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PARTISAN REVIEW
in conspiracies. Eric Hobsbawm, a distinguished historian, announced in
countless interviews that he was very worried that America was aiming at
world domination; but Mr. Hobsbawm has been worried about this for
as long I can remember, and there is no good reason why he should stop
worrying now. Noam Chomsky collected his many interviews between
two hard covers (9-
I
I);
a reader who reviewed it on Amazon.com
enjoyed it immensely and found it sane, balanced, and well researched.
On a somewhat different level there were co ll ections of essays by his–
torians and political scientists, such as
The Age of Terror,
edited by
Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, full of good advice to our leaders:
to act cautiously and wisely, to think strategically, not to overextend, to
bring our policies back in line with our interests, not to act rashly, and
so on. Mr. John Lewis Gaddis, in one of the more interesting contribu–
tions, expressed the hope that we shall regain the clarity of vision that
served us so well during the Cold War. I don 't think these were quite his
views while the Cold War lasted, but perhaps my memory is failing me.
Three essays published in the European press appeared later as
books. First, Arundhati Roy-an Indian of Arab origin, an actress
turned author, and a winner of the Booker Prize-published a bitterly
anti-American essay ("Die Politik der Macht") in which she took great
pains to show that since the end of World War II, America has been
involved in some eighteen wars or warlike operations. She is right but
forgot to add that her own country was involved in nineteen or twenty.
Jean Baudrillard ("L'esprit du terrorisme") wrote an even longer essay,
over two whole pages in
Le Monde,
which had little to do with terror–
ism or bin Laden, but a great deal to do with postmodern views on glob–
alism and the need to resist intolerable American domination. De Gaulle
would have liked his views but not his style. It provoked bitter criticism
from French intellectuals (Jacques Juillard, Alan Mine, and others). To
an outsider it was not absolutely clear if Baudrillard really meant what
he said, but his critics obviously thought so .
Lastly, Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist and writer living in New
York, wrote the longest piece of all ("La rabbia e l'orgoglio"-The
anger and the pride). It was a passionate attack against the terrorists
and those who inspired them and even more against her own country–
men and women too cowardly to stand up against the new barbarians.
Full of four-letter words, it was dismissed as vulgar and a mere diatribe
by many Italian intellectuals of the Left. But the subsequent publishing
history of these three books is interesting. Whereas Roy's and Bau–
drillard's books did not fare well, Fallaci's sold a million copies in two
months and became number one on the bestseller list, a unique phe-
