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KRASNER & BERMAN: STRUCTURAL CONFLICT THEORIES

May 18, 2007 at 7:59 pm | Posted in Books, Globalization, History, Islam, Zionism | Leave a comment

Stephen Krasner and Paul Berman

Stephen Krasner of Stanford University was the main guest on television’s “Charlie Rose,” on Thursday May 17, 2007.

He headed up the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in recent years.

His 1985 book “Structural Conflict” attacks the Third World from a liberal point of view. Krasner is not a neocon per se but a kind of left-liberal anti-Third World theoretician.

This is the “other wing” of Zionist anti-Third World theory.

Paul Berman, author of “Terror and Liberalism”, 2003, is another Jewish liberal in the same Third World & Islam-bashing camp.

Liberal Zionist internationalists like Richard Holbrooke see Berman’s book as a perfect handbook because it avoids or sidesteps the neocon “clash of civilizations” to offer a more palatable “clash of political systems” handle on the world.

These books represent Zionist distortions of the world that are politically useful for Third World-bashers who don’t want to be seen as neocons.

Terror and Liberalism

by Paul Berman (Author)

From Publishers Weekly:

Berman puts his leftist credentials (he’s a member of the editorial board of Dissent) on the line by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror, joining a discourse that has been dominated by conservatives. The most original aspect of his analysis is to categorize Islamism as a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and Communism; drawing on the ideas of Camus in The Rebel, Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death. He illustrates this progression through a nuanced analysis of the writings of a leading Islamist thinker, Sayyid Qutb, ending with some chilling quotations from other Islamists, e.g., “History does not write its lines except with blood,” the blood being that of Islam’s martyrs (such as suicide bombers) as well as of their enemies, Zionists and Crusaders (i.e., Jews and Christians). Berman then launches into his most provocative chapter, and the one he will probably be most criticized for in politically correct journals: a scathing attack on leftist intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, who have applauded terrorism and tried to explain it as a rational response to oppression. Berman exhorts readers to accept that, on the contrary, Islamism is a “pathological mass political movement” that is “drunk on the idea of slaughter.” A former MacArthur fellow and a contributing editor to the New Republic, Berman offers an argument that will be welcomed by disaffected progressives looking for a new analysis of today’s world.

From Library Journal

So new that at press time the publisher’s sales reps had yet to hear about it, this work considers how liberals can respond to the threat of terrorism.

Product Details:

Hardcover: 216 pages

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 2003)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0393057755

ISBN-13: 978-0393057751

Paul Berman has spent his career writing on revolutionary movements and their totalitarian aspects. Here he argues that, in the terror war, we are not facing a battle of the West against Islam—a clash of civilizations. We are facing, instead, the same battle that tore apart Europe during most of the twentieth century, only in a new version. It is the clash of liberalism and its enemies—the battle between freedom and totalitarianism that arose in Europe many years ago and spread to the Muslim world.