On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:13:16 +0000 "Lenin's Tomb"
<leninstombblog at googlemail.com> writes:
> On Jan 20, 2008 4:13 PM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > 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.
The whole point of the "nouveau philosophes" in France was they started out on the radical left, then decided by the late 1970s that Marxists had gotten things all wrong and that the revolutionary project as pursued by Marxists would inevitably lead to totalitarianism, anti-Semitism and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Nothing really new here. Nothing that hadn't been said earlier (and usually better) by people like Karl Popper and Sidney Hook, or in France by folk like Raymond Aron or André Malraux . Nevertheless, they made a big media splash, to the benefit of both the right-wing and Mitterand's Socialist Party which was attempting to cut the PCF down to size.
> 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.
>
> Full details in the book! Pre-order today! Etc.
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