Rediscovering Paul Berman

Six years ago I wrote a review for the Observer about Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, a quite brilliant polemic about the way the legitimate liberal desire to overturn the conventional or the bourgeois can so often turn to murderous terror.

I recognised at the time that it was an extraordinary book, but I couldn’t quite accept his final conclusions, which seemed to elide different forms of barbarism so that Palestinian suicide bombers became equated with the genocide of the Nazi death camps. I still think it is important to make distinctions between the geographical, cultural and historical specifics of individual patterns of atrocity. This is not to say there is a hierarchy of such things. But at the end of the review, I now realise, I made the same mistake myself: 

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“In light of recent events, Berman’s description of a paranoid ‘people of God’ convinced of its own righteousness, prepared to kill its enemies and sacrifice its own in pursuit of a realm of pure truth might just as easily apply to the United States as to its Baathist and Islamist foes.”