Free Public Enemies by Bernard-Henri Lévy Page A

for example, that it hardly has any employment legislation left and that its workers are treated like dogs, the same Russia that leaves the nightclubs where you went to have a laugh and dance with Frédéric [Beigbeder] to rot in a terrifying poverty. In this Russia, no less than under communism, people are ready to betray their parents to steal a broom, a bowl, a badly screwed tap, or—as in Brecht’s
Messingkauf Dialogues
—bits of scrap iron at night from deserted building sites abandoned by oligarchs on the run or in prison … Not only does this Russia inspire no desire in me, it fills me with horror. I’d go so far as to say that it frightens me because I see in it a possible destiny for the late-capitalist societies. Once upon a time, during your postwar “glory days,” the middle class was terrorized by being told that Brezhnev’s communism was not an archaism restricted to distant societies but rather a picture of our own future. We were wrong: it was not communism but postcommunism, Putinism, that may be the testing ground for our future.
    But you already know all that.
    You know it at least as well as I do.
    Just as you know what you’re saying when you say that Céline, that “overrated novelist,” only wrote well in his pamphlets.
    So I will spare you any more of this lecture by a moralist, redresser of ideological wrongs, and staunch defender of high-minded principles, who, when you mention the Beatles, replies—shock, horror—that Russia is not what it used to be,and how is it possible to laugh and sing in terror, among the corpses?
    No, the real question here is our different attitudes to this reality, with which we are both familiar. How is it that, knowing what we know, one of us could act as if nothing was more important than to go on listening to “Ticket to Ride” in the company of gorgeous blondes, while the other gets up on his high horse muttering that we don’t have the right, that we can’t simply wash our hands of this rotten Russia? The real question (at least the one you make me feel like raising, and too bad if that seems pompous) is what’s going on in someone’s mind when they decide or pretend to decide that they don’t care about the destiny of the human race and, on the other hand, what goes on in the mind of someone who, in the face of Africa’s forgotten wars, the massacres in Sarajevo, the Pakistani madrassas where jihad is taught, Algeria in the grip of mass terrorism, Russia today and Chechnya laid waste, chooses to act as if the misfortune of others concerned him, as if he were accountable and even a little responsible and as if it were not possible to be really a “man” without feeling responsible for others—at least some of them—and in some sense their hostage.
    You are right when you say that our improbable exchange will have at least the (minor) virtue of exploring a little this “literature of confession,” which I feel I must point out you were not that much closer to than I was. (I can make out from here the faces of the biographers, webmasters, chasers of literary prizes, police and customs officers of the imagination that you also have at your heels and who rave about your date of birth, your way of life, your Ireland, your dog, your relations with women, and your body—I can see them from here and I must say that the thought of them reading what you threw at them about your father’s whimsicality, hiseccentricity, his remoteness, and his skiing clients makes me laugh out loud.)
    But if it—I’m still talking about our exchange—also succeeds in forcing us to reveal ourselves through questions such as “concern or not about the human race,” if in my case at least it allows me to return to the roots—no bluff, no pretending—of this need I have to feel that I am the one “under an obligation,” the “guardian,” what Levinas * called the “substitute” for my neighbor, if it could help me to understand and say why a man like myself,