Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath [Hardcover]

Paul Berman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2005 | ISBN-10: 1932360913 | ISBN-13: 978-1932360912

In January 2001, a scandal erupted when a series of photos from 1968 emerged showing German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and a group of leftist street toughs assaulting a cop. Paul Berman, one of the leading essayists and intellectual historians of the New Left, uses this event as a springboard to reflect on a crucial question for Western democracies today: was the violence-tinged radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s a force for social good or for social ill? This wide-ranging history of anti-totalitarianism explores the Left’s response to human rights abuses around the world, tracing the intellectual evolution of figures as various as Polish dissident Adam Michnik and Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) to argue that liberals willing to use power to protect human rights are the true heirs of the radical sixties, and that the Islamic totalitarian impulse he identified in the New York Times bestseller Terror and Liberalism must be opposed with vigor.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Berman is a wonderfully lucid presenter and analyzer of recent intellectual history, and his distinctive virtue is his cool voice." -- Nathan Glazer, New York Times Book Review

"One of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history." -- The Economist

"One of America’s leading public intellectuals" -- Foreign Affairs

"One of our most gifted essayists, a deeply pensive writer with a lyrical style and talent for imaginative synthesis" -- Boston Sunday Globe

"One of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America's New Left." -- Salon.com

"Remarkable...superb...lucid" -- New York Times Book Review. Nov 28, 2005

From the Inside Flap

In January 2001, Stern magazine in Germany published a series of shocking photographs of one of Europe’s leading politicians—Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister in that year. The photos showed Fischer as a young bully at a left-wing riot in 1973, beating up a policeman. In the European press, and eventually in the American press, the photos set off a massive accusation against the young radicals of the 1960s and their influence on modern life—a controversy that came to be known as "the trial of the Generation of 1968."

Paul Berman tells the story of this scandal. And he answers the massive accusation by recounting the political evolution of several people from that generation—Fischer himself; Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the French student uprising of 1968; Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders; and others around the world. Berman explains how, out of the leftism of circa 1968, a new kind of liberal and anti-totalitarian thinking slowly emerged—a moral logic that led some of the best-known ‘68ers to support the Kosovo War of 1999, and led those same people to quarrel bitterly with one another over the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War.

But mostly Berman tells a story. His story has the rhythm, complexity, characters and emotion of a novel. Yet this is not a novel.

This is the story of a rebellious spirit from the past, and how it has wended its way into the crises and traumas of our own time—a moving and sometimes puzzling story, disturbing, bracing, heart-breaking, and true.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (September 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932360913
• ISBN-13: 978-1932360912
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,386,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who were the generation of '68?, December 6, 2006

By 

I. Tysoe "Inna Tysoe" (Earth) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (Hardcover)

In Berman's lucid and wonderfully written account, they were people who were animated by the burning question: Would they have been collaborators or resisters in Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe? They were a generation for whom the question of totalitarianism (be it the totalitarianism that "had survived Nazism" in Western society or the totalitarianism that threatened to murder the Vietnamese Boat People) was a real issue; an issue of foreign policy. A Big Issue, rather than a rhetorical gesture to show that our cause is just. It is not an accident that Jimmy Carter (influenced by the 68ers) established the office of the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights; that Jimmy Carter "sent the Sixth Fleet into action scooping up the [Vietnamese] Boat People" (who were called such because a `68er who founded Doctors without Borders, Bernard Kouchner, rented a Boat for Vietnam to rescue the Vietnamese who were fleeing the Communists. Nor is it an accident that this same Kouchner became, under Mitterand, France's secretary of State for Humanitarian Action. A title that allowed him to send "humanitarian actions under the tricolor of France" into Africa.

For this generation then, the question of Yugoslavia, was not a question of real politik, not a sideline question but a question of central importance. And it is not an accident that this generation (of people who were leaders of the world by then) united (finally and too late some might say but united) and chose to intervene in Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds. Because "everyone had the right to D-Day".

But it was also this generation that, by and large, failed to ask the right questions about Iraq. For no matter how one feels about the Iraq war (and Berman points out some of the more lucid arguments for and against military intervention in Iraq) it is hard to deny that the generation of '68 did not make the humanitarian argument for war against Saddam as it had done for war against Milosevic. It was this generation that kept silent while the "bad US government" went to war for the wrong reasons (with disastrous results for this generation and perhaps the world).

It is a generation not without its flaws then; a genuinely human generation. And this is the beautifully-written story about who they were and are and what, in the end, it was all about.

I strongly recommend this book.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting book about the idealism of the Left, September 17, 2005

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (Hardcover)

This book is about idealists on the political Left, with a focus on Germany's Joschka Fischer. In the first chapter, Berman shows that the late 1970s brought home to many people just what the New Left had become: it had supported what became genocide in Cambodia and (roughly speaking) National Socialist policies by Arabs in the Levant. These were exactly the policies the Left had opposed so strongly in the 1930s and 1940s.

Of course, in the case of Zionism, the Left had switched sides in the past, supporting it in the early part of the twentieth century, opposing it in the 1920s and 1930s, supporting it in the 1940s, and opposing it once again in the 1950s and 1960s. But that's not the point. The Left had generally been against right-wing irredentism, racism, and genocide in the past. And some of it clearly went over to it in the 1970s.

In the next chapter, the author discusses some of the ideas of the European Left that "crossed the ocean," such as the Kyoto Protocols and the International Criminal Court. During the Clinton administration, Berman explains that there was an appearance of cooperation between the United States and Europe on these issues. But that fell apart in the present Bush administration. Next, Berman discusses a little about the American Left and the Muslim world. Do those who plead for human rights in the Muslim world get support from American Left? Not all that much.

We also discover how much support such rights get in Europe, and in France. How many on the Left in France preferred an American victory over Saddam Hussein to an American defeat?

Berman indicates that the ideas of the "generation of 1968," which opposed the Vietnam war and intended to be activists in supporting human rights are not those of this generation. The activists of 1968 wanted to be interventionists. They wanted to oppose oppression. But the ideas of today, on both the Left and Right, are a little different.

I think this is a fascinating book, and I recommend it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The New Left's Burden?, November 14, 2007

By 

Omer Belsky (Haifa, Israel) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (Paperback)

There are few books in English on contemporary European affairs; search for "Joschka Fischer" in Amazon.Com, and you'll find only this book in English (another, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany is not yet available).

While books about continental politics are few and far between, "Power and the Idealists" belong to another genre, of which there are many recent specimens. These are about the challenges of the Left in the modern world: with the collapse of the USSR -even before it - traditional leftist found themselves in a new world, where traditional orientations and slogans (Imperialism, Colonialism) seem increasingly irrelevant, and new realities and concepts (Islamism, Humanitarian Intervention) make some of them into uncomfortable bedfellows of those who "only yesterday" were the enemies - the US, Capitalists, NATO.

Various books deal with different Leftists or former leftists and these kinds of challenges: James Naughtie's The Accidental American is about Tony Blair and his strange alliance with Bush. Nick Cohen's What's Left? argues that the Left is lost in cynicism and moral relativism. The early parts of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq deal with Leftist illusions and disillusions past and present; From the Neo-Conservatives to the Liberal Hawks. Paul Berman's is probably the most compelling of the bunch.

Berman's heroes, like the subjects of these other books, follow roughly the same path, typified by Joschka Fischer's. They start as Leftist radicals (to a greater or lesser extent), with extreme and not always coherent views of justice and goodness and equality. They want to transform society, they dream of resistance to Fascism, Imperialism, and their earthly champion, America. They adore Che Guevara, and while they do not support the violence of the Baader Meinhoff gang, they are not too concerned with it; All are fighting the good fight, after all, even if some are misguided, even terribly misguided, in how they do it. Fischer went as far as beating a policeman, and getting caught on camera, leading to a scandal when the pictures surfaced some thirty years later.

Somewhere along the line comes disillusionment. For Fischer, it was Entebbe, when Palestinian terrorists and their German allies not only abducted a plane and threatened to kill its passengers; they also divided them into Jews and Gentiles, releasing the latter while keeping the former captive. For a Leftist like Fischer, the echoes of the Holocaust were too eerie.

Disillusionment had many triggers. For some it was the events in Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese, after vanquishing America, turned against their own people in massacres far worse than My Lai. It might have been watching Che Guevara a little bit too close for comfort; the revolutionary hero was far from what most Leftists made of him.

The realization that the West was not invariably wrong, and that its power could be used for good was dramatic. Berman's heroes (he calls them the 68ers, for a generation shaped by the events of the late 60s and early 70s), as they grew and as some of them came to power, brought their ideals into actions, including military action. They wanted to defend human rights and prevent atrocities, at gunpoint if necessary. The Kosovo War had arguably been their finest hour - a humanitarian effort in which NATO soldiers fought not to further traditional realpolitik ends, but to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

... And the war came. The Iraq war confronted the 68ers with a dilemma. They liked George W. Bush not one bit. Everything about the vulgar American rubbed them the wrong way. They disliked and distrusted his justification for war. But they abhorred Saddam Hussein. Thus the Iraq War saw a fault line in the 68 generation, when the unity of this New Left was shattered: some of them supported the US administrations -while others tried to find a path that would allow them to oppose the war and the administration without supporting its enemies.

Berman presents the failure of the Iraq adventure as a consequence of the supreme incompetence of the American administration, and of lack of support from European nation, especially France (p.257). Nowhere does Berman consider the possibility that the task was too onerous. The Law of Unintentional Consequences has no place in Berman's account, nor does he have any doubt of the capacity of an effective policy to solve Iraq's (and the world's) problems. Berman and his heroes have had many disillusions, but they were not disillusioned of the power of technocracy. The idea that there may be limits to the statist policies doesn't seem to have crossed Berman's mind.

A related problem: the treatment of Islam. The chapter of Islam is viewed through the writing of Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) and of course Kanan Makiya (author of the anti-Baath Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition; No book of this genre is complete without him). When Berman looks at extreme Islam, all he sees is a Totalitarian system, a western ideology in eastern clothing. I think this is an important insight, but a very partial one; there's something seriously wrong with a discussion of radical Islam that pays more attention to Hannah Arendt then to the prophet Muhammad.

This is a general problem with Berman's humanitarians: how little these would be saviors know about the world they would save! Berman's account of Western thought and politics is deep and insightful; His commentary on the rest of the world is shallow and clichéd.

And Berman hardly reflects on how familiar the Interventionist Left seems to those who remember the past. Berman's history starts in the 1940s, but the Leftist quest reminds one of a much older tradition, an earlier generation of Westerners who sought to save the rest of humanity. "Take up the White Man's burden" Kipling wrote in 1899 "The Savage Wars of Peace/Fill Full the Mouth of Famine/and bid the sickness cease ... "

And yet... the Kosovo War did stop the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population, and did dispose of Slobodan Milosevic, didn't it? And so, perhaps...?