E-mail a friendBernard-Henri Levy
airdate September 16, 2008
A philosopher, activist and filmmaker, Bernard-Henri Lévy is also one of the most respected writers in Europe. He's the author of dozens of books, including the best-selling American Vertigo and Left in Dark Times. His films include the documentaries Bosna! and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo. Lévy co-founded the antiracist group SOS Racism and served on diplomatic missions for the French government. He started his career as a war reporter and became famous as founder of the New Philosophers group.
French philosopher and author explains the difference between anti-Bush sentiment and anti-Americanism. (1:27)
Full interview. (12:26)
Bernard-Henri Levy
Tavis: Bernard-Henri Levy is a noted philosopher, journalist, filmmaker and bestselling author whose previous books include "American Vertigo." His latest is called "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism." Bernard-Henri Levy, nice to have you back on the program.
Bernard-Henri Levy: Nice to be back, too.
Tavis: How are things in France, in Paris?
Levy: Not so good.
Tavis: Not so good.
Levy: We have a president who is a little strange. I'm not a great supporter of him.
Tavis: He's your friend, though. You've known him for years.
Levy: He was a friend. He was a friend, but -
Tavis: You're talking about Nicholas Sarkozy, of course.
Levy: Nicholas Sarkozy. I hope he's still president at the moment we speak - yes, I think so.
Tavis: (Laughs) Yeah, I think so - yeah, yeah.
Levy: There was not coup d'état. No, he was a friend, but when a friend begins president, he's a president, and you have to agree or not agree, and I don't agree with I'm.
Tavis: How, then, do you maintain the friendship, because your politics, your beliefs are much more left than his are. How do you maintain the friendship?
Levy: I don't maintain, really, the friendship. I will maintain when he will be out of office. Now, I'm a free man. I express freely my opinions on Darfur, on Georgia, on human rights topics. I'm a free spirit, and this book is a book of a free spirit, depending on nobody, no party, no president - nobody.
Tavis: How does Mr. Sarkozy take your strategy? How does he respond to your strategy of being friends when he's out of office, but criticizing while he's in office? How is he dealing with the truncated nature of your friendship at the moment?
Levy: I don't know. What I know is how I take myself; his promises are unfulfilled - unfulfilled. For example, this I say in the book - when he campaigned, he said, "I will be the president who will help the victims of the genocide of Darfur," which is for me one of the worst, heartbreaking bloodbaths of this moment. He did not do anything.
He said, "I will be the president who will be strong with Mr. Putin. I cannot stand this despotic Putin destroying Grozny and destroying Chechnya." He's the best friend of Putin.
So I don't know how he reacts to me. I know how I react to him - I react as I have always been in my life, with the right and with the left - and the subject of the book is the left - as a free spirit. Left is my family, the progressive camp. A lot of things are going very badly there too. I devote the book to them, like a free spirit.
This is the luck, the chance of an intellectual - depending on himself, able to say the truth when the truth has to be said.
Tavis: I want to come back to the truth that you tell in this book, "Left in Dark Times," in just a moment. Since you mentioned Darfur now a couple of times, you've been very outspoken about Darfur, and your formulation on Darfur really revolves around three movements, if I can put it that way - anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism. Explain those three things for me.
Levy: Yes. The left, in Europe and in America, believes, roughly speaking, that genocide can be only committed by white, stupid rednecks in France or in America. Genocide can be committed also by Black men like in Rwanda, or Arabs like in Darfur.
Number two, they believe that - the left believe that to have been a victim of colonization is a sort of vaccination against being bad. No, you can be a former colony, you can have fight and fought against colonization, and you can become a bad guy too, which is happening to the Sudan regime. They did fight against colonization, but they became at their turn some real butchers.
And the third illusion we have on the left is that when America is somewhere, when America is somewhere, we should be on the other side. This is a sort of Pavlovian reflex - America cannot be on the right side.
So if we see Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell before trying to say a word of compassion with the Darfuri people, it means in a Pavlovian way that we should help the Sudanese. A lot of people in America, people like Noam Chomsky, in France a lot of other names which are not very familiar here have this reaction.
Same with Bosnia - I devote a chapter in the book to that also. In former Yugoslavia, America was on the right side. I'm sorry to say it, I'm not a lover of America, especially. I like America, but America can do things bad. On former Yugoslavia, America was okay. America decided to punish the killers who were the Serbians.
You had a big part of the left who said, "Huh, huh, huh, if America is punishing the butchers, it means that the butchers are right." And they took the side of Milosevic.
So this is this sort of Pavlovian reflexes of the progressive camp in Europe and in America who are like a plague, who are like insanity, and I try to deconstruct all that in this book.
Tavis: Every summer I try to get out of the studio for at least a month to travel the world and the main reason I do that is because I want to get a view of America from the outside. I want to be able to stand outside of this place that I love and live in and see it through a different lens, see it through a different prism so that I can appreciate, if need be, or be more honest in my critique of our country if I need by.
And this view from the outside gives me a perspective you can't get from the inside. That's why I tell all Americans we've got to travel the world more often. So you live in Paris, you live in France, so you see from America from the outside most often.
To your point now, Bernard-Henri, about anti-imperialism and people thinking that if America is on one side it automatically means that they've got to be on the other side, how did that happen? How have you seen that get worse over the last eight years under Bush? Help me contextualize that reality around the world.
Levy: It is not a question of Bush. Bush is clearly the worst president you've had since a long time. (Laughter) But of course, of course - this is obvious now; everybody knows that.
But anti-Americanism has nothing to do with that, and it has nothing to do with that, I'll tell you why. Anti-Americanism does not hate the bad things which America does. Anti-Americanism hates the good part of America. It's a fact.
Look in the radical Muslim movements - al Qaeda and so on. What do they hate? They don't hate death penalty. They don't hate the movements - anti-abortion, which is the bad side of America. No, they hate freedom, they hate women being the equal of the men, they hate the right for every American and European man or woman to change religion if he wants. So anti-Americanism targets not the bad but the good side of America.
Tavis: Let me challenge you on that, though. You're the philosopher, but let me challenge you on that. That's part -
Levy: You are a sort of philosopher too.
Tavis: No, no.
Levy: Yes, you are.
Tavis: I hear that read and I accept part of that read, but I think it's a generous read, I think it's a charitable read, and here's why I say that. There are policies that this country has engaged in around the world that have nothing to do with freedom, have nothing to do with choice. We have made, to your earlier point, bad decisions about how we engage the world, so why can't their anti-American feeling be because of our bad political decisions around the world?
Levy: They don't care. I'm sure - I make a bet with you. If we could ask Osama bin Laden who he votes for in America, Barack Obama or John McCain, I'm sure he would vote for John McCain. I'm sure. Osama bin Laden, the radical Muslim movements, they want the worst America possible, you know what I mean?
This is the situation. So it has nothing to do with the policy of Bush. Of course Bush made a bad policy, of course I pray every morning for Barack Obama being elected. It would change - this I say in the book, too - it would change the face of America, it would change a lot of things all around the world. It will be really a new age.
But there is a core, a center of anti-Americanism which will not be liquidated if Barack Obama is elected. It will not be enough. Anti-Americanism, this is one of the main topic also of the book, is not the politics. It is nearly a religious feeling. It is a religious passion. Religion, you cannot solve it, you cannot suppress it, dilute it in reason, in arguments. It is stronger than that. Anti-Americanism is such a sort of religion it has an old age, it is very - an (unintelligible).
Anti-Americanism began in the 18th or 19th century. And again, the real target, the hate which is in anti-Americanism, is the best of America.
Tavis: This title, "Left in Dark Times," when I saw the book - the title can be read in one of two ways: That we are being left behind, left in dark times, or you're encouraging us to go left politically, progressively, in dark times.
Levy: No, I encourage us to go left. That's why I did not vote Sarkozy and that's why if I were American, I would vote Barack Obama. But I believe that the left has to go out of the dark times where she is today. Left is in dark times. Why? Because she - the left did not succeed in embracing the real stakes of today, because the left is too often prisoner of the old schemes of yesterday.
Because on some important topics - for example, anti-Semitism - my thesis in this book, that the new face of it, the new face of anti-Semitism, the real way in which it can express itself today is in the language of the left, which is anti-Zionist, the hatred of Israel as itself - whatever Israel does, good or bad, Israel as itself, which means a sort of crazy competition of victimhood.
If you are with the Jews, you cannot be with the Palestinians, or the love you give to the one you take it of the others. Please, no. All my life - this is what I say also in this book - is devoted to show that you can be in favor of the Jews, of the Blacks, of the Palestinians, of (inaudible) prosecutions, and that all this adds to each other. It is not a play where what you give to the ones is taken from the others.
Tavis: He is an iconic figure in his native France and one of the most respected philosophers the world over. His name is Bernard-Henri Levy. He has a new book out, it's called "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism." And whenever he comes this way, I'm always honored to have him on the program. Good to see you again.
Levy: Good to see you again.
Tavis: Thank you for coming in.
Levy: Thanks.
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