Arabia Felix

 Aden, Arabie—French communist author Paul Nizan's first and most well-known "novel" (I place the word in quotes because the book is really more of an autobiographical essay or screed, devoid of conventional character or incident)—begins with a famous line about what it means to be twenty. And, perhaps, one has to be twenty in order to understand it. For Nizan takes for granted two fundamental political claims that are generally self-evident only to the very young: 1) that society as we find it is utterly corrupt, evil, and debased; and 2) that all of this could be fixed, if only we had a "revolution." 

I believed both these things myself when I was an adolescent (so perhaps we should actually lower the ideal age at which to read Aden, Arabie from twenty to fifteen—for I had become less secure in both convictions by the time I reached college). Now, in my thirties, I could not explain why either seemed to me so obvious. I am in the position of the mature Wordsworth, looking back on his youth and surveying his irrecoverable lost convictions: The things which I have seen I now can see no more. [...] Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

We are tempted, from the perspective of Wordsworthian maturity, to ask of Nizan: why do you feel the world is so evil and disgusting as it is? Is the current state of society really beyond hope of gradual amelioration? 

He replies: one cannot expect a bourgeois to understand, so I have no obligation to explain; he who is caught in the snares of capital can never see beyond its illusions.  "[T]here is no hope of persuading him," writes Nizan (Pinkham trans. throughout). The only thing to be done with the bourgeois is to destroy him. "[I]t is easier to destroy it than to breathe life into it" ("it" being the talking "machine" that is the individual capitalist). And later, in the same vein: "You will have to refuse them a glass of water when they are dying" ("them" being the bourgeoisie). 

Suppose one then concedes that the present state of society is unjust and cruel and oppressive in various ways (which it certainly is). One then asks: what do you propose to replace it with? Nizan replies, in effect: I don't know; and it's not my responsibility to tell you. "Will I be asked what human life would be made of and what it would be like?" he writes. "I do not see it clearly yet. I am groping my way[.]" But evidently, we are to fall in line and follow him toward this uncertain and unknowable destination anyway, under penalty of death. 

And because Nizan, like many a young radical before him—and many of those he would influence after he was gone, on the streets of Paris in 1968—knows that his intentions are pure, and the goal toward which he strives is—however undefinable—somehow more "human" than our present state of ignorance—then any means are justified in pursuit of it—whether murder, assassination, or torture. We have already heard him tell us he would not give a parched banker or stockbroker a glass of water if he found him in the desert. 

Perhaps, though, all my skeptical questions of Nizan are merely bourgeois mystifications. Perhaps the young really do have direct insight into political truths that become obscured beneath cobwebs with age—Wordsworth himself attests to such things. 

Or, perhaps, the fact that Nizan disdains to answer these questions, and denies any responsibility to answer them, suggests less about the inadequacies of the questions than it does about the inadequacies of the answerer—or of the ideology for which he is a mouthpiece. 

It is hard to believe that anyone could carry such convictions with any seriousness into adulthood; and indeed, Nizan did not carry his for long. As Sartre's foreword to the novel's posthumous edition records, Nizan broke with the Party in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and rightly so. He actually couldn't stomach being asked to pivot overnight from making fulsome denunciations of Hitler to suddenly sabotaging and opposing all efforts to resist him. To his eternal credit, and the Party's disgrace, he enlisted to defend France from the Nazi invasion even when the Soviets would not lift a finger to help. He died by a German bullet in 1940, when Stalin and Hitler were still formally allied. 

But I have no doubt at all that, when Nizan finally broke with the Party, there were other, younger Nizans still in its ranks, who responded to his doubts in the same way that he tries to silence ours: "it's not possible to reason with you; you're still in the toils of bourgeois sentimentality; the only fit answer to you is a bullet; all that can be done with you is to cast you out and destroy you."

Why did the youthful Nizan have such a messianic faith in the Soviet experiment—until at least it was bitterly disappointed by experience? Incredible as it may seem to us in 2024, Sartre tells us that Nizan sincerely believed (at least until an actual visit to the USSR disabused him of it) that people living in the worker's state would be incapable of fearing death. "Out there," as Sartre describes it, "perhaps, men were immortal. [...] United by a long-range undertaking, workers transformed themselves through death into other workers, those workers into still others[.]"

It is the same vision that Stephen Spender offered, in one of his poems from the '30s (and of which he later expressed great embarrassment, in his post-Communist phase). As he imagines the coming socialist "World State" (which was, perhaps, the same one he thought had already been realized in Stalin's Russia)—the workers upon retirement will have no fear of death, for "They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,/One cog in a golden singing hive:/ Like spark from fire, its task happily achieved/ It falls away quietly." 

We are plainly in the domain of religion here. These are not convictions of reason that can be refuted by evidence or logic; they are statements of faith that can only be disproved by bitter personal experience—as both Spender's and Nizan's ultimately were. All we can say, in the light of hindsight, is that the visions hold very little appeal to us today. We have no desire to be drones in Stalin's "golden singing hive," or cogs in the machine of the Soviet superstate, thank you very much!

But even if the exact language and imagery of 1930s totalitarianism is not likely to lure the young of the present, there is much in Nizan's novel that might still speak to them. There is his absolute disgust with the trivial business concerns of the "petty bourgeois," for instance—a feeling that Nizan holds with utter conviction, and seemingly without ever being troubled by the possibility that it might actually reflect an aristocratic disdain rather than a proletarian one—the violent loathing of a young man with an elite humanistic education for the humdrum matters with which we need to concern ourselves if we are going to make a living in business. 

There is also his belief that some revolution, any revolution, would be an improvement over the status quo. Even before we can articulate what the revolution is going to create, other than that it will conquer "alienation," and enable us to live as "men," we are meant to already start firing bullets and planting bombs. Unfortunately, this is a solution that has all too much perennial appeal to the disaffected young. 

Alas, then, the shades of 1930s Stalinism still seem to be very much with us. We see it in the parts of the far-left who have spent so much time opposing U.S. foreign policy that they can't see that Vladimir Putin is much worse, and who seem ready and willing to join forces with the pro-Putin fascist parties of Western Europe—and with Trump's "America First" movement in the U.S. too—if it means the defeat of Western alliances and a setback for U.S. influence abroad. Is that not essentially a proposal for a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact for our time? 

We see shades of Nizan too in the far-left extremists who celebrated Hamas's October 7 atrocities, or who are praising the Houthis in Yemen today, simply because they are engaged in a violent war against the West. It seems not to matter to them that both these organizations are antisemitic death cults. They don't seem interested in asking what these organizations are fighting for (because, if they learned the answer, it would turn out to be a reactionary Islamist caliphate that is nothing like the world that the progressive Left is supposedly trying to build). They just admire the fact that these groups are opposed to the United States, "imperialism," "global capitalism," etc. 

The mentality of the young leftist who thinks it's awesome and admirable for the Houthis to fire rockets at unoffending commercial vessels, which have nothing to do with the war in Gaza they are supposedly protesting, is a sort of perfect distillation of Nizanism. No doubt, the owners of those ships are "bourgeois." What of the sailors on them, though? The ones who are actually in the line of fire? Do they all deserve the same fate as the "global capitalists"? Yes, Nizan would say, for they have been duped by the same ideology. If they own a share in any of the companies for which they work, they have become "complicit." 

I bring up all of this business with the Houthis—and indeed, I was moved to read Nizan's book in the first place—because the renewed conflict happening right now off the coast of Yemen takes place in exactly the eponymous terrain in which Aden, Arabie is set. 

I actually turned to Nizan's book hoping that it might offer fodder for a word of timely protest against U.S. policy in the region—for, as much as I detest the Houthis' ideology and the young leftists who foolishly praise them—I certainly do not absolve my own government for its role in creating the problems in Yemen that have allowed them to flourish. The U.S.'s support for Saudi Arabia's brutal air war against the Houthis obviously failed entirely to dislodge the militant group from power, and in the meantime wreaked untold suffering and havoc among the innocent civilians of Yemen, who were then left at the mercy of the Houthis as the only quasi-state in existence. Western sanctions, likewise—as they so often do—seem only to have increased people's dependence on the militants, while further impoverishing ordinary people and preventing them from building any alternative civil society that could resist them. 

So, as much as I was disappointed by the Stalinism and totalitarianism of Nizan's book, I don't mean entirely to reject its lessons. There is at least one aspect of the novel with which I still concur: namely, its analysis of the brutality and exploitativeness of Western influence in the Middle East. This part of his critique still holds up, after all these years. 

For the people of Yemen—historically known, by what seems a cruel irony in light of present conditions today, as "Arabia Felix," or Arabia "the Happy"—are still suffering horribly from decades of war, famine, and pestilence—much of it brought on or exacerbated by U.S. policy, in particular its support for Yemen's authoritarian neighbors—just as they were in the era of British colonialism that Nizan's tale records. 

And Nizan's question, upon surveying this wreck of misery and injustice and exploitation, should still be one that haunts us—however much of the rest of his ideology we now reject. As we watch the U.S. once again bombing and sanctioning Yemen, after contributing so much to the misery in the country that has allowed the Houthis to gain their stanglehold on power in the first place, we should join with Nizan in asking it: "In Aden you call these purposes [which justify the Western presence] war, commerce, and transit: do you think these words will excuse everything until the end of time?"