We should all look and sound so good at that age:
Today Glucksmann doesn't have to fight against Marx-worship as he did in the 1970s, when even Sartre was swearing allegiance to Mao. But even if Marx is no longer being evoked, his spirit lives on in other forms. If we don't live like Gods, Glucksmann says, it's the brutal laws of the market, Wall Street, globalisation, and the free movement of people, ideas, goods and feelings that are to blame. "Those who fight against the West have retained from the fallen Marx his critique of capitalistic society and the command to destroy it. He disposes of communist dreams and convoluted Utopias but piously maintains the radicalism of heavy accusations. This New Age Marxism–Nihilism is a major nodal point, where religious fundamentalism, national fanaticism, revived racism and the cynicism of the over-saturated all meet."
And here is the confession — "Why I Choose Sarkozy" — that has the philosophe in the soup back home. (Originally published in Le Monde, this essay was reprinted in Democratiya. What would we do without Democratiya? I mean, what would we do?):
Nicolas Sarkozy is the only candidate today to place himself in this large-hearted French tradition. He deplores the sacrifice of the Bulgarian nurses condemned to death in Libya, he denounces massacres in Darfur and the murder of journalists, and then states a principle of governance far removed from that of Jacques Chirac: 'I don't believe in what people call 'realpolitik', which rejects values and still doesn't win any deals. I don't accept what's going on in Chechnya, since 250,000 dead or persecuted Chechens are more than a detail of world history. Because General de Gaulle wanted freedom for everyone, the right to liberty is theirs, too. To be silent is to be an accomplice, and I don't want to be any dictator's accomplice' (14/1/2007).
It's self-evident that Glucksmann has become midly neoconservative, if he wasn't in fact there already before Irving Kristol gave tongue. However, note that Andre also writes that his dream ticket for '08 would be Royal-Kouchner. Royal is socialism with a human pair of legs, for sure, but why Bernard Kouchner?
Because the founder of Medicins sans frontieres is the only leftist activist I can think of who did not attempt to climb-down from his organization's chilling findings into Saddam's Iraq when those findings were being reiterated by Tony Blair as justification for war. (Compare this to Amnesty International's claim that Blair had "selectively" taken evidence provided by that NGO in order to indict Baathism. Also see Amnesty's files under "gulag, Guantanamo.")
Some things are true, noted Orwell, even if The Daily Telegraph says they are true. So too is genocide real menace even if New Labour or a pampered New England Yankee in Austin, Texas points it out.
The lesson here comes, felicitously enough, at the expense of mouth-breathing, nativist Francophobes in this country, who seem not to realize that the duchy of Jacques Chirac is also the home of men like Glucksmann, Kouchner and Bernard Henri-Levy.