Rating: 
Summary: Wake Up Call
Review: Through his book "Terror and Liberalism", Paul Berman has proven false old stereotypes and rhetoric as to the roots of Islamic Fundamentalism. It serves as a wake up call for both liberals and conservatives. He challenges us to put partisan politics aside and place focus on the real enemy...Islamic Fundamentalists who seek to destroy the world as we know it. As he points out, among Islamic Fundamentalists coexistence is not an option. They want to kill Christians, Jews, and moderate Muslims. Through his book, he demonstrates that diplomacy is not an option with a group of people who value death over life. If you want corroborating evidence for his many arguments read the Koran. The true Muslim religion advocates violence, martyrdom, destruction of all sources of temptation, and an extreme desperation for seventh century religion. If nothing else he sheds light on the existence on the Anti-Christ amongst us.
Rating:
Summary: Finally, a liberal, intelligent defense of liberal society
Review: Today the totalitarian danger has not yet lost its sting, and there is no wisdom in claiming otherwise. Thus opens the first sentence of the last paragraph in Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism. It is his thesis, and he defends it well. I've stated in another review that Islam is a form of conservative thinking. Berman doesn't quite put it this way, arguing instead that the danger from Islamism today is that it has adopted the totalitarian ideologies of the early twentieth century and thrived by it.This is a book written by a liberal for liberals. It is intellectual, so conservatives need not bother with it. For the rest of us, Berman makes an impassioned and well-stated argument as to why liberalism must be defended from totalitarian Islam. Even more important is the case that it is liberalism more than anything that the bin Ladens of the world are angry at. After reviewing the rise of death cultology in the nineteenth century, and witnessing its spread into the fascist and communist ideologies, Berman shows at considerable length just how and to some extent why it has taken hold and thrived in Islam, allowing so many Muslim to rage against the United States. A hint: it's not because we're hypocritical about our values, it's because of our values. And then comes the kicker. Why is it, he asks, that so many intelligent and well meaning people (liberals) who look at Nazi death factories and Stalinist rampages with horror and condemnation can look at the prevalence of atrocities in the Islamic world and shrug, seeing nothing wrong? He offers numbers and statistics. He gives analogies from history. He asks good questions, like why opponents of capital punishment don't occasionally turn their rage to places where the victims are buried with bulldozers? Or why the more suicide bombs go off in Israel, the more otherwise decent thinking individuals condemn Israel? He really digs in here, picking apart Noam Chomsky's binary theory of human history. The basic idea is that decent thinking people are naturally enough driven to try to understand the world. If things are going wrong there must be a reason. If things are going very wrong, there must be a big reason. We should try to figure it out. Fine enough, but only to a point. The search for reasons should not endanger our very lives. He offers the example of Leon Blum, the French pre-war socialist prime minister who advocated a tough stance against Nazi Germany. His anti-war socialist opponents condemned him. He went to Dachau but survived and returned to politics unvarnished. They became collaborators. Enough said? Actually, no. It's not enough, but for more you'll have to read the book. My review is simple, but the text is involved. If you're like me, a liberal hawk (for lack of a better term), this will be a much-needed relief. It turns out that there are other people out there who not only believe in the liberal society that we have, but understand that to keep it, we have to recognize its enemies and then defend it. P.S. An index would be nice, perhaps in the second edition? (hint, hint)
Rating: 
Summary: Both identifies and contributes to the problem
Review: When I was very young my dad told me that politics was like baseball. People put on different uniforms and compete against each other in an attempt to beat out the other team in an act of physical aggression. One day one team comes out on top, another day this same team is losing and falling behind. But the important thing to remember son, he would say, was that both teams are filled with the same people underneath those uniforms. They all are playing the same game and are all playing by the same rules. And that baseball is never about right and wrong, it is about who wins.
Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism is a political book designed to persuade American leftist liberals into supporting what was at the time an upcoming war against Iraq. The arguments put forth by Berman are at times seemingly clear and thought provoking and at other times seemingly ridiculous and insane (which we can expect from literature that comes out of wartime). The book does deliver a comprehensive and well researched look at Muslim history and motivation (both the good motivations and bad motivations behind the Islamic Muslim movement) and that seems rare to find in English. For that, it certainly deserves at least a look.
By far and large, the most valuable thing in Terror and Liberalism is Berman's look into the development of the Muslim belief system. It goes into great detail on the basis of the religion, their desire to remove the two faced, labor driven society we all live in, and to live purely, honestly, and free. It shows that in its basic form, the Muslim idealistic/unrealistic wishes in the Koran and other popular Muslim works are no different than our own religious idealistic/unrealistic wishes. Religiously, they are hoping for a better world, one in which all the corruption, hate, manipulation, and abuse of humans is removed so that they can live in peace (notice I said "they" and not "we", since apparently it's only us crappy other humans who are to blame for all the mess). We all wish such a thing could come true at least at some level for ourselves.
Of course, once you combine the politics with that familiar religious "life should be great" huffle puff , then this sort of thing always seem to turn into "we will be overthrown by the "evil barbarians" if we don't do something, and our survival depends on our ability to exterminate our enemies in the name of "God" and replace them with ourselves!" Berman notices this all too familiar pattern and points out parallels to this sort of behavior drawn between the paranoid massacres of the Nazi's and the harshness of the Soviet Union (both conveniently prior enemies of the United States mind you). Such parallels are extended to other great works of literature, philosophy, and even to the religious books themselves. And this argument is convincing in parts, as there ARE parallels in the violent behavior between the Islamic political movement and other harsh radical political movements that took place in the 20th century (are there ANY political movements that aren't harsh to their enemies?).
But the main mistake this book makes is that its overall message is to push forward practically the same behavior it is criticizing. The books overall message (which ultimately boils down to "We need to eliminate the totalitarian Islamic scum in one way or another") seems like it can only contribute to fear and hate and does not attempt to remove any of it. After going over the basic motivations of the Islamic Muslim faith, Berman himself starts labeling them generally as beings who are less than human. They become totalitarian barbarian terrorists; irrational creatures that are obsessed only with "murder and suicide"; beings that are incapable of rational thought. Towards the end of the book, it becomes apparent that the only way for freedom itself to survive is by (take a wild guess) fighting a great war in the name of "freedom" to exterminate these totalitarian Muslim terrorists, and then to plant shiny new political systems (which of course are perfectly the same as our own) in their place to bring peace. According to Berman, there is no point in trying to rationalize their behavior (as Berman criticizes many of the intellectuals who are at least are attempting to do that much in his book), for Islamists are simply Scarecrows from the Wizard of Oz singing "If I only had a brain" while running around randomly with bombs strapped onto their backs. They are irrational lunatics in a cult of suicide and death. Oh please, don't tell me that is the only conclusion that Berman can muster about huma...sorry, Muslim behavior? It apparently is.
And most of his arguments concerning our role in the current conflicts are completely absurd. For example, if we are against the idea of people who are killing others for political gain, then how can we feel justified about going in and killing them? If our enemies are participating in genocide, aren't we doing the same thing in reverse? Are we really acting in defense? Berman answered this question when replying to the deaths of people when we took Afghanistan. He said simply that since more people entered the country afterwards than the potentially millions who were killed taking it (by us? by Pakistan?) then it's not genocide at all in this case, it's actually genogenesis! You can't be serious? If that logic were actually to be accepted, then the Islamist radicals could argue (so long as the math came out) that if they just made it so that there were more Muslims living on the land than the people who were there previously, then they are right in participating in "genogenesis" themselves! Yay for stupid logic!
In the end, this book is what most political books seem to be, vehicles for trashing the enemies movements while simultaneously justifying the author's own political movements. In my mind, there will always be reasons for or against wars that kill humans, and any person advocating that one side is completely right is faulting somewhere morally (whatever happened to the sorrow of "we fight with each other because we are what we are and have no other choice?"). I don't really like baseball much so this sort of thing is not for me to begin with, but hey if you happen to be an American and want to feel like we are more rightful in killing than our enemies OR are a hard lining Islamic Muslim who wants to defend your position by displaying some of the ridiculous arguments that appear in this book, then by all means these 200 pages of blind political (...) are for you. I can only hope that most of the people running our country at least do what they do with more logic backing them up than this book has.
Rating: 
Summary: Liberal Centrists
Review: [...]
Author Paul Berman does not speak directly about Iraq since during the writing of this book, the US had not really even began to talk about invasion. Berman speaks mostly of the justification of Afghanistan (which I incline to agree with him - but disagree that it has "worked" as an example of Classical Liberal liberation of an oppressed people. We should have finished the job before moving on to Iraq, but that is another topic all together). He points out how Saddam killed thousands of people over the years, and how liberals failed to see how bad it was out of fear of war. This is his assessment of how modern liberals have drifted far from their Classical Liberal roots.
(A good summation of Berman's views on Iraq and modern liberalism in general can be found [...]
Basically, Berman's argument is that Classic Liberalism has shaped 19th and 20th century liberals into spineless cowards. What Berman fails to recognize is that the Left is largely divided and typically only reconcile their differences when it comes to Bush and the current War on Terror. While claiming to be a Classic Liberal (a liberal who champions the poor and underclass of society), he defends the War on Terror (and less directly the war in Iraq).
Berman does not address the vastness of the scope as to why Islamism developed in the first place (he does, however, say that this is a flaw of modern liberalism, that liberals always say things are more complicated than they are because they don't want to truly confront them). He does, of course recount the evidence of some of the more modern Islamic thinkers like Qutb, but he refrains from going any further back in history. Why did Qutb and his followers arrive at such a hatred of the West, surly not simply out the fear of secular dominance? There must be other issues, issues that have been boiling between the East and the West since the Crusades.
Modern liberals, says Berman, are quick to point the finger back to the colonial West and its debacles in the Middle East. While Berman agrees that the West has fueled the fire for modern Islamism via botched colonialism, he fails to address how this historical conflict has metabolized in the modern Islamicist. While I will agree that the modern liberal will levy the entire burden of terrorism on the West's colonial past and more recent US foreign policy, I will not agree with Berman that the historical conflict between the Middle East and West had little to do with modern terrorism and totalitarianism. The history between the West and the Middle East has everything to do with it. We are a product of our history, good or bad, and it is that same history that shapes our actions today. Therefore, totalitarianism and Islamism are not simple death-cults that emerged via their black-hearted intent alone, they are responses to stimuli, and that stimuli, in part (but not entirely), are the result of our clash with the Middle East. This does not place the blame entirely on the West, but a finger must be turned back at ourselves, if only for moment, to see the entire picture.
I think modern liberals and Classical Liberals, as Berman defines, would agree at least on the issue of helping the lower-class and the oppressed people of the world. Modern liberals are still very active in this matter domestically via social services. The rift seems to occur only on the issue of US foreign policy. Domestically, the answer is easy: if the poor, the homeless, and the abused children need help, then it is in the government's best interest to intervene to correct the problem. But if a child, or the poor are being abused abroad, then military action seems to be the only recourse available. The problem, I suppose then, is which military actions are "just" and which are not. This of course brings us to the Iraq issue where the liberal intent to free an oppressed people is mixed with the colonial intent of conservatism. The issue to invade/liberate Iraq instantly becomes a convoluted mess by trying to be two polar opposites. One cannot liberate a people by occupying them. One cannot offer freedom under marshal law. Berman is clear in his interpretation of the issue: yes, you can do both. Classical Liberalism, as he defines it, has the duty to stand up for the underprivileged of the world, and to do so by military action which is the only way he views will work. The irony here is that Berman fails to realize his own rhetoric, if liberation is only achievable by force, then Berman has in fact become the nihilistic leftist he so readily denounces. His actions as invader/liberator are similar, if not identical to that of the nihilist/anarchist: freedom must be delivered by force.
Overall, I think Berman makes some strong points in regard to his assessment of modern liberals and how they view totalitarianism (whether it be in the form of Baathist, Nazis, or Islamicists). I think, however, that how to deal with these emerging totalitarian movements has yet to be determined. The issues are not so black and white as Berman would like to believe. There are many other factors that Berman leaves out. It is not simply a matter of whether or not tyranny exists, it is a matter of how did that tyranny develop, how can it be address (via militarily, diplomatically, etc), and how can we prevent it in the future.
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