Lévy and his intellectual friends became opportunistic journalists. They found easy targets among French committed writers: Sartre had flirted with terrorists of the German Baader-Meinhof Gang and Debray trained in guerrilla warfare in Bolivia with Che Guevara. Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Régis Debray and also André Gide, despite his flirts with Cold War anti-Communists, were the other side of the moon from the so-called philosophes.
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For as always and everywhere post-commitment intellectuals like Lévy find themselves in the blind alley of having to try to justify social injustice. Under the guise of neo-liberal free marketers, conformists coolly tell us that rich countries have no responsibility for problems of the Third World—as if we didn’t all belong to the same world. Given his impeccable credentials as an elegant counter-revolutionary, it should come as no surprise that Henri-Lévy, thick central casting Hollywood French accent and all, is warmly received, some would say fawned upon in the most distinguished precincts of the American media establishment, from the intellectually clueless Charlie Rose to the pseudo-left gnomes at NPR.
Fortunately, many European and Latin American intellectuals have been political and progressive. By force of their commitment they are members of the intelligentsia striving to change the world: such as Sartre and Camus in France. In Latin America Gabriel García Márquez (my journalistic model and master on the positive role of bias), the great writer Ernesto Sábato in Argentina who headed action against the military regime, and Pablo Neruda in Chile who joined the Socialist government of Salvador Allende, belong to the committed intelligentsia, as did the prototype of the man of action, Che Guevara, and certainly Fidel, whose role as a dedicated teacher of the masses, as Mao once saw himself, is also well established. Presidents Chavez and Morales are now following the same route.
To grasp the world of difference between the compromised artistic intellectual and the committed intelligentsia one only needs to compare their role in society with that of powerful, highly placed Jorge Luis Borges who instead supported the military regime in Argentina. Or with the neoliberal Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, wonderful writer, but considered by many a traitor to his original vocation.
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