War, Evil, and the End of History [Paperback]

Bernard Henri Levy (Author), Charlotte Mandell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2004

From the maverick author of the international bestseller Who Killed Daniel Pearl? — "a gripping blend of reportage and philosophy," according to The New York Times — comes another startlingly original work of literature.

In WAR, EVIL AND THE END OF HISTORY, Bernard-Henri Lévy continues his daring investigation into the breeding grounds of terrorism with a series of riveting first-person reports from five of the world's most horrific "forgotten" war zones. In Sri Lanka, he conducts a clandestine interview with a terrified young woman escaped from a suicide-bomber training camp . . . he journeys, blindfolded, into the Colombian jungle to interview a psychotic drug lord who considers himself the successor to Che Guevara and fronts a bloodthirsty "guerilla" army . . . Lévy surreptitiously observes the nameless slaves working the diamond mines that fund an endless war in Angola . . . airdrops into a rebel stronghold in the blockaded Nuba mountains of the Sudan . . . and reports on the ongoing carnage in Burundi between Hutus and Tutsis. But Lévy is more than just a journalist: as France's leading philosopher, he follows the reports with a series of intensely personal and probing "reflections" considering how, in an enlightened, cultured, and well-informed society, these wars have acquired such a perverse "non-meaning." He considers war literature from Stendhal, Hemingway, Proust and others, and issues an excoriating response to those who have glorified it. He reconsiders his own background as a student revolutionary in Paris in May 1968, and as a 22-year-old war reporter in Bangladesh. And, in one of the book's most moving passages, he recounts his travels with Ahmad Massoud, the anti-Taliban Afghan leader assassinated hours before the September 11 attacks. Already a huge bestseller in Europe, WAR, EVIL, AND THE END OF HISTORY is the work of a scintillating intellect at the height of its powers. Bernard-Henri Lévy's previous book foresaw today's headlines about Pakistan's secret trading of nuclear technology and the nexus of terrorist groups behind the murder of Daniel Pearl. WAR, EVIL, AND THE END OF HISTORY is his brilliant foray into the next danger zones.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of France's most celebrated intellectuals and author of the French bestseller Who Killed Daniel Pearl? reports on five currently forgotten or marginalized war zones-Angola, Sri Lanka, Burundi, Colombia and the Sudan-and elaborates his eyewitness accounts with philosophizing about genocide, terrorism and the nature of history. The first part is philosophical travelogue, richly descriptive and highly visual in style. A lyrical yet disciplined commentator, Lévy teases out the underlying logic and cultural specificity of each site of devastation. Human encounters, such as a meeting with a young female Tamil would-be suicide bomber on the run or an interview with a jittery Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader in Colombia, are full of intelligent observation. The two million dead of Sudan haunt the ghost towns Lévy describes, and he never spares us details of atrocities. Burundi, a scene of total desolation, comes to represent his degree zero of despair. In the book's second part, the author mingles his intellectual autobiography (early Maoist activism, his first war reporting in Bangladesh) with essays on Hegelian definitions of history, the philosophy of ruins, war nostalgia, dehumanization, the laws of war and self-reflexive musings on the role of journalism. In these stylishly fragmented discussions he draws on readings in Nietzsche, Sartre, Bataille, Benjamin, Levinas and Foucault as well as on fiction and film. Mandell's translation preserves a singularly French style of lofty questioning that some readers may find slightly dizzying, even while they glean much from his erudite contemplation of the developing world's most tragic regions.
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Review

""Bernard-Henri Levy is accorded the kind of adulation in France that most countries reserve for their rock stars." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Melville House (March 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971865957
• ISBN-13: 978-0971865952
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,441,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Reflections on World Events, July 7, 2004

By 

Laurence Jarvik "laurencejarvikonline" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War, Evil, and the End of History (Paperback)

War, Evil, and the End of History
Recently finished Bernard-Henri Levy's latest book, War, Evil, and the End of History. There's so much in it, on a variety of different levels, it is difficult to capture in a paragraph. Bottom line: The book is a response to a number of philosophical arguments, ranging from Foucault to Fukuyama. Levy takes his personal transformation, comparing himself to, and distinguishing himsef from, Benny Levy in the Bangladesh civil war and May 68 events in Paris, as well as personal confessions from BHL travelling to hot spots today, such as Sri Lanka, to make a number of points:

*No single philosophical or political system can cope with the problems of war and evil, they are permanent features of human existence which must be confronted constantly.

*History does not "end." And the smaller and more remote regions are even more affected by it than the central powers.

*Islam is not the only movement that spawns terrorists and suicide bombers. There are fanatics and mass murderers wherever one looks for them, from Burundi, to Sri Lanka, to Rwanda, to Sudan--and his chapter on Sudan, written years ago, is particularly relevant today.

The style is intensely personal and stream of consciousness. But combining journalism with philosophy is pretty interesting reading--BHL's references to Malraux seem appropriate.

War, Evil, and the End of History combines theoretical reflection with striking descriptions of some forgotten messy realities. It is a good reminder that there are lots of loose ends out there, that politics is not the answer to everything, that academic writing removed from the facts of life has some shortcomings. It is also an antidote to the triumphalism of the "End of History" school, that briefly mutated into "Unipolar world" advocacy. This book shows us that facts and actual lived human experience are every bit as important as theoretical paradigms.

Fascinating, and challenging. Put War, Evil, and the End of History on your summer reading list.

23 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Connects 9/11 to Long Era of Imperial Deceit & Predatory Looting, September 18, 2004

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War, Evil, and the End of History (Paperback)

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to connect to more recent books.

There are some gems in this book, but it is *not* anywhere near the kind of blindingly brilliant, deeply philosophical work that the publicists would have you believe. He is a talented and very wealthy (inherited wealth) Frenchman of the Jewish faith who could be called the Bill Gates of French philosophy, fwith irst-rate marketing.

The author is clearly a courageous and inquisitive individual, and I would rank him third, after Robert Young Pelton and Robert Kaplan, in the "journalist-philosopher-adventurer" category. He has been to all of these places, he has seen with his own eyes, and he writes thoughtfully, if often tediously, about what he has seen.

The real gem in the book is the connection he makes between 9-11 and our deliberate ignorance of the many wars, genocides, crimes against women and children, torture, corruption, etcetera that we in the West have manifested. He writes with conviction and insight about the "meaningless war" across Africa, South Asia, around the globe, where entire regions have descended into a chaotic hell of kill and be killed, work and die, slavery or death, rape then death. His point, which I like very much, is that history does not end, it recycles, and in 9-11 and the global war on terrorism what we have is a "homecoming" of all these wars to America and its Western allies.

This is not, however, completely original, in the sense that the "Map of World Conflict & Human Rights" that I have been handing out to my adult students (thanks to Berto Jongman in The Netherlands for creating it, and to the European Centre for Conflict Prevention and Goals for Americans Foundation, among others, for funding its creation) ably documents all of this is a single compelling document, and many books in the 490+ that I have reviewed cover all aspects of these "ungovernable regions" in great detail.

The author is half absurd and half correct when he condemns the United Nations for its zealous pursuit of Israel as a racist and terrorist state, while the United Nations largely ignores the many genocides taking place from Russia and China to Indonesia and Brazil and Central America and onwards. He is absurd on the first count, correct on the second.

The book is fully worth four stars, definitely worth purchasing, for its articulation of a European view on "the heart of darkness" as it exists today. I was especially taken with his discussion of Buddhist versus Hindu terrorism and extremism and the use of child soldiers in Sri Lanka, since it makes the point that other religions, not just Islam and Christianity, spawn cycles of terrorism and ethnic violence.

The book concludes on a note worthy of the greatest philosophers, a reflection on the death of memory within Western civilization, the death of *moral* memory. Having just returned from Denver, where I was privileged to observe a two-week Office of Personnel Management course on National Security, a first-class endeavor, I was struck by the recurring theme, across virtually all of the world-class lecturers: "morality matters." Morality has a tangible value in helping nations, organizations, and individuals "get it right." The last two pages of the book are the best, and conjure up clear and frightening pictures of billions of dispossessed swarming over the European and US cities, bringing the despair we have ignored to our doorstep. Ignore history, ignore evil, and it will eventually, inevitably, come to your doorstep. We--or perhaps even more sadly, our children and grandchildren--will pay for our moral cowardice and our historical blindness. In these final reflections, the author does demonstrate a brilliance that requires us to attend to his future reflections.

More recent books supportive of this author's insights:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent, February 20, 2006

By 

Julian (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: War, Evil, and the End of History (Paperback)

After seeing the author on TV I was intrigued enough to buy all three of his books -- sadly, his newest, American Vertigo, was terrible. It seemed all the more so, however, in comparison with his other two books, which were both wonderful. Who Killed Daniel Pearl was a real thriller and very smart, but this book, War, Evil, and the End of History, was absolutely brilliant. It seems to be almost a model for American vertigo - reporting, followed by philosophical consideration of the reporting. But this book is about people and places that really matter -- Darfur, Sri Lanka, etc., not Sharon Stone and Warren Beatty. It is brave work -- Levy went to some very dangerous places -- and his writing about those places is stirring and beautiful. Thought provoking and like a trip to a totally different world and way of thinking; it made me see the world differently. Skip the new ones, read the old ones, especially this one.