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> It's kind of besides the point (because he's still a first rank enabler of
> humanitarian intervention), but didn't BHL go from right to left? He
> started out in the 1970s as a conservative [nouveau] philosophe. From
> there to founding SOS Racisme in the 1980s seems a move leftwards.
No, BHL was a Maoist who was close to Louis Althusser. One of his first books was a marxisant account of the war in Bangladesh. When Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' was first published, Levy was among the critics of the Russian "gaffeur", and leapt to the defense of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Only later did he decide that Solzhenitsyn had proved, once and for all, that terror was the lining of the sacrosanct coat of Marxism (as I think he put it). And it wasn't until 1977 that he made his debut as a "nouveau philosophe" This, of course, involved a huge amount of hysterics and accusations of totalitarianism and anti-semitism against his opponents. After that he has always been close to the Socialist Party, a hardline supporter of French and US imperialism (to the extent that he quit SOS Racisme when that body condemned the Gulf War in 1991). Btw, co-founding SOS Racisme wasn't really a "move leftwards". From BHL's point of view, aside from the perfectly laudible anti-racist agenda, it could also act as a vote-catcher for the PS.
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