Aff Vs. The K

Not necessarily a devastating card, but definitely a start to a good aff framework/defense of US action. I am interested in checking out this Levy book

Seattlest 9-24-08

Sep. 24, 2008 ( delivered by Newstex) -- Bernard-Henri Levy looks pretty much like you'd expect: a rail-thin Frenchman with a rather dashing coif of hair, who walked to the podium at Town Hall last night wearing a designer suit with his white dress shirt unbuttoned down to the navel (his signature), like a rock star looking to get his (mostly salt-and-pepper haired) groupies' panties in a twist. And in France, where Levy is a star of gossip pages, known only as "BHL," he is something of a rock star. But Levy is also a leading public intellectual who came to prominence in the late 1970s as a anti-Communist liberal and, in contrast to most of the European Left, a leading supporter of Israel. So dashing pretension of the celebrity speaker aside, it was extremely interesting to see Levy only two weeks after seeing Slavoj Zizek speak. Together, these two represent the two poles of the spectrum of the political Left: Levy, the modern progressive-liberal journalist and philosophe; Zizek, the Marxist theorist and radical-chic academic. And yet both have exactly the same message when diagnosing the problems of the modern Left: We're short of ideas and haven't done the leg-work necessary to make ourselves relevant in the post-Cold War world. All of which leaves us thinking that perhaps the real problem is too much thinking. And talking. And arguing. And writing books. Because there couldn't have been more difference between the directions these two international leftist titans are pointing, and anyway, no one seems to be paying attention to them. Levy's appearance was in support of his new book, . In it, Levy seeks to lay out a critique of the problems the Left faces today, the challenges it will have to overcome to remain relevant, and encouraging it to return to its old-fashioned values of internationalism, human rights, and universalism. "Bernard-Henri Levy @ 92Y" by Flickr user . Eloquent despite his accent (the source of a few self-effacing jokes), Levy delivered a passionate call to arms on the above points, complete with fist-pumping enthusiasm. Fundamentally, his argument centered on the corruption of those values and their impact on global politics. Internationalism and human rights, which should be universal, have been corrupted by multiculturalist tendencies and the demands of "realist" foreign policy; all of a sudden, equal rights for women??"a standard in the West??"is a cultural-imperialist imposition on sovereign cultures in the Middle East, say. And the trick works both ways: Whereas once the left was about breaking down boundaries and liberating peoples, now the rhetoric has been adopted by nationalists, afraid of international institutions like the U.N. or the E.U. co-opting their sovereignty and corrupting their unique culture through global capitalist exploitation. Oh, and speaking of all that imperialism, this has engendered an almost conspiracy-panic amongst leftists who are all convinced the U.S. is an imperial power (or at least wants to be), and who see in every act and in every policy a subtext of ruthless self-interest and expansionism. It's on this point that Levy chose to defer to his new book, reading a lengthy passage that begins several years ago with Levy taking part in a discussion on a radio show in France. The subject is the Darfur genocide, and Levy's fellow talking-head a French liberal-leftist and co-founder of the international human rights group Doctors Without Borders. Levy was arguing strongly on behalf of taking direct action (with the potential for military intervention) to stop the genocide, while his opponent, despite his ostensible dedication to human rights, was against it. Ultimately, he lets drop the words "America" and "empire," and Levy sees the truth for what it is: His opponent??"a personal friend??"who should share his dedication to supporting the victims of genocide, is willing to abandon the Darfuris to their fate because he's convinced that whatever America wants to do (and America said plenty about wanting to do something about Darfur) must be a vicious extension of imperialist aims. And this line??"as all do, it seems??"leads to the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. The second part of the excerpt he read from concerned the Sept. 2001 U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa. For those who've forgotten (which should be just about everyone, because this stuff is all terribly unimportant), the conference descended into chaos because numerous nations, primarily Muslim, wanted a discussion of whether Zionism constituted racism. Western nations balked, a lot of high-minded people traded pot-shots, and the nothing that would have occurred either way happened, and the whole sorry affair was quickly forgotten in the aftermath of 9/11. But in Levy's telling, Durban was a watershed moment, when the left's increasing hostility to Israel revealed itself for the modern anti-Semitism it, apparently, is. What of all the other victims of genocide and racism? he asks, naming off friends or representatives of one ethnically cleansed group after another. What of them and their suffering? Ultimately, he concludes that we've reached a point where anti-American conspiracy-mongering and a latent anti-Semitism have raised the Palestinians' suffering to the non plus ultra of oppression, for which the American empire, with their British poodles and Israeli clients, bear responsibility, and every other racist, cruel, oppressive, chauvinistic government is therefore absolved of any culpability, and their victims silenced, their suffering suppressed. Now, we don't mean to suggest that we don't think Levy has a bit of a point on all this, particularly given the proclivity of lefties to assume that whatever America does must be nefarious and evil (despite all available evidence to the contrary), nor with the willingness of many such people to see more good than there actually is the Ahmadinejads and Chavezes of the world. But the Durban conference? Really? We're reminded of a comment Zizek threw back at a questioner who rambled on endlessly about the crimes of the Bush administration and so on, and then asked "can you comment on that?", desperate to have someone more important than her say, "Why yes! I totally agree, you were right, and everything you think is true and accurate!" Instead, Zizek explained in his patient, professorial way (which made the rather devastating response somehow nicer-seeming) that the tendency of the left to fall back on moralistic arguments really just revealed the poverty of our side, the lack of real initiatives or politics or narratives or ideas that could actually have a real impact on the world. Not having read Levy's new book, we can't really evaluate his arguments (Christopher Hitchens offers ), but to judge by Levy's talk, it sounds like he could do a bit more of the intellectual heavy-lifting himself. Newstex ID: