Terror and Liberalism [Hardcover]

Paul Berman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2003

A manifesto for an aggressive liberal response to terrorist attacks, this text argues that in the terror war we are not facing a battle of the West against Islam, a clash against civilizations, rather, that we are facing the same battle that tore Europe apart during most of the 20th century, only in a new version. It is the clash of liberalism and its enemies: the battle between freedom and totalitarianism that arose in Europe many years ago and spread to the Muslim world. The author considers the wars against fascism and communism from the past and draws cautionary lessons from them. He also draws a liberal programme for the present from those past experiences, a programme that departs from the policies of the Bush administration.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Berman puts his leftist credentials (he's a member of the editorial board of Dissent) on the line by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror, joining a discourse that has been dominated by conservatives. The most original aspect of his analysis is to categorize Islamism as a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism; drawing on the ideas of Camus in The Rebel, Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death. He illustrates this progression through a nuanced analysis of the writings of a leading Islamist thinker, Sayyid Qutb, ending with some chilling quotations from other Islamists, e.g., "History does not write its lines except with blood," the blood being that of Islam's martyrs (such as suicide bombers) as well as of their enemies, Zionists and Crusaders (i.e., Jews and Christians). Berman then launches into his most provocative chapter, and the one he will probably be most criticized for in politically correct journals: a scathing attack on leftist intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, who have applauded terrorism and tried to explain it as a rational response to oppression. Berman exhorts readers to accept that, on the contrary, Islamism is a "pathological mass political movement" that is "drunk on the idea of slaughter." A former MacArthur fellow and a contributing editor to the New Republic, Berman offers an argument that will be welcomed by disaffected progressives looking for a new analysis of today's world.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

So new that at press time the publisher's sales reps had yet to hear about it, this work considers how liberals can respond to the threat of terrorism.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 214 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393057755
• ISBN-13: 978-0393057751
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.9 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #981,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 77 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars *Terror and Liberalism*: A Great Book for the Century September 28, 2003

By Sam Condon

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Paul Berman's *Terror and Liberalism* might very well be the first "great" book of the 21st Century, since it's probably the first book that really captures what the 20th Century was about, and what we have carried over into the 21st as unfinished business. But the book may not get the attention it deserves, because it isn't a very scholarly work. It manages to discuss totalitarianism without referencing Hannah Arendt even once, and it doesn't have so much as a minimal Index. What it has, instead, is a coherent thesis. Consider the following passage:

"He [Albert Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and the nineteenth century and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. (p. 46)"

This is an enormous insight, and to be frank it does not appear with such clarity in Arendt's work. Her explanation, that loneliness has become an "everyday experience," seems grossly inadequate. Surely the notion that it's all a matter of loneliness appeals to a sense of profound irony, but couldn't we all just get a puppy? This was the payoff for all that scholarly zeal and industry?

Moreover, Arendt never makes the connection between terror as an organizing principle for a 20th Century form of government, and terrorism as a strategy of totalitarian movements that are out of power. And so she did, in fact, miss something important.

And of course even if Arendt had not completely missed the seeding of the Middle East with the totalitarian ideas of the Nazis and the Stalinist,s she never would have guessed that Islam itself could become the excuse for such a movement. She, herself, had been a product of the German Counter-enlightenment. Her mentor, Martin Heidegger, made a vain bid to become the philosopher of National Socialism, and would have succeeded had not the Nazis been too clever. So she has no excuse for missing the role that the Counter-enlightenment plays the writings of the Ba'ath founder, Michael Aflaq, and the Islamist founder, Sayyid Qutb.

So if Berman lacks some background, he does manage to get to the heart of a matter that deflected more scholarly minds. And he stands as the first to make this leap. Even today people don't appear to see the connection between Jurgen Habermas' "Lifeworld vs. System World" typology, inherited from Husserl and Heidegger, and the philosophy of Qutb, which simply maps the same concepts into the religious framework of Islam. The insight that man had become alienated from his own nature, whether through the "false consciousness" of Marx or by our "deluded faith in the power of reason," makes virtually the same diagnosis as Qutb. So it's not really that surprising for Arendt to identify loneliness (alienation) as the culprit. Of course, it had to be. There is not such a great distance, philosophically, between Qutb's "hideous schizophrenia" of modern life, and the nostalgic longing for the "Lebenswelt" that drives much of modern European philosophy.

Liberalism did not evolve as a cure for the condition of man. It evolved as a cure for the tendency of mankind to become dogmatic. Hence it looks nothing like a cure for mankind's inherent ills. It doesn't regard mankind as "alienated" from himself. One side sees the human condition as tragically fragmented, and seeks a remedy in unity. The other sees the longing for a remedy as the problem, a compulsion to worry the patient to death.

Berman reflects this insight in his critique of Noam Chomsky, whom he views as "the last of the 19th Century rationalists." But this analysis, though informative, doesn't quite capture the slipperiness of Chomsky, whose philosophy is ultimately counter-rational. While Chomsky does, in fact, tend to see the world in the simplistic terms of a "greed vs. freedom" dialectic, his main problem is that he really has no program for calamity. Berman is probably more clear about totalitarianism than liberalism, which may be why his great book ultimately reaches a sort of impasse.

Why is it the Americans who recognize the necessity? Why is the American faith that the sovereignty of others means security for themselves so exceptional? Why are the Americans so uniquely disinterested in perfecting mankind? Perhaps we need to be as canny as those Germans were, about communicating the antidote to their philosophies of "revolutionary nationalism and totalitarianism?"

Ultimately Berman gets it. The problem lies in the habit of wishful thinking that afflicts most of America's historical allies, and some of its own deluded clan. Without any capacity to confront calamity the natural tendency is to deny it. Pretend it doesn't exist, or is an exaggeration and you need not change your worldview, or your mind. (But you may be obligated to hate the bearer of bad news.) Thus Chomsky's obsessive unwillingness to be impressed by 9/11, an attitude also affected by Michael Moore, and by Derrida and Habermas recently. And it's only this resistance to the horns of the dilemma that represents the impasse. How could there be any problem that can't be resolved by a trick of the tongue or the eye? Oh, I mean by revealing the tricks, of course. It was all just a trick of the eye that day in early September. Don't be alarmed.

But thanks to Berman's eloquence we are able to see such pretense for what it is. We are at last able to perceive clearly the continuity of the beast that replaced chattel slavery as the world's consummate evil, and is destined to one day join it on the ash heap. It is alarming. But not beyond us.

...

73 of 82 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The naked truth about fundamentalist terrorism... May 12, 2003

By jmk444

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Paul Berman's "Terror and Liberalism" is an excellent attempt at finding common ground between America's political Left and Right, at least when it comes to the current "War on Terror." Berman painstakingly shows Islamic fundamentalism for what it is, a mass political movement, actually the combining of two mass political movements - pan-Arabism (ie. the Baath party) and pan-Islamacism (ie. al Qaeda and the Islamic Jihad) that are both devoted to violence and diametrically opposed to the Western Liberal tradition.

Berman also argues that the Left in America has as much at stake in the "War on Terror" as do those on the Right.

Paul Berman's historical research is excellent, following the path of the modern pan-Islamic movement to its roots with Sayyid Qutb (ku-tab) author of "In the Shade of the Qur'an," "Social Justice in Islam" and other works. Qutb attended the Colorado State College of Education in the late 1940's and earned a Masters Degree, but came away thoroughly disgusted with what he saw as "the barbarous West." He was especially disgusted by what the West hailed as "the emancipation of women" and "sexual liberation."

At the same time that pan-Islamacism was growing, pan-Arabism was coming into political prominence behind such figures as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Though the differences between the two camps were subtle - pan-Arabists wanted a return of the old Ottoman Empire, while pan-Islamacists envisioned a world under shariah (the legal code of Islam) - they were also volatile. Berman describes the differences between the two groups as akin to the differences between the Italian fascists under Mussolini who sought to rebuild the Roman Empire and the German Nazis who sought a return to the Roman Empire in a Germanic form. Indeed the Arab world sided with the Axis powers during World War II, which led to England and the U.S. setting up the state of Israel in what was then the Palestine territories.

In 1966 shortly after Colonel Nasser took power in Egypt, several attempts were made on his life. He blamed them on his alienating Qutb's group, the Islamic Brotherhood and had Sayyid Qutb hung in retribution. Still, despite their differences, the two factions have been bound by a hatred of Israel and the West that ignites their common passions.

After delving into the history of pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, Berman takes on what he sees as a misguided view among many Western Leftists like Noam Chomsky, who've rationalized terrorism as the only possible response to Western oppression by less technologically advanced nations. People like Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky have defined Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as an appropriate response by a smaller opponent to a bully, while Berman sees it as a cataclysmic struggle between two conflicting ideologies, one rooted in individual liberty, the separation of Church and State, a love of technology and women's suffrage and the other one diametrically opposed to all of these things on virtually every level.

"Terror and Liberalism" is an excellent book that not only gives the reader a broader understanding of the roots of fundamentalist Islam, but an insight into why so many on the American Left reflexively support any movement willing to take on the bully they see as America's "Military-Industrial Complex," and why that view is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous as well.

47 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening account that takes our enemies at their words April 18, 2003

By Michael Gebert

Format:Hardcover

"Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding up massacres and charnel houses." So said an Algerian religious-political figure quoted by Paul Berman, whose effort here is to get people who believe in liberalism and liberal society to throw off the blinders of multicultural sensitivity and see and hear the real deeds and words and intentions of Islamic extremists as they call for our death and destruction. This small but powerfully reasoned book draws two inescapable conclusions:

1) That "Islamic fascism" is not just a metaphor drawn from European culture (as one might speak in reverse of a French jihad against American fast food), but the actual importation of mid-20th century European fascism, with all the same characteristics as Nazism, Stalinism, Franco's Spain and other such movements: intolerance of any other way of life within its borders, an obsession with purity (which requires ever more total enforcement), the notion of a Gotterdammerung-style clash between the pure and the infidels, and last but not least, a virulent anti-Semitism which in some cases, such as that of a Nazi racial theorist who wound up on Nasser's payroll, is quite literally imported from Europe. The implication, clearly, is that Islamic fascism has to be broken just like European fascisms were.

2) A willful blindness on the part of liberal society to recognize that our enemies really do say and think what they're saying and thinking. Both sides in politics still try to see rational motivations for what is in fact an irrational mass movement in love with death. The right, thanks to its business ties with the Saudis, is only slowly acknowledging how the terror really stems from those supposed friends and allies, since why would good business partners do such a thing? The left refuses to entertain the idea that events like 9-11 could have a maniacal religious motivation, since any blow against the US must, by definition, be part of the struggle of the oppressed against global capitalism, and therefore must be ultimately rational (and regrettable yet understandable, if not indeed downright admirable). (For a perfect example of how resistant the left is to criticism of the view that it's All About The U.S., read The Nation's review of this book, which spends most of its energy angrily attacking a couple of pages that skewer Noam Chomsky as the perfect exemplar of the Grand Unified Evil-America Theory of all history.)

Whether it's an eye-opening (and far from unsympathetic) exegesis of the writings of the extremist author Sayyid Qutb, or a look at 1989, the year of democracy's supposed triumph, from the Islamic point of view (they saw it as their triumph over the infidel invading Soviets-- and were they entirely wrong?), Berman gives the facts underlying the news we read every day a new perspective. The good news is, liberal society did defeat fascism once, twice, multiple times. The bad news, the fight almost always started later than it should have, and long after someone like Berman had made it clear that a Mein Kampf-- and a Hitler-- really meant what he said.