Jaw-jaw about civil war
Anthony Daniels
WAR, EVIL AND THE END OF HISTORY by Bernard-Henri Lévy Duckworth, £12.99, pp.371, ISBN 0715633368 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Bernard-Henri Lévy is possessed of a large fortune, great intelligence and film-star good looks (if now a little ageing). He therefore had the wherewithal to go through life like a hot knife through butter, but yet has chosen many times to expose himself to great danger in the continuing wars of torrid zones. Why?
In this book, he reprints his reportage from five lengthy, indeed seemingly eternal, civil conflicts — Angola, Burundi, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sudan — and then appends philosophical reflections as footnotes to what he wrote. These footnotes form two thirds of the book.
The author suffers from one of the besetting sins of French intellectuals, a tendency to torrential, undisciplined abstraction, presumably in the hope that profundity will eventually emerge of its own accord. It would have been better for the author’s prose if, during his youth, he had sat at the feet of the clear and concise Raymond Aron rather than at those of the mad and muddy Louis Althusser (anyone who has read the latter’s prose will be surprised only that his wife did not kill him before he killed her).
Nevertheless, many of Lévy’s reflections are interesting, if in the end unsatisfying. He characterises the wars he has here written about as ‘meaningless,’ in the sense that they no longer have a place in any grand narrative of history. For example, what was once in Angola a proxy confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, between the ideals represented by communism and anti-communism, became, after the end of the Cold War, merely a struggle for loot in the form of oil and diamonds, with child soldiers not knowing what they were fighting for but committing acts of savagery (so much for the intrinsic innocence of childhood, Lévy rightly remarks).
Did this emptying of the conflict of ideological meaning represent a moral advance or a moral retreat? The author cannot quite decide whether wars fought, at least ostensibly, for ideologies are better or worse than wars fought for no such reason, which are wars that are for him — a pale Hegelian outside history, or rather History.
I personally find the characterisation of large events, such as people being massacred by the hundreds of thousand, as being outside history both mystifying and profoundly distasteful. It implies that there are some people who take part in history and others who merely experience events. There is an echo here of Marx’s disgusting and proto-genocidal contempt for unhistorical nations.
Surely the war in Burundi has a meaning. As the author recognises, Burundi is a mirror image of Rwanda (as Rwanda is of Burundi). The war is thus an attempt to pre-empt genocide by means of committing it first. This may not be glorious or even rational, but it is certainly not meaningless for those who participate in it. Indeed, one might ascribe the war not to the absence of history, but to the tyranny of history: the inability to suppose that anything in the future could be different from, or not completely determined by, the past. The evidence that the author adduces for the post-historical nature of the Burundian conflict, namely the silent blankness of the faces of the victims it creates, is evidence of no such thing. It is evidence only of what they have suffered.
The footnotes to the reportage represent an eternal pirouetting around concepts of dubious ontological status or explanatory force. No doubt they give plenty of scope for ferocious polemics by like-minded intellectuals, but they make me think of the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers.
The author half-recognises the self-indulgent nature of his enterprise. (It is interesting that he cites one of the great early French masters of reportage, Albert Londres, who was most definitely not a self-flagellating narcissist.) Much as he hates violence, and excoriates an intellectual and literary tradition that has glorified it, he is honest enough not to claim that he travels to war zones solely for the good of humanity. A man with his possibilities of leading an extremely comfortable life surely cannot expose himself to insect bites by the million with the chance of being shot into the bargain simply because he wants to give voice to the voiceless — though his desire to do so is creditable.
Perhaps the most memorable words in the book are a quotation of Drieu la Rochelle, the novelist and fascist sympathiser. Anyone who has heard and followed the siren song of man-made danger — as I have done — will recognise the truth of these words:
There is within me a terrible taste for depriving myself of everything, for leaving everything: that’s what I like about war; I’ve never been so happy — while being atrociously unhappy — as in those winters when all I had in the world was a fifty-cent book by Pascal, a knife, my watch, and two or three handkerchiefs, and when I didn’t get any letters.
Lévy, too, has known life stripped of its accidentals, when only the big questions are asked. As I read this book I oscillated between admiration and irritation.
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