Leftovers Book

This is the first time i've read something by BHL that i've found compelling and absorbing. now, don't get me wrong -- he's still a bloviating windbag and it's really the latter half that earns my praise -- but this is a damn worthwhile book. much as paul berman did in Power and the Idealists, BHL traces the history of the european left and proceeds to excoriate them for their present state…

BHL feels that it is a better world now that the question amongst the left, as posed by foucault, has changed from 'is the revolution possible?' to 'is the revolution desirable?' -- the left, BHL explains, no longer invokes History with a capital "H" or throws out stock phrases such as 'make an omelette you break some eggs' to justify murder… in his own words:

"Today I no longer see people trying to explain that concentration camps, massacres, crimes against humanity, genocides, can, in certain circumstances, bearing in mind a certain conjuncture or a relation of powers, be historically necessary, have an almost divine legitimacy, and may be part of the plan on the Absolute.

I don't hear many people say that the Chechen rebels are the salt of the earth of the Caucasus; or that the Palestinians are not about to achieve their own state but to regenerate humanity; or that the massacres in Darfur are part of the plan of History and therefore blessed by the Gods; I don't hear - as one still did thirty years ago with regard to other bloodbaths - that the humanists who get worked up about the victims of Rwanda are simpletons who haven't read enough Hegel and who would know, if they had, that the dialectic might very well have to chop off a few heads; and neither do I hear, as one did back then, literally, forty years ago, that the Tibetans are lice, harmful insects, germs, who can be treated only by the millenary political medicine of the Chinese."


but the european left is still a moral disaster and embarrassment. (as is the right, of course, but BHL a self-proclaimed 'man of the left' is interested in setting right his own 'family' rather than preaching to an opponent) it prizes certain myths such as 'a disavowl of Europe, anti-Americanism and the morbid fixation on Empire, this recurrence of anti-Semitism, this refusal to understand the truth about Fascislamism' over truth. and over morality.


and while there may be truth to the claims of those who loathe america, israel, etc, the overwhelming majority of their methods and arguments are wildly counterproductive and work to focus on a few 'glamorous' or high profile problems leaving countless africans, sri lankans, or colombians to stew in the shit… in other words, if your oppressors (or who the left imagine to be your oppressors) are not doing it (in reality or in fantasyland) in the name of empire capitalism or zionism… well, your cause and your life aren't worth our time.

moreover, BHL laments the passing of a time in which it was the left who were the anti-fascists and anti-totalitarians rather than the jingoistic and imbecilic right. BHL believes (again, as paul berman puts forward in his great and highly recommended Terror and Liberalism) that radical islam, whose modern origins come from the 30s, to be another of the forms of totalitarian movements that wreaked such havoc over the last century… and, again, mourns a time - ours - in which the right wing in their narrow, nationalist fervor is doing the fighting. furthermore, he's troubled that the neo-cons have so successfully scared the bejesus out of the left to the extent that they employ a litany of stock reasons (just about all of them bullshit) as to why a country should never enter or invade another country to put an end to genocide or mass murder.


BHL asks that the left erase 'castle in the sky' utopias and focus on true earthly suffering. that they drop the cultural relativism that allows them to demonize america, say, for school shootings, but turn away from the stoning of women as 'with western eyes, we are unable to make morality judgments on other cultures'. he asks that while they continue to push for a palestinian state they stop pretending that it is israel which is the cause of, for example, pakistani islamism and the taliban and ubiquitous middle-eastern hatred of women and homosexuals, for poverty and suffering and lack of education…

well, i could go on and on. but i won't. the point is made. and for someone who had always considered himself somewhat affiliated with the left ('somewhat' in that i have that gene - for which i am eternally thankful - that will never truly allow me to consider myself part of any group or institution) but has been so sickened by what he's seen that the 'somewhat' has transformed to 'sometimes'… BHL's book makes a lot of sense.