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Wednesday 3 December 2008

'Anti-Americanism is a form of fascism'

Narrow nationalism, hatred of Jews, and chauvinism find their meeting place in anti-Americanism, the acclaimed French thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Allister Heath

The result, a series of observations on Americans and their foibles, is often fascinating but occasionally frustrating. His views on the need to combat Islamic extremism are unusually robust; and he is one of the last upholders of a long but often overlooked tradition of pro-Americanism in France â” albeit in BHL’s case a very French, left-wing, anti-Iraq war pro-Americanism that most US conservatives would not recognise. But his Gallic style, which is charming in conversation, takes a little getting used to in print. Even regular readers of French philosophy will probably get annoyed by his machine-gun prose, with its constant use of exaggerated repetitions for effect, and his apparent inability to cut to the chase.

There is much that Lévy dislikes about America, including its vast churches and President Bush; and like virtually all French intellectuals, he has little understanding of its successful market economy. But he is clearly attracted by the US ideal of democracy. In one telling passage he compares French roads, with their unofficial fast lanes from which slower drivers move away when approached by those in a hurry, to the American ones, where no such informal rules exist. Drivers of fast cars are treated like everybody else, he notes admiringly, and in this respect America is more egalitarian than France.

Lévy’s American heroes are those traditional East Coast liberals who also ‘get it’ when it comes to the threat caused by radical Islamists. ‘Hillary Clinton, I think she understands,’ he told me. ‘There is a rising consciousness today in the liberal circles of America that Islamism is a threat, not only for America, but for the Muslim world and for the world in general. People like Norman Mailer and Barack Obama also understand. They are the people whom I admire most in America.’

His self-styled anti-anti-Americanism â” he pronounces anti, like many other words, the American way, albeit in a heavy French accent â” is derived from his fundamentally liberal philosophy. ‘My position is that there is not one America but two, and that anti-Americanism is a form of fascism,’ he says. ‘It is a way in which fascism always expressed itself. We should know that.’

This was already true of Nazi Germany. ‘During the 1920s, people inspired by romantic conceptions of the nation, deeply rooted in race and in tradition, were opposed to the “country without memory” that is America. In France, the tradition opposed to human rights, opposed to citizenship, nostalgic for the organic nation with a common soil also opposed America, the embodiment of their nightmare.’

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