Bernard-Henri Levy, France’s conservative philosophy guru, is a big fat liar. As soon as war broke out in Georgia, Levy rushed there hoping to reproduce his fabled war zone reporting from Bosnia. It turns out, however, the article he wrote for Le Monde and the Huffington Post about what he saw in Gori was all his imagination. Here’s his description of Gori:
After crossing through six new check points, one of which consists of a tree trunk hoisted up and down by a winch commanded by a group of paramilitaries, we arrive in Gori. We are not in the center of the city. But from where Lomaia has dropped us, before taking off in the Audi to collect his wounded, from this intersection dominated by an enormous tank as big as a rolling bunker, we can see fires burning everywhere. Rockets lighting up the sky at regular intervals, followed by short detonations. The emptiness. The slight odor of putrefaction and death. Most of all, the incessant rumbling of armored vehicles. Almost every other car is an unmarked car jammed with militia, recognizable because of their white armbands and their headbands. Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians claim they have come to “liberate.” It is a Georgian town. And they have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town. Emptied.
John Rosenthal writes in the World Politics Review that Levy never got into Gori. “The problem with this account,” Rosenthal says, “is that Lévy appears not to have seen what he reported seeing. In fact, as has since been confirmed by other members of the group and even conceded by members of Lévy’s own entourage, Lévy never made it to Gori.”
Hat tip to SRB commentor Kolya for the article.
