Frenchman BHL on Rights

For John, BLUF:  An interesting conversation with a French Intellectual who tries to adhere to a philosophy without veering to one side or the other.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy on the Rights of Women and of the Accused

Here is the sub-headline:

“It is a duty, a moral duty, to hold firm the idea that there is no people, no ethnicity, forbidding democracy,” the world’s most famous French intellectual says.

From The New Yorker, by Staff Writer Isaac Chotiner, 18 March 2019.

Here is the lede plus two:

“The history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels,” the French author André Maurois wrote. With Bernard-Henri Lévy, it often seems that the world’s most famous French intellectual is taking part in everyone else’s quarrels.  Born in Algeria, to a Jewish family, B.H.L. (as he is known) made a name for himself as a journalist in East Pakistan, in the early seventies, during its struggle to become Bangladesh.  A few years later, he was part of a group of young French writers, called the New Philosophers, who broke decisively from Marxism and the influence of Sartre.  Over the past several decades, he has written philosophy and history and journalism, on subjects ranging from the war in Bosnia to the death of Daniel Pearl and the need for a strong stand against Islamic fundamentalism.

He has also, unlike some of his forebears, evinced a passionate love for the United States.  He retraced Tocqueville’s footsteps in a series of essays for The Atlantic (which became the book “American Vertigo”), speaks proudly of his “anti-anti-Americanism,” and has urged the United States to exercise its power, voicing support for military action in Libya.  (He played a large role in convincing the French government to help overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.)  His new book is called “The Empire and the Five Kings:  America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World,” and it explains why an American “retreat” from the global stage is likely to have calamitous effects, with other, less democratic countries filling the void.

Lévy has sparked controversy for a number of his stances, including his advocacy for France’s burqa ban, his “unconditional love” of Israel, and his criticism of the rape cases against the film director Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to statutory rape, in 1978, and fled to France to avoid imprisonment, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.  Strauss-Kahn, a friend of Lévy’s, has been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct.  In 2011, New York prosecutors charged him with the sexual assault of a maid at a Manhattan hotel; the charges were dropped, but not before Lévy published a piece defending Strauss-Kahn, in which he questioned why a maid would have gone into Strauss-Kahn’s hotel room alone, and claimed that his friend had been “thrown to the dogs.”

Read it to see a person struggle to go below the top layer to find truth.

Regards  —  Cliff