The Tyranny of Guilt
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"For half a century, the heart of darkness has no longer been the epic of colonialism. It is independent Africa, “that cocktail of disasters,” as Kofi Annan modestly called it in 2001: the murderous reign of the Red Negus, Mengistu; the macabre buffoonery of an Idi Amin, Sekou Touré, or Bokassa; the madness of a Samuel Doe or a Charles Taylor in Liberia; in Sierra Leone, the blood diamonds of a Foday Sankho, who invented “short-sleeve” mutilation by cutting people’s arms off at the elbow, and “long-sleeve” mutilation by cutting their arms off at the shoulder; the use of child soldiers, killer kids who are beaten and drugged; detention camps; mass rapes; the endless conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea; the civil wars in Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, and Côte d'Ivoire; cannibalism in the Congo; crimes against humanity in Darfur; and, last but not least, the genocide in Rwanda and the Great Lakes war, with its three to four million victims since 1998. Decolonization was a great process of democratic equality: the former slaves achieved within a few years the same level of bestiality as their former masters. The only remarkable exceptions to this somber account are South Africa and Botswana, the small and large dragons of Asia, and the irruption of India and China, both of which have gone over to capitalism in a revenge taken by the thieves of fire on the earlier dominators." --Cultural Amnesia (2007) by Clive James "Our selective hypermnesia recalls only the calamities, never the highpoints." --The Tyranny of Guilt (2006) by Pascal Bruckner "Perhaps Revel’s single best book about the world picture is L'Obsession anti-américaine (2002, translated as Anti-Americanism), which ranges far more widely than its title suggests, persuasively tracing the development of globalized terror from its origins in the threat, not that the Palestinians might be denied their own state, but that they might gain it in a way that accepted the existence of the state of Israel."--The Tyranny of Guilt (2006) by Pascal Bruckner |
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The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2006, La Tyrannie de la Pénitence: Essai sur le Masochisme Occidental) is a book by Pascal Bruckner. Roger Kimball regards Tyranny of Guilt as a sequel to Bruckner's 1983 book The Tears of the White Man. Richard Wolin preferred to describe it as a "pendant," a revisiting of the theme of Tears of the White Man.
Theme
Bruckner acknowledges Western sins including racism and slavery, but points out that the west is also responsible for the creation of such things as Civil liberties, modern democratic government and abolitionism. "There is no doubt," Bruckner writes, "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 problem with the tyranny of guilt, according to Bruckner, is not the West is without sin, but that the Western culture of remorse is a disabling form of narcissism that makes it impossible to effectively criticize contemporary non-Western violations of human rights.
Bruckner argues that the West has inadvertently collaborated with Islamists who seek to destroy Western liberal values and political freedom by focusing on western sins including imperialism, racism and Nazism, and thereby conceding the right of Islamists to impose their standards on the Western countries to which they immigrate. Julia Pascal summarizes part of Bruckner's argument as an argument that "Europe has never recovered from its own barbarity and that now it seeks to cleanse its original sin with a new Eden; even if this Paradise has 70 waiting virgins." Brendan Simms as, "an eagerness to apologize for the sins of colonialism and genocide and other Western crimes," that defines every Western state as a "penitent state ... never an innocent victim of terrorist attack but a deserving one: It has, after all, provoked the wrath of the oppressed, either at home or abroad."
Douglas Murray describes Bruckner's characterization of the tyranny of guilt as a form of self-flagellation, a kind of moral intoxicant that "People imbibe because they like it... It lifts them up and exalts them."
Narrative
According to Bruckner, the Islamo-Leftist pushing of the idea of the centrality of Western guilt in contemporary politics idea originated with the Socialist Workers Party (UK) party goal of replacing traditional Commmunism with a worldwide movement to "spearhead a new insurrection in the name of the oppressed." This ideal caught fire beginning in the 1960s, reinvigorating Western leftism with the idea that the United Sates and Israel are the great oppressors, and uniting the European Left, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in a world view according to which "the Jew has become the Nazi, the Palestinian the Jew and radical Islam is now the victim of Western democracy and not its executioner."
Bruckner sees the beginnings of the Islamization of Europe in such things as the institution of separate hours for men and women at public swimming pools.
Publishing history
The 2010 translation into (American) English was made by Steven Rendall.
