WORLD AFFAIRS:I CAN ONLY IMAGINE that serious authors must greet the news that Tony Judt has been commissioned to write a review of their latest publication in the New York Review of Books with a touch of fear, writes Misha Glenny.
For the task, Judt, they can be sure, will only employ precision analytical tools as he delicately removes layer upon layer of narrative and argument to reveal what truths or falsehoods lie underneath.
But if he comes across something disagreeable or, worse still, intellectually offensive, then he will not only cut it out but display it for public ridicule and assassination. A basic error, or a single deceitful argument, is enough to unleash Judt the Destroyer. One of the enjoyable if tantalising aspects of reading his collection Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century is the short paragraph he attaches at the end of each essay explaining when and where it was originally published.
"This decidedly unsympathetic review of John Gaddis's popular new history of the cold war appeared in the NYRB," he tells us with typical understatement after massacring what has in a short time become a sacred text for many general and academic readers in the US. "Gaddis, understandably enough, took umbrage at my lack of enthusiasm . . . but the fact remains that his book contributes significantly to widespread misunderstanding and ignorance in the US concerning the nature of the cold war, the way it ended, and its troubling, unfinished legacies at home and abroad."
My favourite observation followed his assessment of John Paul II: "My (one) reference to Karol Wojtyla's 'Mariolatry' provoked a certain discomfort among some Polish correspondents".
Judt does not appear to care whom he offends. This is a refreshing approach to serious book reviewing, much of which these days is dedicated either to settling personal scores or ingratiating oneself to the author under supposed scrutiny.
The essays in this book are passionately committed to establishing historical and contemporary truth and Prof Judt is prepared to sacrifice his own comfort to that end. Indeed, his intellectual honesty cost him his association with at least one journal, The New Republic, whose editors removed him from the masthead because they disagreed with an article he wrote - not very 5th amendment. The collection is divided into four sections although all trawl the three-dimensional connections between Europe, the Middle East and America across the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st (I consider 1989 to be the beginning of the present century).
As Judt outlines in his introduction, he is concerned that we do not equate the overwhelmingly horrific European experiences of the 20th century with what has happened since the end of the Cold War. "The danger of abstracting "terrorism" from its different contexts, setting it upon a pedestal as the greatest threat to Western civilisation, or democracy, or "our way of life', and targeting it for an indefinite war is that we shall neglect the many other challenges of the age."
The first 10 chapters consider the lives of major figures of the 20th century, two of whom survive, Eric Hobsbawm and Leszek Kolakowski. With the exception of the last subject, Edward Said, these chapters consider Europe and how our attitudes here have been moulded by our relationship above all to war, totalitarianism and the role of the state. But these lofty discussions emerge from absolutely gripping assessments of the particular characters. His demolition of the charlatan philosopher Louis Althusser, not only highlights the appalling gullibility of some of the world's most respected academics, it also describes the depths of obscurantism into which one branch of Western Marxism sunk. "Althusser's special contribution," Judt writes, "was to remove Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics, and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort."
But it is Judt's moving tribute to his late friend, Edward Said, which acts as a pivotal piece, drawing in the experiences of America, Europe and the Middle East into a single focus and thereby lending this book considerable coherence. The chapter is entitled The Rootless Cosmopolitan, which for so many regimes of the 20th century was used as an insult but which for Judt (and certainly for me) is an epithet to be worn with pride.
This is also the starting point for Judt's own battle royal in which he has demonstrated immense intellectual and personal courage. Since 1967, the former kibbutz member and witness to the Six-Day War has observed the decline in Israel's image in the Middle East and beyond. Judt argues that Israel must roll back the policies of territorial acquisition and ruthless occupation that have now come to define the country in so many parts of the world.
The one exception to that perception has been in America, which continues to underwrite the Israeli state and which affords it vital political support. Judt argues not from a position of hostility to Israel but as a warning. He rightly identifies the debate surrounding the publication of John Mearsheimer's and Stephen Walt's essay The Israeli Lobby as a critical moment, not because it was essentially illuminating but "as Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well done, but one is amazed to see it done at all. The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S . . . And this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while its foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests . . . of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term concerns".
Judt is effectively urging Israel and its lobby in the US to wake up and smell the coffee. The security relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is not a given but conditional, and if Israel doesn't adjust its policies soon, it will be in for an unpleasant surprise. Needless to say, his bravery has been met by angry denunciations and the crude gesture of publications like The New Republic when it removed him from the masthead.
Although by no means as original, Reappraisals is in some respects a better book than Judt's Postwar, A History of Europe since 1945. It shows the breadth of his scholarship and enables him to display his elegant literary style. If he carries on like this, his reputation will be approaching the likes of Koestler, Camus and Primo Levi about whom he writes so convincingly.
Misha Glenny's book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers was published by Bodley Head earlier this year
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, By Tony Judt, William Heinemann, 464pp, £20.