What's left of the Left: Lévy .

A man of the European left, particularly of the French left, Lévy maintains, cannot be other than . . . ashamed "of France’s brutal efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to maintain control of Algeria -- so Peter Berkowitz paraphrases the Leftist intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy on Algeria.

Lévy is hardly alone in this: the memory of the Algerian War of the mid-20th century has become, for France, the PC MC equivalent of America's "shame" about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's internment of Japanese-American citizens during WW2, and America's "shame" about Vietnam. I.e., it is a non-negotiable axiom of PC MC in France to decry and feel shame about what the French had to do in Algeria. A man of consummate reflection and intelligence, such as Lévy, apparently cannot even accomplish the elementary operation of thought of which any sophomore should be capapble: to consider the context and the nature of the enemy that is the principal feature of that context. The French colonization of Algeria was the best thing that happened to that Islamic hell-hole. For the century and a half that France ruled Algeria, that Islamic hell-hole finally saw glimmers of social, legal, political and technological progress. France's beneficent rule over Algeria began to fall apart in the mid-20th century for two reasons:

1) the West itself was undergoing a cataclysmic sea change in consciousness consequent upon the dismantling -- materially, structurally, institutionally, and philosophically -- of its various colonialist territories; and

2) various forces of Islamic jihad in Algeria, due to a concatenation of circumstances and opportunities (including the weakness of the Infidel due to #1), were finally getting their shit together to resist and overthrow the Infidel occupiers.

Lévy's unremarkable and, alas, all-too common "shame" about France's conduct toward Algeria neglects to factor in two things: a) the French were defending the only good rule Algeria had ever had; b) the French were fighting a grotesquely ghoulish and evil enemy of fantically determined savagery. Rather than feel "shame" about the whole Algerian mess, the more appropriate sentiment would be, if not actually pride in having attempted to salvage a good polity, French Algeria, then at least a grim solidarity for the efforts of the French in having tried valiantly.

The only "shame" about Algeria any self-respecting Frenchman should feel is the shame at having lost Algeria and, thus, for having not been sufficiently brutal against those utterly demonic Muslims who -- to pick just one of thousands of barbarities out of a fez of which they are capable -- routinely slit the throats of whole families in the name of their Satanic ideology.

While Lévy has been somewhat commendable for his ability to cut through a certain layer of PC MC bullshit about the Third World and Islam, his hangover about Algeria reflects the underlying reason why not only the Left, but nearly the entire West, cannot rationally think about, and act against, the metastasizing global menace of an Islam Redivivus.

Update:

No wonder, then, that Lévy (according to this otherwise unsurprisingly flawed analysis by Spencer) subscribes basically to the PC MC paradigm about the problem of Islam -- perhaps the high end of that paradigm, possibly the low end of the asymptotic view -- including the view that "Islamist" extremism is a modern phenomenon fueled in one way or another by Western forces. And for his trouble at being PC MC (or asymptotic), Lévy has been honored with death threats from Muslims. And if the reader scrolls down the Jihad Watch article linked above, they will find this informative comment about how Lévy stupidly befriended and supported the Bosnian Master Jihadist Izerbegovic (in addition to supporting the Bosnian Jihad in general). Someone as intelligent and well-informed as Lévy does not become this stupid by inexplicably vacating his brain: this (and innumerable other similarly infuriating examples that could be adduced throughout the West) can only be explained, as I have reiterated tirelessly in dozens of essays over the past two years at The Hesperado and Jihad Watch Watch, by a complex psycho-socio-cultural sea change in consciousness by which the West has come under the mainstream dominance of a new worldview, a new paradigm -- Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC).