By Russell A. Berman · Friday, September 1, 2006 Of course, it was Imperial Japan, not Nazi Germany, that attacked Hawaii. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the day of infamy, the United States entered a war both in Europe and in the Pacific. Although the political structures and ideologies of Japan and Germany were hardly identical and their geopolitical ambitions were not at all thoroughly aligned (who would replace the British in India?), President Roosevelt was able to articulate a clear opposition between the democracies and the fascist powers. Differences among the various fascist regimes could still leave room for nuanced policies and strategic decisions: there was no allied invasion of Franco’s Spain. Yet the fact that Mussolini was not Hitler did not prohibit the invasion of Sicily, a crucial link in the chain that would lead to victory in both theaters.
Such was the ability of American society then and its political leadership to resist and defeat the dictatorships of the Second World War, followed decades later by the successful conclusion of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That capacity for such political and military resolve is however of a completely different nature than academic inquiry which, characteristically, has developed a rich insight into the specific features and differences among the dictatorships. Scholars distinguish and differentiate, and this variegated knowledge can, at times, inform policy decisions, but, in the end, academics have the professional luxury of never having to act and certainly not to take action to contribute to national security.
Some intellectuals nonetheless have the ability to see the big picture. Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism of 1951 draws primarily on the examples of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, between which she describes important similarities. Aside from the left, which has always resented the impugning of Communism, academic objections to Arendt’s study have pointed out the undeniable differences between Hitler and Stalin, and their respective regimes. Within scholarly research, such criticisms should not be discounted, but there is a point, particularly when one moves from the university into the political arena, where this quibbling becomes a debilitating fixation: insistence on the specificity of each tree, while refusing to take note of the forest.
This is a problem with categories as such. Individual phenomena retain an irreducible particularity, which makes up the texture of lived life, the Lebenswelt; at the same time, we cannot do without a conceptual vocabulary to describe commonalities and to enable action in the world. Action is a defining condition of humanity, the ability to build on reflection to transform the world through creative innovation. Without the conceptual tools of thought, action becomes blind; but without an active pursuit of human goals—telos—thought diminishes.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 31, 2006 Ramin Jahanbegloo, a leading proponent of Iranian democratization, has just been released from several months of incarceration in Teheran. Active in building bridges to Western intellectuals (including dialogues with Isaiah Berlin and George Steiner), Jahanbegloo—also a Canadian citizen—was arrested in April of this year at the Teheran airport on his way to a conference in Europe. Accusations included spying and efforts to pursue a US-inspired “Velvet Revolution” in Iran. Other accounts suggest that an interview he gave with a Spanish newspaper, critical of Ahmadenijad’s Holocaust denial, led to his arrest.
The release may represent an effort to pursue a minor distraction from the crisis over Iran’s nuclear technology. There is certainly no indication of a larger thaw. There may be some more complex ideological and tactical connection, discussed below. This is however an important opportunity to pursue the connections between “theory,” which is clearly Jahanbegloo’s passion, and the urgent political questions of the moment.
In his essay “Iranian Intellectuals: from Revolution to Dissent,” Jahanbegloo distinguishes between reformist/revolutionary and conservative forces. Note the intellectual genealogy of the conservatives of the Mullahocracy.
“Unlike the reformist intellectuals, the neo- conservative intellectuals in Iran are in favor of the supremacy of the Leader and against concepts such as democracy, civil society and pluralism. This movement includes figures such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Javad Larijani and Mehdi Golshani. The famous personality among these is Reza Davari Ardakani, who as an anti- Western philosopher is very familiar with the works of Martin Heidegger. Davari, unlike Soroosh, takes some of the features of Heidegger’s thought, mainly the critic of modernity and puts it into an Islamic wording. He rejects the Western model of democracy, which is based on the separation of politics and religion.”
Heidegger in Teheran as an account of anti-modernism? But beyond the dialectic of left and right from the generation of the Iranian revolution, Jahanbegloo describes a younger generation which approaches modernity from what appears to be a post-modern perspective: not post-modern in the sense of giddy relativism or irresponsibility but with liberal openness and an interest in dialogue.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, July 31, 2006 Against the backdrop of the violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, an interesting letter-to-the-editor appeared in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel on July 30. The author, Dr. Mounir Herzallah, self-identifies as a Lebanese Shiite and comments:
“Until 2002, I lived in a small village in the south of Lebanon near Mardschajun, with a majority population of Shiites, like myself. After Israel’s departure from Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to show up and to take over, not only with us but in all the neighboring villages as well. Greeted as successful resistance fighters, they came loaded with arms and, in our village too, they constructed missile storage facilities in an underground bunker. The social work of the Party of God entailed building a school and an apartment building right on top of the bunker! A local sheikh explained to me, with a smile, that the Jews would lose in any case: either because they would be hit with the missiles or because, should they attack the missile storage, they would be condemned by the world public due to ensuing civilian deaths. The [Hezbollah] was not at all interested in the Lebanese people; they only used them as shields and—when they were dead—as propaganda. As long as Hezbollah remains there, there will be no peace and quiet.” (my translation)
The connection between war and welfare—schools on top of bunkers—is intriguing and reminiscent of other “guns and butter” debates. So is the simultaneous suggestion that Hezbollah merely instrumentalizes the local population: it may claim to be fighting in the name of some population, in order to invoke a democratic legitimacy, but in fact it only uses the locals as human shields. Hence also the reports that in some instances Hezbollah has prevented civilian departures from the warfront in Southern Lebanon precisely in order to increase casualty rates. One notes similarly the willingness to tolerate deaths when its own missiles hit Israeli Arabs. This predisposition of an extremist political movement to argue, occasionally, with a democratizing rhetoric (defending a people) while in fact disregarding the lives of the people is a symptomatic feature of totalitarian mentalities: neither Hitler nor Stalin cared much about the numbers of their own who were lost.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, March 10, 2006 Telos 134: Politics and Religion is available for purchase in our store
 “Au secours, Voltaire! Ils sont fous.“ (“Save us Voltaire, they are crazy.”) With this cry for help, the French newspaper France Soir appealed to a national hero, the notoriously anti-religious philosopher of the Enlightenment, in the face of burgeoning Muslim protests against its reproduction of the Danish caricatures of Mohammed. As of this writing, European embassies in Damascus are in flames, and angry protestors have filled the streets from Jakarta to Jutland. The consequences are, as the Danish Prime Minister has put it, “unforeseeable,” at least as far as the political dimension goes. Suddenly it is Western Europe and not the U.S. that bears the brunt of Muslim anger. The contrast is telling, though hardly a reason to gloat. On the eve of the Iraq War, opponents warned that the “Arab street” would be up in arms if the U.S. were to invade. Nothing of the sort ensued; with few exceptions, demonstrations in the Muslim world in response to Operation Iraqi Freedom were few and far between. How striking the difference, then, is the scope of public outrage to the cartoons in the European press. When all is said and done, caricaturing the Prophet is worse than toppling Saddam. Reams of public opinion polling about anti-Americanism in the Arab world suddenly seem irrelevant in the face of this unpredicted explosion of anti-European sentiment. (The long-standing pro-Palestinian tilt of Denmark and Norway has not won them much sympathy, not even in Gaza.)
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