| Submit your comments on this article |
| Europe |
| The Old World needs an intellectual revolution to meet the challenges ahead. |
| 2007-06-03 |
| Pascal Bruckner, Wall Street Journal . . . A civilization capable of the worst atrocities as well as the most sublime creation cannot examine itself only from the perspective of a guilty conscience. Genocide is far from a Western specialty, and it is the West which has allowed us to conceptualize certain acts as crimes against humanity; it is the West which since 1945 has distanced itself from its own barbarity to give a precise meaning to the term crimes against humanity. Europe's genius is that it knows too well the fragility of the barriers separating it from its own ignominy. This lucidity, pushed to the extreme, keeps Europe from calling for a crusade of Good against Evil, inspiring it to substitute instead the battle of the preferable against the detestable, to use the excellent formula of Raymond Aron. Europe is constituted inside the very doubt which denies its existence, seeing itself with the pitiless gaze of an intransigent judge. This suspicion weighing down our most notable successes risks degenerating into self-hate, into facile defeatism. We would then have only one obligation, to pay off our debts, forever atoning for what we have taken from humanity since its beginnings. Observe the wave of repentance ravaging our latitudes, especially our principal Protestant and Catholic churches: It is a good thing, a salutary awakening of awareness, provided that they accept reciprocity, and that other cultures and other faiths recognize their errors as well. Contrition is not reserved for the chosen, nor is moral purity given like a moral allowance to those who say they are humiliated and persecuted. For too many countries, in Africa, in the Middle East, in South America, self-criticism is confused with the selection of an easy scapegoat who can explain their unhappiness: It is never their fault, always someone else's, the American Great Satan or the little European Satan. This is the problem in Europe today: No policies of great import can be achieved through guilt. This was made clear in the whole [Danish] affair of the Muhammad caricatures, when Brussels, instead of showing solidarity with Denmark and Norway, whose embassies were being burned down--chose instead to send Javier Solana into the Arab capitals like a traveling salesman of mea culpa. Just as the status of "victim" cannot be transmitted hereditarily, there is also no transmission of the status of "executioner." The duty of memory does not imply the punishment or the automatic corruption of our children or of our great grandchildren. There are no innocent states or citizens, that is what we have learned during the past half century. But there are states capable of recognizing their duty and looking their own barbarity in the eye, and there are others who seek in their long-ago oppression excuses for the indignities of today. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |