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.
When the white man set foot in Asia, Africa, or America, death, chaos, and destruction followed. 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). "All of modern thought," he adds, "can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter's hypocrisy, violence, and abomination."Ĭover of Pascal Bruckner's "The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism." Another way to sum his message: the imperialism of guilt. "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.
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