THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XII, Issue # 59, April 27, 2010
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
IN EUROPE, REMORSE HAS TURNED INTO MASOCHISM
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
WESTERN MASOCHISM & THE TYRANNY OF GUILT: EUROPEAN ATTITITUDES & BELIEFS REGARDING WESTERN
HISTORY & CULTURE -- PERCEPTION OF EUROPE AS THE SICK MAN OF THE PLANET -- THE BURDEN OF EUROPE'S PAST:
ITS SINS OF IMPERIALISM, FASCISM, & RACISM -- ITS VIOLENT & AGGRESSIVE PAST FROZEN IN TIME -- EUROPE
DISARMING ITSELF IN THE GLOBAL WAR BETWEEN ISLAMISM & THE WEST
FULL STORY:
"Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West." So writes the French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner in his
book La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), capably translated into English by Steven Rendall and recently published
by Princeton University Press as The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. "All of modern
thought," he adds, "can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter's hypocrisy,
violence, and abomination."
He exaggerates, but not by much.
He shows how Europeans see themselves as "the sick man of the planet" whose pestilence causes every problem in the
non-Western world (what he calls the South). When the white man set foot in Asia, Africa or America, death, chaos, and
destruction followed. Europeans feel themselves born with stigmata: "the white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he
has gone." His pale skin signals his moral defectiveness.
These provocative statements undergird Bruckner's brilliant polemic arguing that European remorse for the sins of
imperialism, Fascism, and racism have gripped the continent to the point of stifling its creativity, destroying its
self-confidence, and depleting its optimism.
Bruckner himself concedes Europe's blemishes, but he also praises it for self-criticism: "There is no doubt that Europe
has given birth to monsters, but, at the same time, it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and
destroy these monsters." The continent, he maintains, cannot be just a curse, for its sublime achievements complement
its worst atrocities. This he calls "proof of grandeur."
Paradoxically, it is Europe's very readiness to acknowledge its faults that prompts self-hatred, for societies that do not
engage in such introspection do not lacerate themselves. Europe's strength is thus its weakness. Although the continent
has "more or less vanquished its monsters" -- such as slavery, colonialism, and Fascism -- it chooses to dwell on the
worst of its record. Thus, his book's title, The Tyranny of Guilt. The past, with its violence and aggression, is
frozen in time, a burden Europeans expect never to throw off.
The South, in contrast, is deemed perpetually innocent. Even as colonialism fades into the past, Europeans righteously
blame themselves for the plight of once colonized peoples. Eternal innocence means infantilizing non-Westerners;
Europeans flatter themselves as the only adults – itself a form of racism. It also offers a way to preempt criticism.
About one million Spaniards protested the terrorist bombings one day after they took place, on March 12, 2004 -- by
blaming the atrocity on their own Prime Minister, José María Aznar.
This explains why Europeans ask what they "can do for the South, rather than asking what the South can do for itself."
It also explains why, after the Madrid bombings of 2004, a million Spaniards marched against, not the Islamist
perpetrators, but their own Prime Minister. And worse: why they saw Spanish civilians "torn apart by steel and fire" as
the guilty party.
As shown by the Madrid bombing and countless other acts of violence, Muslims tend to have the most hostile
attitudes toward the West, and Palestinians rank as the most hostile of Muslims. That Palestinians face off against Jews,
the extreme victims of Western murderousness, makes them a perversely ideal vehicle for rebutting Western guilt.
Making matters worse, even as Europeans disarm themselves, Jews take up the sword and wield it unashamedly.
Europe exonerates itself of crimes against Jews by extolling Palestinians as victims, no matter how viciously they act,
and by portraying Israelis as latter-day Nazis, no matter how necessary their self-defense. Thus has the Palestinian
question "quietly relegitimated hatred of the Jews." Europeans focus on Israel with such an intensity that one could
think the fate of the planet will be determined "in a tiny stretch of land between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza."
And America? Just as "Europe relieves itself of the crime of the Shoah by blaming Israel, [so] it relieves itself of the sin
of colonialism by blaming the United States." Excommunicating its American child permits Europe to preen. For his part,
Bruckner rejects this easy out and himself admires American confidence and pride of country. "Whereas America
asserts itself, Europe questions itself." He also notes that, in time of need, the wretched of the earth invariably turn to
the United States, not the European Union. To him, the United States is "the last great nation in the West."
He hopes that Europe and America will cooperate again, for, when they do, they "achieve marvelous results." But his
own evidence points to the unlikelihood of that prospect.
© Daniel Pipes 2010
Originally Published in National Review Online, April 27, 2010
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, April 27, 2010
Article URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/8293/europe-remorse-turned-masochism
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Europe, Europeans, & American Foreign Policy
Jews & Anti-Semitism
Europe, Europeans, & Anti-Semitism
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is Founder and Director of the Middle East Forum,
Founder of Campus Watch, Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a
signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a former
adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology, and a
former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for Front Page Magazine, the New York
Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and developments in the Middle East
have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington Post, the New York Times,
and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network television, as well as at universities and
think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on
BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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