Le Premier Homme

Voilà some publicity for Harvard University Press’s recent publication of Albert Camus’s Algerian Chronicles—a compilation of Camus’s essays and letters on Algeria from the 1930s through the ’50s—, translated into English by Arthur Goldhammer—of French Politics blogging fame (and who has been translating French social science and humanities since my college days)—and edited and introduced by Alice Kaplan (reviews here and here). On the subject of Camus—whose birth centennial is this November 7th—I recently saw the cinematic adaptation of his unfinished autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme (in English, The First Man), by Italian director Gianni Amelio. I liked the novel—and more than any other I’ve read by Camus, including L’Étranger and La Peste—, in particular for its vivid imagery of lower-class pied-noir life in Algiers in the 1910s and ’20s. The film closely follows Camus’s childhood such as depicted in the novel via the character of Jacques Cormery and with flash-forwards to the 1950s—of Cormery’s return to Algiers during the war—, scenes that weren’t in the novel. Technically the film—which was entirely shot in Algeria (mainly in Algiers and Mostaganem) and employed Benjamin Stora as historical adviser—is impeccable. Nice to watch. But it doesn’t work. This is one of those novels that cannot be adapted to the screen. And if one has not read it—and is not aware that Jacques Cormery is Albert Camus (and does not know too much about Camus or Algérie française)—, the film will make no sense at all. So if you haven’t read the book—and are not familiar with France’s history in Algeria—, do not see the movie; you will be wasting your time. Gianni Amelio directed two very good films in the ’90s, ‘Il ladro di bambini‘ and ‘Lamerica‘, so I had somewhat high expectations for this one. Oh well. US reviews are here and here, French reviews here, and the NYT review of the book here.

Needless to say, the film was not a box office hit in France. I saw it on the first Saturday night after its opening and in a big Paris multiplex. The salle was well over half empty. Un échec annoncé. As I’ve said before, the French movie-going public is simply not interested in Algeria, post- or pre-1962.

À propos, another movie about Algérie française—and likewise based on a novel by a major author—opened in France last fall: ‘Ce que le jour doit à la nuit’, from Yasmina Khadra’s eponymous 2008 novel (in English: What the Day Owes the Night), which I have not read. This director of this one was the middle to lowbrow Alexandre Arcady, juif d’Algérie who is not precisely known for making films d’auteur. I hesitated on seeing it and despite the compelling subject matter, in view of its 2 hour 40 minute length and the fact that Arcady has never done anything that could remotely be called a chef d’œuvre, but decided to take the plunge (Saturday AM matinee) before it disappeared from the salles. I’ll let Le Monde’s Noémie Luciani—who liked the pic more than did other French critics—describe it

Dans l’Algérie des années 1930, Younes, 9 ans, est recueilli par son oncle et sa tante et rebaptisé Jonas. Elevé par ce couple peu ordinaire (Mohamed est musulman, Madeleine chrétienne), Jonas grandit à Oran puis à Rio Salado, véritable jardin d’Eden où la vie est douce et lente, jusqu’à ce qu’Emilie n’amène les premières violences de l’amour, et l’Histoire les premiers feux de la guerre.

Adapté du roman à succès de Yasmina Khadra, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit est une fresque monumentale dans tous les sens du terme. Reconstitution détaillée à l’extrême, musique grandiose, mise en scène toute dans l’ampleur, jusqu’aux orages, qui répondent avec un mimétisme verlainien aux émotions : que Jonas perde un instant le goût de vivre, et “il pleure dans son coeur comme il pleut sur la ville”.

Ce totalitarisme de moyens, s’il est indéniablement l’expression vibrante d’un amour fou du réalisateur pour le livre auquel il offre un monde visible, a ses charmes et ses limites. D’un côté l’élégance du décor, la belle musique d’Armand Amar, une intelligence remarquable du rythme, tenant de bout en bout l’histoire sur presque trois heures de film.

De l’autre, l’explicite imposant, le poids des fatalités trop visibles, la place ténue de l’humour. Surtout, le jeu d’acteurs enivrés de se voir devenus Rhett et Scarlett, Juliette et Roméo : exalté, plus rarement exaltant, tout en grands gestes, grands mots, grands yeux noyés de larmes. Fu’ad Aït Aattou (Younes/Jonas) : la gravité un peu appuyé de la voix, le port de tête. Nora Arnezeder (Emilie) : le sourire lentement construit pour illuminer, un peu trop lent à venir. Anne Parillaud (madame Cazenave, la mère d’Emilie) : la démarche alanguie, la diction lourdement sensuelle, les tics de séductrice aguerrie.

On hésite à leur autoriser tant de fards : peut-être faut-il autant pour que l’histoire ait moins à voir avec le commun amour qu’avec le mythe. Peut-être avons-nous perdu l’habitude. Dans le doute, être un peu plus crédule, glisser sur certains traits. Tout travaillé qu’il soit, tout alourdi d’art qu’il peut être, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit garde au coeur un souffle romantique volé à l’Hollywood des heures anciennes : naïf et flamboyant à son image, emportant furieusement tout ce que l’on consentira à lui laisser prendre – l’amour, le feu, la guerre…

A ‘Gone With the Wind’ in the waning days of Algérie française (for a synopsis of the pic in English—there are as yet no reviews from the US or UK—, go here). One gets the general idea. The film is melodramatic and maudlin, i.e. it’s schlock. But… I was thoroughly entertained (as were others who saw it, to judge by Allociné’s audience ratings; though, as befitting films in France with an Algeria theme, it was a box office failure). It’s a grand spectacle and in which the director pulls out all the stops (trailer here). So for this one I suspended critical judgment and decided to just take it in (it’s also hard for me to give the total thumbs down to a film on Algeria whose historical adviser was the incontournable, inévitable Benjamin Stora). As it will likely not be making it outre-Atlantique or outre-Manche anytime soon, the only way to see it will be via streaming (if one requires English subtitles, that might be a problem).

There was a special projection of the film in Algiers last October, which was the subject of an amusing reportage by El Watan’s Chawki Amari, “Le film d’Arcady n’a pas réconcilié les Algériens.” The lede

«Ce que le jour doit à la nuit», le film d’Alexandre Arcady, tiré du chef-d’œuvre de Yasmina Khadra, a été projeté à Alger sur fond de rivalités entre des ministres et de rumeurs sur la mort du président Bouteflika. Récit cinématographique.

Among other things, one learns that Arcady’s film, despite the sponsorship of the Algerian Ministry of Culture, failed to receive the necessary authorizations in time, so had to be shot in Tunisia. Une histoire algérienne. Amari’s article, which is quite funny—I was cracking up while reading it—, will be appreciated by those who know Algeria well.

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Khomeini rises

Adam Shatz has an excellent review essay in the latest LRB of James Buchan’s Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences.

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Dealing with bad reviews

[update below]

Chicago writer Joe Konrath has an amusing post on his blog on how writers should deal with bad reviews of their work. Though tongue-in-cheek and for laughs he concludes on a serious note

Also remember that the pendulum swings both ways. You’re a writer, so you know how difficult it is to write a story. Trashing your peers, or their work, shows a staggering lack of empathy. Be above that.

Good point and well-taken, though which begs the question as to what to do when confronted with a piece of shit seriously flawed book on a subject of which one possesses specialist knowledge—or, in the case of cinema, when a film critic has to review an objectively bad movie. I have had numerous propositions over the years to review books that I thought were crap but passed them up, as I did not want to make eternal enemies with the author—particularly if s/he were someone I risked crossing paths with professionally (and all the more so if the author were someone with whom I was friendly)—, though on one occasion felt professionally duty-bound to rubbish a book that simply needed to be rubbished. In this case the author was/is a very high-profile specialist of his subject—a subject of which I know two or three things as well—and was accustomed to getting a free ride—and particularly in France—when it came to reviews of his work, so it took a fearless, relative outsider like myself to mettre le holà. I knew the august author would never forgive me—and he hasn’t (and no doubt contemplated employing against me one of the tricks Konrath enumerated in his post)—but I figured it would be no great loss—and the hypothetical loss was, in fact, more than compensated by the praise I received from numerous (French) academicians who would have never dared publicly write ill of the author’s work, however much they did so orally in private.

Something else Konrath does not consider: negative reviews are fun, both to write and read. And they are often deliciously fun, when the reviewed author manifestly deserves to be rubbished for his/her calamitous book. My all-time model of the genre is film critic David Denby’s annihilation of Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, which Denby called “the stupidest book about popular culture that I have read to the end” (the review, published in the November 2 1992 New Republic, is unfortunately not online). William Dalrymple’s demolition of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl? also comes to mind (as does Garrison Keillor’s drubbing of BHL’s American Vertigo). We’re not talking here about anonymous wankers posting one-star reviews on Amazon but recognized specialists taking apart pieces of shit seriously flawed books in their domains of specialization.

À propos, Konrath dedicates his post to Roger Ebert, as Konrath was no doubt a fan of his fellow Chicagoan. But Ebert was a master of the scathing movie review, a number of which were gems. Among those that come to mind are his massacres of ‘Battlefield Earth‘ (based on Scientologist Ron Hubbard’s novel) and the hit comedy (in France) ‘Un Indien dans la ville‘. And then there was Ebert’s famous panning of the first cut of Vincent Gallo’s ‘The Brown Bunny’ and which led to an equally famous polemic between the two. Ebert’s negative reviews were so noteworthy that the top 50 have been aggregated into a single post on Complex.com. A great read.

The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of idiots people out there who need to be put in their place when they say, write, or make stupid stuff, as, e.g., Ebert did to this petit con (watch and savor).

There have been many tributes to Ebert over the past two days and postings of articles on him. I will link to just one here, a 2011 video (h/t Victoria Ferauge) of Ebert talking movingly of losing and re-finding his voice. R.I.P.

UPDATE: Asawin Suebsaeng at Mother Jones writes on “One more reason to miss Roger Ebert: his love of trash,” where he says that

…what I will remember Ebert for is this: It is rare for a man of his influence and fame to so gleefully and unabashedly embrace (and I write this with the greatest enthusiasm) cinematic trash. No snobbery, no pretentiousness, and absolutely no shame in indulging in guilty pleasure—that’s what impressed me the most about his criticism. His favorite films of all time were critically acclaimed gold mines like Werner Herzog’s beautiful and notorious Aguirre, the Wrath of God or the 2011 Oscar-winning Iranian film A Separation. But he had a soft spot for popular garbage: Remember that ridiculous and disposable Vin Diesel action flick from 2002—the one so groggily titled XXX? If you don’t remember, it’s the Vin Diesel movie where Vin Diesel goes snowboarding in an avalanche [and that received from Ebert a] loving, nearly four-star review…

It was indeed the case that Ebert gave the thumbs up to a lot of schlocky-looking movies that I would not consider even seeing on DVD at home, let alone go to the cinema for. But in Ebert’s defense he was the film critic at a daily newspaper of America’s third largest city, so had to see just about everything, and particularly Hollywood movies for the masses (and the Chicagoland masses were indeed the readers of the Sun-Times, which, as it happens, was a great American newspaper—and that I much preferred to its more upmarket competitor, the Tribune—until Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1984). He couldn’t pick and choose, or privilege films d’auteur. He had to sit through so much dreck that when an action pic or mass market comedy with a halfway original screenplay and/or decent acting came along, he would take note and give it the thumbs up it may well have deserved for its genre.

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Django Unchained

[update below]

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I really liked this movie. It is highly entertaining and with great acting, is funny, offbeat, zany, you name it. It made my top 10 list of 2012 and was my pick for Oscar best picture (though having yet to see ‘Zero Dark Thirty’). But I have just now finished reading a biting critique of the film by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, which, while not causing the film to fall out of my top 10, is, I will readily admit, very good, indeed excellent. In addition to skewering Quentin Tarantino’s film Reed also does a number on ‘The Help’—a film I appreciated rather less—and delivers a few body blows to ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’—which I did not unreservedly like—and other race-themed Hollywood pics while he’s it. His dense, learned, wide-ranging essay—title: “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why“—is very long—clocking in at almost 14,000 words, plus substantive endnotes—but is well worth the time and effort.

In a nutshell, Reed argues that

Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses…[and that] perpetrating such brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later.

Central to Reed’s argument is the linking of the films in question to the increasing ideological predominance of neoliberalism over the past three decades. His analysis here is very interesting. I liked this passage in particular

Libertarianism is a shuck, more an aesthetics than a politics. Libertarians don’t want the state to do anything other than what they want the state to do. And, as its founding icons understood, it is fundamentally about property rights über alles. Mises and Hayek made clear in theory, and Thatcher and Friedman as Pinochet’s muse in Chile did in practice, that a libertarian society requires an anti-popular, authoritarian government to make sure that property rights are kept sacrosanct. That’s why it’s so common that a few bad days, some sweet nothings, and a couple of snazzy epaulets will turn a libertarian into an open fascist.

Absolutely on target. À propos, I had a post in Sep. ’11 on libertarianism and fascism, in which I (and Michael Lind, to whom I linked) said much the same thing.

Reed is really very smart. I remember well his book The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, which I read during the 1988 Democratic primary campaign. Most of my lefty friends enthusiastically supported Jesse’s candidacy that year but I most decidedly did not (I backed Dukakis after Hart pulled out of the race, though did, as a symbolic gesture, vote for Jesse in the 1984 IL primary), and found Reed’s critical stance toward Jesse a breath of fresh air.

Back to Tarantino’s film, TDB had a piece last week on “Django Unchained’s bloody real history in Mississippi.” The lede

Critics have carped that Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is outlandish history, but two new books show that, in fact, Mississippi was even more violent and bizarre in that period. Historian Adam Rothman on a bloody incident of mob justice and slavery.

The new books are Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Belknap Press) and Joshua D. Rothman’s Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (University of Georgia Press).

The upshot: the South sucked. And it still does. It was—and remains—the most reactionary, retrograde, and all around depraved region of the Western world. The continuum of the slave owners and their petits blancs enforcers—such as depicted in ‘Django Unchained’—and today’s southern GOP base is manifest. Ça ne se discute même pas.

In his essay Reed takes issue with the positive assessments of Tarantino’s film by some of his academic associates, including this one by Lawrence D. Bobo, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. IMHO, Bobo’s review isn’t bad.

UPDATE: Hussein Ibish, in a rather critical review, asks “Who’s really exploited in ‘Django Unchained’?” Answer: you, the spectator. (March 5)

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Inside the FLN

Full title: Inside the FLN: The Paris Massacre and the French Intelligence Service. This is a new, unpublished monograph by historian Neil MacMaster on the events of October 17, 1961 (which I’ve posted on here and here), and that may be downloaded here. Haven’t read it yet but it looks most interesting. MacMaster is the leading historian in the English-speaking world of this dark episode in modern French history, and one of the top ones of France and colonial Algeria more generally. Among his books are Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-62; Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (co-authored with Jim House); and Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954–62 (disclosure: I have a long overdue review of this to write). All excellent and must reads for anyone interested in the subject.

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Recent books on migration and citizenship

My blogging consœur Victoria Ferauge has posted an annotated bibliography of recent scholarly works she has read of late on international migration, immigration, and citizenship. It will be useful for those interested in the general subject.

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New books on Muslims in Europe

In my last post I discussed Tariq Ramadan, the charismatic Egyptian-Swiss philosopher who has authored a slew of books on Islam and being a Muslim in Europe, and with a target audience of youthful European Muslim post-migrants. More interesting-looking—for me at least—is some new social scientific scholarship out on Muslims in Europe, which is reviewed in this fine essay by Timothy Garton Ash in the November 22, 2012, NYRB. The new books are Robert Leiken’s Europe’s Angry Muslims, Jonathan Laurence’s The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, Martha Nussbaum’s The New Religious Intolerance, and Paul Scheffer’s Immigrant Nations (this one looks particularly interesting), plus the Open Society Foundation’s report on Muslims in 11 EU cities. To these one may add anthropologist John R. Bowen’s Blaming Islam, which is reviewed in this essay in Qantara.de. Bowen has authored two major recent works on Muslims and Islam in France—both first-rate—, so this one will certainly be worth the read.

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Tariq Ramadan’s Arab winter

Photo credit: Sia Kambou / AFP

In my January 27th post on France’s Mali intervention I linked to a tribune by a Senegalese academic, Bakary Sambe, who skewered Tariq Ramadan for his opposition to the said intervention, and where I referred to the celebrated Egyptian-Swiss philosopher as an “overrated bloviator.” I am not a fan of the très médiatique Ramadan, needless to say, though used to have a positive image of him, taking him to be a moderate, modernist Islamic thinker based on numerous op-ed type articles he published over the years in the French press, plus flattering portraits of him that appeared here and there (I never did bother to read his books, which mainly focus on Islamic thought, not a subject of great interest to me and who has the time?). I also did not (and do not) care for some of Ramadan’s high-profile detractors in France and the US (e.g. Caroline Fourest, Paul Berman, Daniel Pipes), who have been engaged in an obsessive vendetta against him for years. And I considered indefensible his temporary banning from France in the mid ’90s—over which I initiated a letter of protest by MESA to then interior minister Jean-Louis Debré—and exclusion from the US during the Bush administration.

But after seeing TR up close—for the first time some five years ago, in a classroom talk—and exchanging a few words with him, I decided that he is a slick, smooth-talking self-promoter, who wows audiences with his affability, eloquence—he can give a one-hour talk in flawless English, with no notes and without skipping a beat—, and dapper good looks but ultimately says little of substance. And his answers to questions on politics and social issues during a Q&A are for the most part langue de bois (e.g. I asked him to give his assessment of the AKP government in Turkey—which had been in power for five years—, to which responded something to the effect that “What is happening in Turkey is very interesting and we need to follow it closely and see where it’s going”… Not terribly deep or enlightening). He’s a friendly fundamentalist, adapting his discourse to the circumstance. He does not, however, merit the demonization to which he has been subjected by Fourest, Berman et al—he’s not significant enough—, but nor does he merit the celebrity he’s attained beyond his following among youthful pious European Muslim post-migrants (and notably by European policy makers anxiously seeking European Muslim interlocutors). Intellectually and politically speaking, TR does not impress me.

And I do find his apologetics for the Muslim Brotherhood disturbing, not to mention his views and equivocations on a host of other issues.

I bring all this up as I read just the other day a review essay in TNR, dated October 1, 2012, of Ramadan’s latest book, in which he offers analysis and commentary on the so-called Arab spring. Reviewer Samuel Helfont, a Near Eastern Studies Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, was not impressed, taking to task Ramadan’s “problematic views,” “sloppy analysis and inconsistencies,” and “contorted arguments and anti-imperialist platitudes,” all of which are quite simply “not serious.” Very good. Couldn’t have said it better myself, even though I haven’t read the book (and have no intention of).

While I’m at it, here is a tribune I also read recently, by the Franco-Tunisian intellectual Abdelwahab Meddeb—a political and philosophical enemy of TR’s (the two have publicly crossed swords)—, “Towards A Global Network of Liberal Muslims,” that was first published three weeks ago in a Bangladeshi newspaper. Excellent initiative.

I mentioned Daniel Pipes as one of TR’s detractors. Pipes is no dummy when it comes to subjects of which he is a specialist but is politically reactionary and a crackpot on a number of issues (e.g. flirting with Obama birtherism, obsessively trying to “prove” that Obama is a Muslim, situating himself well to the right of Netanyahu on the Israeli political spectrum). I generally don’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Which is not to say I don’t read him every so often. The other day I came across an interview with him in the current issue of The American Spectator, on “Islam and Islamism in the Modern World,” and which is surprisingly unobjectionable for the most part. I give it the green light.

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The Unlearned History of the United States

This is what historian Sean Wilentz says Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s revisionist history of the US should be properly entitled. When I first heard about Stone and Kuznick’s book (and documentary) these past couple of months I declined to read about it. Oliver Stone is a fine filmmaker—I’ll see just about anything he does—but when it comes to politics and history, he’s out to lunch. A simple-minded gauchiste given over to conspiracy theories (e.g. his ‘JFK’: good cinema, trash history). But Wilentz has done the dirty work in the latest NYRB and taken Stone and Kuznick’s bullshit to the cleaners. He rubbishes their book. Stone and Kuznick’s interpretation of history was in vogue in the 1970s—when I came of age intellectually and politically—and I adhered to it at the time and into the ’80s, e.g. the argument that the US was responsible for the Cold War (William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko et al). But I evolved intellectually and politically, and left all that behind. But many lefties out there—aging red diaper babies and others, who were stunned and bewildered by the fall of the Berlin Wall—have not. They should read Wilentz’s review.

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La Droite brune

Je viens de lire cet excellent livre sur l’évolution de la droite parlementaire—précisément, l’UMP—ces dix dernières années, c’est-à-dire, sous l’ère Sarkozy (Sarko étant devenu le chef de file de l’UMP pendant le deuxième mandat de Chirac). L’auteur Renaud Dély, Directeur de la rédaction du Nouvel Observateur—et l’un des meilleurs journalistes de la politique française—, livre un réquisitoire dévastateur contre le sarkozysme et son projet—largement réussi—de “décomplexer” la droite en la rapprochant idéologiquement et politiquement du Front national. Dély, l’auteur de l’une des meilleures enquêtes sur le FN, sait de quoi il parle. Il consacre un chapitre entier sur Patrick Buisson, le Raspoutine maléfique et ultradroitier de Sarkozy (et de Jean-François Copé aujourd-hui), et sur le FN sous Marine Le Pen. Un livre à lire absolument.

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America, Germany, and the Muslim Brotherhood

Following from my last post, I just read another (somewhat) Egypt-related article, this one a review essay in the August-September 2012 issue of Policy Review of Ian Johnson‘s A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, a book that purports to reveal an apparent US collusion with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood going back to the 1950s, specifically a covert relationship between the CIA and Said Ramadan, MB founder Hassan al-Banna’s son-in-law and spiritual heir—and father of Tariq Ramadan—, who lived in exile in West Germany, then Switzerland, from the mid 1950s on. The notion that the US has long supported Islamist movements across the Muslim world has been out there since the 1980s and fervently believed by many—and fueled by the misconstrued, misunderstood US support of the Afghan “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union—but there has never been anything to it (e.g. it has been widely believed by secular Algerians—and more than a few French observers—that the US supported the FIS and its successors during that country’s tumultuous political conjuncture in the 1990s; the notion is pure fantasy, a complete figment of some collective imagination and which I have argued against for decades, but there is no refuting it for those who believe it dur comme fer). That the US could have actively cultivated the Egyptian MB, and at any point along the way, has never made sense to me. So I was skeptical of Johnson’s thesis—summarized here in the NYRB—, needless to say, but was willing to give it a look, so I got hold of a copy and read it en diagonale. Not convinced.

Reading John Rosenthal’s Policy Review essay confirmed my assessment. Rosenthal, who writes on security issues and is a German-speaker—thereby enabling him to look at Johnson’s original source material plus others—, pronounced Johnson’s supposed revelation of a CIA-Said Ramadan collaboration to be without foundation, that Johnson in no way proves it in his book. In his essay Rosenthal refers extensively to a book published in Germany (as yet untranslated into English) shortly after Johnson’s and on precisely the same subject, A Mosque in Germany: Nazis, Secret Services, and the Rise of Political Islam in the West, by Stefan Meining. This work, which carries more extensive documentation from American and German archives than does Johnson’s, comes up with no evidence pointing to a US-MB collusion. So for me at least, Rosenthal’s essay settles the issue.

What Meining’s book does do, as Rosenthal explicates, is document some of the liaisons dangereuses between German intelligence and Islamist movements over the decades—continuing from the extensive Nazi collaboration with Muslims during WWII (Haj Amin al-Husseini, the recruitment of Bosniaks and anti-Soviet Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia into the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, etc)—, and of a general German complaisance toward Islamists. So if one is looking for covert Western collusion with the MB & Co., look to Bonn and Berlin, not Washington.

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Cairo: A Memoir

Gamal Abdel Nasser and Eric Rouleau, 1963

As it’s still vacation for moi, I’ve been catching up on some reading, notably in trying to work my way through a mountain of articles I’ve printed out over the past year. One fascinating one I just read is this English translation of an excerpt of Eric Rouleau’s memoirs, published in the Summer 2012 issue of The Cairo Review of Global Affairs (of the American University in Cairo; the memoirs themselves were published in October by Fayard). Rouleau was Le Monde’s grand reporter, mainly in the Middle East, from the 1950s to the mid 1980s, after which he embarked on a second career as a diplomat (as French ambassador to Tunisia and Turkey, entre autres). In this excerpt Rouleau—an Egyptian Jew born and raised in Cairo (his veritable name is Elie Raffoul)—recounts his visit to Cairo in 1963 at the invitation of the Egyptian state—his first back there since his forced departure from the country twelve years earlier, when he was threatened with legal prosecution for “Zionist and communist activities” (though he had never adhered to either creed)—, his interactions with intellectuals such as Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and Lotfi El-Kholi, and, above all, his audience with Nasser. Very interesting. Reading Rouleau’s account—and being transported back to that period—makes me want to read the book ASAP.

I regularly followed Rouleau reportages in Le Monde in the late 1970s-1980s and had the opportunity to see him speak, at a public talk he gave at the University of Chicago in 1984. Don’t remember much of what he said except that I was impressed.

On Nasser, this YouTube—of him making sport of the Muslim Brotherhood (in 1966)—has been making the rounds over the past year. Between Nasser—warts and all—and Egypt’s current president, my choice is clear.

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Life of Pi

Saw this yesterday. It’s an amazing film and of a wonderful, beautifully written novel (and as I am not a big novel reader, if I say it’s beautiful please do take my word for it). No screenplay could do justice to the richness of Yann Martel’s writing but this one did succeed, at least as much as could be expected. Do see the film. And if you haven’t read the novel, do that too.

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James C. Scott

Today’s NYT has a very interesting article on Yale political scientist James C. Scott, the “Professor Who Learns From Peasants.” In addition to his originality—as a political scientist and as a person—he has the singularity of writing books that appeal to left-liberals and conservative-libertarians alike. There are not too many people like him around in academia.

He’s…the kind of big thinker (and stylish writer), colleagues say, who has all but disappeared in his field: the last of a breed of wide-angled 20th-century social theorists, going back to Max Weber, to marry the insights of social science to the broad sweep of history, even as he cautions against putting too much faith in theory.

“He marches to his own drum completely,” said Ian Shapiro, a longtime colleague of Mr. Scott’s in the Yale political science department. While most social scientists pick apart problems in previous research, “Jim always starts with problems in the real world,” Mr. Shapiro said. “That’s why his work launches ships.”

On his work:

In the late 1970s Mr. Scott took his family to a Malaysian village for two years of fieldwork, despite colleagues’ warnings that it would be a “career-killing” move for a political scientist. The result was “Weapons of the Weak,” which (along with a follow-up, “Domination and the Arts of Resistance”) explored the ways peasants and other powerless people used evasion and subterfuge, rather than direct confrontation, to thwart efforts at centralized state control.

“Seeing Like a State,” published a decade later, looked at the limitations of state power from the other end, examining — through examples as diverse as 18th-century German scientific forestry and “villagization” in 1970s Tanzania — the way that “high modernist” social engineering doomed itself by ignoring local custom and practical knowledge, which Mr. Scott, borrowing the classical Greek word for wisdom, calls “metis.”

Mr. Scott has also been a longstanding critic of what he sees as the overconfident hyper-rationalism of political science itself, which has sacrificed its own kind of metis in favor of statistical analysis and abstract, immutable laws of political behavior. These days he’s flattered to be so often misidentified as an anthropologist.

“An anthropologist goes in and tries to have as few prejudices as possible and be as open as possible to where the world leads you,” he said, “whereas a political scientist would go in with a questionnaire.”

I am ashamed to admit that I have not read any of Scott’s many books but will absolutely, and soon (and particularly the above). Encore de la lecture…

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Is the enemy us?

This is the title of Claire Berlinski’s review in City Journal of Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind. I have not seen this book and am not likely to, not after having read through Bawer’s 2007 While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (verdict: thumbs down). I had several quick comments on Claire’s review and that I was about to post on the comments thread of her FB post of it, but have decided to post on AWAV instead. So voilà

Quoting Claire

This inability of many young Americans to express a simple or even grammatically coherent thought, in Bawer’s view, owes to a variety of academic fads that in the early 1980s captured the American university.

The problem does not begin in university, or even in high school. The poor writing skills of American college students—the majority of them—is a source of dismay for anyone who has to grade their papers. And poor writing is often accompanied by inadequate verbal skills and muddled thinking. The problem, I think, lies in the American educational system but also somewhere in American culture, where being well-spoken and able to write well is not culturally valued in the way it is elsewhere. E.g. in France speaking and writing well are taken very seriously—they are primordial—and particularly when seeking employment (for jobs necessitating at least some higher education). In France, persons who cannot express themselves well or write coherently are not taken seriously. A politician in France with the verbal skills of George W. Bush would get nowhere, and certainly nowhere near the summit of the state (whereas on the American right, being an intellectual nitwit tends to be viewed positively, when not celebrated outright). If I have been dismayed by the writing and verbal skills of my American students, I have been impressed by those of my French students when writing in their own language—and who are far more verbally articulate than their American counterparts. Part of it is shaped by culture—of what is culturally valued—but also the educational system, from primary through high school. The French system has its problems and is not superior to the American overall—not to American public schools in well-to-do communities—but it does teach students how to write, as well as how to structure their thoughts. E.g. there are almost no multiple choice or true-and-false tests in French schools. Everything has to be written out and in full, grammatically correct sentences. And even if one gets the right answer, one will be marked down for errors in writing. It’s severe and not always fair, but at least the kids come out of the system knowing how to write their native language properly. And the baccalaureate exam at the end of high school is a week-long marathon of writing. No American high school student—which I was myself way back when—has ever had to go through such a grueling process (as my daughter did last June).

Then arrived the minor idea of hegemony, conceived by the minor Marxist intellect Antonio Gramsci, who argued that modern liberal democracies are no freer than the most ruthless of totalitarianisms. The oppression was merely unseen.

WADR, Antonio Gramsci was a major Marxist intellect, more so than any of his Marxist contemporaries (and far more so than Lenin or anyone who came out of Russia). The Gramscian concept of hegemony is also mischaracterized here (I think there’s a confusion with Marcuse). On this, I will let my friend and former professor Frank Adler—who taught the first-ever college course on Gramsci in an American university, and which I took 35 years ago (one of my best university courses ever)—respond in detail, should he choose to.

The Marxist post-colonialist Frantz Fanon completes the intellectual trio.

I recently read Les Damnés de la terre, of which I had read parts three decades ago but not too seriously. It was a book for its time— and heavily driven by the Algerian experience—and no longer has much relevance, but is quite interesting nonetheless. I was expecting to find much in it to object to, but surprisingly did not.

I don’t know what precisely the problem is, only that there is a problem. But having observed this condition from abroad—as Bawer has—I can think of only one place that would allow me to study the issue at leisure, in peace, and in depth: the universities.

None of this, of course, makes me yearn to spend time among the Fat Studiers. But they remain the outliers; they are a trend; and they are unlikely to produce much of value. Reading the works on the comparative literature syllabus at the California State University, Long Beach, on the other hand, will surely do those students quite a bit of good.

I entirely agree. American universities, for all their problems—the prohibitive costs of tuition being the greatest—, are the best in the world. They’re wonderful places. When it comes to higher education, America rules. And that’s not going to change, not anytime soon. And it is the case that Gender, Queer, Fat, Chicano etc Studies are the exception. They’re in a ghetto and most students don’t pay attention to them. One problem in higher education—and about which there is nothing to be done—is hyper-specialization. Few academics of my generation—not to mention the younger ones—have a broad education or deep knowledge base outside their disciplines—or even within them—and are often uninterested in teaching broad survey courses (e.g. the kind of introductory, interdisciplinary course I teach on modern France to American undergraduates each semester; students from elite or flagship state universities have told me that no such course is offered at their schools; and I am not a recognized academic specialist of France), if they’re even able to. There are no professional rewards in it. One gets an academic job by being specialized, and moves up the promotion ladder and receives tenure by maintaining and refining that specialization. Almost none of my academic contemporaries possesses the English gentleman-type level of intellectual cultivation and worldliness of my professors at Chicago who went to college and graduate school in the 1940s and ’50s (well, there is one exception to this among those I know personally—here—but he’s European…). Just about everyone I know who has had a successful academic career has been hyper-specialized, working and publishing on single subject areas for years, if not decades (something I am incapable of). But then, just about every profession is hyper-specialized nowadays, not just academia.

And when it comes to the discipline I was trained in, political science, there is the hegemony of mathematics—of quantitative methods, formal modeling, game theory, etc—, such that nowadays one almost has to have mastered econometrics to get a Ph.D. in politics, but don’t get me started on that…

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Jacques Derrida

Adam Shatz, contributing editor at the London Review Books and dear personal friend, has a brilliant review essay in the latest LRB on the English translation of Benoît Peeters’ biography of Jacques Derrida. I won’t say that I’m knowledgeable about Derrida’s œuvre—I glanced at one of his books once and could make no sense of it—but was more familiar with some of his political commitments, particularly on Algeria in the 1990s (his sensibility on that question was the same as mine and I saw him speak on it at a political meeting in ’94). Adam indeed touches on Derrida’s personal engagement with Algeria—he was born and raised in Algiers—and refers to some interesting revelations in the biography of his attitude toward the war of independence and decolonization. Particularly interesting in Adam’s essay is the discussion of the Parisian intellectual world from the 1950s onward and in which Derrida was, of course, a major figure. One does not have to know a thing about Derridean philosophy—which Adam does delve into; and everyone knows how to deconstruct a text, bien entendu—to read the essay with interest. Great job, Adam. Chapeau !

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Why Democrats need the white working class

Ruy Teixeira positively reviews Joan Walsh’s new book in TNR. Important subject for the Democrats, needless to say.

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Eric Hobsbawm R.I.P.

[update below] [2nd update below]

There have been numerous tributes to him over the past two days. As he was still going strong intellectually at age 95, one can say that he led a full life—as for someone like Eric Hobsbawm, if one can read, write and discuss ideas, one is living fully. He was one of my references during my college-graduate school years and, like just about every political science-history inclined major of my generation, I read several of his books, including his famous trilogy of the long 19th century (1789-1914). And I saw him speak once, back in ’77 or ’78, at the Karl Marx Library in London (or maybe it was at one of the other lefty meeting places in town; can’t remember precisely). More recently I read his memoir, Interesting Times, along with the other members of my reading group, which we greatly enjoyed. One of his more noteworthy books that I have not read, though, is his history of the 20th century, The Age of Extremes. TNR has posted Eugene Genovese’s review essay of the book from 1995 (as it happens, Genovese died on September 26th). The essay is particularly interesting, as Genovese, like Hobsbawm, was a Marxist but, very much unlike Hobsbawm, became a conservative. I also dug up this review essay on the book—which is rather more critical—by Brad DeLong.

UPDATE: Age of Extremes and Interesting Times were reviewed by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books here and here. Interesting Times was reviewed by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books here and here.

2nd UPDATE: Julia Hobsbawm has a lengthy article in the FT (April 19, 2013) on “Remembering Dad.” The concluding paragraphs

Despite being a secular Jew all of his life, he had requested that his friend the American academic Ira Katznelson from Columbia University recite Kaddish at his funeral. His mother, he told me, “always said to me: never deny you are Jewish”. So at the very end when Ira, fresh off the red-eye from Manhattan, read the most important prayer of the Jews, I knew that my Dad – unobservant of the Jewish faith in any way during his life – was keeping true to her wish and her memory now, possibly when it mattered most.

Our final goodbye as a family at Highgate Cemetery was marked mainly in silence. It was cold, but autumn was still flaming away in the trees in Waterlow Park next door. Earlier, as I was buying a small bunch of flowers to lay on the grave, I had an overwhelming sentimental urge to give my father one last thing to read: it seemed impossible that he would never breathe in ideas again. I bought the London Review of Books, which he had regularly contributed to in life and which featured, as it happened, his friend Karl Miller’s obituary of him. We laid the copy, fresh and folded, on top, and then the gravedigger finished his work.

 

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Clint fucking Eastwood

This is—no joke—the title of a serious little book on Clint Eastwood published in France earlier this year (if you don’t believe me, see here), which I was reminded of this morning after hearing the news reports of Eastwood’s skit at the RNC last night (which fell flat, so it seems). The book, which I have admittedly not read, is authored by former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Stéphane Bouquet and takes up a matter that I have been puzzling over for many years now, which is Eastwood’s outsized reputation and popularity in France (Télérama—the French TV Guide for lefties—called Bouquet’s book “un bon fucking livre“). Americans have this cliché about the supposed French love for Jerry Lewis—a notion that exists only in the American imagination (and that I have written about here)—but it really is the case when it comes to Clint Eastwood, whose films invariably receive stellar reviews from Paris critics and are box office hits from Dunkerque to Perpignan.

I first became aware of the French Eastwood phenomenon in 1995, with the release of ‘The Bridges of Madison County’, which French critics praised to the high heavens, calling it a chef d’œuvre almost on a par with ‘La Règle du jeu’ and ‘Citizen Kane’, and whose gushing sentiments were shared by the film-going public (US reviews were mostly positive, though some were tepid, indeed mixed). Personally speaking, I thought the pic was cringeworthy schlock. I likewise found ‘Million Dollar Baby’ schlocky, disliked ‘Changeling’, and gave the thumbs down to ‘Gran Torino’. French audiences—including friends and family—loved all, needless to say (and particularly ‘Gran Torino’, which was systematically applauded at the end in Parisian salles).

In his book, Bouquet, who is not a fan of Eastwood, seeks to understand and analyze why his films so resonate in France. In an interview in January, he thus explained

 L’idolâtrie partagée tant par le public que la critique est un phénomène typiquement français, c’est vrai. Malgré son image de conservateur, Clint Eastwood s’est construit une figure mythique d’anti-héros, ou plutôt de héros résolument anti-macho et anti-raciste. Tous ses films accueillent des gens appartenant à des minorités défavorisées. Il va jusqu’à recueillir dans son propre corps de transplanté cardiaque le cœur d’une femme appartenant à la communauté latino. En ce sens, Eastwood apparaît comme une figure de réconciliation nationale, auxquels les Français sont sensibles.

For the French, Clint Eastwood in effect incarnates l’Amérique qu’on aime… The French, in their majority, like America, or at least admire it, and when America gives a less than positive image, Clint Eastwood, via his films, brings that positive image back. The fact that he likes France in return also helps.

I don’t dislike all of Eastwood’s films, il faut le dire, at least those he directed (as an actor, he’s one-dimensional, sans intérêt). I thought ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’ were excellent and liked ‘Heartbreak Ridge’ (which was a hoot), ‘A Perfect World’, and ‘Flags of Our Fathers’. ‘Play Misty for Me’ was creepy but not bad as a film. ‘Unforgiven’ was entertaining, as was ‘Invictus’. I never did see ‘Bird’ and deliberately skipped ‘J.Edgar’. As for Eastwood’s politics, who cares?

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Romney and Diamond

[mise à jour en français ci-dessous]

Mitt Romney, in explaining the reasons for Israel’s apparent superiority over the Palestinians during his Jerusalem visit last week, referred to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond, writing in today’s NYT, says that Mitt’s description of his book is “so different from what [the] book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.” And Diamond then goes on to summarize the book’s arguments.

Diamond’s book is on the list of the most important books I’ve ever read, as I learned something new from it—not just mere facts but about the Big Picture—and it changed the way I think about things. It really is a must read. Hopefully Mitt Romney will get around to it one of these days.

MISE À JOUR: Le livre de Jared Diamond a été traduit en français sous le titre De l’inégalité parmi les sociétés – Essai sur l’homme et l’environnement dans l’histoire (Gallimard, 2000). Il n’a malheureusement pas eu le même retentissement en France que dans le monde anglophone.

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