BHL Indicted

I'm a few weeks late on this one, but it's worth posting nonetheless. On Counterpunch (here), Tariq Ali writes:

“Order for the  indictment of Bernard-Henri Lévy before the Assize Court, and for  his arrest:
             
We have determined that whereas investigation has established the following facts concerning the accused:

- His unrelenting promotion of imperialism and Zionism,

- His intellectual fakery, symptom of philosophical nullity amid the accumulation of capital and power,

- His leveling of false accusations and calumnies against Iran,

- His warmongering and advocacy of “humanitarian imperialism,”

- His aiding in the creation and promotion of SOS Racisme to smother autonomous immigration movements,

- His dissemination of false news likely to sow social and eligious discord between Christians and Muslims.

For these reasons, we rule that  there is sufficient evidence against Bernard-Henri Lévy that he  committed such acts, punishable under the Criminal Code, in regard to Articles 175, 176, 181, 183 and 184. We order the indictment of Bernard-Henri Lévy, to be lodged at the Court of Assizes of the department of Seine- Saint-Denis to be tried according to law.”

Executed in Chambers, December 18, 2010.”

We've been following BHL's antics for some time: whether he is working some bad scholarship, blabbering about Icelandic volcanoes, or prevaricating about Israel/Palestine.

Slavenka Drakulic, "Two Underdogs and a Cat: Three Reflections on Communism"

(Seagull Books, 2009)


The four title Seagull Books series "What was Communism?" risks giving something of a wrong impression of its editor. Tariq Ali remains an "inveterate socialist", and this would suggest that the backward-looking orientation of the series cannot be the last word. As Devin pointed out in his review of Ali's own contribution to the series, one is left wanting a "What is Communism", or even "What will Communism Be?" Despite the pitfalls of a backward-looking emphasis, I recommend all four books in the series for their clarity, breadth of scope, concise delivery and - the bibliophile in me can't resist! - the excellent graphics and packaging. I'll only speak here of the fourth installment, Drakulic's Two Underdogs and a Cat.

Whereas the first three titles in the series are straight-up assessments of the history of communism, Drakulic delivers her reflections on communism in eastern and central Europe by using a time-honoured ploy: speaking from the perspective of animal characters. She invokes Orwell of course, but one is also reminded in places of the magical realism of Mikhail Bulgakov. This makes Drakulic's book the most fun of the series, but despite employing this whimsical literary device she has much to teach the reader about real historical conditions (and with a surprising degree of subtlety). Animals, because of their unique subject positions within any given society, would be in a privileged position to explain much of what goes unnoticed in everyday life if they only had a voice. Drakulic indulges in imagining what they would say if they had this voice; in the case of the first two chapters at least, her gesture amounts to constructing a history from below - way below.

The book is divided into three first-person narratives: a mouse living in the Czech Museum of Communism tells a visitor about life under a Soviet proxy government, and the failed hope of a genuine Czechoslovak socialism; an old dog in Bucharest traces the hundreds of thousands of stray dogs roaming about the city to the urban policies of Ceaucescu; finally, the house cat of divisive polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski writes a letter to the courts explaining the extenuating circumstances and character traits which led her owner to declare martial law in 1981. Drakulic manages to deliver history lessons through the mouths of her protagonists without overlooking the many grey areas of life under actually existing communism. To say that her book is an indictment of the communist system in eastern and central Europe would be too simplistic; she rightly points out that the complicity of citizens under such regimes was not solely the result of state terror but also because of the very real securities that the regimes could afford. Post-communism is rightly portrayed by Drakulic as at best a mixed blessing, and at worst a major regression for the vast majority of citizens.

Readers could probably polish this book off in an hour or two. It gets my stamp of approval for making history - even the dreary history of communist satellite states - at once humorous, serious, thought-provoking and digestable.

Tariq Ali Profiled in the Guardian

On The Notes Taken, our references to Tariq Ali have discussed his critique of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, more recently, his book The Idea of Communism. I've read several of his more recent books on politics (and Joshua has a hard to find title in which Ali praises Boris Yeltsin...), but none of his fiction. The reason is simple: I have been interested in his Islamic Quintet, but as a completist kind of reader, reading one volume requires reading all five, which is a serious time commitment when I've got so many other projects going. I had been mulling all this over while I wrote the review of The Idea of Communism, which is why I found the Guardian's recent profile of Ali's 'life in writing' interesting. James Campbell gives an overview of Ali's Islamic Quintet on the occasion of the publication of the final volume, the Night of the Golden Butterfly. A few highlights:

[Ali claims] "the first criticism of Obama in a work of fiction. It just came to me at the time the drone attacks were taking place against Pakistan. I thought: I want to be the first." His gleeful laugh belies a long opposition to American foreign policy, which has not been mitigated by the election of a [...] hope-and-change president.

It is also mentioned that the Rolling Stone's wrote "Street Fighting Man" for Ali, who in turn titled his autobiography Street Fighting Years. I thought a few of my friends would like this:

In Street Fighting Years, Ali describes how he asked Jagger to write out the words of "Street Fighting Man", to be printed in facsimile in the Black Dwarf. "He agreed immediately. We photographed the sheet of paper and I threw the original into the wastepaper basket. No one in the office thought this was sacrilegious. The cult of the individual is always a substitute for collective action."

However, there's no mention of Ali's The Idea of Communism, or the series "What was Communism?" We're currently planning on reviewing the other three volumes in the series: Piero Gleijeses's The Cuban Drumbeat, Boris Kagarlitsky's Back in the USSR, and Slavenka Drakulic's Two Underdogs and a Cat: Three Reflections on Communism.

Ideas of Communism: Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism (2009) serves as the introduction to the Seagull Books series "What was Communism?," which includes three other volumes evaluating the history of communism in Cuba and the former Soviet Union. Ali outlines a short history of communism, including its successes and its failures, as an antidote to the  de-politicized amnesia that surrounded the occasion for the book, the fall of the Berlin Wall, not least the irony that such celebration took place during one of the deepest crises of capitalism since the Great Depression.

Much of Ali's argument is summarized in the following passage:

A twenty-first-century socialism based on a socially just economic structure coupled with a radical political democracy would offer the most profound and meaningful challenge to the priorities of the capitalist order in the West, which triumphed largely because of the bureaucratic despotisms that led to the besmirching of socialism in the former Soviet Union. The price paid for the survival of capitalism has not been a small one: two World Wars, genocide against colonial peoples...the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians (while protecting the Emperor who unleashed the war); the use of chemicals in Vietnam; institutionalized misery in the 'Third World'; and the threat of a nuclear conflagration that could obliterate all life on this planet (89-90).

"Nor has the twenty-first century started well..." he continues, citing the continuing human cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, not to mention the latest financial crisis. With such a mounting cost, it is clear that an alternative vision and understanding of the world is necessary. The idea that society ought to be organized around the principle 'from each according to ability, to each according to need' is no less valid than it was when worker's struggles began to shake the industrialized world. Nor should we dismiss Marxist critique, which is one of the few that can explain why capitalism continues from crisis to crisis, with increased ruin behind it: capitalism is a system of distribution structured by inequality (be it by class, geography, etc.).

The brevity of Ali's account is both its virtue and its vice. For his intended audience, those who are not familiar with the history of communism, the arguments and the narrative are clear and concise,  never falling into  tired debates or jargon; there are no long digressions on how Leninists or Stalinists or Trotskyites or Maoists scored theoretical points against each other. Sometimes, however, the brevity requires Ali to simplify or schematize his account (so one is left with the impression that a self-interested bureaucracy is the primary fault of state communism, which is true to a degree but there are other sides of the failure of communism that could be explored, including continued class struggle and constant capitalist/imperialist aggression...). 

Nevertheless, Ali makes sure to underline the advances that these societies experienced under communism (standard of living, health care, housing, etc.), because these are precisely the features that point toward the future. Hopefully the series "What was Communism?" will be followed by "What is Communism?" and "What will Communism be?"

The Sunday Review

Things are getting into order at The Notes Taken.

Coming up in the next week, we've got Sean Moreland reviewing Anna Powell's Deleuze and Horror Film, and sometime soon, Jamie Bradley will be reviewing Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Matt McLennan and I will, in our own ways, contribute something.

Today, in the New York Times Book Review, Jim Holt reviews Logicomix (written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou; illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna):

Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.

And, in The London Review of Books (although this article is from late July), Tariq Ali provides a glimpse into the politics of Pakistan. In sum,

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’.

And my recent project on Sartre and the New Atheists leads me even further (back[?]) into the arcane and otherwise. I've started on Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution, while Hegel's Faith and Knowledge taunts me from the shelf.