Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [43]
Let’s go further and say that the adoption of an attitude of nonviolent resistance, or a morally admirable form of resistance, perhaps, may also be a form of calculated self-interest; nor is it necessarily a losing strategy.
Stalin’s famous phrase—“The pope! How many divisions has he got?”—is somewhat laughable given the not insignificant role that Pope John Paul II would play decades later in the final collapse of communism. Stalin, in short, was a stupid arsehole. Or, to be more polite, his view of human nature was rather limited.
Let’s state the obvious: man is not, in general, a morally admirable creature. To delicately state something less obvious: man, in general, has enough in him to admire that which, morally, is beyond him and to behave accordingly. Tibetan resistance, from the outset, commands respect. And, in the long term, to command respect is not necessarily a losing strategy. I don’t know who the idiot was who coined the phrase—like the title of a dissertation: “Kantian philosophy has kept its hands clean; but it has no hands,”* but I do know that he would have been better off saying nothing that day. Moral law does have hands, and powerful hands at that.
Because what is at stake in Tibet is not the vague, historically variable entity the nation-state; what is at stake in Tibet, in the eyes of the whole of the civilized world, is moral law; yes, itself, personified, as is manifest by the impeccable behavior of the victims. And what motivates the Tibetan people is not the fickle phantom, that mixture of frustrated resentment and silly pride we call national feeling; it is a principle of a spiritual nature, the most difficult thing in the world to defeat (something that is perhaps, strictly speaking, invincible).
I certainly have no wish to put the “spiritual” on a pedestal; it is also a principle of a spiritual nature that motivates the Islamic revolution throughout the modern world; in fact it is this that makes it so terribly dangerous.
Moral law was also at stake, to the greatest possible extent, in Nazism. There, too, there was a principle of a spiritual nature (one that you obviously know much more about than I do). There was only one (one can hardly define as “spirituality” a mishmash of Nordic mythology, a tedious remix; Chesterton noted that even a committed freethinker would give himself a serious headache if, in the space of an afternoon, he had to come up with a blasphemy intended to offend the great god Thor).*
And it was a spiritual principle that triumphed; or at least in retrospect one can read history that way.
Problems, real problems, begin when two spiritual principles come face-to-face; this is why I am not terribly optimistic on the subject of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
I have made my choice, it is the same as that of Maurice Dantec† (though we express ourselves differently and do so for different reasons). Maurice converted, good for him; but for my part the choice continues to be one of uniquely moral considerations. I am gathering together the conditions for perfect objectivity on the subject: I have, as far as I am aware, no Arabic or Jewish forebears; the religions they practice seem to me almost equally absurd. But there is, to my mind, an essential, crucial difference between a blind attack and a targeted strike. You see the importance I attach to the means! They go so far as to influence my judgment of the end.
• • •
Well, well, well. I believe I have just proved that I too could easily have been a pontificating/grandiloquent/sincere individual. Let’s go back to the admittedly more trivial question of the nation. Here too I think I need to go back a little. Some years ago, I was included (together with Maurice Dantec, Philippe Muray,* and a number of others) as one of the leading figures in a small, easily readable book that described us as the new reactionaries. My first reaction was one of amusement;