Commenter Swedish Family on BHL and Houellebecq on Russia:

Seeing Bernard-Henri Lévy’s name here made me dig out an old book of his, Public Enemies, a book of Lévy’s mail correspondence with novelist Michel Houellebecq in the spring of 2008 (so after Putin’s Munich speech but half a year before Lehman Brothers and the war in Georgia). It’s fascnating to see violently anti-Putin Lévy was already back then. I’ll come to his tirade in a moment, but let’s first have a look at Houellebecq’s warm feelings for Moscow.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of finding myself in Moscow with Frédéric Beigbeder (by accident; we were there for different reasons and didn’t plan to meet up). Twice we did sets as DJs in nightclubs full of the sumptuous blondes popularized by current affairs magazines. Twice Frédéric and I noticed the same thing: young Russians adore the Beatles, they react to their music immediately, they like it (whereas I’m sure they didn’t know the music before, they only discovered western music in the 1980s through groups like U2 and A-Ha). And not only do they like the Beatles, they like early Beatles, songs like “Ticket to Ride” and “Love Me Do.” The music, made eternal by their genius, their enthusiasm, their joie de vivre; the music of youth, of heading off on holiday (the music of economic growth, of full employment). Back in France, the magazines ran headlines about a new idea: economic decline. A very different atmosphere, obviously. The worst thing is, the ecologists are right. Of course, none of the problems facing humanity can be tackled without stabilizing the world population, without stabilizing energy consumption, without intelligently managing nonrenewable resources, without tackling climate change. And yet coming back to Western Europe I felt like I was coming back to the dead. Of course, life is hard, very hard in Russia, it is a violent life, but they live, they are filled with a desire to live that we have lost. And I wished I were young and Russian and, ecologically speaking, irresponsible. I also felt I needed idealism (a rarer commodity, I admit, in contemporary Russia). I wished I were part of a time when our heroes were Yuri Gagarin and the Beatles; when Louis de Funès made everyone in France laugh; when Jean Ferrat was adapting Aragon.

Here is Lévy’s reply to Houellebecq. I find this passage very revealing of what drives people like Lévy. Note, again, that this is written in the spring of 2008 (March 12), so at this point, Russia has basically been playing nice in the face of aggressive Western expansion. Yet …