The New York Times magazine has featured Berman twice, as some kind of important theorist of the left. If he thinks the antiwar movement is a bunch of appeasers, that's interesting. I've excerpted a big chunk of his Salon Premium interview here (in which he completely mischaracterizes Chomsky, BTW). Here are a couple of lines I have problems with:
There really is a long history of excellent people with the best of hearts and the best of intentions ending up inadvertently collaborating with the worst of totalitarians.

[...]

The simplest history is of the fellow travelers of Stalin. But there's even more grotesque examples of it -- that of the French socialists in the 1930s. They wanted to avoid a new outbreak of the First World War; they refused to believe that millions of people in Germany had gone out of their minds and supported the Nazi movement.

[...]

We do see some of the same things [today]. With the French socialists of the 1930s, there was even a slippage into outright anti-Semitism, and no one can doubt that some of that has been occurring in the antiwar movement in the United States and above all in Europe. Of course most people in the antiwar movement are against that. But signs of it exist and it would be foolish to close your eyes to that.

[...]

Have you been watching the war coverage on the news?

A little bit. I can say that there was something truly pathetic in seeing antiwar demonstrations denounce the war at one moment and then in another moment seeing grateful Iraqis welcome their British and American liberators. If I were a member of the antiwar movement, I would have felt a moral shudder at that experience.


- tom moody 3-27-2003 7:02 pm





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