The previous issue of Telos included a collection of articles concerned with one side of the totalitarian experience in Germany, the Nazi regime and some of its ramifications for political theory, philosophy, and historiography. This current issue, which rounds out the collection of essays organized by Amir Eshel and myself, was initially envisioned as a companion discussion of the second of the two evil twins, Communism, especially in East Germany. After all, the original theorization of totalitarianism in Hannah Arendt’s study on The Origins of Totalitarianism was based on a parallelism (but no simple equation) of Nazism and Communism, although her reference point in a study published in 1951 was of course Stalin’s Russia, not Ulbricht’s Germany. Yet this companion volume has not turned out to be a neatly delimited and symmetrical treatment of East German Communism, and it is worthwhile reflecting on this outcome.
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Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, on a controversial speaking tour through some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, has been served with a summons and faces a law suit for his role in the detention and imprisonment of Iranian Jews during the 1990s. As reported by PR Newswire, On Friday [September 6] evening copies of the complaint and summons were served on Khatami at a reception in Arlington, Virginia hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Khatami has twenty days to file an answer denying the allegations or default the case. This blog previously discussed the challenge Khatami faced at Harvard when a questioner confronted him with the arrest, rape and murder of Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi. This new revelation of Khatami’s role in persecuting Iran’s Jews only confirms the fraudulent character of his call for dialogue. Such make-believe dialogue is only the “human face” of the tyranny of the Iranian regime, a propaganda decoy designed to distract attention from the really-existing oppression, the character of which Khatami helped forge. Celebrating him at prestigious American venues and indeed the misguided decision to invite him are an embarrassment, especially in the context of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In response to the publication of the “Euston Manifesto, in London,” a hard copy of which appears in Telos 136, a group of writers in the US co-authored “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto,” a link to which is posted at the top of the main page of this site. For technical reasons, discussion cannot take place there, but it is invited in the form of comments after this brief note. The statement, like the original “Euston Manifesto,” speaks for itself as a restatement of liberal values in the current world situation. It describes the challenge posed by Islamic extremism as the key challenge of the age, and it calls for liberals not to cede this agenda to the conservative end of the political spectrum. This is where the situations in the UK and the US differ. In the UK, a Labor Prime Minister with extraordinary rhetorical and intellectual skills has been the proponent of an aggressive resistance to the jihadist forces increasingly described as “Islamo-fascist.” Politics in Blair’s England have had a distinctively different character than those in Bush’s America. The highly polarized situation in the US has encouraged parts of the liberal and left political spectrum to slide toward a neo-isolationism or what some call a return to McGovernism, with the potential for political marginalization. Meanwhile it has been the Republican President who has articulated a critique of a neo-totalitarian ideology and the imperative of a “war for civilization”—instead of a “clash of civilizations.” “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto” presents an argument for liberals to rise to the challenge of developing a foreign policy that includes consistent opposition to reactionary movements in the Middle East and that purposefully combines support for liberal-democratic values at home with advocacy of those values overseas as well. The text displays clear signs of a range of opinions, from the center to the democratic left, with various judgments on current foreign policy. The authors agreed to disagree on some points in order to unite in this appeal. Nonetheless there remains plenty of room to continue discussion of those differences. You are invited to post your comments on the Euston texts here, or at the Euston site itself.
Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami advocates a dialogue between civilizations, and Harvard defended its controversial decision to give him the prominent forum of the Kennedy School invitation because of the importance of the free exchange of ideas. Yet Khatami evidently cannot tolerate dialogue within a civilization, i.e., free and open discourse within Iran; and Harvard has given a forum of freedom to freedom’s enemy. This became painfully evident in a detail of the exchange following his speech. An Iranian in the audience questioned him about an egregious case of the suppression of free speech: the arrest, rape and murder of Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi. Khatami’s propaganda mission has been to present a softer image of Iran to a West perplexed by the antics of his successor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet the material of this question was not immediately relevant to that project, since it involved an internal Iranian scandal—no matter how much it also involved Canada and the world public. “Dialogue between civilizations, but tyranny at home”—this seems to be Khatami’s motto. He offered no condemnation of Ahmadeinjad’s call to purge Iranian universities, no apology for his own role in the suppression of dissidents in Iran. One day before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the CNN “Law Center” has chosen to post an interview that tends to exonerate Richard Reid, the “Shoe Bomber,” and provides multiple excuses for his efforts to blow up a passenger plane in midair. The publication at this date seems timed precisely to intrude on the anniversary of the attacks in New York and Washington. The text consists of an interview by CNN’s Becky Anderson with a British human rights lawyer, Peter Herbert, who had spoken with Reid. Yet Herbert’s conversation with Reid took place four years ago, so there was nothing new or timely in Herbert’s comments. Nor did Herbert play any role in Reid’s defense: just another lawyer trying to get in on the act. Presumably CNN made the intentional editorial decision to publish Herbert’s exoneration of Reid on the eve of 9/11. As the saying goes, one can’t argue about taste. Exoneration? Herbert does in fact report that Reid had clear political intentions: He didn’t regard himself as evil, he regarded what he was about to do as being a necessity and in a great cause which was to bring the world and especially America’s attention to the injustices being suffered by Muslims in different parts of the world. He mentioned specifically Bosnia, he mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan Why Bosnia? Had not the West fought on the side of Muslims there? But what do facts matter in this context. Reid’s declaration at his trial, in fact, was explicit on his political goals, and it was reprinted in Telos (issue 129). Yet the CNN journalist and the human rights lawyer cooperate quickly to turn this into a very different matter: not Reid as political actor, attempting (and luckily failing) to carry out a terrorist attack, but poor Richard Reid as victim of society. . . . “Sudan’s president, Omar Al-Bashir, has vowed to fight off UN troops himself, and warned that Sudan would take on international soldiers ‘as Hizbullah beat Israeli forces.'” —Rob Crilly, reporting for the Christian Science Monitor The genocide in Darfur is a tragedy of enormous proportions. At the same time it raises fundamental questions about the very character of world opinion and international organizations. The whole world is watching—and just watches. The one international institution established in response to genocide and constitutively committed to human rights—to rights that humans can claim as humans, and not as citizens of particular states—the United Nations, has shown itself to be troublesomely incapable of acting, even in the most dire of circumstances. At its core, the UN is hampered by a conflict between the ideal commitment to universal values (human rights) and the real obligation to the sovereignty of nation states, no matter how heinous. Perhaps the answer is simply sad realism: the UN is not a panacea, it cannot alleviate suffering generally, but it can ameliorate conditions marginally. The way for the UN to succeed is to lower the expectations. That line of thought is, however, quite grim for the victims of genocide. If the killing proceeds in Darfur and no strong international force is introduced to halt it—because the UN processes prevent such a force—the UN will lose whatever remaining credibility it may still have, and with it a bevy of internationalist principles and beliefs. If the UN cannot succeed here, then its mission, truly, becomes marginal, and not universal. Its inability to realize ideals in the world is an object lesson in the limitations of ideals. |
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