True believers

The Belmont Club:

Reader DL sends an excerpt from Paul Berman's recent Terror and Liberalism who "puts his liberal credentials on the line ... by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror". Berman believes the Left should have arrived at a logical opposition to radical Islamism independently because:

... Islamism (is) a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism ... Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death.

In a word the Left would logically be expected to oppose Osama Bin Laden because it represents everything Berman thinks the Left has fought against since it's inception. The question Berman tries to answer is why the precise opposite has happened. To get a handle on the problem he dissects the failure of the 1930s French Left to resolutely oppose Hitler....
Read it all.

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