French Firebrand Brings Fury to NY

It’s hard to tell whether Bernard-Henri Lévy, colloquially known (often exasperatedly) as “BHL”, gets a bad rap. On the one hand, he has been one of the West’s most consistent and enterprising critics of human rights abuses. Since 1977, when he denounced the Soviet gulags in his book Barbarism with a Human Face, he has taken it upon himself to chronicle injustices around the world, often personally journeying to areas of conflict in an attempt to get the world’s (or at least France’s) attention. His itinerary has included stints with the mujahideen in Afghanistan as they fought the Soviets in the 1980s, Bosnian nationalists in war-torn Sarajevo in the 1990s, and most recently, African militias in the scorching desert of Darfur.

On the other hand, Lévy has been widely criticized for his narcissism and lack of critical inquiry, a “public intellectual” heavy on public appearances and light on intellectual rigor. With his trademark unbuttoned white chemise, an actress-wife said to have the smallest waistline in France, and his unrepentant love of America, many consider him more Hollywood glamour puss than philosopher worthy of standing with the ranks of France’s more influential thinkers. His works are accused of being riddled with factual errors, and his political analyses are derided as naïve or simplistic. Perhaps most damningly, he has been a record five-time victim of the notorious anarchist pie-thrower Noel Godin. He simply cannot resist, Godin once told the New York Times: Lévy “takes himself monstrously seriously.”

It probably does not help, then, that tonight Lévy will be appearing with an actress, Mia Farrow, to discuss the ongoing crisis in Darfur and what the world should be doing about it. To be fair, the talk, part of the weeklong PEN World Voices Festival, will focus on what role artists and intellectuals can and should be playing when faced with major humanitarian crises, so in theory they are not delving into territory for which they are unqualified.

Lévy’s reports on the crisis were published in Le Monde and The New Republic. In an interview from Paris—but in English—Lévy described how he smuggled himself across the Chadian border inside the most desolate and decimated areas of Darfur. “I came back from this journey, not only horrified, but indignant, and feeling compelled to do something,” he said. “I had no choice after seeing what I saw, I could not do anything else but to shout, to tell what I saw and call other people to join and to shout with me.”

Asked why so little has been done to ameliorate the situation, Lévy pointed to a combination of apathy and oversensitivity. There is, of course, no oil, he explained. Many Western countries are also afraid of offending the Chinese, since for most nations, “business goes before human rights.” Yet he also recognizes more profound issues at work. “Parts of the progressive camp within the European and American intelligentsia are saying that Western powers should not get involved in third world countries, especially former colonies or victims of imperialism,” he said. “They say that if we involve ourselves in the internal affairs of these countries we will only be continuing the old habits of colonialism and imperialism. This notion has the very strange and paradoxical effect of making us blind and deaf faced with this bloodbath.”

The rest of the world, he said, must recognize that to have been a former victim of colonialism does not give one the right to be racist—injustices must not beget other injustices. Such leniency, he explained, helped enable the genocide in Rwanda, as well as the likes of Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, running their countries into the ground. The West, he explained, must be able to “combine anti-imperialism and anti-totalitarianism.”

For the most part, then, Lévy seems to have the right message. We will have to wait, however, to see how people will respond to the messenger.