in Jewish Affairs Vol. 19 January 1964: 4-9. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 1982, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. [1] Young-Bruehl 1982, pp. 152-63.
Notes
[2] Young-Bruehl 1982, p. ix. [3] Young-Bruehl 1982, p. 329, Citing Arendt to Thompson, Rockerfeller Foundation, 20 December 1960. [4] Bernstein 1996, p. 155. [5] Rabinbach 2004. [6] Howe 1968. [7] Rabinbach 2004, citing McCarthy to Arendt, 24 September 1963. [8] Howe 1982, pp. 269-74. [9] Howe 1982, p. 271. [10] Syrkin 1963a. [11] Musmanno 1963a. [12] See Musmanno 1963a, ‘Letters to the Editor’ 1963a, ‘Letters to the Editor’ 1963b. [13] Arendt 1966, citing Daily News, 20 May 1963. [14] Spiegal 1963. [15] Syrkin 1963a. [16] Syrkin 1963b. [17] Ezorsky 1963. [18] ‘Controversy: Eichmann and the Jews’, Winter 1964. [19] Spender 1963. [20] Mayhew1963. [21] Bettelheim 1963. [22] The New Republic, 20 July 1963. [23] Musmanno 1963b. [24] Musmanno 1963c. [25] ‘”Eichmann in Jerusalem”, An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt’, January 1964. [26] Young-Bruehl 1982, p. 167. [27] Partisan Review, Editor’s Note, Summer 1963.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 [28] William Phillips to Arendt, 11 July 1963, Correspondence Publishers, 1963, n.d. (Series: Adolf Eichmann File, 1938-1968, n.d.) Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [29] Abel 1963. [30] Bell 1963. [31] McCarthy 1964. [32] ‘Arguments: More on Eichmann’, Spring 1964. [33] Howe 1982, p. 274. [34] ‘Arguments: More on Eichmann’, Spring 1964, Comment from Irving Howe. [35] Dissent, Editorial, Winter 1964. [36] Young-Bruehl 1982, p. 360. [37] Hilberg 1996, p. 154. [38] Young-Bruehl, p. 360. [39] Dissent, Editorial, Winter 1964. [40] Decter 1982. [41] ‘Arguments: More on Eichmann’, Spring 1964, Comment from William Phillips. [42] ‘Arguments: More on Eichmann’, Spring 1964, Comment from Irving Howe. [43] Howe 1968. [44] Howe 1982, p. 274. [45] Decter 1982. [46] Howe 1982, p. 275. [47] Podhoretz 1963. [48] Howe 1963. [49] Kellen 1963. [50] Simon 1963. [51] Donat 1963. [52] Prinz n.d.. [53] Schappes 1963a, 1963b, 1963c. [54] Harap 1964. [55] Fruchter 1965. [56] ‘Notes and Communications: On Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity’, Fall 1965, Comments from Louis Harap and Morris U. Schappes. [57] Gross 1963. [58] Laqueur 1963. [59] Trevor-Roper 1963. [60] Notes and Communications: On Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity, Fall 1965, Cited by Louis Harap. [61] Notes and Communications: On Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity, Fall 1965, Cited by Louis Harap.
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Ezra | Arendt in New York [62] Ainsztein 1963. [63] Jewish Chronicle 1 November 1963. [64] Cohen 2001. Cohen quotes Köpke, H, ‘Die Nazi-Verbrechen sind wiederholbar: Adolf Eichmann war kein Dämon. Zu Hannah Arendt’s heftig umstrittenen Buch’, Frankfurter Rundschau 19 September 1964. [65] Hilberg 1996, p. 164. [66] Young-Bruehl 1982, p. 398. [67] Musmanno 1963b. [68] Robinson 1965. [69] Robinson 1965. [70] Ezorsky 1966. [71] Syrkin 1966. [72] Laqueur 1965. [73] Arendt 1966. [74] Berman 1963. [75] Arendt to Berman, 30 September 1963, Correspondence Publishers, 1963. (Series: Adolf Eichmann File, 1938-1968, n.d.) Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [76] Decter, 1965. [77] Cesarani 2005 (2004), p. 346.
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The concept of totalitarianism Claude Lefort The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union has not put an end to the longstanding debate over the pertinence of the concept of totalitarianism or on its more or less limited usage. [1] Its physiognomy has, however, changed. Uncertainties over the future of the Soviet regime no longer weigh down on protagonists of the concept as they once did and science has taken the lead over political judgement, even though it sometimes retains the imprint of the old ideological oppositions. Discussions now tend to revolve around the circle of historians. What seems to me more remarkable is the persistence of the objections and reservations to characterising the communist system as totalitarian, or more generally to the idea of a new social formation emerging beneath the opposed traits of communism and fascism. Some of the arguments advanced under the sign of scientific rigour deserve to be examined inasmuch as they can help us to clarify the problem. I shall discuss four of these arguments: (i) communism and fascism are fundamentally different; (ii) the totalitarian phenomenon can only be detected in Germany and Russia during limited periods; (iii) the concept, as suggestive as it may be, has no practical value for the historian; (iv) it only becomes pertinent if it is introduced as an idealtype in the Weberian sense of the term. First argument: the characterisation of fascism and communism as two sides of a new social formation renders incomprehensible the radical opposition between the ideologies which informs them. The position appears to be even less permissible in the light of the observation that ideology is indeed constitutive of each of the regimes whose kinship is affirmed. Communism claims to hold universal values; it only denounces democracy because it appears to be formal, and in order to establish a real democracy, that is to say, one which gives full meaning to the concept of equality and to the participation of the people in public matters. Its main aim is to assure the common good within the society in which it is established; and its final aim is to safeguard the common good of humanity. Violence presents itself as counter-violence imposed by the domination of the bourgeoisie. Fascism, on the other hand, glorifies nationalistic passions and claims to realise the particular destiny of a people. In its extreme version, that of Nazism, it attributes absolute superiority to the people of Germany and associates this image with that of the pure race, summoned either to subjugate inferior races or to eliminate them; anti-
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism Semitism lies at the heart of the ideology. Violence is then considered to be an expression of life. In one case, then, the referent is the Law of History, in the other it is the Law of Nature. Two questions arise from this argument. The first has often been posed: does consideration of opposition of principles and claimed objectives relieve the analyst of the need to measure the difference between the ideology and the actual practice of communism? This gap has indeed remained concealed for a long time. Domination through Terror has been justified either by the need to overcome the resistance of those social classes born of the Ancien Regime and to confront the aggression of imperialist powers, or by the exceptional difficulties facing the construction of socialism in a backward nation. Such an interpretation has now become untenable. No serious historian would deny that Stalinist terror exceeded the scope of violence imposed by necessity, nor that the construction of socialism was sustained in spite of the excesses of Stalinism. This much has become clear over the last decades in the context of the disintegration of the regime and its eventual ruin. Secondly, should we not question what is meant by ideology when we speak of the antagonism between communism and fascism. It seems that there is a tendency to use this term to designate the explicit aspect of the dominant discourse, that is to say, statements concerning the principles of the political and social order, the aims of the leaders, and more generally the aims of collective action. Although we should not underestimate the function of ideology, understood in this sense, nor reduce it to an instrument of domination, should the question not be raised as to how ideology acquires such a vast efficacy under Nazism and communism and how it succeeds in being diffused so widely in social life? The question already prompts us not to stop at the expression of ideas that are judged as characteristic of one regime or the other – for example, ideas on equality, the classless society and the emancipation of humanity, nor ideas on national greatness, the destiny of a people and racial differences. In effect, the dominant ideas reveal themselves to be in one shape or another tied to the existence of a party whose organisation and unity presents itself as untouchable. To satisfy oneself by saying that the party is an organ created as a consequence of and subservient to a defined ideology, would be to neglect the fact that it implies within its very structure, that is to say, independently of its doctrine, a representation of interpersonal relationships in a community or rather an idea of what constitutes a social bond in its purity. If we conserve the commonly received notion of ideology
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 as a body of ideas or indeed a doctrine which shapes discourse about the meaning of social life and history, we cannot fail to observe that, in the communist regime as in the fascist, the discourse emanates from a single source, that of power materialised in the party whose leader is endowed with supreme authority. In this context ideology – as it has been formed in ‘bourgeois society,’ to use Marxist terminology, or, if you wish to avoid that, in modem, liberal democratic society – changes its character. Ideology of this type, assuming that it can be reduced to a small number of ideas, is characterised by the dispersion of those who guarantee its diffusion; it expresses itself in the spheres of politics, the economy, law, information, education, etc. By contrast, communist and fascist ideology – and is this not precisely a sign of the totalitarian phenomenon? – bears witness to a new ‘regime’ of political thought and language. The power of discourse and the discourse of the power become indistinguishable. To add a further suggestion concerning the change which has come about, I recall that Marxism (to the extent to which it can be defined as a doctrine) finds in social democracy an alternative outlet to that in communism. Even before the reign of Stalin, the Communist Party marks the birth of a political body which is at the same time a body of ideas. Second argument: the totalitarian phenomenon is only discernable on the conditions that on the one hand we distinguish between Nazism and Italian fascism and on the other that we define in the history of Nazism and communism the periods when it was fully realised. Hannah Arendt has herself supported this interpretation. Is it convincing? As far as Italian fascism is concerned, a subject whose assessment exceeds the scope of my paper, its project should certainly not become confused with that of Nazism. Its nationalism was not combined with an explosion of racism; the state did not become subordinate to the party in the same way as in Nazism; terror was not pushed to its extreme. Should we not admit, nevertheless, that Italian fascism departed from the traditional framework of nationalism, when it formulated for the first time the ideal of a totalitarian state, abolished not only political but also civil and individual liberties and claimed the creation of a new order based on the support of all sectors of the population, especially the young. Finally, even if it appears limited next to that of Nazism, fascist terror was not negligible. The Italian phenomenon indicates a new political orientation and sketches out a model that we would neglect only if we lost sight of the European dimension of the anti-democratic revolution. Why then exclude Italian fascism from the field of totalitarianism? This step can be understood more clearly if we consider the concern of certain historians, including
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt herself, to distinguish a pre-totalitarian phase within Nazism, and both a pre-totalitarian and post-totalitarian phase within communism. Arendt, who, we know, does not wish to be considered a philosopher, endeavoured to fix criteria of a scientific nature. It has always seemed to me that on this point she yielded to a ‘realist’ illusion. By that I mean that she struggles in vain to discern in reality the facts that indicate a complete domination. This was exercised in practice under Stalin from 1929 or perhaps 1934 to 1941, then after the interruption of the war which unsettled the system, from 1945 until the death of the Supreme Leader. On the other hand, under Hitler’s rule it was the war which made possible the construction of a truly totalitarian regime. Now, however much it seems justified to heed the transformations of Nazism and of communism, we should take care not to confuse the totalitarian project and reality in which it was never entirely realised. That in a given period the project may expand, the capacity for action of the leaders may reach its highest level, the methods of coercion may multiply and at the same time there may be an increase in the mobilisation of the population demonstrating its adherence to the regime – all this should not let us forget the general direction of change taken since the party and its leader succeeded in taking power. It is true that the state of society, the scope of the institutions in place, define the field of the possible at any given time. The path that is taken, is taken under the impact of events that could only in part be predicted. However, the responses to these events are not the product of chance, they interlink and constitute a definite progression. To adhere to a strict definition of a ‘truly totalitarian’ regime, we confront the well founded objection that we never discover a fully regulated society, rendered uniform under the effect of ideology and terror. In fact Arendt, inspired by the picture of the Nazi regime provided by Franz Neumann in Behemoth, highlights the confusion of functions between Party and State, and the doubling of responsibilities at various levels of the administration. She sees there quite rightly the sign of a cunning whose aim is to prevent all stabilisation of institutions and all consolidation of hierarchies that would risk providing a level of security and independence for the functionaries of the Party and State at the expense of the authority of the supreme leader and of the leadership core. Nevertheless, the description leaves no doubt about the discords of the system and the rivalries between apparatuses whose competencies overlap. The situation is different in the Soviet Union, but these phenomena are much more accentuated. The purges carried out by Stalin in the bureaucracy justify even more Arendt’s interpretation. Besides his obsession with plots, they reveal his wish
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 to maintain in a permanent state of insecurity the cadres of Party and State (the engineers and technicians themselves), but they engender a disorganisation that Germany never knew. Moreover, the territorial immensity, the regional inequalities, the complicated nature of the relations between the central authority and the local authorities, and finally, the subordination of the production system to political imperatives, doomed to failure the programme of co-ordination between all the sectors of activity. One of the most disturbing characteristics of the totalitarian regime is the general disposition it arouses in the population to act with one movement in pursuit of a goal which defies understanding. Neither the means of constraint, as considerable as they are, nor the efficacy of propaganda are sufficient to explain this phenomenon; nor is the popularity from which the leader benefits nor faith in the doctrine of the Party. As so many witnesses have indicated, when instructions are lacking people attempt to guess them and obey an imagined will of the leaders. If there is hesitation over the line followed by the Party, the uncertainty remains that the line exists. In a way that surpasses appearance, everything is known, everything has been decided. Thus as soon as Hitler and Stalin are in power, not only do servants and executants of servants proliferate but also they have to divine their Leader’s intentions. The period in which, according to Arendt, total domination was achieved in Germany, offers a disconcerting picture for one who only wishes to find the strict organisation of all activities. Let us recall the process of exterminating Jews meticulously described by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of European Jews. It requires a mass mobilisation involving very diverse sectors: the administration of several ministries, the railways, industry and the army. That the Final Solution was decided by Hitler and a small circle of leaders is not in historical doubt. But their plan remains a secret and only results in a considerable number of operations that are often independent of one another and may even ignore each other. In the mass of actors who form part of the process, there are countless individuals who are unaware of its final aim and yet everything passes as if their co-operation was controlled. Was I saying: they do not know? but neither are they blind and each one is responsible. As their actions are adjusted to one another, they are not deprived of sense in the double meaning of the term. The convergence of these actions, even if they are not the effect of a co-ordination exercised under a unique command, are not accidental. Moreover, if we recall the description made by Solzhenitsyn of the Terror in Russia, we are confronted by similar phenomena. The terror seems to have been decided by
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism Stalin, but simultaneously a multitude of Party functionaries and ordinary people are working to ‘feed’ the Gulag, and it is impossible to say of them whether or not they are aware of what they are doing. From what Hilberg writes, the debate that has taken off between the ‘intentionalist’ and ‘functionalist’ historians seems senseless. To take into account a subjective intention does not dispense with the need to recognise at the social level an anonymous intentionality. The notion of anonymous intentionality, like that of the totalitarian project, does not give us the key to an interpretation; they only prompt us to abandon the image of a society which we could define by objective criteria as being truly totalitarian. Third argument: in the framework of comparative history, the task consists of reconstructing the evolution of fascist and communist regimes since their formation, in order to locate their similarities and differences. The idea of totalitarianism, as it was advanced in the very early years, primarily by theoreticians who had been persecuted by Nazism, risks prejudging the importance of the similarities. Comparison of the two regimes is justified on the basis that they emerged in the wake of the First World War and developed in the same historical conjuncture up until the Second World War. To understand this history, writes François Furet (in the chapter ‘Communism and Fascism’ from his work Le passe d’une illusion – a work that stands out for the breadth of its investigation and acuteness of its analyses), ‘a concept like that of totalitarianism is only useful if the historian uses it sparingly. It indicates at best (my emphasis) a certain state reached by the regimes in question, and not necessarily all, at different stages of their evolution. But it says nothing about the relations between their nature and the circumstances of their development, nor about the origins they might have in common and their hidden reciprocities.’ And, speaking of another path that opens itself up – ‘the comparative history of 20th century dictatorships’ – Furet states: ‘it is not a case of examining them in the light of a concept, at a moment when they have respectively reached the peak of their curve [a phrase no doubt directed against Arendt], but one of pursuing their formation and progression in a way that enables us to grasp what is specific to each and what they have in common with the others.’ To wish to move away from the theory, therefore, does not necessarily mean rejecting its pertinence in toto: it is perhaps to recapture some elements of it in the course of historical investigation, but above all, it seems to me, it is to resist the temptation to conceive totalitarianism as a new social formation. It is a question of not yielding to the idea that the eventual kinship which exists between the two opposed regimes indicates a historical direction. I refer once more to François Furet:
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 in the first chapter of his book, after having pointed out the charm which continues to be attached to the beginnings of communism and after having explained it ‘by the survival of this famous sense of history, another name for its necessity, which takes the place of religion for those who have no religion and is thus so difficult, so painful even, to abandon,’ the historian notes that ‘neither fascism nor communism have been the inverted signs of a providential human destiny. They are short episodes framed by what they wanted to destroy. Products of democracy: they have been buried by it. Nothing in them has been necessary and the history of our century, like that of preceding ones, could have occurred differently: It is enough to imagine, for example, a year 1917 in Russia without Lenin or a Weimar Germany without Hitler. The self-understanding of our epoch is only possible if we free ourselves from the illusion of necessity: the century is only explicable, to the extent that it is, if we reinstate its unpredictable character denied by those primarily responsible for the tragedy.’ In these phrases we discover what is at stake in the critique of the concept of totalitarianism: to make it fully consistent would be to fall for the fiction of communists and fascists at the same moment as we condemn their enterprise. To escape this fiction, we must observe the rule for all historians in assessing the events which mark the development of each regime to ask ourselves: what would have happened if...? – that is to say, if such an event had not occurred or had turned out differently. If we consider the First World War, we would have to admit that nothing proves that it had to break out and take such unheard-of proportions when the incident which originated it appears so minimal and the dispute appears so susceptible to being resolved by diplomacy: this war, however, creates the conditions for the take-off of Bolshevik and Nazi movements. Consider the Russian Revolution: its success was ‘improbable’ and due to the audacity and skilfulness of one man, Lenin. In his absence, as is shown by the hesitancy of his companions, events could have taken a different turn. There is no need to list all the hypotheses which give us back a sense of contingency. There is one among them, however, which stands out since it runs the risk of ruining the theory of totalitarianism. If Hitler and Stalin had not emerged, two exceptional personalities, what would have become of a Nazi or communist regime? The immeasurable desire for conquest, the senseless adventure of war against Russia, the paroxysm of hate against Jews, the very project to exterminate them – do they not bear the imprint of the will of the Fuhrer, or should we say of his paranoia? Similarly, in the frenzied politics of collectivisation, the deportation of entire peoples on Soviet territory, the succession of purges which devastated sectors of industry, administration and
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism the army, the Terror which weighed down without intelligible discrimination on ordinary citizens, do we not recognise the mark of Stalin? Once we imagine for a moment a Nazism without Hitler or a communism without Stalin, once we remove in our thinking one or the other or both at the same time from what is called the course of history, what remains of the idea of a totalitarian logic? The argument that I mention has some force. It has even too much because for it to be followed, historical inquiry would as a consequence always reduce a regime to a constellation of accidental facts that only lasts as long as it is not destroyed by further accidents that themselves might not have happened. This is not, however, Furet’s view: one proof of this among others is that he says of fascism and communism that they are ‘short episodes framed by what they wanted to destroy.’ This is to admit implicitly that their failure was not accidental. It is giving necessity its due. And yet could we not object to this claim that ‘the history of our century could have happened differently?’ What are the facts that support this hypothesis? Concerning the defeat of Nazism, can we disregard the participation of America in the war and the role played by Roosevelt in abandoning isolationist politics? Concerning the exhaustion of communism, can we brush aside the possibility of an incident which would have provoked world war? The notion of the unpredictable is never erased after the event. And yet, if this notion accompanies our inquiry, it does not distract from the task of understanding what actually happened and took shape in the world. The demand remains to understand the nature of new kinds of regime. Indeed historians do not ignore this demand: even if they reject the concept of totalitarianism, they try nonetheless to grasp the specificity and the novelty of communism and of fascism. In doing so, they tend to conceive of them as products of democracy that have remained ‘within the framework of what they wanted to destroy.’ To tell you the truth, I myself have long thought that Nazism and communism constitute two trends of an anti-democratic revolution and that we can only interpret their project on the basis of what Tocqueville – in order to make the larger context apparent instead of only sticking to the effects of a few great events like the American and French Revolutions – so aptly called the ‘democratic revolution.’ It is again essential, however, to ask ourselves if these ‘products’ (communism and Nazism) do not also indicate something other than a battle with democracy on democracy’s own ground, something other than the destruction of a system of government based on democratic principles: the general will, the sovereignty of the nation, the equality
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 of citizens... something other, that is to say, than a revolution in the foundations of modern society. It is a double question: on the one hand, it prompts us to re-evaluate what we call democracy, to understand how it could have generated within its own horizons a type of regime which seeks its destruction; on the other, it gives us notice that we should think what was previously unthinkable. It is this challenge to thought which lives on after the fall of the regimes born in the first part of the century. Their duration measured on the scale of centuries, appears brief – though not so much with respect to communism (70 years) if we use the advent of European democracy as a benchmark. But other than the fact that no one can deny the acceleration of change brought about by these regimes, the fissure in our universe has been so deep that it would be unwise to think it healed. Let us not abandon, finally, the historians’ argument without reverting to the image of two personalities whose power was exorbitant and whose will decided events to which we lend a sense of historical inevitability. I had already given part of a response to this objection when I remarked that we cannot dissociate the intention of the leader from an anonymous intentionality. More precisely the representation which should be called phantasmal, of a society unified in all its parts, released from the opaqueness which derived from the division of interests and passions, mobilised by the task of self-realisation and the aim of eliminating all those who conspire against the power of the people, does not this representation imply the position of someone who is detached from everyone, all-powerful, all-seeing, omniscient, thanks to whom the people calls itself One. From the total power of the Fuhrer or Supreme Leader we could certainly not deduce the personalities of Hitler or Stalin. But can one overlook the fact that the image of a man who considers obedience to legality as a simple prejudice, who is constantly proving his will of iron, who presents himself as invested by Destiny, elucidates the character of the regime. Those who doubt it should consider the role of Mussolini, an eccentric character whose captivation of Italians astonishes us. His paranoia does not reach the same level as that of Hitler. Be that as it may, the example is ambiguous. But when we then consider some other communist leaders instead of staying fixed on the image of the Hitler-Stalin couplet – for example, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Ceaucescu or Enver Hodja – could they all be the children of chance or is there not some logic that governs the selection of personalities capable of interpreting the role of Egocrat. (to use Solzhenitsyn’s term), the man in whom social power is embodied. Far from putting the concept of totalitarianism at fault, the singular position of the
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism leader, incomparable with that of the classic tyrant or modern dictator, is the sign of a new social formation. Last argument: the concept of totalitarianism is only pertinent if it is defined as an ‘Ideal-type.’ François Furet in particular associates himself with this interpretation in a passage in which he goes on to say of National Socialism and Stalinist Bolshevism that ‘they are not only comparable, but they form in some way a political category which has won rightful recognition since Hannah Arendt. I understand well that acceptance is not universal but I do not see proposed a more adequate concept to define regimes in which an atomised society, made up of individuals systematically deprived of political ties, is subjected to the total power of an ideological party and its leader. Since it is a case of an ideal type [my emphasis], the idea does not suggest that the regimes are identical or even comparable in every respect, nor does it indicate that the trait in question is equally pronounced over the whole length of their history.’ Is it right that atomisation is the main characteristic of the system? Should we stick with the definition that Arendt gives: total domination by ideology and terror? Let us put this question aside for a moment. Furet’s historical judgement is important to me because, without contradicting the former recommendation of only making limited use of the concept of totalitarianism, it marks an advance of his thinking to admit the validity of a new ‘political category.’ After all, this is what I want to say myself. However, can we be satisfied with this notion of an ideal-type? Borrowed from Max Weber, it has the merit of encouraging a break from the naiveté of a purely descriptive history. The historian certainly only has the chance to make facts intelligible if he formulates a question referring to them and elaborates hypotheses. An object of investigation is only defined on condition of selecting certain signs from the pure diversity of the real: an operation guided by the interest that the researcher finds in them according to his own values or those of his time and on the assumption that they have some connection between them. If his hypothesis is found to be confirmed in the course of his inquiry, relationships of causality appear whose validity makes itself apparent to anybody, whatever their own values may be, even to the Chinese, as Weber says. Put another way, science attains universal propositions as long as it does not yield to the illusion of treating them as if they were historical reality. On its own historical reality does not speak. Whoever claims to discover in facts the genesis of meaning, escapes into philosophy. No doubt we can observe that Max Weber himself infringes the rules of his method when he
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 shows the degradation of the Protestant ethic and the petrifaction of the spirit of capitalism. In spite of his care to demarcate the frontiers of his investigation and to connect strictly defined facts, he himself cannot avoid confronting a question which goes beyond science and bears on the nature of modem civilisation. We would thus be mistaken in concluding that speculation is not tied to scientific inquiry. Whatever the problems posed by Weber’s methodology, I do not see how one could reduce totalitarianism to an ideal-type. If we speak of it as a political category, it is to confer on the term ‘political’ a broader meaning than it ordinarily has – when it is distinguished from the economic, the religious or the juridical. This political category is as indispensable as that of democracy, for example, or of aristocratic society. In each case, the intention is to designate a system, or to use a more neutral term, a regime, which may be distinguished by a certain number of characteristics: notably, determination of the locus of power, the legitimacy which it claims, the scope of its prerogatives, the right which underpins a certain type of social differentiation, the links between property relationships and the mode of production, dominant beliefs and customs. Could one say that the nature of modem democracy is not inscribed in facts, that its existence may be debated? There is no ground to conclude that it is merely the product of an intellectual construction. Let us recall the researches of Tocqueville (to which historians always feel obliged to return): he endeavours to decipher the signs of a new type of society, focusing attention not only on political institutions but on transformations of social life and the dominance of new passions – those of equality, welfare and individual liberty. The element of construction cannot be separated from that of exploration. Now Tocqueville does not rely on a theory of Reason for thinking history. He lets himself be guided by signs of new meaning which he discovers in the breaking up of the old social framework in which people previously apprehended their relations of dependence together with their experience of time, nature, the order of world and the distinction between the ‘this worldly’ and the ‘other worldly.’ In the passage from the aristocratic society of the Ancien Regime to democratic society, Tocqueville discerns a mutation of the symbolic order, that is to say, something other than intelligible progressions of thought whose validity would be recognisable to the Chinese, once the author’s initial hypotheses are accepted. The author’s interpretation does not leave him in a position of neutrality; it enjoins him to think what previously exceeded the limits of the thinkable.
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism One might think that the construction of an ideal-type allows the historian to escape from the alternatives of philosophy and descriptive history, but it does so only by converting the historian into a subject of knowledge external to the historical account in which he is implicated and seeks orientation.
* Hannah Arendt (who, I have noted in passing, insists that the recognition of the totalitarian phenomenon be limited to certain periods of Nazism and Communism) has elaborated a theory to which most analysts refer, either to contest it or to make it less abrupt: that of total domination by means of ideology and terror. What does she understand by total domination? She informs us that it is not only exercised from above by external means, but also imposes itself ‘from within.’ It is apparently ideology that makes this possible. How does ideology obtain such efficacy? Arendt mentions the function of propaganda, and then more precisely that of indoctrination. Its success seems to derive from the very character of a doctrine which leaves no place for doubt. But should it not be added that all questioning of the truth values of the doctrine is rendered impossible? Then we should have to admit that in the absence of terror, the outlawing of all opposition and the threat which weighs on all potential opponents, indoctrination would be an insufficient means. This phenomenon accounts for the diffusion of ideology among the circle of militants which, despite its scope, remains limited; it does not shed any light on the subjection of the population. Moreover, the term ‘indoctrination,’ which implies action on the part of the doctrine’s bearers on those subjected to it, does not fully express the idea of domination from within. On the other hand, Arendt herself points out that the efficacy of the doctrine does not lie in its novelty. In the case of Stalinism, the doctrine derives from Marxism which teaches that history is the product of class struggle and that it will terminate in the destruction of the last dominant class engendered by capitalism. For its part, Nazism adopts the already widely diffused themes of Pan-Germanism, racism and social Darwinism. The new fact would consist, therefore, in the intensification of the belief into a comprehensive intelligibility and predictability of the processes of history or of nature. That which was implicit would become explicit once Communism or Nazism placed the doctrine at the service of a plan for total domination. From a doctrine affirming the elimination of the dominant class, Arendt notes, the decision to exterminate all those who hindered the course of history could not be deduced. No more could the decision to exterminate inferior races, and above all the Jewish race, be deduced
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 from racial theory. But if we stopped at this interpretation, there would be a risk of attributing to the doctrine a purely artificial quality. Hannah Arendt leads us in a different direction when she speaks of a domination from within. According to her argument, the transition from doctrine to totalitarian ideology, from a conception of history or nature to an action which results from a command issued by history or nature, implies a regression of thought into a logical construction so complete that it dissolves the frontier separating thought from experience, and by the same token thought from action. So, necessity makes law – not a necessity imposed from without, but a necessity internalised by the Subject who surrenders herself to a chain of ideas which, so to say, merge into one single idea. Arendt, it may be recalled, comes to define ideology as the logic of an idea. By this criterion Nazism and Communism would be reunited. There is no doubt in my eyes that Arendt reaches the essential point in her analysis when she shows that the idea of a law which governs the course of history or nature is confounded with that of law as command. The new idea of law, in her view, reveals the radical novelty of the totalitarian regime and the function of terror. This regime, she emphasises, is distinguished from tyranny which is a regime without laws. She could have added that it is also distinguished from a despotism which turns the supreme Master into a being endowed with supernatural powers or even into a demi-God; or no less from a modem dictatorship which justifies itself by reference to the circumstances or the particular character of a type of society. Totalitarianism is, in effect, accompanied by an absolute affirmation of law. It deprives all positive laws of their function and destroys the consensus juris which assures people of their rights and mutual obligations in a common world. At the same time, the Subject finds herself deprived of the capacity to determine her own conduct and to account for her actions to herself and others according to norms of justice and injustice, truth and falsity, good and bad. Where the transcendence of law is abolished, there results in Arendt’s terms an ‘identification of man with the law,’ or the emergence of a humanity that becomes the ‘living incarnation of law.’ To be sure Arendt does not let one forget that a change of this kind requires the position of a mediator, of a leader, in whom is concentrated infallible knowledge and absolute power. She says of him in one place that he monopolises knowledge, and in another that his will is incarnate in all places and at all times. This supreme and unconditional authority, however seems to derive from a conception of law as a law of history or of nature: a law of movement in both cases, of a movement which inhabits the Subject.
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism Without minimising the importance of this belief, I wonder if it does not bear the mark of a rationalisation serving to justify all initiatives of power and unconditional obedience to orders. We come back to the question: how does the notion of a law which dispossesses individuals of the markers of legality and morality establish itself in social reality? This question brings me back to the critique, previously mentioned, of a definition of ideology which stands up poorly to the phenomenon of totalitarianism. Arendt still seems to be sharing in it when she speaks of ideology as the logic of an idea and seeks to grasp in that logic the key sign of a ‘domination from within.’ However, she indicates a new direction when she acknowledges the phenomenon of organisation. Unfortunately her considerations (in Chapter 11 of The Origins of Totalitarianism) are disconnected from her subsequent reflections on the new status of law. It is precisely after having noted that total domination implies a domination from within, that she affirms the practical objective of the movement, whether Communist or Nazi, to ‘enlist the greatest number in their organisation.’ Following her penchant for excessive formulae, she adds that this does not respond to any political objective. Returning later to this theme, she specifies that the aim of propaganda is not to persuade, but to organise. To this end, originality of ideological content can only be considered an obstacle. It is not by chance that the two totalitarian movements of our time, so horrifyingly new and ingenious in their methods of domination, have never invented an ideology which was not previously popular. The masses are not won over by the public success of demagogy, but by the visible reality and power of a ‘living organisation’ (an expression taken from Hitler). What is important, for example, in the fabrication of a Jewish conspiracy is the conjunction of fiction and organisation. Thus the fiction remains even after the massacre of the Jews – as it did in the Stalinist regime when the fiction of a Trotskyist conspiracy continued to exist after the liquidation of the Trotskyists and the assassination of Trotsky himself. The efficacy of fiction is not denied, but it proves itself correct by being tied to organisation. In my own words, I would say: ideas become ‘substantial’ where people believe together and adapt to one another within an organisation. Arendt says of the Nazi movement, once it has developed, that ‘in practice it materialised daily in the hierarchy of a political organisation, in which context it would have been unrealistic to question it’ (the term ‘unrealistic’ must be understood in the sense of contradictory to a sense of reality). With regard
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 to Bolshevism, once it has developed, Arendt notes that ‘it no longer needed to engage in a discussion on class struggle, internationalism and the unconditional submission of the proletariat’s interest to that of the Soviet Union: the organisation of the Komintern, as it functioned, is more convincing than any ideological argument.’ As I have previously indicated, we should not conclude that organisation reveals the reality of the regime beyond its ideas. In one sense it consists of an actual transformation of social relations. The most obvious illustration of this transformation is the creation of the Bolshevik and Nazi parties. To some extent both of them have something in common with mass parties operating in a democracy, whose own tendency is to multiply grass root organisations in cities, towns and country. A totalitarian party, however, constructs a pyramid of committees whose members, as Arendt notes, perceive the organisation as ‘the essence of their lives.’ The division of functions, continuous mobilisation, the common discipline required in the application of orders from the Centre, do not have a limited objective, that of ensuring that leaders who share the same political affiliation prevail in the organs of public decision-making, be they in the state apparatus or at the regional level. Their objective is to control and regulate behaviour in all spheres of social life, in all professions, but also in all situations where human relations are formed outside institutional frameworks. No doubt it is in this sense that Arendt can affirm that it is not a question of a ‘political’ objective: this objective, I would say, is to render everything organisable, everything becomes matter for party organisation. Nor should we confuse – if we wish to account for the formation of totalitarian regimes – the process of bureaucratisation characteristic of all modem societies which, whilst possessing its own dynamic, remains subordinate to particular technical imperatives of a different order, and the process of organisation whose objective is to impose on the whole of society common norms. To be sure, the Party exploits the process of bureaucratisation, it accelerates it; but in eliminating the distinction between the political and the non-political, it changes its nature. That the ideal of total organisation has a material existence does not prevent us from recognising that it has a phantasmal quality. I have already pointed this out, in connecting on this point with Arendt’s analysis: that the form of domination within the Party as well as the Party’s domination of the state bureaucracy contradicts the image of a perfectly arranged system. But, independently of this observation, the fantasy is revealed in my view in the split in the representation of total organisation. It is that of a totally active society and that of an amorphous society which is
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism like material in the hands of builders. Inside the Party this split on the one hand converts a militant into an activist distinguished by his or her voluntarism, whose energy is constantly mobilised, and on the other hand into a pure product of the organisation, a creature of the Party. If it is important to scrutinise so much the Communist or Fascist ideal according to which social relations, modes of knowledge and actions are articulated with one another and derived from a single principle, it is because it masks, even as it also bears the trace of, the work of domination. While power is manifested in the person of the leader, it does not stop appearing as a social power. The image of the infallible leader and the allegiance which he is granted concur with the vision of a society all of whose parts are in harmony with each other and whose law impresses itself on each and everyone. Now, the ideal of organisation gives one of the keys to terror since it implies, to the point where it would be impossible to identify the first cause, the destruction of the existing social fabric, of all the ties – previously ensured by rights that were not only political but civil and individual – which attest to a spontaneous mode of socialisation. It would be equally mistaken to reduce the Terror to the elimination of those judged responsible, here and there, for the organisers’ failures. In the very definition of the enemy, the dual character of the totalitarian phantasm is revealed: to the image of the activist militant corresponds that of the maleficent adversary who is everywhere active, conspiratorial, the agent of a foreign organisation or a saboteur of production. The image of a perfectly malleable material corresponds with that of waste which must be removed in the operation which gives shape. Nonetheless to limit oneself to this analysis would be to neglect another task of Communism and Fascism: that of the incorporation of individuals into a collective body, the absorption of the many into the One. While the organisation is concerned with the project of artificially building the social, taken to its extreme but already present in the modern world, where it accompanies the rationalisation of diverse spheres of activity, notably the political, economical and religious, the task of incorporation is concerned with a more substantialist ideal. Once more, it is the Party with the new characteristics it has acquired which reveals to us the sense of the totalitarian dynamic. The Party is not only perceived as an organisation, in the received political sense of the term, it is a ‘mystical being’ in which its members are merged, and as such, it incarnates the people. The image of the indivisible people projects itself on the party, the image of the indivisible party projects itself on
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 the people. Within the party itself, the hierarchy is half concealed by a logic of identification which binds the militant to the supreme leader. Now, if we could say from our initial viewpoint that the Party concealed the project of total organisation, we can now add that it conceals that of making total incorporation. Witness its effort to create throughout the whole of society a myriad of collectives which possess the property, each apart from the other, of presenting a bodily image of an organic whole: these are unions, youth movements, cultural groupings, unions of authors and artists, academies of science, associations of lawyers and doctors, etc. In considering this formidable enterprise, with its tendency toward the reestablishment of ‘corporeality’ in the social, I am surprised at the atomisation thesis of totalitarian society obstinately maintained by Arendt. Generally so careful not to detach understanding from the notions formed by common sense and to find in the non-critical use of the word ‘totalitarian’ a sign of some initial understanding, she takes no account of this naive vision, very soon formed, of collectivism. It is true that this term, used above all to describe the Communist system, often formed part of the vocabulary belonging to the Right and bore the mark of a defence of bourgeois individualism. Nevertheless, it bears witness to the perception of a new phenomenon. Arendt only wishes to retain from the totalitarian project the domination of a population transformed into a mass of individuals, each of whom is separated from others and finds a substitute for the feeling of existence only through binding themselves to others under the shadow either of a subjugating authority or of Terror. To Hitler she attributes the intention of pursuing a process of atomisation which already characterised Weimar Germany; to Stalin, that of fabricating the mass through the programmes of collectivisation and frantic industrialisation. Without doubt Arendt does not allow one to ignore what in a passage devoted to the Terror she calls ‘the creation the One out of the many.’ In the same chapter she writes: ‘For the barriers and channels of communication between individuals, [Terror] substitutes an iron link which binds them so closely together that plurality has almost vanished into a single man of gigantic dimensions.’ In another passage she evokes Hitler’s pleasure when faced with the spectacle of millions of militants appearing to him as a single human being. Observations of this kind, however, always portray the One as the objective of domination. Whatever the adequacy of this view, it leaves out the appeal, for those called upon to submit, of belonging to a party, a group or a people united; it also leaves out the satisfaction gained for the multiple appetites for power which operate under the cover of participation in a common cause. For my part, I associate the image of the One with the image of the body. This notion is charged with all the connotations associated with aesthetics
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism and social hygiene. Beauty, vigour and health are the attributes of the ‘new man’ by contrast with the decrepit and sick man of the democratic world. Within this context I can only allude to a totalitarian aesthetic which has rightfully drawn the attention of some historians. On the other hand I must emphasise the relation which links the Terror with the image of the parasites to be eliminated. The attraction of the good social body goes hand in hand with the repulsion of foreign elements. In the case of Nazism, the phenomenon is obvious. There is no need to multiply the numbers of citations drawn from Hitler and more eloquently from Himmler. The enemy, above all the Jew, is labelled a louse or a bug; he infects the German population. Anti-Semitic propaganda is not bound to the logic of organisation which I was referring to. Hatred is disguised under the imperative of extirpating from the social body everything which is thought to endanger its integrity. Meanwhile, in a language which is not that of an exaltation of racial purity, Communism also claims for itself a programme of social prophylactics. And it has to be recognised that Communism gave the first signs: already in 1918 Lenin called for the cleansing from Russian soil of all its harmful insects. The hunt for parasites evolved under Stalinism: Trotskyists in particular found themselves continually branded as vermin. One need only recall Vyshinski’s vocabulary. Finally at the other pole of the totalitarian phantasmagoria, how can one neglect the vision of the body of the Fuhrer or the Supreme Guide? In both of them are concentrated vital forces, youth and invulnerability. Could we say that this representation of the leader is accidental? How could one forget the face of Mao, Kim Il Sung, Castro and some others? In vain would one like to dissolve this phenomenon into the more general one of the dictator’s popularity? In the visible person of the ‘Egocrat’ is projected the image of the body of the community. Why does Arendt present totalitarian society as a society which has been deliberately atomised so that it may become the material for total domination? The reason seems to me to be that she already sees in democracy, or at least in Europe, the advent of a mass society accompanying the decline of the nation state and the destruction of the class structure which guaranteed individuals permanent frameworks for their existence and made it possible for them to relate to one another on the basis of common interest and intelligible forms of opposition. At the origin of the Nazi and Communist movements’ success Arendt thus discovers the appearance of a new category of people, literally disinterested, who have even lost a sense of their own survival. According to the argument she develops in the
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 third part of Origins of Totalitarianism, Nazism and communism exploited the effects of social disintegration in order to destroy liberties which only continued to exist because they were linked to bourgeois individualism and to an economy based on competition. An interpretation of the kind (incidentally based on rather unconvincing facts for the class structure and that of the parties and unions which derived from it, were not broken up in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s taking power) does not allow for an understanding of the two ‘revolutionary’ movements whose objective, taking off from opposite points of view, is to abolish the constitutive principles of modem democracy; that is to say, not only the representative system, a juridical-political category, but a form of social life in which is tacitly accepted the legitimacy of different interests, opinions and beliefs, of class conflict and of modes of activity, of forms of knowledge and expression which are not derived from common norms but which confront in their limits the question of their foundation and finality and whilst participating in a common experience of the world. We can only conceive the ‘reduction of the many to the One’ which operates within totalitarian regimes, on condition that we do not confuse ‘multiplicity’ with the multitude, that is to say, with the mass of isolated individuals, and that we find there the sign of the unfolding of civil society and of the differentiation and creativity which accompanies it. The fact that the totalitarian phenomenon has no precedent, as is noted by Arendt, should not let us forget that the modem democratic phenomenon itself has no precedent. Communist and Fascist regimes present the same characteristic: complete occupation of the place of power by the holder of supreme authority, while at the same time power appears as a social power and the leader as one who embodies it. By the same token, all distinction between the instances of power, law and knowledge are eradicated. This is to say that notions of what is just and unjust, like those of what is true and what is false or a lie, are absent from all discussion and instead are derived from the one who from moment to moment holds the power, either directly or through his representatives, to decide the course of events. We cannot understand the full significance of this phenomenon without appreciating the importance of the rupture marked by the advent of democracy in the history of Europe. With the affirmation that power belongs to no one, is associated the idea that it indicates a place which can be neither occupied nor
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Lefort | Archive: The Concept of Totalitarianism represented or embodied in any figure. Those who exercise public authority, thanks to the existence of suffrage, appear like ordinary mortals destined to be replaced by others. The method by which they are appointed and their actions are subjected to the law and their competence stops at the frontiers of domains recognised to be non-political. It is not a question there of simple rules designed to ensure national cohesion. The notion of a power confined within limits is separated from that of the law whose foundations are concealed and which from now on can only be put to the test by demands of new groupings and material changes which affect social life. Democratic principles were affirmed in opposition to the Ancien Regime, in which power appeared to be embodied in the person of the sovereign who, without being master of the law, bore the imprint of God’s will or of the order of nature, and seemed invested with a legitimacy and wisdom which escaped ordinary mortals. The new distinction, applicable only to democracy, between the locus of power – an empty place resistant to appropriation or representation embodiment, shielded from religious dramatisation, a purely symbolic place – and the exercise in reality of the means of decision-making and command; the disimbrication of the instance of Law and that of knowledge; the acceptance of divisions which traverse society: here is what totalitarian regimes reject. Not, of course, in order to re-establish an old order but to forge the fiction of an undivided society with which power is consubstantial. This kind of soldering which totalitarianism attempts to establish at once between those in Power and the people, and between power, law and knowledge, has the same meaning as the soldering between the classes or, to put it better, as the negation of all internal, social opposition – a negation which is accompanied by the return of the sharp divide between the people and its enemies. Is it simply the sign of a project of domination that totalitarianism reveals, one which would be accomplished in favour of an ideology that elevates the movement of history or of nature into a supreme law? Should we not rather discern a new, symbolic constitution of the social? I hesitate, however, to use this term. It is meant to indicate a chain of interdependent relations which make reference to one another and are constitutive of an experience of social life, I am not afraid to say, a logic. But in another sense, it would be better to speak of a destruction of the symbolic, of a logic determined by the negation of articulations of the social which provide each individual, at different registers of his or her existence, with the possibility of apprehending reality in its limits. Linked to the notion of a homogeneous society is that of closure: the abolition of the mystery of its beginning
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 and of the indeterminacy of its history. With the demand for a ‘real’ democracy to substitute for formal democracy, or for a concrete community freed from the reign of abstraction, is attached the endless elimination of the enemy.
Claude Lefort is the Director of Studies Emeritus at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris. He founded, with Cornelius Castoriadis, the influential journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and he has written extensively in the fields of politics and philosophy. His previous publications in English include The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy and Totalitarianism (1986), Democracy and Political Theory (1988) and Writing: The Political Test (2000). In 2007 Columbia University Press published Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia Studies in Political Thought, translated and with an introduction by Julian Bourg; Foreword by Dick Howard). Notes
[1] This paper was presented at the ESRC Research Seminar on Social Theory and Major Social Transformations at the University of Warwick in June 1997. It was first published in Papers in Social Theory, No.2 (1988, Warwick Social Theory Centre and Sussex Centre for Critical Social Theory) and was translated by Robert Fine and Peter Wagner.
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The concept of totalitarianism: three comments on Claude Lefort Robert Fine First point Let me start with what I see as a crucial contribution of theorists of totalitarianism (like Claude Lefort but also Hannah Arendt) to contemporary social theory. [1] It is that they confront what Hannah Arendt called ‘the burden of events’ in history – in her words, ‘neither denying their existence nor submitting meekly to their weight as though everything that in fact happened could not have happened otherwise’ (Origins of Totalitarianism, p. xiv). The concept of totalitarianism was developed by political philosophers as an attentive facing up to and resisting of a new and previously unthinkable social reality. The shadow of the Gulag and Auschwitz was so dark that the categories of modern political thought could not remain untouched. They continue to weigh upon our writings, casting into doubt all claims of modern political thought to innocence. Let us say, after Auschwitz and the Gulag implication is our condition. It is not that Marx or Rousseau or Hegel or Nietzsche were somehow responsible for the rise of totalitarianism. We could equally well say that liberalism has so often demonstrated its inability to resist totalitarianism that not only its failure but also its complicity can be counted among the facts of our century. But it is to re-read the political tradition through a lens darkened by the Gulag and Auschwitz. To be sure, the concept of totalitarianism was vulgarised. The question of how and why these events could happen was lost in ‘pious banalities’ (to use another of Arendt’s terms) which do no more than hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order or ‘to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury into oblivion.’ Worse still, of course, the concept of totalitarianism was appropriated as a weapon in the armoury of cold-war anti-communism. In this usage the concept lost its critical edge: no longer was it an anguished expression of how and why but it became an accomplice to complacency on behalf of the world in which we live. For Arendt and Lefort, the whole point of theorising totalitarianism has been to break from such theoretical certainties; not to ‘explain away,’ as Arendt
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 put it ‘the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalisations,’ not to allow ourselves to be ‘wheedled with the voice of common sense.’ The concept of totalitarianism was also developed out of and in response to the perceived limitations of Marxism. Not just the official Marxism of the Communist states which justified barbarism in the name of socialism, but also the left communism of the Trotskyists, socialist humanists and existential Marxists who never could quite from apologetics for Russia and its empire (although it should be said that in his last writings in 1939 Trotsky described Stalin’s regime as totalitarian and similar in form to Nazi Germany except for the greater brutality of the former). Marxism’s failure to go beyond a ‘reformed totalitarianism,’ as Claude Lefort put it, led him to re-examine his own relation to Marxism and to Marx’s own thought. Their main weakness was seen as that of downgrading a priori what he calls the ‘political or symbolic function.’ The concept of ‘totalitarianism’ expressed the urgency of developing a critical relation to the revolutionary tradition: turning decisively from apologetics for Stalinism and allowing the political and the imaginary its own voice. The promise to ground political thought in experience, to let it be touched by events, is a great advance over those for whom social theory remains untouched by events as vast as the Holocaust or the Russian Terror. The concept of totalitarianism is the emblem of a collective intellectual effort (in the past often marginalised) to express the primacy of experience over theory and avoid averting our eyes from horror. Second point My second point is both more critical and more contentious. It is about megalomania. The concept of totalitarianism was originally the brainchild of Italian fascists like Giovanni Gentile who defined it as ‘comprehensive, all embracing, pervasive – the total state.’ The self-aggrandising myth of a new class of political aspirants in the inter-war years was that they could control everything and everyone and remake man, woman and nature in their own image. Totalitarianism was at first, at least, the ideological expression of this grandiloquent self-deception, doubtless rooted in the history of imperialism and in the illusion of the modern state, and not an analytic category defining a new social formation. It was a dangerous illusion since it led its bearers to try constantly to prove the truth of their self-deception: into ever escalating, acts of destruction and displays of power to demonstrate the validity of their supra-human claims.
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Fine | Three Comments on Claude Lefort But should we not resist turning a self-deception of the modern political imagination into a would-be social and scientific category? It reminds me of what I would describe as Foucault’s error: that of turning the advertising slogans of Bentham’s panopticon – that it would be all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, a perfect machine for grinding rogues honest – into the truth of the disciplinary power it embodied. It seems to me we should not repeat the same mistake of taking the megalomaniac at his word and turning his rodomontade into theory. We may laugh at him, as Charlie Chaplin did in The Great Dictator or Lubitch in To Be or Not To Be, or we may psychoanalyse him, as Adorno did in Elements of Antisemitism, but not take his pretensions too seriously. My difficulty with the concept of totalitarianism and its admission to the lexicon of social theory – the difficulty that Lefort wrestles with – is that it signifies a succumbing of thought to appearances, an insufficiently critical acceptance that the way people present themselves is what they are. The Nazi may dream of total domination but it is less realisation of this dream than its abject failure that led the Nazi into an escalating orgy of destruction in the death and concentration camps. Total domination, we might say, you should be so lucky! And yet do we not slip into a confusion between megalomaniac dreams and what totalitarianism actually was? Third point It is a common enough phenomenon that criticism mirrors in some sense what it most opposes. Just as totalitarianism itself purports to eliminate the space between the ‘enunciation and that which is enunciated,’ to use Lefort’s own words, so too I wonder whether anti-totalitarianism in its own way does the same. Those theorists who have seriously confronted the phenomenon of totalitarianism and drawn it into the interiority of their thinking (i.e. those who have not treated it as a blip in the great project of enlightenment or as anomaly in search of ‘rectification’) have in general moved away from social theory and into political or moral philosophy or even into aesthetics. I think that this tendency is apparent in the writings of Hannah Arendt, where the ‘rise of the social’ appears pervasively as the fundamental source of all totalising tendencies: the erosion of both private and public life, the degeneration of the revolutionary tradition in all its different forms, the collapse of classical politics, the homogenisation of the masses, etc. It is as if understanding totalitarianism demands not so much another or a different social theory but rather a break from social theory itself.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Why a break from social theory? Because social theory seems caught within the parameters of the social; it turns into a realism – that is, into something incontrovertible – that which seemed to Arendt to lie at the heart of the problem of modern existence. For Arendt what was needed instead was to speak about the unspeakable; to tell the story of ‘total domination’ in camps in which were conducted ‘the ghastly experiment of eliminating under scientifically controlled conditions spontaneity itself as an expression of human behaviour’; to capture the stages in the process of extermination – the murder of the juridical person, the murder of the moral person and finally the murder of the uniqueness of the individual in addition to merely physical annihilation; to grasp the sheer madness of totalitarianism – the lack of economic or military or any other utility that was manifest in the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis or the devouring of the bureaucracy and military officer corps by itself under the Stalinists; to understand the anti- structural quality of totalitarian regimes – where party gives way to movement, bureaucracy to multiple, non-hierarchical lines of authority, the rational architectonic of the state to the will of the Leader, juridic principles of law and right to the Law of Nature or History, the nation to unlimited expansion, order to perpetual motion. To speak about all this is to speak about the absurd. To do it from the conventional point of view of social theory is a refusal to confront the phenomenon. It’s like the living telling us what it is like to be dead or the camp survivor (as Levi recounts) telling what it is like to be one of the immersi. For Arendt (and perhaps for Lefort too) what is required is not social theory, not a theory that hypostatises the social, but a philosophy in which the ‘supreme capacity of man’ is identified with the capacity to begin; or by the ‘incalculable grace of (Christian) love which says with Augustine ‘Volo ut sis’ (I want you to be) without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation; or by moral recognition of ‘the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such ... the disturbing miracle that each of us is made as he is – single, unique, unchangeable.’ I think Claude Lefort would call this a form of knowledge which ‘brings to light the question of the Other, the question of Being.’ Next to this question of Being, Arendt placed society on the side of that which suspects, resents and relegates our uniqueness, as if it is in the nature of society to portray difference as alien and insist on homogeneity in the hope of eliminating difference. She wrote of how society is bound to reify racial identities, so that all the deeds of a ‘negro’ are ‘explained as the necessary consequences of some “Negro” qualities.’ That society may individualise as well as homogenise, differentiate
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Fine | Three Comments on Claude Lefort as well as equalise, seemed ruled out from this world. Society appears fixed and unchangeable – the one thing that individuals cannot act upon. In this exile consciousness freedom could only be escape from society. But if this is true, my question is simple: what role is left for social theory? My brief comment does not address the extraordinary complexity of Lefort’s engagement with Arendt. Its purpose is twofold: to re-affirm with them the necessity of the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ if political thought is to open itself up to the events of this century – or if not ‘totalitarianism’ then some other category of the same order; but also to acknowledge the element of illusion that is present in any notion of total domination and the retreat from the social that thinking about totalitarianism may imply. The meaning of the concept is as much about its uses as its referent. If ‘totalitarianism’ lends itself on the one hand to a mode of reification which obliterates the gap between the concept and its existence in the world, and on the other to a mode of abstraction which takes flight from the whole terrain of social relations and social theory, this is not enough reason to abandon the concept. It demands only that we continue to refine its use.
Robert Fine is Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, and an advisory editor of Democratiya. His most recent book is Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2007). Notes
[1] This comment on Lefort’s paper was presented at the ESRC Research Seminar on Social Theory and Major Social Transformations at the University of Warwick in June 1997. It was first published in Papers in Social Theory, No.2 (1988, Warwick Social Theory Centre and Sussex Centre for Critical Social Theory).
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Human Rights and Democracy in Iran: An Interview with Ladan Boroumand Ladan Boroumand is the research director at The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. A former visiting fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, she studied history at Ecole des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales in Paris with Claude Lefort, Mona Ozouf and François Furet. She is the author of la Guerre des Principes (1999), and has written several articles on the French Revolution, the Iranian revolution, and the nature of Islamist terrorism. The interview was conducted on 15 May 2007.
Part 1: Personal and Intellectual Background Alan Johnson: What have been the most important influences shaping your enduring political ideas and commitments? Ladan Boroumand: My mother played a major role because she nurtured the importance of truth in our lives. When we did something wrong she would say 'if you tell me the truth you wont be punished' – which was in absolute contradiction with our outside world, where authority was more important than the truth. My father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, was a liberal opponent of the Shah. Amidst Iran's traditionalist and autocratic cultures he created a more democratic atmosphere within the family. He never tried to impose his will on us. And the fact that we were in the opposition was important. I saw that while many would show respect and obedience to the Shah, inside our family there was always a critical discourse. We gained a sense of the importance of being critical and judging for ourselves. We learnt something else from our Father. He was a PhD, an ambitious young man, a lawyer, and he wanted to have a career in politics. But at some point he said 'no' to honours and power, in the name of beliefs. We witnessed him dedicate his life to a cause. Alan Johnson: What books had a big influence on you? Ladan Boroumand: It's a very interesting question and it takes us to the heart of the problem that we have in Iran. My father was a literate and well-educated man. Although he was familiar with classic texts in political philosophy he was not an
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand intellectual in the sense we understand the word in the West. And that was the problem of the nationalists, whether liberals or socialists or authoritarians. So while our father would give us the classics of Persian literature, his younger friends would encourage us to read Franz Fanon and Ali Shariati – third-worldist, leftist and antiimperialist literature. We did not read the classical authors of democracy such as Jean Jacques Rousseau or Montesquieu – they were out of fashion when we were growing up. We were protected from gravitating to the authoritarian ideologies not by books but the way of life inside our family – the way we talked, made decisions and lived. I came across the theory and idea of democracy as a student in Paris. Student in Paris I left Iran in 1975 and went to study political sociology in Paris. I never joined any exile group, though I knew my father's friend, Bani-Sadr, who was an exile in Paris, and also a student. Paris was a centre of student opposition to the Shah and I was approached by the Iranian Communists but I had already acquired a strong liberal culture from my family, so I was reluctant. Yet I took very seriously their argument that social justice would be attained only if we were ready to sacrifice our 'bourgeois freedoms.' I thought we shouldn't dismiss this point. And though I was very keen to keep the liberty I had discovered in Paris, I agreed it would be very selfish to sacrifice humanity's well-being to my individual freedoms. But I had to make sure their argument was correct. I started to study both Marxism and the situation of workers and farmers in China, the USSR and Eastern European countries. The timing was good; many books were being published on these topics by dissidents. The scope of devastation in China during the Great Leap Forward was unbelievable. And a book by Hungarian dissident depicted the grim situation of factory workers in Eastern Europe. I was outraged that my Iranian comrades were refusing to see the reality and preferred to live in a fantasy land. By 1977-78, I had become a strong supporter of dissidents in communist countries. Bani-Sadr's group had a more Islamic, semi-liberal atmosphere, so I hung around them. I was trying to figure out the meaning of abstract concepts such as 'nationhood' and 'freedom.' But I was studying at the University of Nanterre, a very leftist university, in the post-1968 years when being 'revolutionary' was still very cool. The Marxist and structuralist ideas that were in vogue were kind of alien to my concerns – what are human rights, what is liberty, what is a nation?
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 However, a few years later, after the Iranian revolution, I left Nanterre and went to the famous Ecole des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, where many influential French intellectuals were teaching. I studied with Claude Lefort, François Furet, Pierre Manent, and Mona Ozouf. Pierre Manent introduced me to the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As I read them I became outraged that in my early years of university there was never any mention of these authors! I thought I had been duped, and that I had wasted my time. Now my real education started. The Iranian Revolution Ladan Boroumand: When Khomeini came to Paris in October 1978 I had the opportunity to meet him. My father was sent to Paris as an envoy of the National Front – he knew Khomeini and had helped him in exile. My father was a believer, you see, albeit an open-minded one. In the 1960s and 1970s he had sent his religious taxes to Khomeini through Bani-Sadr. My father was sent to Paris by the National Front to figure out what Khomeini's plans were. Khomeini told him to tell his friends that they would know about his plans in due time. My father returned to Tehran and informed his colleagues at the National Front that Khomeini was a dangerous man, acting as if the rest of the opposition didn't exist. From then on my father backed Dr Bahktiar who argued that the opposition to the Shah should refuse to come under Khomeini's umbrella. At about the same time in Paris, in a small printing house owned by Bani-Sadr, I stumbled upon Khomeini's book The Guardianship of the Islamic Jurisprudent. I realised that his programme was not democratic and that he believed in the sovereignty of the Jurisprudent – a religious man whose knowledge of the religious law gives him full authority over the nation. I approached Bani-Sadr and warned him. I said 'this is dangerous.' He responded: 'Khomeini has evolved.' I said 'why don't we ask him?' So (laughs) I wrote out, in Paris, very childishly, a series of 13 questions for Khomeini. One was 'what is your message to Iranian youth?' but the other twelve concerned the foundations of the body politic and the state. We handed this to Khomeini's son in law who took it to Khomeini. The message came back 'The Ayatollah wont respond to these questions – he says it's not the right time for this.' I said 'when will the right time be?' He just smiled at me. This was a week or so before Khomeini returned to Iran.
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand I realised something was wrong but I was too young, and not educated enough. Later on, Khomeini implemented, step-by-step, exactly what he wrote in that book. I learnt a lesson about the importance of ideology in politics. Always read with care what any leader to be has written. Never think it is not important. I was worried about what Khomeini intended for Iran, and I wanted to be a witness to the revolution. So, on the pretext of being a student engaged in a field research, I arrived in Iran one week after Khomeini, in the midst of the revolution. On February 11 I was at the Parliament when it was taken by the 'revolutionary forces.' I saw the invasion of the military barracks by the people and I saw how the arms were distributed. I can still see a young man driving a tank and looking at me and asking 'Would you like to drive the tank?' It was a surreal atmosphere – crazy and surreal. It was not a war because the army had retreated and left the city to the insurgents. Kids of 13 and 14 were taking arms. In this tumult I interviewed teachers, labourers, people from the markets, trying to understand the dreams of each social group. The conclusion I reached was that none knew about Khomeini's programme. Their ideal future was a representative parliamentary regime. I also discovered that there were two social groups who were not initially enthusiastic about the revolution or the Mullahs – workers and peasants. I interviewed workers in a cement factory in the city of Esfahan and I witnessed a tension between the engineers and the workers. At the time of the General Strike in October 1978 the workers had not wanted to go on strike so the engineers had paid the bus-drivers not to pick the workers up! And now the workers were afraid of being labelled 'counter-revolutionaries,' worried about the 'revolution' and worried for their livelihood. The same was true of the villagers, whose main memory of the Mullahs was that in 1960 they had opposed the Shah's agrarian reform. To them the Mullahs were a feudal force not to be trusted. But very quickly Khomeini started to talk about the 'downtrodden versus the Arrogants' – and about class differences between the rich and poor. The less privileged classes began to think there may be an opportunity in the Islamic revolution and began to join the movement. In a couple of months the social landscape changed totally as the middle classes that were the real support of the revolution became wary and some turned to opposition, while – I don't like to use this concept – 'the masses' became pro-Khomeini.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Alan Johnson: What explains the support of so many women for the Islamic revolution? Ladan Boroumand: Khomeini's official discourse was that he was uninterested in power, and only wanted to fight against corruption, and for freedom. Of course he would also use phrases such as 'within the limits of Islamic requirements' – this was the warning we did not understand. Women did not join the movement thinking these guys would radically restrict their social freedoms. When I interviewed woman teachers, I found that they wanted more freedom, less corruption and to elect their representatives. But in revolutionary situations, each actor projects its fantasy onto the leadership. And because Khomeini was discreet about his real agenda each social actor could fantasise about what the Imam wanted for Iran, and joined the movement on the basis of that fantasy. Alan Johnson: Soon enough a brutal reality replaced the fantasies. You have written that you witnessed scenes that left you 'overwhelmed by shame.' Can you tell me about that? Ladan Boroumand: I remember the first executions – of former regime officials. They published photographs of the corpses in the newspapers and plastered these images on the walls. It was horrible. I rang Bani-Sadr and asked why? His response was very perturbing. He said 'They had to kill them because otherwise the people would have lynched them.' But I knew that was not true, because I had accompanied Bani-Sadr to the very places these former officials had been held. There was no popular mood against them. The society was peaceful. The revolution was peaceful, really. The hatred was nurtured after the revolution by the revolutionaries. The shame I felt was due to the fact that I was one of millions of people who had wished for change and my heart was with the movement. I felt responsible for what had happened to these men, who had been denied all their rights as accused and summarily executed. I felt guilty and ashamed and at this moment I turned 'counter-revolutionary.' I did not vote for 'the Islamic Republic' and I became an opponent of the regime. We had overthrown the Shah but now we had another arbitrary regime killing people. We had wanted due process of Law, and human rights, but with this wave of executions – and all those that followed – the regime showed that we had got only a totalitarian system. I returned to Paris knowing I would not return to Iran for a very long time. The day I left there was a huge May 1st parade. Thousands of young Iranian communists were on their way to the
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand demonstration, rather satisfied with the work of the revolutionary Courts, unaware that by approving these courts, they were becoming accomplices to their own persecution. As I looked at these young people I felt that the writing was already on the wall for them. And I have never been back to Iran since that day. An Encounter with Evil Alan Johnson: You settled in Paris with your father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, a social democrat who was a leader of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance. On April 18 1991, he was stabbed to death in his apartment building, presumably by agents of the Iranian government. Can you tell me something about your father and why he – and three months later, his friend and leader Shapour Bakhtiar – were assassinated? After all, both were elderly and without international support. Why were they viewed as a threat by the Mullahs? Ladan Boroumand: After the revolution degenerated, my father came to France, and Dr Bahktiar arrived six months later. They created the first active opposition to the regime and worked together for a decade. Why were they killed? Well, from the earliest days Khomeini's regime was killing its opponents outside the country, but in the early 1990s they started a campaign of liquidation of all opposition figures outside the country. The killings of Bahktiar and my father were part of this wave of assassinations. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the regime had lost an important support on the international scene. It had to figure out what to do in the new world. And when Rafsanjani became president in 1989, there was an opening to the West. The regime feared this opening could encourage the pro-democracy movement inside Iran. And of course all totalitarian regimes are paranoid and insecure because they don't have genuine popular support. There was nothing special about my father's beliefs. He thought Iran should have a representative regime based on human rights, and that those in the majority today should allow the minority to fight for its ideas and become a majority tomorrow. Internationally, they wanted Iran to be an independent country pursuing its own agenda. Bahktiar was getting old but he remained the most legitimate figure in the opposition because he had never been part of the Shah's regime, and he had never worked with the Khomeini's regime. Moreover, he had warned the nation about the huge mistake of rallying around Khomeini. To this day, Bahktiar remains a revered figure. Because my father would be his successor, they killed him first. Then they
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 killed Bahktiar. The strategy was to eliminate the national democratic movement and in a way they succeeded. Alan Johnson: The French government failed to react properly to the assassination of Shapour Bakhtiar. You have written that this failure 'gave substance to the Islamist assumption.' What did you mean by that? What is 'the Islamist assumption?' Ladan Boroumand: By killing their opponents outside the country, while negotiating commercial deals with the very states that had given asylum to these oppositionists (and which were responsible for their security) the regime in Tehran sent a message to the Iranian people. That message was 'Look at these Western democracies to which you aspire, and whom you think are your friends. We go on their soil, violate their sovereignty, and kill our opponents, and these countries do nothing because they have commercial and financial interests with us.' The deeper philosophical message is that, for the western countries, democracy and human rights are not universal. When western democracies pursue commercial interests while ignoring their own ideological foundations they indirectly help the development of Islamism and terrorism. Totalitarian regimes always have a universal message, you see. The Islamists think that the whole world should convert to their ideology. What they fear most is a war of ideas with another universalist ideology that would challenge their worldview. By tacitly accepting the elimination of Iranian dissidents on their soil Western democracies seem to endorse the nonuniversal character of democratic rights, since what is unacceptable for a French citizen is tolerated if it is targeting an Iranian refugee. The French government did not even officially deplore the assassination of Iranian exiles taking place in France. Nothing. We received no word from any official. Bakhtiar died under the very nose of the French police but the state did nothing. For over 36 hours the body was not even found – yet several policemen were inside the house at the time of the assassination and afterward! It is not believable. The investigation was suspiciously inept. Later, rumours circulated that a bargain had been struck by the French state: do what you want to your own people but leave French citizens alone. One day there must be a real investigation about the role of the French state in the case of Bahktiar's killing. Alan Johnson: Giving testimony before the US Human Rights Caucus you described the day of your father's murder as 'an encounter with evil.' You said, 'the day after the crime we find ourselves with a mutilated soul. And this is precisely
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand where lies the effectiveness of Terror. It is not as much for the life it takes than for the faith in human being that it shatters. How then is it possible to find the strength to believe again, and to fight for the human being who is capable of such an act?' It may be of great value to many others if you could say something about how you have lived with those questions yourself and found the strength to believe again. Ladan Boroumand: When they killed my father I went there before he was taken away. When the doctor said there was no hope I thought: 'in the end they succeeded; they were here to kill us and we were here to be killed.' I had been living in fear for many years. Each time my father was out of the house I knew he might be killed, but the psychological impact was incommensurable with what one 'knows' or anticipates. It is an encounter with evil because it is irremediable, and because the moment the crime is committed there is an eclipse of humanity. A moment is by definition transient but paradoxically those framing the unspeakable become eternal. There is nothing you can do. It is done. The day after I did not want to wake up and if I had the strength to put an end to my life I would have done it. The shame of living after that day was very strong and I survived out of sheer cowardice. There was nothing heroic about it. One does not believe in life anymore. I recall that the day after I wanted to talk to Holocaust survivors and ask how they managed. I hoped that no one I knew would see me in the street. My work for a decade had been unconsciously seeking to prevent this crime. I had published reports on human rights violations in Iran while my studies on the French Revolution sought to understand human rights, to figure out what politics is, and what the ideological response to authoritarianism and totalitarianism should be. But I could not do anything about the killing. So you ask yourself what is the use of all that work and whether life is worth living. What helps one carry on is friendship and love – the sole antidotes to hatred and murder – and the sense of duty you have to the survivors. It is a long process to learn to live and to continue one's struggle. Slowly, very slowly, you try to figure out how you can remedy the irremediable. And that is, perhaps, why my sister and I created The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran. The Iranian Revolution and the Left Alan Johnson: The Iranian left (and the western left, with a few exceptions) catastrophically misjudged the Islamists by supporting the 'anti-imperialist Imam'
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 – failing to see that along with human rights and democracy, their own survival was threatened. Before it was dispatched by the regime, the left had failed to defend the democratic rights of 'perfumed bourgeois women' and 'bourgeois liberals' so intoxicated were they by their fantasies about 'the anti-imperialist revolution.' Fred Halliday has argued that 'the central avoidable error of most of the Iranian left [was] its catastrophic stand on "liberalism."' He claims that 'the Left allied with Khomeini to break "liberalism" – that is those moderate democratic forces that opposed the Shah but were against clerical dictatorship.' He goes on: While '[i] n any historical materialist perspective, the "liberals" reflected a more progressive position than the reactionary ideas and policies of Khomeini, the Marxists viewed events through the prism of "anti-imperialism."' For myself, I'd say the repudiation in theory and practice of this basic historical materialist truth by vast swathes of the post-1960s left, including the 'historical materialists,' is now left-wing common sense and the result has been a catastrophic loss of political bearings. Ladan Boroumand: Well, actually I don't think the Left made a big mistake. If they were to be true to their ideology, which was a totalitarian ideology, then they made the right choice. Yes, they got killed for it, but many Communists got killed for it in the Soviet Union as well. The fact is that between Dr Bahktiar – who represented the option for a liberal democracy – and the creation of a totalitarian system, the Left supported the creation of a totalitarian system. Why? Because that system was much closer to what they wanted than what Bahktiar was offering. Alan Johnson: Perhaps I am revealing my own wishful thinking about what any Left 'should' support. Ladan Boroumand: So the real questions are: why did so many Leftists have a totalitarian mind-set? Why were so many so easily absorbed by a totalitarian ideology instead of supporting liberal-democracy? We were an autocratic nation lacking the cultural, philosophical and intellectual heritage of the West. Only ten chapters of John Locke were available in Farsi in 1979 in a book that had not been on the market for 20 years. Liberal ideas were almost non-existent while Lenin, Marx, Fanon were systematically translated. We just didn't have the liberal background that you had in the West that helped you resist and defeat your own totalitarian tendencies in the twentieth century.
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand Revolutionary History and Virtuous Minorities Alan Johnson: In 1999 you published La Guerre des Principes (1999) an important study of the tensions between the 'rights of man' and the 'sovereignty of the nation' during the French Revolution. Your central argument is that the revolutionaries created a metaphysical notion of 'the people' and substituted this for the flesh and blood people of France. You wrote that 'the people could not be admitted into the sphere of the nation's sovereignty' and were viewed by the revolutionaries as a 'metaphysical entity par excellence …an ideal being.' Had your experience of the Iranian revolution shaped your reading of the French revolution? Ladan Boroumand: When I started to work on the French Revolution I wanted to understand the West. Here was my question: if these countries are democratic polities based on the assumption that the individual is free and autonomous, then why, during the 19th and 20th centuries, have they denied this right to other countries? My question concerned colonialism and imperialism, but it was not the classical leftist question. Mine was a philosophical question – why a body politic based on democratic principles behaves undemocratically on the international scene. If these principles are really universal, then logically they should also inform the international behaviour of this entity. If these principles are not universal then what are 'human rights?' I reached the conclusion that each time a western democratic polity behaves undemocratically on the international scene it is by reference to 'the nation' and its 'glory,' 'honour' 'security,' 'interest,' and 'stability.' There is a tension between the nation as a concept, and as a political form, and human rights as a universal principle. You can see this in the UN Charter, by the way. On the one hand, the Declaration of Human Rights, on the other hand, the sovereignty of the nation state. The tension between these two principles are at the heart of the UN's inconsistency and problems. The only time in the history of western politics that these two concepts were at play in the internal history of one nation was during the French Revolution – they were both included in the 1791 constitution. Both concepts – 'human rights' and 'the sovereignty of the nation' – formed the normative foundations of the state. So I studied how a polity based on human rights could lead to a Government of Terror. By studying everyday legislative debates during several years of the French revolution I discovered that the central category of 'the people' did not refer to real people but was a juridical category that had been filled by an ideological orthodoxy
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 and which was embodied by a 'virtuous minority.' And that is when I understood what I had been told by Mr Bani-Sadr. Do you recall, he said to me, justifying the first summary executions, that 'the people would have killed these former regime officials?' His response made sense in retrospect. The people he referred to could not have been the real people (40 million individuals). He meant that the orthodoxy of the new regime representing 'the people' required the summary execution of these particular people, because the orthodoxy did not include human rights. Alan Johnson: You found a 'continuity of political reflexes and expedients before and after 1789,' as each regime was 'informed by the same principle: "the sovereignty of the nation"' interpreted as meaning the sovereignty of a virtuous minority. In Iran, before and after the Shah, virtuous minorities claimed rights to interpret the meaning of this juridical category – 'the people.' Ladan Boroumand: Yes, the definition of 'the people' applied only to those who espoused the new ideology. Those who opposed it became 'enemies of the people.' And this is how I came to understand that nationhood in the west is not necessarily a rational category made of free and equal individuals endowed with inalienable natural rights and bound by a social contract. In the history of the West, up to WW2, both democratic and undemocratic leaders have embodied the 'sovereignty of the nation.' The 'sovereignty of the nation,' then, does not equal democracy, and nationhood in the west has not been individualistic. To put it simply, if citizens in the US or GB had democratic rights it was more because they were British or American than because they were human beings. That is why representative democracies such as the United Kingdom could, consistently, pursue undemocratic foreign policies. Since the end of WW2 Western polities have gone through a slow but steady trend of democratisation that can be measured both in their internal regime and their foreign policies. The most important of all is the introduction of human rights in their constitutional texts, which would have been unthinkable before WW2.
Part 2: Politics in Iran Today Alan Johnson: Iran's theo-polity is based on the bedrock principle of Velayat-e Faqih – the rule of the Islamic jurisprudent. Yet this principle may be the regime's weakness. As you have noted, the notion of 'setting up the theologian as political guardian of the people was Khomeini's idea' and many orthodox clerics have always rejected it. Moreover, there now is widespread cynicism about the clergy, especially among the young. And a civil society movement has emerged from 1997, opposed
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand to the principle of Velayat-e Faqih, expressing, you say, a new 'philosophical and ideological consensus … without precedent in the country's modern history' in favour of 'the dignity or intrinsic worth of the human person.' How can the reform movement exploit these contradictions politically? What are the levers? What are the agencies? What are the flash-point issues? Ladan Boroumand: Many people say the constitution contains two contradictory principles. One is valayet-e faqih, which means the guardianship of the jurisprudent, i.e. the leader who knows the laws of God and has total control over society on that basis. Note, by the way, that this principle is a heresy, as in Abrahamic religions only God's power is absolute. Valayet-e faqih puts the Iranian regime at odds with religious orthodoxy and makes it a very modern totalitarian regime. Many go on to say that the principle of valayet-e faqih is flanked by the concept of the sovereignty of the people, and during the reform era of Khatami many people tried to play one of these concepts against the other. In my view, this was an optical illusion on the part of the reformists because the sovereignty of the people in the constitution refers only to a limited sovereignty in 'social life' – i.e. freedom to choose their spouses, their business, to own property, etc. It does not grant the people political power. The sovereignty of the people is defined in the constitution as subordinate to the absolute power of the jurisprudent, and that is why the constitution has functioned for 30 years. A constitutional text that contains genuine contradictions – like the constitution of 1791 in France, in which human rights and national sovereignty both had normative power – will create a crisis. So I would not put it, as you do, as a matter of exploiting 'contradictions.' The real problem the regime faces is that some of those who compose it have stopped believing in it and have defected. I will give you an example. The Office of Consolidating Unity was an umbrella organisation for Islamist student associations in the Universities. In the 1980s it was a terror organisation imposing orthodoxy, spying on students and denouncing dissidents to the authorities. Today, the Islamic Associations are virtually dissident organisations! People who were part of the regime have lost faith in its ideology and have defected with a chunk of the institutions which used to be part of the regime. This is the internal difficulty facing the regime. On the other hand the social movements you refer to, of women, and other civil society activists which mount a social resistance to the regime's orthodoxy, are the external difficulties the regime faces.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 'Two Iran's?' Alan Johnson: Christopher Hitchens visited Iran in 2005 and was struck by the existence of 'two Irans.' 'Iran today exists in state of dual power and split personality. [H]uge billboards and murals proclaim it an Islamic republic, under the eternal guidance of the immortal memory of Ayatollah Khomeini … But directly underneath those forbidding posters and right under the noses of the morals enforcers, Iranians are buying and selling videos, making and consuming alcohol, tuning in to satellite TV stations, producing subversive films and plays and books, and defying the dress code … The country is an 'as if ' society. People live as if they were free, as if they were in the West, as if they had a right to an opinion, or a private life.' And the Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Shirin Abadi has written that 'Iran's young people remain cheerfully pro-American, the last pocket of such sentiment in an angry Middle East' (213) Is Hitchens right? Is Abadi right? Ladan Boroumand: They are both right. The big challenge facing the regime is how to recuperate that part of the society which is totally resistant to the regime's ideology and over which it has no control. Each time the regimes cracks down the opposition resurfaces in another way. For example, the women organised sitins at Universities, and they were beaten. So they came up with the idea of a onemillion signature campaign for women's equality under the law. For example, when the regime arrested part of the leadership of the student movement another set of leaders emerged. The regime constantly tries to control civil society's resistance but it fails because it has lost its credibility. Khatami and the Reform Movement Alan Johnson: In May 1997 Khatami was elected President on a reform ticket by a landslide. As you wrote, 'Within a few weeks, the political discourse burst through the narrow framework of the official revolutionary language. Expressions like 'freedom of thought, pluralism, and civil society filled the air' and people hoped for a 'Tehran Spring.' But it was not to be. The hardliners panicked and clamped down. Ladan Boroumand: Khatami wanted a more dynamic civil society, some freedom, but he always believed in the absolute power of the jurisprudent. The reform movement happened because of two developments. First, supporters of the ruling elite in the 1980s were sidelined in the 1990s. These people had leftist leanings and were deeply shaken by the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism. After 1989 these former authoritarians became influenced by writers like Hannah
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand Arendt, the Eastern European dissident literature and were slowly converting to democracy. Akbar Gangi is representative of those 'insiders' who campaigned for Khatami and who developed a new discourse of democracy, freedom of press, and so on. Second, a younger generation, who had not witnessed the early days of the revolution, and who had no memory of the Terror which had decimated our generation, were ecstatic about this new language. The old 'insider' leaders who had been converted to more democratic views allied with a younger generation of civil society activists – and that made possible a reform movement. The reform movement frightened the hard-liners who launched a counter-attack: a crack down on pro-democracy figures, serial killings of writers and journalists and dissidents, and the banning of the burgeoning press. And although this crackdown consolidated the defection of many major figures from Khatami's movement – people like Gangi, Sazegara and others – the reform movement was not strong enough to push for constitutional change. But it did create a space for debate during which many people realised that the constitution itself is the main problem. Alan Johnson: Isn't another problem touched on in something you wrote after the 2005 elections. You said that Ahmadinejad appealed to some extent to the poor, and this should have 'alerted the democratic opposition to the need to reach out to the less-educated and poorer strata of society.' Are there any signs that this is happening? Ladan Boroumand: I was echoing the conclusions of the student movement which argued the debate should be popularised and taken beyond intellectuals and students. For example, the debate about the boycott of the elections was never properly translated into popular terminology. This is exactly what the women activists understood. The genius of the one million signatures campaign is that it takes their cause to the wider society and creates a new conversation. The activists talk to people in the streets, encourage people to approach their family members, and talk about the laws and about equality and rights. They have created a little booklet that explains what gender discrimination is, the impact it has, and why it is important for women to have equality and rights. Slowly the women have become the most subversive movement in Iran. The regime has now understood this, hence the latest crack-down.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Détente or Regime-Change? Alan Johnson: Your view of the reform movement contrasts with that of Ray Tekeyh's in Foreign Affairs in Summer 2007. In urging the West to abandon regime change and pursue détente with Iran he argued the Iranian democratic opposition should be cut adrift on two (mutually contradictory, it seems to me) grounds: it is 'non-existent' and it is an obstacle to détente. Democratisation, he argued, should be pursued indirectly through bolstering 'moderate' conservatives such as Larijani, and by the long-term benefits of 'integrating Iran into the world economy and global society.' How do you respond to that argument? Ladan Boroumand: There are several points to make here. First 'regime change' is an unfortunate expression. It really doesn't mean anything. It does not tell you what will come after. I mean, there was a regime change in Iraq. When the West has diplomatic leverage it should use it only with reference to 'human rights' and 'democratic principles.' This would leave it less vulnerable to criticism. Second, what people like Tekeyh are promoting is really just the old traditional realpolitik based on the absolute sovereignty of nation-states. His 'solution' has already been tried in the 1990s and it failed. At the time of Rafsanjani that was exactly the stance taken by all western countries, including the United States. But they could not persuade the Islamic Republic to stop supporting terrorism in the region, or behave like a normal nation state. The plain fact is that the Iranian government is not a normal nation-state. Khomeini's people erased the notion of 'nation' from the name of the country's political institutions – the National Assembly was rebaptised 'Islamic Assembly.' There is no 'nation' in the constitutional text of Iran. It is a universalist Islamist regime that has an international agenda. Third, we must return to the question of 'the West.' The western polities are also a mutating phenomenon. They are in the midst of very profound changes – the sovereignty of the nation-state is giving way to new transnational political and economic forms. One of the reasons for inconsistency and contradiction – such a tragic paralysis with regard to pushing forward democratic agendas – is that foreign policy is pushed in contradictory directions due to this unfinished political mutation in the West itself. We must also acknowledge the problems of 'interventions' from above. We have, thus far, a failed intervention in Iraq, and Afghanistan is not a real democracy.
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand There are serious arguments about how to pursue pro-democracy policies and we human rights advocates and democrats should think of ways of organising at the level of international civil society to make us independent of the short-term political agendas of governments. We should organise a vast network of solidarity that could provide moral support, even material support to people struggling for democracy. It is vitally important for the Iranian reform movement to know that it has supporters in the West beyond President Bush (who is quite popular in Iran). Fourth, the West has an ideological stake here. To treat the Iranian reform movement in the way Tekeyh suggests would only weaken the West's own ideological foundations and encourage Islamist terrorists. And, anyway, why should the Islamic regime be allowed to support the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or other groups in Iraq, while the democratic polities are not allowed to support their fellow democrats! The Politics of Iranian 'Elections' Alan Johnson: You have pointed out that Khatami's election victories were 'largely inconsequential' because 'while reform kept winning votes, the unelected organs of the state kept tightening the screws.' The election boycott movement emerged in the 1990s because high turnouts had only 'strengthened the regime's international position without bringing any increase in political freedom.' However, boycotts led to Ahmadinejad. (A turnout in 2003 of a mere 12 percent in Tehran – an Islamist rump – gave us Mayor Ahmadinejad, and, in 2005, President Ahmadinejad.) So how should progressives treat elections in Iran? Are elections still 'a subversive element within a closed ideological system?' Was the 2005 boycott a strategic error? What should democrats do in 2008? Ladan Boroumand: The Islamic Republic confiscates elections, empties them of their real meaning and turns them into their opposite. Genuinely free elections are an institution that crystallises on the political level the autonomy of the individual. The Iranian regime uses elections to crystallise the negation of the autonomy of the individual. A Guardian decides who is apt to rule you and how they will rule you and which laws they will impose on you. And the regime then calls on you to go and choose who is to do all this to you, from a range of people they have pre-selected! When you play this game you become an accomplice of the denial of your own autonomy. It has been a major ideological success of the regime to trick citizens to go and vote.
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Many who have suffered terribly at the hands of the regime do vote, of course. I have a friend who voted for Rafsanjani, knowing full well that Rafsanjani killed his uncle. Many people feel like prisoners, and look to voting to create a 'bigger window in the cell,' so to speak. I do not judge them – it's a moral and individual choice. But Havel says you pay a price when you become an accomplice in your own persecution. We have to defend with all our strength the dignity of democratic institutions and recapture these institutions from the hands of the regime that has confiscated them. The meaning of Ahmadinejad Alan Johnson: You have described the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as 'a man who stands squarely at the nexus of radical-Islamist ideology and terrorism.' What is the political meaning of his rise to power, so soon after the high hopes of the reform movement? And how should we interpret the regime's recent actions – the pursuit of the bomb, the Holocaust denial conferences, the 'wipe Israel off the map' rhetoric, the kidnapping of the 15 British sailors? Are these actions the expressions of a newly confident Islamic Republic or desperate efforts to escape deep problems? Ladan Boroumand: The election of Ahmadinejad is directly linked to the reformist episode. Khatami's new reformist language stimulated the opposition while his drive to modernise Iran's image on the international scene forced the regime to water down its radical ideological rhetoric and rein in, rhetorically at least, its violent agents. But this created new dangers for the regime. The regime risked alienating its own agents causing them to waiver in their loyalty or even fear their own arrest. The regime was running the risk of losing them, psychologically. Now, if elections and modernisation are bringing many electors to the polls, and the world is being given the impression of a 'popular' Iranian regime, well OK, that is a risk worth running to gain international recognition. But once the reform movement grew, and once the boycott began to bite, the regime said, 'Well, we must nurture our own base.' Under Ahmadinejad, once again the police and security forces can shoot people with impunity and women can be harassed in the streets. His rhetoric about Israel is another expression of this strengthening of the regime's orthodoxy. (Actually, it is a less euphemistic expression of what the Islamic Republic has always advocated.) His policies are aimed at remobilising the hard core supporters of the regime who
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand had been disheartened by 8 years of Khatami's ambiguous rhetoric. America's difficulties in Iraq have certainly boosted the regime self confidence, but this is deceptive. Since the election of Ahmadinejad Iran has faced three major popular uprisings in Kurdistan, Azerbaijan and Khuzistan. And it has been challenged by student activists, the women rights movement, teachers,' and sporadic strikes and demonstrations by workers.
Part 3: Reforming Islam Alan Johnson: Let's talk about the reform of Islam. The Iranian human rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi argues that 'an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith.' Drafting a women's rights law she relied on the central texts of Islam taught in the seminaries of the holy city of Qom, and proved that 'a basic right for a women could be guaranteed within an Islamic framework of government provided those in government were inclined to interpret the faith in the spirit of equality.' Like Saad Eddin Ibrahim, interviewed in Democratiya 8, she defends the idea of reinterpretation, or 'ijtihad,' to create a space for 'adapting Islamic values and traditions to our lives in the modern world.' However, she also warns that ijtihad is 'a tricky foundation on which to base inalienable, universal rights' – 'patriarchal men and powerful authoritarian regimes who repress in the name of Islam can exploit ijtihad to reinterpret Islam in the regressive unforgiving manner that suits their sensibilities and political agendas.' Is Islam compatible with democracy, equality and women's rights? How can the gates of ijtihad be opened? Ladan Boroumand: There are several questions here. First, is religious truth compatible with democracy? You can say 'yes' and 'no.' 'No,' because democracy is based on the assumption that truth is unattainable. Individuals are fallible – what they think is the truth might not be the truth. Democracies organise so each person can individually speak truth but not impose it on the society. But religions insist they know the truth and represent it. So there is always tension between religious faith and democratic beliefs. On the other hand, 'yes,' because according to all Abrahamic religions God is transcendent and there is nothing sacred about the world, which is only the creation of God. Nature is just nature, and man is sovereign on earth. Now, once man is defined as a free-willed entity that will be accountable to God after death, we have the conceptual ingredients for democratic systems. I know from my own studies of the theological origins of human rights that monotheism has been a key element in the nurturing and development of democratic philosophy. A nature
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 that is profane, and a man defined by reason, fallibility, and freewill – historically these elements have come from Abrahamic religions. The difference between Islam and Christianity is the difference in the role of the Prophet. Muhammad ruled the political community whereas Christ thought his dominion was not in this world. And that is what allowed Christianity to evolve. In the space evacuated by Christ, men could make human-made laws and deal with their temporal lives. We have a problem in Islam with Sharia law. A profound reform is necessary, but it is also possible. In some areas, Islam is more progressive than Christianity, particularly in the area of gender, because ontologically, in Islam, men and women were created equal, from the same earth, whereas in Christianity woman was created from the spare rib of the man. In dignity and creation man and women are absolutely equal in Islam. You can argue from the ontology of Islam to a reform of Sharia law. But a reformation of Islam will require profound intellectual debate among theologians. And here is a problem. Christianity has a much stronger intellectual backbone than Islam – there have been thinkers of the stature of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, the debates of the nominalists in the 13th and 14th centuries, the example of William of Ockham, and the controversies about the status of human beings on earth fought between the Papacy and the Empire. All of this intellectual tumult created elements for a philosophical debate that ended in the social contract. We just don't have this kind of background in the Islamic tradition. That's why it would be very fruitful for Muslim theologians and thinkers to know these debates. One of the projects we should support is the translation of the political and theological debates that took place at the end of the Middle Ages, which were really the key to the birth of democratic ideologies. Perhaps the Shia are more open to ijtihad at the moment. They have the example of the imams who renounced political power. The tradition of the twelfth imam is that he did not go after the power. The only person who waged war and has become a revolutionary hero for Muslims today is the third imam, Hussein. But if you read the traditional stories about Hussein and the war he waged in Karbala you can draw a totally opposite conclusion. The original texts tell that on the eve of the final battle Hussein conversed with God and was given two options; to win the war and rule the community of the faithful, or to be killed and join Him, God. Between the two options – temporal power and joining his friend, God – Hussein chose to be
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand killed. And this could be the symbolic myth we need – the religious leader, the heir to the prophet, renounces political power for the love of God. Alan Johnson: It seems likely that Tony Blair will set up a Foundation after he leaves office and one of its aims will be to stimulate inter-faith dialogue. Ladan Boroumand: There is a problem right now with traditional theological studies. They are really boring – how to wash your hands, and so on. They spend a lot of their time on nonsense. So intelligent elements of society are drawn to modern studies – engineering, law, and so on. Those who go to religious studies are not necessarily the brightest minds. It is very important to create a space where bright minds will be drawn to the intellectual challenge of theological reform and have the opportunity to study Judaism and Christianity and the debates of these traditions. But we need to be careful. Those interested in the real debate are often in hiding, or are not well known or are scared. The space for inter-faith dialogue must not be confiscated by the well-funded Wahhabists, and other brands of totalitarian Islam, who will seek to stop an authentic dialogue. 'Leninism in Islamist Dress' Alan Johnson: You have described the Sayyid Qutb's ideology as 'Leninism in Islamist dress' and noted the western 'revolutionary' language in Sayyid Abu'l A Mawdudi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Pakistan. Modern Islamism, you insist, marks the continuing influence of a modern Jacobin-totalitarian European ideology of the 'virtuous revolutionary minority.' You identify a lineage running 'from the guillotine, and the Cheka to the suicide bomber.' Can you please explain your thinking about the relation of the European Jacobin tradition to European totalitarianism and contemporary Islamism? Ladan Boroumand: They are so many points of continuity. For instance, to read the Iranian newspapers in 1979 and 1980 was to read a 'Leninist' discourse, but instead of 'the communist ideal' we had 'the Islamist ideal.' In both cases you could detect a power that saw itself as God on earth, organised as an all-powerful state, denying the right to individual belief, and reserving the right to define truth about and for the individual. The Iranian regime would look into the eyes of a believer and say 'you are not a true believer, you are not a true Muslim, and you are at war with God.' This was straight out of the Moscow Trials. It was not enough for the person to 'I am a Muslim, I do believe in God, but I don't believe in you.' That distinction
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 was not allowed to exist, just as it was not possible, as Trotsky put it, to be right against the Party. Another point of continuity was the revolutionary tribunals of the Iranian regime, which were exactly like the Soviet trials and before them, the French Revolutionary tribunals. And of course the status of the leader in the Islamic Republic is very similar to the status of the Leader in fascist or communist systems. And we have not paid enough attention to the role of 'sacrifice' in Islamism or its roots in the death-cults of the European totalitarian tradition. One of the major achievements of Abrahamic religion was to put an end to human sacrifice for Gods. The symbolic event, of course, is when the Angel stops Abraham from sacrificing his son for God. Suicide bombing is reinstituting human sacrifice. This would be outrageous to the Prophet – we have no precedent for that kind of behaviour. It is heresy. In all of this Islamism is more like the modern totalitarian death-cults than a religious faith. Alan Johnson: Since 9/11 the consequences of Islamism for the West have been plain. But you have written with passion of the tragic consequences of Islamism for Islamic societies, arguing that '[We have] lost the keys to our own culture' as a 'degenerate Leninism … pass[es] itself off as the true expression of a great monotheistic religion.' Ladan Boroumand: Totalitarianism in the west did not arise from the confiscation of a religion. It did so in our culture for a number of reasons. First, Islam lacks a formal organised church as an authoritative institution. Second, we lacked the rich philosophical and intellectual inheritance enjoyed by the West. Third, we experienced a rapid modernisation and a turbulent shift from tribal monarchies to nation-states. Fourth, we inherited political institutions from the West and did not go through the intellectual, political and socio-cultural struggle of inventing them. Fifth, latterly we have been awash with forms of 'revolutionary' ideology, as the West was. So we were poorly equipped to defend ourselves against the ideological attack of the Islamists. Moreover, the traditional religious seminaries had been more or less deserted by intelligent people and became stultifying places. They could not resist Khomeini's assault. They were outraged by Khomeini but they could not respond intellectually. Alan Johnson: Is it your view that to defend and advance democracy we must – in part – defend Islam against Islamism? That we need to frame Islamism as having imported the worst of the West – the totalitarian idea – against which a reformed
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand Islam and an internationalist democratic impulse must join forces to defeat? I'd like to talk about this as you strike me as one of the very few people who seek to think strategically about the battle of ideas we need to wage and win. Ladan Boroumand: As a liberal and secularist I am not the best person to defend Islam against impostors. As a student of political ideas however, I believe deconstructing Islamism in the name of Islam would be a good strategy. There are now a new generation of theologians who are more learned, and deplore the manipulation of the faith by Islamists. Many have non-theological backgrounds in engineering and other modern disciplines. There are religious thinkers in Iran who have put forward alternatives. One is Mohammad Modjtahed Shabestari who is thinking religion in terms of human rights and believes there is no contradiction. This movement is just emerging and should be nurtured. These thinkers are persecuted and the West should seek a protective role. For instance, a religious scholar Iran who was a feminist spent years working on the texts, finding a basis for equality between men and women. In a blink of an eye they stormed into his house, arrested and defrocked him, and confiscated all his notes. We have not heard from him since 2000. Alan Johnson: How can we protect these reformist theologians? Ladan Boroumand: In Europe protection came as a by-product of the tension between the Papacy and the Empire. The Imperial Court would protect those theologians who argued against the Pope's right to control temporal life and political power. If the worldly Princes had not protected these theologians they would have been burned at the stake. So what the West could do today is to create safe spaces for these debates to take place, free from the assaults of the revolutionary Islamists. We should have seminaries in the West to stimulate a real dialogue. I do not mean a culturally relativistic polite exchange of pleasantries, but challenging debate of the kind we witnessed in the 19th century between Ernest Renan and Jamal-el-din Afghani. Renan wrote a piece sharply criticising Islam and instead of taking umbrage, burning embassies or beheading hostages, Afghani took his pen and responded to him. We should be uncompromising about freedom of expression if we want a real debate to take place.
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Part 4: The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation Alan Johnson: You co-founded and help to run The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran. How did you come to set it up and what are its goals? Ladan Boroumand: The Foundation was created in March 2001 by my sister, Roya Boroumand and myself. We talked earlier about our father's assassination as an encounter with evil and how, slowly, we learned to live again. But the feeling of guilt never left us. The four children are all still dealing with this and we all believe that it is our duty to make sure that justice is done. When we saw the changes in Iran in the 1990s, and the rise of a new generation that wants democracy, we decided the time was right to set up the Foundation. We had long had this in mind. Alan Johnson: Please tell me about the Foundation's memory project for victims of the Islamic Republic – Omid. Ladan Boroumand: In 1982 we published a report 'Iran: In Defence of Human Rights.' At that time we were outraged that each political party was defending the rights of its own 'martyrs' while supporting the execution of those outside their ranks. We realised the problem was not just persecution by the Islamists but the failure of much wider layers of Iranian society to understand that no one's rights could be protected unless everyone's rights were protected. Omid is a bi-lingual virtual memorial, library and resource-centre. We seek to list every person killed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and create a file and a virtual memorial to them, telling the story of how and why he or she was killed. The only common denominator is that each victim is a human being who was killed while the due process of law was violated and his or her rights as a defendant were denied. It is our way of paying homage to the victims and to posthumously restore their rights. Omid is our way to remedy the irremediable. Evil consists in the eclipse of humanity and in Omid we can acknowledge each victim's humanity and create a space for empathy. We provide their loved ones with a forum to talk about them and even to mount the defence that they were not allowed to mount when they were alive. We are also sending a message to the killers: here are the people you wanted to erase from the surface of the earth and they live on in a virtual world and they are demanding justice.
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JOHNSON | An Interview with Ladan Boroumand We want justice for our father but we won’t get it if we don't fight for the right to justice for all fathers, all brothers, all mothers, all sisters, and all children. There is no right for us if there is no right for them. Our individual interest will be protected only when theirs is too. We want to tell our fellow citizens that we understand this, and invite them to understand it. And we want to send a message to the world about the Islamic Republic of Iran: this regime pretends to be an 'Islamic' regime but has killed thousands and thousands of Muslims; it pretends to be popular but rests on violence. Grief is profoundly unsettling. You can collapse, but you can also be overwhelmed by the need to understand and act. Your mind can become very open to learning. We want people to visit Omid and to learn – about human rights and how to argue for them. So we have also created a virtual library, and are translating the most important human rights instruments and classical texts on democracy. It is a work on progress. We have also dedicated a collection of the library to the memoirs of former prisoners, to tell their story. We also offer scholars and activists a resource bank of information about the Iranian pro-democracy movement. We have had over 400 people completing online forms, telling the story of their loved ones, many from the Islamic Republic of Iran. We interact with them without knowing them. They send pictures of their loved ones and we complete the case of each person slowly by interacting with the victims. Omid is the initiative of the Boroumand Foundation but we want it to be the project of the Iranian nation one day. Alan Johnson: What are you working on now? Ladan Boroumand: At the Foundation we are working on the translation of democratic classics. Right now we are translating John Locke's Second Treatise, Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless, and some of The Federalist papers. I am also working on an article for The Journal of Democracy assessing the prospects for the civil society movement in Iran. Later I would like to write a book based on our work at Omid, about the pattern of violence exerted by totalitarian regimes.
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Two letters about the exodus of the Iraqi Jews Editors: Ms. Lyn Julius, who wrote a Letter to the Editor in response to my review of Abbas Shiblak’s book, seems to have misread my conclusion. I do not conclude that the bombings against Jewish and other targets in Iraq were the ‘decisive’ factor behind emigration. Though I consider the possibility, I point out that we cannot properly determine the import of the scattered anecdotal evidence supporting such a contention. The absence of any ‘organised effort to collate such testimonies within the framework of a scientific survey’ has ensured as much. As a result, I describe the bombings as ‘a major factor’ behind the exodus. Such a distinction, though nuanced, is important. It is unfortunate that (an entirely justified) moral outrage at the Iraqi state’s poor treatment of its Jewish citizens sometimes leads to (a factually groundless) certainty regarding the reasons for a very sudden exodus. Ms. Julius also gets a few facts wrong. The Farhud is one example. Conflicting casualty figures aside, the Farhud of 1941 was not the work of the Iraqi state; it occurred during a power vacuum between the fall of Rashid Ali al-Kaylani’s government (which fled Baghdad before oncoming British soldiers) and the British reassertion of control. The term ‘Farhud,’ after all, means ‘breakdown of law and order.’ With the advantage of hindsight, we can certainly say that the decision by most Jews to leave their native Iraq in 1950-51 was a wise one. As portrayed most recently by Mona Yahia’s semi-autobiographical novel, When The Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad, the post-exodus era was a dark and oppressive time for those Jews who remained. In addition to Iraq’s descent into the world of military coups and dictatorships – bad news for all Iraqis – Jews quickly became the object of systematic persecution. Yet the focus of my review was much more limited; I simply wished to further investigate claims made by Abbas Shiblak, Moshe Gat and others concerning the significance of the 1950-51 bombings, an issue which is hardly as clear-cut as many make it out to be. Sincerely, Rayyan Al-Shawaf
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Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 Editors: A few years ago I had occasion to ask my uncle, who was ten year old when his parents left Iraq for Israel, about the claims, similar to those made by Rayyan Al-Shawaf. His answer tallied, to a great degree, with Lyn Julius’s main argument, that more than two thirds of the Jews were already gone or on their way out when those incidents took place. There was a rumour that Jews were responsible for those bombs, he said. The rumour persisted because, he said, this mode of terrorizing the Jewish population was an aberration – too small, understated, patently useless – from what Iraqi Jews had come to expect. They knew officially sponsored riots which involved mobs, organized from outside urban areas, and openly staged. There was nothing clandestine about them. That’s why the idea that these bombs were of Jewish origin had some purchase among Iraqi Jews. But the rumour was heard by a community that had already dwindled into insignificance. I also happen to know the daughter of Shafik Ades. She told me about her family’s history. Needless to say, the shadow of such a history haunts her to this day. She said that her father was a businessman who had no interest in Zionism whatsoever. I don’t know if it proves anything that the family, upon fleeing Iraq, moved to England and later on to Canada. Presumably, Zionism was not necessarily a value that they learned at home. Of course this is all circumstantial, but it does lend some support to Ms. Julius’s misgivings about Rayyan’s Al-Shawaf ’s thesis. It is also worth noting that for a community that was terrorized out their comfortable life, Iraqi Jews seem remarkably sanguine about Zionist culpability etc. Most Iraqi Jews who do not live in Israel love Israel, have relatives there and visit regularly. This however does not exclude some lingering resentment over the social prejudice Iraqi Jews had to suffer in Israel in the years immediately following their immigration. Since my information is anecdotal and personal, I do not feel I can creditably challenge Al-Shawaf ’s article. But I would like thank Ms. Julius for her points, which I think need to be made. Sincerely, Noga Emanuel
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