|
|
Benoist: From the Right to the Left
| Article
# : |
12922 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
3,030 Words |
| Author
: |
David Gress
|
Marx once said that political events occur twice, once as history and a second time as farce. Europe and the Third World is a good illustration of this saying. Benoist's understanding of imperialism and of the relations between America, Europe, and the Third World are warmed-over repetitions of claims and arguments first made in the early 1960s that even then were wrong. In the meantime, evidence has continued to accumulate, so that even many of those who put forth the original arguments have abandoned them. Instead, former self-styled Rightists like Benoist pick them up, apparently unaware that they are no longer original, or even correct, and present them with great fanfare as new discoveries.
Benoist's thesis, such as it is, has two parts. First, he denounces the United States as a threat to the cultures and civilizations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Second, he argues that Europe, too, is threatened by American capitalism and American culture, and that European peoples therefore share an interest with the Third World in maintaining a pluralistic world independent of American power. Both parts of the thesis are illogical and absurd, and demonstrate a highly patronizing attitude toward Third World interests and concerns.
The idea that capitalist, democratic America threatens to overwhelm presumably more elevated and dignified cultures elsewhere in the world was first developed by the European Right in the late nineteenth century. In Germany, many leading intellectuals saw World War I as a fight between German "culture" and Franco-British "civilization." "Culture," in this vocabulary, was an organic growth rooted in national character, whereas "civilization" was a set of superficial, cosmopolitan attitudes which were indistinguishable from country to country. These attitudes were a threat to "culture" because they tended to suffocate any and all national differences in the name of liberty, equality, and the free market. The similarity of this idea to Benoist's notion that democratic capitalism threatens other cultures with uniformity is striking.
In the late 1920s, after Germany's defeat in the war, some conservatives moved from the idea of a grand struggle between national "culture" and cosmopolitan, egalitarian "civilization" to the idea of a "third way" between Western capitalism and socialism. In Germany, the idea of a "third way" fed into Nazism, which may be why Benoist does not make much of this element of his intellectual ancestry. Similar ideas were to be found on the French Right as well, and in France, after World War II, the idea of a "third way" found great resonance on both the antidemocratic and antiegalitarian right and on the radical Left.
The immediate prehistory of Benoist's Third Worldism begins in the 1950s. France was engaged in a bloody struggle against national liberation forces in Algeria, a struggle that ended with French surrender in 1958. The Algerian war was opposed by a wide spectrum of French intellectual opinion, including the writer Albert Camus, the political philosopher Raymond Aron, and the conservative politician Jacques Soustelle. The war also helped to crystallize a growing tendency on the extreme Left to see the very structure of Western democratic industrial nations as a threat to the rest of the world, a tendency which found eloquent expression in Frantz Fanon's 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon presented, in a socialist guise and with considerably greater rhetorical skill, the same charges as Benoist twenty-five years later: that American
...
Read Full Article
|
|
