A cynic might title this, ‘Fake French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy inserts himself into the current Refugee Crisis in Europe’. This man thinks of himself as the natural inheritor of the mantle of Sartre and Camus. Perhaps he is, in the age of television and the internet, a kind of vapid facsimile of the Public Intellectual of another time and place: a creation of self-will and broad based public relations. With a veneer of anguished moralizing chatter attuned to the political orthodoxy of the moment? There is no mistaking the high flown hectoring rhetoric, nor forgetting M. Lévy last moral performance of note, that took place at Ukraine: Thinking together Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-05-06-newsitem-en.html
But I am forgetting his many rhetorical interventions on the question of Charlie Hebdo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/in-praise-of-blasphemy_b_7185898.html
One wonders at this sentence:
Our society of the spectacle, normally so quick to manufacture an instant celebrity to serve as the “face” of the crisis du jour (anything from swine flu to a truckers’ strike), has not taken an interest in the fate of a single one of the “migrants.”
Had M. Lévy missed these? His essay being published before these appeared?
I can’t find a credit for this. An oversight perhaps. Mea culpa!
Some, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, claim that the conflicts generating these refugees rage only in Arab countries that are being bombed by the West.
Here again, the figures do not lie. The top source of refugees is Syria, where the international community has refused to conduct the kinds of military operations required by the “responsibility to protect” – even though international law demands intervention when a mad despot, having killed 240,000 of his people, undertakes to empty his country. The West also is not bombing Eritrea, another major source of refugees.
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