[Lt_Apple]

What follows in an 18 page interview with Paul Berman, the author of "Terror & Liberalism"


Interrogating Terror and Liberalism: An Interview with Paul Berman
Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (1997), Terror and Liberalism (2003) and Power and the Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (2005). Over the years he has written about politics and literature for The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and other magazines. He is a contributing editor of the New Republic, a member of the editorial board of Dissent, and a writer in residence at New York University. Ellen Willis has written that 'The left's ability to address the issue Berman raises is nothing less than a test of its ability to make sense of the contemporary world'. The interview was conducted on May 24 2006.

http://www.democratiya.com/interview.asp?issueid=5

[Drugmachine]

Thanks for this thread, this guy is brilliant!!!!

Here is a person who is a self confessed leftist but has not followed the rest of the herd. Here is what I liked about what he said:

• He recognises that Islamism (not Islam) is a form of totalitarianism
• He recognises that Islamists are much more dangerous than conventional terrorists because Islamists have an explicit aim to cause mass death and casualties in the millions.
• Unlike many other leftists, he is not reflexively anti Bush. He is just critical about Bush's methods.
• He is critical of Bush because he preferred the use of attention grabbing headlines (such as WMDs and Iraq/Al Quaida relations) to justify the invasion of Iraq rather than the issue of human rights in the same way that it was used in Kosovo.
• He recognises the fact that the military options do play a role in the fight against Islamism (not Islam).
• He is however critical of the fact that the fight for "the hearts and minds" of Islamic people has not been conducted appropriately
• He is highly critical of his fellow leftists for not recognising the danger stemming from Islamism (rather than Islam) and for choosing to wage a war against Bush rather than helping him on his weak front of counteracting the ideas of Islamism in "the war of ideas" which is the more important aspect of this war.
• He is critical of his fellow leftists in the west for marginalising, rather than supporting, the liberals in the Muslim world (people like Karzai).
• He is also critical of them because rather than choosing to contribute constructively in the fight of ideas, they are just reflecxively turn on bush in disputes such as Iran's proposed nuclear initiative

I particularily liked his following statements, which I quote below:
The crucial place for this war of ideas, by the way, is Europe. In so much of the Arab world, and Iran, it is very difficult to have a serious debate because the conditions don't exist. In Europe they do. And in Europe there is a vast Arab and Muslim population. In fact many of the deep underlying ideas of radical Islamism, Ba'athism, and radical Pan-Arabism were European ideas to begin with. Totalitarian movements have regularly been greeted by the blindness to which liberalism is prone, and even by apologetics. Hitler, and not just Stalin, had his apologists. Without these apologists neither one of those dictators would have been able to get as far as he did. And what we are seeing now is something exactly parallel. There are only a few screwballs defending Al Qaeda, or Zarqawi in Iraq, or applauding Saddam. But the people who really matter are those (many more numerous) who find some way to say either that these totalitarian movements are normal, natural, rational, or, in any case, that they should be ignored because we should focus our attention on defeating Bush. In these ways, the adherents of the totalitarian movements are not given much opposition and sometimes are even given a back-handed support. So, naturally, the movements prosper. In regard to Stephen Schwartz's criticism, I don't write about Islam at all. I only write about Islamism. I assume that Islam, like the other great religions, is a huge piano keyboard on which one could play this tune or that. Islam isn't the cause of the problem. Islam is the setting of the problem. Islam has offered a language for the totalitarian movements but an anti-totalitarian language could just as easily be drawn out of Islam, and is by some people.