Demosophia

Paul Berman's Challenge

Although Paul Berman has taken considerable heat from the "New Left" about his views on the "War on Terrorism" his leftist creditials are intact, and his stand on issues relating to Islamo/Fascism are principled. Check out his recent Op Ed in the NY Times: "Will the Opposition Lead?". It is a challenge to Kerry that is genuinely substancial, in a way that the Kerry handlers have not been. A few key paras:

American foreign policy acted on that impression [that the "coming utopia" was seen by some in a secular and by others in a theocratic light, and that this represented an exploitable division between extremist movements], and tried to play the movements against one another, and backed every non-apocalyptic dictator who promised to keep the extremists under control. The American policy was cynical and cruel. It did nothing to prevent those sundry movements and dictators from committing murders on a gigantic scale. Nor did the policy produce anything good for America, in the long run. For the sundry movements did share a common outlook, which ought to have been obvious all along — the paranoid and apocalyptic outlook of European fascism from long ago, draped in Muslim robes. These movements added up to a new kind of modern totalitarianism. And, in time, the new totalitarianism found its common point, on which everyone could agree. This was the shared project of building the human bomb. The Shiite theocrats of Iran pioneered the notion of suicide terror. And everyone else took it up: Sunni theocrats, Baathist anti-theocrats of Iraq and Syria, the more radical Palestinian nationalists, and others, too. The Sept. 11 attacks came from a relatively small organization. But Al Qaeda was a kind of foam thrown up by the larger extremist wave. The police and special forces were never going to be able to stamp out the Qaeda cells so long as millions of people around the world accepted the paranoid and apocalyptic views and revered suicide terror. The only long-term hope for tamping down the terrorist impulse was to turn America's traditional policies upside down, and come out for once in favor of the liberal democrats of the Muslim world. This would mean promoting a counter-wave of liberal and rational ideas to combat the allure of paranoia and apocalypse.

If you'd like to help, beyond maintaining your own blog to "set the record straight" wherever you can, here's a good way. Posted by Demosophist at April 16, 2004 11:37 AM | TrackBack