Bad boys of Europe.(Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and Its Aftermath)(Book Review)

Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and Its Aftermath, by Paul Berman (Soft Skull, 314 pp., $23.95)

IN modern times, the Left has been wrong about everything important--with the one exception of Nazism. Wrong about Stalin, wrong about Mao and Castro, wrong to support North Vietnam and the Sandinistas and Milosevic, wrong, wrong, wrong. And now the Left comes out to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power, and his overthrow is worse than a mistake, indeed a crime. The enthusiasm for dictators is really quite extraordinary, except that it is so absolutely ordinary.

Why does the ideology of the Left give priority to totalitarianism over straightforward human freedom? Why is the Left habitually blind to the real victims? Probably there is no fully satisfying explanation of these central political conundrums, but Paul Berman explores them with insights all his own, and what's more, in prose of strength, subtlety, and even humor.

Superficially, Power and the Idealists is an account of the author himself: an intelligent and informed man taking his distance from the leftist ideology with which he had grown up. Once, he lets drop, he lived in a Maoist commune in Paris; he researched the literature of the Left, and he knew and admired Edward Said, then in his heyday as chief causemonger for Palestine. The 1968 student riots in Paris were an unforgettable moment of hope for him and many others like him. Revolution, at last!

Generously, maybe nostalgically, Berman supposes that the '68ers and their kind were conditioned by the specter of the Nazism that their parents had endured, imagining themselves as potential resisters, never collaborators. In the absence of Nazism, something else would have to substitute as a bogey, for instance America, Israel, the West, capitalism, democracy.

The revolution, then, was grounded in myth, not reality, so naturally things did not work out as expected. Delirium and mania are among the words Berman attaches to the few who resorted to terror in the form of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Black Panthers, and the Red Brigades. Mainstream '68ers confined themselves to posturing; they were in the grip of vanity and self-indulgence, much too rich and privileged for their own good. Most of them have long ago risen to the top of their society, where the power and influence they wield is irreconcilable with their former ideals.

Berman became acquainted with several contemporaries already prominent at that time. Their development into public figures over the years allows him to analyze and interpret how the Left in general has lost its way. Chief among them, and in some ways the book's villain, is Joschka Fischer, until recently the German foreign minister, and most improbable in that role. A '68er through and through, he began as a scruffy Marxist agitator. At one demonstration he was caught on camera attacking and injuring a policeman. If not a terrorist himself, he was certainly an accomplice of terror. He attended a PLO conference where a motion to eliminate Israel was passed unanimously. According to Berman, the Entebbe hijacking shocked Fischer into realizing that he was now supporting the murder of Jews--and thus not opposing Nazis, but imitating them. The Marxist swiftly morphed into a Green, a parliamentarian, if not exactly a politician like any other.