For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”-after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism. Despite his dire warning, Lévy offers cautious hope: The five entities are economically and politically weak, and they lack a vision for a revival of culture and science, instead focusing, morbidly, on past grandeur.Īn erudite and impassioned call for the West to retake the lead in championing liberty.Ĭuster died for your sins. In 1935, notes the author, Persia changed its name to Iran-“which, in Farsi, means ‘land of the Aryans’ ”-in a gesture of alignment with Hitlerism. “What for so long had been known as ‘the truth,’ ” Lévy writes, “is really a shifting shadow.” Despite his admiration for Persian and Arab civilization and Russia’s great literature, the author condemns the five empires for their attraction to Nazism, anti-Semitism, fascism, and totalitarianism.
The author also blames the decline of Western influence on “the digitization of the world,” where all “expressions of belief are of equal value,” an idea contorted by Trump into the notion of fake news. Without America’s strength and influence, five former empires may vie for global power.įrench philosopher, activist, and documentary filmmaker Lévy ( The Genius of Judaism, 2017, etc.), a self-described “committed intellectual,” makes a compelling case that America’s isolationism has created a “great vacuum” that may incite aggressive political ambitions in five powers “bent on redrawing, in their favor, the global map of authority and power.” Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and radical Sunni Islam are beginning “to stir again, to set themselves in motion, and, given the world newly exposed by the American withdrawal…to recommence the assault on history.” For Lévy, America stands as an exceptional nation whose “political, mythological, and symbolic inheritance” impels it to carry the torch of democracy “into dark lands.” Unlike Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, the last two presidents have turned away from European alliances: Barack Obama favored forging ties with Asia and refused to support France when Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in Syria Trump seemingly wants to withdraw from everything.
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