Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Perhaps the best answer is that he considered himself debarred from attacking an ally. Most of the damning analysis he made of Hitlerite tyranny could have been transferred with equal validity to Stalin, but for Aron to have explicitly done so would have detracted from his first object as a French patriot and as a Jew—the defeat of Nazi Germany. As it happened, Aron underestimated the effects of Vichy’s enthusiastic collaboration with the occupying power on the Jewish Question. (In reality, there never was such a question, hence the capital “Q”: an early instance of falsification through typography.) Never a true pessimist, although always pessimistic enough to be a realist, Aron was not equipped by temperament to guess that a Final Solution was under way. But he had no illusions about the essential barbarity of Nazi anti-Semitic policies and the general nihilism of the assault on humanism by the psychotic authoritarian right—he hadn’t since well before the day he stood with Golo Mann and watched the Nazis burn the books. As a man who loved France, he condemned the Vichy regime first of all for the false patriotism which allowed it to participate in the Nazi attack on the very thing that made French civilization what it was: its humanist heritage. Hence his reluctance to make distinctions between the various columns of the Resistance, one of the most prominent of which, after June 1941 at any rate, was Communist. He believed in de Gaulle, but not enough to disbelieve that the Communist résistants had earned a hearing. Nevertheless, after the Liberation, he could be heard—and can still be heard, in “L’Avenir des religions séculaires” (The Future of the Secular Religions), one of the last chapters of Chroniques de guerre—reminding himself and his readership that, despite the immense prestige won by the Red Army for Stalin’s regime and the people of the Soviet Union, a system of belief which confused the desirable and the inevitable was still a dogma.

  As the war came to an end, Aron, who was always a liberal more on the left than those on the left were liberal, was convinced that some form of socialism would be bound to prevail in all the European countries. He just didn’t want any of those forms to be totalitarian. When it became rapidly more apparent that a different view prevailed in the Kremlin, he prepared himself to write L’Opium des intellectuels. Acting more from artistic intuition than solid study, the scholastically unqualified but piercingly sympathetic Camus anticipated Aron’s central precepts by four years with the relevant chapters of L’Homme révolté (The Rebel ), but Aron’s is incomparably the more coherent work. Camus had appropriated much of his knowledge of Soviet reality from Arthur Koestler, along with the warm attentions of Koestler’s wife. Aron had done his own research, in a colder archive. Camus’s book was part of his romance, along with the vilification that it attracted. (The starting gun for the vilification was fired by Sartre, who tried to counter his upstart protégé’s arguments by discrediting his qualifications: a reflex among established gurus that we should learn to look out for.) Aron’s book was an impersonal treatise much harder to criticize in detail. The English translation, The Opium of the Intellectuals, was meticulously carried out by the doyen of London literary editors, Terence Kilmartin, who did for Aron’s prose what he later did for Proust’s—he caught its measure, which in Aron’s case was always, throughout his career, the measure of sobriety, comprehensive sanity, and a sad but resolute acknowledgement of history’s intractable contingency. Kilmartin himself thought that Aron in his old age overdid the last quality. One day in the Black Friars pub near The Observer’s old location at the foot of Ludgate Hill, and long before I knew that Kilmartin had been the English translator of L’Opium des intellectuels, I was loudly praising Aron—at that stage I had read about three of his books out of thirty—when Kilmartin warned me that my new hero had become, in his declining years, so cautious about social innovation that he was “a bit, um, right wing.” Kilmartin remained “a bit left wing” until his dying day: a proper ideal for a generous man, and one to copy.

  In the course of the last forty years, the only part of the world that has enjoyed peace is the continent divided between two zones of political civilization both of them armed with atomic bombs.

  —RAYMOND ARON, Les Dernières Années du siècle (THE LAST YEARS OF THE CENTURY), P. 68

  It was always a bad mistake to suppose that Aron was some kind of Gallic Dr. Strangelove who had learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. The contrary was true: the annihilation of the defenceless was at the centre of his worries. The point to grasp is that he had already seen it happen. Hitler had dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb on at least six million perfectly innocent people—a weapon more than sixty times more powerful than the one that obliterated Hiroshima. Stalin had dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb a hundred times more powerful on his own citizens. Those bombs had gone off in comparative silence, but Aron had understood the repercussions. For an era in which mass extermination was already not just a possibility but a reality, he presciently drew the conclusion that mutual assured destruction would be the only possible guarantee against disaster. Arguments that it was a guarantee for disaster did not impress him. Hence he was free from the debilitating impulse to warn the world that the arms race was dangerous. Obviously it was: too obviously to need pointing out. While whole generations of intellectuals on the left exhausted their thin talents in an effort to say something that Kate Bush couldn’t sing—she, too, daringly believed that a nuclear weapon was an offence against love and peace—Aron occupied himself with the more useful task of examining the peace that had finally come to Europe, guaranteed at last by no further armed conflict being possible, no matter how thoroughly each side might plan for just such an eventuality. In fact the more concretely they planned, the more the possibility retreated into the notional. Political conflict, however, was clear-cut as never before, and here, for once, Marx was proved right. Economics determined the outcome.

  The conflict began and ended in Berlin, with not a shot fired except against unarmed people attempting to cross the killing zone between East and West. Nobody was ever shot trying to cross from West to East. When the Wall went up in 1961, its creators called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier. There were no longer any fascists who mattered, but the need for protection was real. East Germany, and by extension the Warsaw Pact countries taken as a totality, all had to protect themselves against the glare from the shop windows of West Berlin. Soviet bloc propaganda, faithfully echoed by gauchiste theorists in the West, asserted from the beginning that a free Berlin could not be free at all: its materialist attractiveness was being artificially enhanced by American imperialism as a forward outpost of West Germany, which, in its turn, had been artificially bolstered by the Marshall Plan as a capitalist armed camp. In actuality, the Bundesrepublik would have outperformed the German Democratic Republic whatever the circumstances, merely through its not being burdened with a centralized economy. The propaganda was a fantastic response to a real and potentially lethal threat, already identified by Stalin before 1948, when he made his one and only military move: an armed blockade. Without the resulting Berlin airlift, he would have succeeded in reducing the city by starving and freezing its inhabitants—methods to whose human consequences he had already proved himself indifferent when applying them on a much larger scale against his own people.

  Plane-loads of food and coal were the Allied response, which could not have been mounted without the threat of atomic war to back it up. When Stalin lifted the blockade, his battle was lost and the war along with it. From then on, the armed aggression of the East German regime was against its own citizens. In 1953, they had to be put down with tanks. The Wall was put up because too many of them had fled: East Germany was dying from its brain-drain. The Wall ensured only that it would die more slowly, from envy. The confrontation over a divided Berlin, a divided Germany and a divided Europe was one long war, which at any previous point in history would unquestionably have been fought with weapons. It was called the Cold War mainly in derision, by those who had managed to convince themselves that it was all an American idea. But Aron was
surely right to view as peace a war in which the winning side made every effort not to fire a shot, and the losing side could have no recourse to its weapons even in despair. There were many thinkers who disagreed with him over the issue, especially among the French left. But he had more trouble with agreement from the right. He succeeded in detaching himself, however, from the addled notion that the long drawn out defeat suffered by the Soviet bloc was a victory for the American Way of Life. He was too clear-sighted for that, and the triumph of his lifetime’s effort as a writer on politics was to demonstrate that the believer in liberal democracy, and not the believer in an autocratic utopia, is the one with the hard head. By now everybody realizes that the West’s material abundance was decisive. Aron was the first to realize that the fight would have to be without weapons. That was what he really meant by his famous slogan “Peace impossible, war unlikely.” He meant that there could be no settled peace without the threat of war, but that the war would probably not happen, and as long as it didn’t there was a kind of peace anyway: the only kind available at the time.

  An aggressor would not be able to destroy them without killing American personnel, which is to say, without running a grave danger of reprisals.

  —RAYMOND ARON, Paix et guerre entre les nations, QUOTED IN Les Dernières Années du siècle

  Aron’s Realpolitik was distinguished by being real, as Realpolitik in the strict sense rarely is. When he reminds us of Machiavelli, he reminds us of Machiavelli’s truly hard-headed style, and not of the would-be hard-headedness of his political philosophy—a philosophy that was essentially nihilistic. Machiavelli, perhaps encouraged into admiration by the ruthlessness with which the Medicis would eventually rack him, wrote an invitation to despotism. Aron was writing a prescription for democracy. But the prescription had to include a realistic assessment of the totalitarian challenge (a menace even though the opportunists who made a career from opposing it amounted to a menace in themselves) and in that department realism had to include an acknowledgement that a nuclear confrontation between West and East could not be wished away. In this particular passage, he makes a point which was so antipathetic to the proponents of unilateral disarmament that they were obliged to rewrite history in order to circumvent it.

  European countries wanted American atomic bombs based on their soil, not just to fulfil their NATO obligations but because the weapons were accompanied by American personnel. A Soviet strike against the weapons would thus constitute an attack on the United States, which would be unable to remain uninvolved in the conflict. Hence there could be no localized nuclear exchange: only a global one. Unilateralists, unable to accept that it was in the interests of a European country to play host to American nuclear weapons, were obliged to argue that they were an imposition. By extension, this argument fitted a picture in which the U.S.A. was an imperialist presence in Western Europe, like the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. (Even further to the left lay the belief that the U.S.A. was the only imperialist presence in Europe, the Soviet Union acting merely as a protective power against the further encroachment of a capitalist hegemony.) At this distance it is difficult to appreciate how thoroughly Aron’s position went against the general trend of liberal sympathies. Stated on its own, this one point was enough to make him sound like Edward Teller, whose political programme—which had only parodic relevance to his practical ability as a scientist—amounted to building bigger and bigger bombs, and digging deeper and deeper holes in which to hide from the consequences. Teller being the principal model for Dr. Strangelove, it became easy to hint that Aron might share the same enthusiasms, even though his own right hand showed no tendency to shoot spontaneously skyward.

  But Aron was right, and the effort the USSR made to back the unilateral nuclear disarmament movement in Europe proves it. With the American weapons in place, the USSR was unable to contemplate exerting military pressure in Western Europe in any circumstances. In Paix et guerre Aron made many other points of similarly unpalatable realism, the whole tract adding up to an advance on Clausewitz (one of Aron’s passions: he wrote a two-volume commentary), in which Clausewitz’s connection between diplomacy and war was extended into a further connection between perpetually imminent total war and the only possible form of peace—an armed truce. That the armed truce included an arms race was incidental, because the high cost was merely material, whereas the price of a shoot-out would have been the loss of everything. Salvation lay in the obviousness of this latter point to all. Aron’s conclusion was an epigram: “Peace impossible, war unlikely.” But it is the way his whole argument is laid out that needs to be appreciated. He was fully aware of the bitter irony inherent in reaching such a position from humanist principles, but he saw no paradox in the irony: if there was an apparent contradiction, history had enforced it. A real contradiction would have been to disarm in the hope that moral superiority would have prevailed. For Aron, such trust would have flown in the face of his basic geopolitical precept, which he held to be true for all time: that the nation states are in a state of nature with one another. It would also have flouted his reading of contemporary history, in which totalitarian nation states were bound to find it intolerable to cohabit with democracies unless forced to by the inevitable consequences of failing to contain their patience.

  Personality affects thought—or at any rate affects the train of thought—and there can be no doubt that Aron’s quiet but considerable amour propre got a boost from his being the only one in step. Near the end of his life, when his views became less unfashionable, he was at his least decisive. Jean-François Revel, recalling, in his book of memoirs Le Voleur dans la maison vide (The Thief in the Empty House), his time as editor of L’Express, complains sharply about the senescent vacillations of the paper’s most distinguished contributor. Old men with many laurels often use them to lie down in. Aron was at his best when out of the swim, saying hard things—hard things that were made harder to say because they superficially echoed the unthinking right. During the war, for example, he had been no toady for de Gaulle, but when de Gaulle, in 1963, came back to supremacy on the promise to keep Algeria and then promptly gave it away, Aron clearly enjoyed saying that only de Gaulle possessed what the Fourth Republic had lacked, l’héroïsme de l’abandon—the bravery to renounce (Démocratie et totalitarisme, p. 11). There was always an element of sombre relish, of hushed gusto, in Aron’s readiness to puncture liberal assumptions. But he himself was the very model of the liberal, and those on the left who persisted in believing that liberal democracy was itself ideological were bound to despise him, because he was the one who proved it wasn’t. Liberal democracy was, and is, reality. No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness. Only realism can, and Raymond Aron’s long shelf of lucid books will always be there to tell us why.

  B

  Walter Benjamin

  Marc Bloch

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Robert Brasillach

  Sir Thomas Browne

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  Walter Benjamin was born in Wilhelmine Berlin in 1892 and committed suicide on the Spanish border in 1940, almost within sight of safety. In the 1960s, when his work as a critic began to appear in English, he was hailed as an original contributor to the assessment of the position of the arts in modern industrial society, and by now he is taken for granted as one of the early giants of Theory, that capitalized catch-all term which is meant to cover all the various ways of studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist. Benjamin is above all taken for granted as a precursor of post-modernism. It remains sadly true, however, that he is more often taken for granted than actually read. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the Benjamin essay that everybody knows a little bit about. Whether its central thesis is true is seldom questioned, just as the value of his work as a whole is seldom doubted. His untimely death was such a tragedy that nobody wants to think of his life as less than a triumph. But there had already been many thousands of Jewish tragedies
before his turn came, and what is remarkable for the historically minded observer is just how slow so brilliant a man was to get the point about what the Nazis had in mind. About the other tragedy, the one in Russia, he never got the point at all. This might seem an unpitying line to take, as well as a presumptuous one. Reinforced by the impressive density of his prose style, Benjamin’s intellectual status is monumental, and it is bathed in the awful light of his personal disaster. As a critic devoted to the real, however, Benjamin deserves the courtesy of not being treated as a hero in a melodrama.

  Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythic manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function, the destruction of which thus becomes obligatory.

  —WALTER BENJAMIN, Selected Writings, VOL. 1, 1913–1926, P. 249

  BUT LET’S BREAK the flow of eloquent opacity at that point and ask ourselves about its author. The essay is called “A Critique of Violence” and yields a lot more in the same strain. With Benjamin, “strain” was the operative word. Part of his sad fate has been to have his name bandied about the intellectual world without very many of its inhabitants being quite sure why, apart from the vague idea that he was a literary critic who somehow got beyond literary criticism: he got up into the realm of theory, where critics rank as philosophers if they are hard enough to read. Clever always, he was clear seldom: a handy combination of talents for attaining oracular status. More often mentioned than quoted, he has become a byword for multiplex cultural scope. But the unearned omniscience of post-modernism depends on its facility for connecting things without examining them, and the routine invocation of Benjamin as a precursor is symptomatic. In the under-illuminated conference hall where everything is discussed at once, everybody who matters knows his name, even if nobody seems to remember much of what he actually said. One of the few things Benjamin is remembered for actually saying is that his country was not Germany but German, meaning the German language. The idea poignantly harked forward to the unified New Europe which is now, we are assured, in the final stages of getting its act together. Populated by the merrily flush inhabitants of twinned towns, it will be the good New Place with no real borders except where languages meet. Unfortunately for Benjamin, as for nearly all the Jews of the Old Europe, he lived at a time when unity was being striven for by other means, and for other ends. In Hitler’s New Europe, where all internal political frontiers had indeed been dissolved but only at the cost of surrounding the whole expanse with barbed wire, Benjamin, a French-speaking cosmopolitan who should have been at home everywhere, was safe nowhere. At the border between France and Spain, within hailing distance of freedom but without a proper visa, he took his own life because he was convinced that for him there was no getting out of Nazi territory. He had devoted his career to pieces of paper with writing on them, but he didn’t have the right one.