By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, September 7, 2006 Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami will be speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School on Sunday, September 10. The timing of the talk is particularly embarrassing: Iran has recently accelerated its purge of liberal and secular elements from its universities, as recently discussed here. To make matters worse, the topic of Khatami’s address is the “Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence.” The title reads like a parody of Iranian policy.
The situation in Iran is dire:
“Earlier this year, Iran retired dozens of liberal university professors and teachers. And last November, Ahmadinejad’s administration for the first time named a cleric to head the country’s oldest university in Tehran amid protests by students over the appointment.”
It is sorry that Harvard would give a platform to a representative of a dictatorial regime currently crushing its own academic world. That this takes place the day before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks testifies to a particular callousness.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, September 4, 2006 Arguments against the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo have generally focused on the problem of establishing a zone that appeared to be outside commonly accepted rules of law. The captives were treated neither as prisoners of war, subject to treaties and international law, nor were they seen as vested with the constitutional rights applicable within the US. To some extent, this ambiguous outcome resulted from the anomalous nature of the war in Afghanistan but generally characterizes the wider war on terror: the enemy, not made up of regular soldiers, is also not a composed simply of criminals in the normal sense of the term. To date, the conflict between the liberal approach to view terrorists as criminals and respond with police action and the administration’s view of them as enemies, justifying a war footing, leaves an unresolved categorical problem, which—to say the least—has become an enormous political problem.
As a problem for political theory, Guantanamo points to concerns about a “state of exception,” as formulated by thinkers as diverse as Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. To what extent do political systems depend on exceptions? That sort of argument, evidently, could lead to an apologetic claim of the necessity of extralegality. Others may wish to comment on that line of thought. Of additional interest however is the duplication of processes of extralegality in the recent experience with special prosecution. In terms of the political spectrum, if Guantanamo was a problem for “the right,” special prosecution—especially Fitzgerald’s—is a problem for the “the left.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, September 2, 2006 In the debates during and after the recent war in Lebanon, supporters of Hezbollah have tried to represent it as a deliverer of social welfare and not as a terrorist organization. Let us leave aside the question as to why a social welfare organization would be armed to the teeth and dwell for a moment in order to consider the claim itself and its theoretical/political implications. The utopia of the social welfare state has been phrased for a more than a century in terms of providing benefits to its client-citizens “from cradle to grave.” In other words, the whole life course would become an object of state administrative practices. This bureaucratic apparatus logically necessitates some level of intrusion by the state into the private sphere of family life: care-taking, starting with the cradle, means a politicization of the nursery, and so forth. Hence Hayek’s anxieties that even a modest social state would not stay modest for long and set out on a “road to serfdom.”
To talk about Hezbollah as only a welfare state is an apologistic misrepresentation, akin to discussing Hitler in terms of managing unemployment and building the Autobahn (the way the press praises Hezbollah for its Iran-bankrolled big-spending in the Lebanese reconstruction). Hezbollah is however like a “welfare state” in the Hayekian sense: leveraging its resources and political clout to extend a tyrannical control over the private sphere. This is nowhere more evident than in the fate of the Hezbollah children.
 
The intrusion of Nazi ideology into nascent pan-Arabism in the 1930s in fact included the establishment of youth movements modeled on the Hitlerjugend, and the lynchpin in this connection was none other than Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Nazi youth program. This sort of fascist politicization of youth therefore has a long history, but Hezbollah has taken it to new heights. Its message to the Lebanese is evidently this: the price for the social welfare benefits is sacrificing your children. The content of Hezbollah’s welfare state practice is to accelerate the itinerary from cradle to grave: straight from the cradle, into the grave.
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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 · 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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