The Golden Gate

There are plenty of books on my bookshelf that I like a great deal. And then there are those books which so deeply resonate wth me that I end up lending or giving copies away to my friends. Paul Berman’s fantastic Terror and Liberalism is in the latter category. To date, I have purchased over a half-dozen copies of this book and given away all but one dog-eared bookmarked copy.

What makes Terror and Liberalism so good? Berman sees with absolute clarity the nature of the war we’re in. He contextualizes the war against Islamic Fascism with precision and without letting partisanship or sentimentality cloud his analysis. Oh, and one other remarkable thing — Berman is an avowed leftist. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, among other things.

But for all his unimpeachable leftist credentials, Berman sees what so many on the Left (and quite a few on the Right) do not; that this war on Islamic Fascism really transcends questions of “Right” and “Left.” He builds an absolutely unasssailable case that “anti-fascists” from the Left, Right, Middle — and all the other directions — really ought to be making common cause. He elucidates the mentality and the movements that are aligned against and which threaten our Liberal societies — and he means “Liberal” in it’s orignal sense, as in “those which value Liberty.”

Terror and Liberalism is quite simply one of the essential books — if not the essential book — out there. Get it and read it, if you haven’t already. Or give a copy to a friend who is struggling to untangle the issues and the media’s reporting regarding the War on Terror.

One other thing; Berman’s book was originally published in the the Spring of 2003, just as the liberation of Iraq had begun. In the aftermath, Berman was continually assailed with variations of the question “hey, mr. leftist, do you support the move into Iraq?” Berman did, and does, and said so eloquently, forcefully and publicly. But he also brought out a revised edition of Terror and Liberalism last year which contained a new preface which explained just why. I’m posting an excerpt here, because it gives a fantastic overview of the issues which are explored in detaill in his remarkable work:

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My book proposes an interpretation of modern history, and I will mention a few elements of that interpretation here. In the last couple of centuries, a new kind of society has come into being–a society that tries to encourage individual freedom, and tries to keep religion and government in separate corners, and to encourage open debate, and in those several ways to inculcate a public habit of rational decision making. This is the kind of society that I describe as “liberal” — meaning liberal in the philosophical sense, based on liberty. Liberal societies and liberal ideas have prospered during these last centuries, and have spread to ever-larger portions of the globe, and have produced a few successes, here and there. These successes have filled many people with hope for a better world. But liberal society and habits of mind have also aroused, among other people and sometimes among the same people, feelings of violent revulsion. In the twentieth century, those feelings combusted into a series of political rebellions, which set out to overthrow liberal society and demolish the liberal ideas.

The anti-liberal rebellions were, in the beginning, strictly European. They were movements of the extreme right and extreme left–Fascists, Phalangists, Nazis, and Communists–each movement with its own set of paranoid conspiracy theories, its own apocalyptic fantasies, and its own fashion of celebrating death: totalitarian movements, each and all. The movements wrecked Europe. Yet they spoke to powerful feelings about modern life, and their inspiration spread outward to the world, and this did not exclude the regions nearest at hand, namely, the Muslim countries. A new kind of totalitarianism, drawing on the European model, grew quite strong, after a while, in portions of the Muslim world–a totalitarianism that flourished in several, sometimes contradictory, versions. Islamism the radical political movement (not to be confused with Islam the ancient religion) was one of those versions, and came in several variations of its own. The Baath movement of Iraq and of Syria was another, and the peculiar movement led by Muammar el-Qaddafi, still another.

These were rebellions in the twentieth-century mode, and just as bloody. Some of the totalitarian factions never did come to power. yet, even so, launched frantic campaigns of random murder. Some of the factions did come to power. During the months when I was writing “Terror and Liberalism,” reports came flooding out of occupied Afghanistan, and I pointed to those reports to show what totalitarianism’s triumph was like–the ease with which entire societies could be decimated, cultures destroyed, populations reduced. But that was before the second, more difficult invasion–before people had begun to ask me, what do you think, now?

So, then: I think the events in Iraq brought the picture I have drawn into a sharper and more tragic focus than before. Before the invasion, some people had imagined that Iraq under the Baath was merely a gangster state, ruled by a Mafia chieftain named Saddam. The revelations post-invasion did reveal a gangster state–but also something more. Sizable numbers of Iraqis in at least one region of the country plainly subscribed to the Baath’s paranoid conspiracy thenries and its cult of cruelty and death. The leader’s followers chanted, “With our souls, our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam!” and went on chanting even after his arrest–a chilling scene of fanaticism, and doubly so to anyone with a sense of European history.

The news pouring out of Iraq told us that three hundred thousand Iraqis were estimated to be missing, and possibly hundreds of thousands more, murdered by the Baath. We learned about hundreds of mass graves. We read one hair-raising story after another about nephews killed, brothers killed, athletes tortured, students raped, villages destroyed. And we saw something strange and unnerving. In the first months after the invasion, a portion of the Iraqi people appeared to be in a stupor–the stupor of people who had spent thirty-five years with a boot stamping on their face, in Orwell’s phrase, and who, in their grogginess, hardly knew how to react, once the boot was removed. We saw looting, assassinations, suicide bombings, and massacres–as if the face beneath the boot had become, over the years, covered with sores.

We saw nobler things. We saw the august medieval universities, the mosques new and old, the new police forces and the ancient merchant neighborhoods. And we saw that, in a great many of those institutions and places, some people were rousing themselves to put up a fight against the old order–sometimes only a few people, sometimes a large number. Their struggles seemed to be, from afar, confused and murky–disheartening struggles, often. Those were recognizable struggles, even so. They were struggles to create a normal political society in Iraq–the sort of struggles that have engaged vast portions of the world during most of the last century, struggles against the totalitarian movements not on the grand scale, but on the local scale, where life is lived.

We saw admirable people. And we saw the kind of support and solidarity those people received from elsewhere in the world–saw how miserly was that support, how cautious, how self-interested and sometimes how deluded. And this, too, the spectacle of people around the world failing to rally to the anti-totalitarians in their moment of crisis, conformed to a main pattern of modern history. For liberal-minded people have always had a good deal of trouble understanding the totalitarian rebellions against liberal society, therefore a lot of trouble in putting up a resistance. That was a big problem during the times of Hitler and Stalin. Forward-thinking and well-educated people with the most generous of ideals sometimes found it hard in those days to believe that Nazis and Stalinists were as bad as they seemed. And this phenomenon of the past, a deep-grained naivete of liberal society, turned out to be a phenomenon of the present. We saw a few signs of it even among people who prided themselves on their sophistication, and even on the brutality of their sophistication–the kind of people who would rather have died than commit the soft-headed errors of mere idealists.

Yet what else but a soft-headed naivete can explain the many curious American blunders that accompanied the invasion of Iraq? The commanders and strategists back in Washington seem to have planned for every possible thing, except an enemy who was driven by fanatical zeal. These were the same strategists who, after all, had never imagined that anyone would be so crazy as to fly a plane into the Pentagon. And so, the strategists threw America’s soldiers and the rest of the coalition into battle with nothing even remotely approaching adequate preparation, and the strategists had trouble recognizing their own errors, and the cost was terrible.

But then, what did everyone else do, good-hearted people all over the world, during those moments of American bungling? The invasion revealed that ordinary Iraqis were desperately in need of more help than the coalition armies could provide; and, around the world, some of the richest and most powerful of nations, pursuing their national interests, lifted not one finger in aid. The coalition soldiers likewise needed help; and still no aid. It became clear that Washington, in its underestimation of the enemy, was spending not nearly enough money; and the cry went up in the United States Congress that Washington was spending too much. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were new flare-ups of an old war, which has been going on for most of a century–the war between liberal society and the anti-liberal rebellions–this time in a series of Muslim landscapes. But the meaning of these Afghan and Iraqi battles remained invisible to entire populations all over the world, and a great many people went on gazing at those faraway battles in a spirit of detachment or even schadenfreude, faintly satisfied to see the United States floundering.

So the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq had to go forward despite the feckless naivete and irresponsibility of the strategists and commanders back in Washington, and despite the indifference and even the opposition of masses of liberal-minded people around the world. The American and British soldiers, the Spanish, Poles, Italians, and other partners in the coalition, the local administrators, together with the anti-totalitarian Afghans and Iraqis, whose sufferings were endless–these people, all of them, had to improvise as best they could, And they did improvise. The world is not without heroes.

And what were the final consequences?

Scenes of tragedy and nobility flit before our eyes, darkest shadow and brightest light, blurring our focus. We see, and don’t see. Fifty years will pass before we know the final consequences. Still, a few provisional consequences seem detectable even now. We can see that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, two of the worst political movements in the modern world have been driven from state power–though both of those movements, in their strength, have gone on fighting as guerrilla insurgencies. We can see that some 45 million people in those two countries have climbed up from a pit of eternal damnation to a still-miserable place in which a better future and a free society have become, at least, imaginable–a better society that has already loomed into sight, here and there within both of those countries. We can see that totalitarian impulses in the larger Muslim world have been dealt two very serious blows, and liberal impulses in the Muslim world have been given two very shaky, but also very unprecedented, boosts. And we are still in the middle of events, and things might go either way.

That is what I think, now.