the tyranny of guilt an essay on western masochism

Thomas and forward through Jacques Derrida and President George W. Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust film “Life is Beautiful”, which shows a sanitized version of Auschwitz, indicates that Europe is like a murderer trying to “erase the evidence of his crime.” Bruckner reaches back to Immanuel Kant and St. He quotes, for example, Jean Baudrillard giving an “utterly religious justification of the vengeance” of the terrorists against the US in 9/11. How can Western nations assess current affairs if the West by default positions itself as sinners begging for punishment?īruckner widens his view from headlines to filmmakers, saints, thinkers, and world leaders, weaving together Western narratives in an eerily effective way. Bruckner’s shows that public discourse in the West is rife with self-hatred and self-blame, which he argues is a threat to clear thinking. Le Parisien’s headline read, “Al-Qaeda Punishes London.” Then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s responded, “The suicide attacks would probably not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I.” As with the European response to 9/11, which Bruckner summarizes, there was sympathy for the victims, but the attacks themselves – well, we had it coming. Western Democracies are populated, as Bruckner memorably puts it, by “self-flagellants” whose masochistic expressions of guilt border on the “suicidal.” He cites as examples the response to the Jbombings of the London transport system. And in the case of France, Bruckner argues, guilt is also a symptom of the West’s dwindling importance relative to increasingly dynamic “Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Arab, and Hispanic” cultures. The West wallows more than it repays debts, makes amends, or fully understands its role in the world. Bruckner, a prize-winning French essayist and novelist, tackles the subject mostly from the French or European perspective and says that unending guilt is in fact vain and ineffective. The Tyranny of Guilt examines how the Western guilt complex may in fact be a major hurdle in fighting today’s atrocities. But are we taking this guilt too far? Pascal Bruckner thinks so. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochismīy Pascal Bruckner (Translated by Steven Rendall)Įach of us in the West may well have a reason to carry around a guilty conscience, considering our history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide.

The tyranny of guilt an essay on western masochism