BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) on Darfur, Human rights, western superiority and on the reasons why too many on the Left don't give a damn:
And in America and in France, you have a lot of people [of] the Left, to which I belong, [who believe that] we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of Sudan. Let’s be careful not to impose under the flag of human rights the old rule of Western superiority. The result of which is that we are abandoning to that [idea] the worst death, these unnumbered lots of people. And in the end: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. We are prisoners of a scheme of thought in which, if you are a victim and if you don’t play a role, if you don’t have a part on the big stage, in the big history, in the big tale of the opposition of the evil empire and the good anti-imperialist forces, you don’t really deserve attention.
In past decades, in the 60s and 70s during the Cold War, if you were neither with the Soviets nor with the US, you had a pretty good chance of falling into the big hole of the ignored wars. If you didn’t have a real role in this big fight, which [was] supposed to be the fight of the poor against empire, you didn’t exist. These poor people, these women—the son of whom will die in a few hours—have nothing to do with the Big Story, which is the story of Mr. Chomsky, the story of Mr. Badiou in France, the story of people in England, the story of the fight against empire. So [they are] out of the frame, out of our visibility. Nonexistent.
The question, which BHL doesn't answer is the following: what is the point of belonging to a left, which only cares about the Big story and considers that everything else is a footnote to history?
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