LEFT IN DARK TIMES: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (2008) by Bernard-Henri Levy, Random House.

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“...In the case of any given injustice, the man or woman of the Right will say it's inevitable. The man or woman of the Left will say it's intolerable.”

-Francoise Sagan

“Yes, I think it is a long-lasting ideological struggle. Frankly, the War on Terror is somewhat misnamed, though. It ought to be called the struggle of a totalitarian point of view that uses terror as a tool to intimidate the free.”

-President George W. Bush, Time Magazine, September 6 2004

“My problem is less dissociating myself from Bush than it is finding the idea that will let me dissociate the righteous from the Nazi; the Arabs who fought for Free France from those who were rooting for a German victory...Muslim Algerian women from their persecutors...The real line that separates them is therefore not a religious one but a political one.

....Here again, here more than ever, we are desperately seeking an antifascist Left”

• Bernard Henri-Levy, Left in Dark Times

Bernard-Henri Levy, aka BHL, with his stunning wife, is a regular item in Paris Match. No matter where he goes the multi-millionaire industrialist heir is always clad in designer suits, with his signature open-necked white shirt. He also happens to be France's No.1 Media Intellectual. Curiously, he is sometimes roundly criticized by academics and journalists- for his superficial arguments of course, rather than his public Dandyism.

Yet BHL is a graduate of that highly selective cradle of French intelligentsia, the Ecole Normale Superieure. A founding member of the Parisian New Philosophers, he attacked the French Left's unquestioning support of the Soviet Union, and blind adherence to Communism. In the 1977 book that made him famous, Barbarism with a Human Face, BHL went so far as to propose that Marxism was inherently corrupt.

Yet when BHL's friend President Nicolas Sarkozy sought his endorsement while campaigning – given that many communists and socialists had already joined the soon-to-be-President's bipartisan team-BHL declined, personal friendship notwithstanding.

Sarkozy was nonplussed, protesting that BHL's so-called political “family” had told BHL to “f**k himself”.

Taking all of that into consideration, and noting Sarkozy's valid views on the Left's responses to Darfur, Chechnya and Hezbollah, BHL started to examine his own drives and motives for subscribing to the Left. The result is Left in Dark Times- a Stand against the New Barbarism.

Indirectly, and possibly unintentionally given his unflattering views of the former US President, BHL raises the fascinating point that the right-wing George W. Bush and the left-wing George Orwell, may have more in common than identical Christian names. Both Orwell and Bush have identified totalitarianism as the enemy of their respective times. Whether the totalitarians appear as fascists or terrorists, they are equally destructive towards the freedom and dignity of the individual and democracy.

In expressing his own commitment to the Left, BHL draws upon turning points in French history, along with his own personal memories and associations- the Nazi occupation of France and Petain's Vichy Government; French colonialism in Algeria; the 1968 riots that first challenged the brutal excesses of Communist regimes.

In the process, BHL delivers food for thought with his observations and proposals: A Palestinian state for its own sake, as of right; how Arab Muslims introduced Greek philosophy-and the democratic principles that come with it- to the West; Christianity originated in the Middle East and, as such, is not an exclusively Western religion; that the Left now fails to fight for universal justice and the oppressed; that a misguided anti-Americanism associates liberalism exclusively with the free-market ignoring democracy and human rights.

BHL proposes to rebuild the Left with a commitment to justice across borders, classes, and ethnic groups, while remembering that some tyrants such as Pol Pot were educated in elite European universities.

BHL relates the significance of the infamous Dreyfus Affair of 1894 to current times, due to ongoing anti-Semitism. When the French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was unjustly jailed for spying- with forged evidence-ultra-conservative and anti-Semitic forces at work within the French Government were seen as too powerful to be challenged.

BHL's cautionary tale is that then, as now, the Left were too slow to come to the aid of a persecuted Jew; to stand up for the rights of the individual.

Dreyfus' innocence was not to be discussed, in the interests of preserving the strength of the French Republic, the Army and the State. Although BHL raises the relevance of the Dreyfus Affair to both the history of France and the formation of Israel, he says next to nothing about Emile Zola, the popular French novelist who went from darling of the French Establishment to exile in England, only to return to a hero's welcome in France once Dreyfus was exonerated. The Dreyfus-Zola story became the Hollywood classic The Life of Emile Zola,( 1937) winner of an Oscar for Best Picture, with the portrayal of Captain Dreyfus, by Joseph Schildkraut, winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

That cinematic account of liberty, equality, and fraternity could have been illustrated by BHL as a positive point of departure for strong relations between France and the USA.

On the other hand, in a series of essays, and subsequent book, BHL did retrace the steps that Alexis de Tocqueville took when writing Democracy in America (1835). BHL challenged Europe's prevailing anti-American mood of 2005 in the light of the USA coming to Europe's rescue during both World Wars, and with the Marshall Plan.

Bernard-Henri Levy, as a writer, is at once exhilarating and frustrating.

The exhilaration comes from the force of his intellectual integrity; his expansive knowledge of European history and world affairs; and his all too rare balanced focus on individual rights and global justice.

He seeks a pragmatic Secular Humanism, warning the atheist against creating a “heaven of ideas” to replace our concept of heaven. Building that “heaven”on Earth, may soon become a living hell if universal principles of individuality and justice are not applied. He proposes instead a gradual, step-by-step, attempt to reclaim key virtues through addressing social issues.

BHL's frustrating style of speaking in paragraphs, with torrents of “stream of consciousness” breaking down walls of punctuation, leaves the reader wondering if BHL is addressing us, or inviting us into his interior monologues. But that is a minor quibble compared to the prospect that Left in the Dark, and BHL, support an observation which I have come to agree with: Socialists simply do not have a sense of humour.

Various reasons for this view: Envy and resentment are the driving forces of socialism; one should not laugh when so many are afflicted by injustice; humour is the product of the idiosyncrasies of individuality and diversity, which socialists inherently distrust.

As a scholar of history and philosophy, BHL will be aware that over five hundred years ago, the Renaissance offered a treasure trove of European humanist literature from which to inspire and inform his vision for the future, such as the Englishman Shakespeare, the Spaniard Cervantes,and France's greatest Renaissance writer, Francois Rabelais ( 1490-1553).

BHL never mentions Rabelais, even though the latter rebelled against tyranny, ignorance, narrow-mindedness with“whole-hearted laughter that neither sneers or rages”, according to historians of the time.

Thought to have presaged Charles Dickens, Rabelais was a former Franciscan monk and trained physician who was a “humourist pure and simple, feeling often in earnest; thinking always in jest”.

According to Rabelais' credo of Pantagruelism, the world is only saved, and cleansed, by humour and laughter. His writing “belonged to the morning of the world, a time of mirth and a time of expectation.”

Under Pantagruelism, people's natural instincts prompt them towards knowledge, manners, honour and virtue. But once people are enslaved and brainwashed into doing what they really don't want to do, they turn away from virtue in favour of chasing after forbidden fruits, desiring only what is denied them without setting their sights any higher.

T.S Eliot, winner of 1948's Nobel Prize for Literature, may have been a Pantagruelist when he wrote that personalities are repressed and distorted, not improved, when lively individuals, who can be neither understood nor ignored are pressured into conforming.

Bernard-Henri Levy has written a rewarding book, and is a commentator for our times. His writing can only be greatly enhanced by acknowledging, if not including, the levity of Francois Rabelais and the bravery of Emile Zola in his future works.

- ADAM GREENWELL, JULY 31, 2008