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April 18, 2003
Great Article on Europe
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
This article, written by a French formerly-radical leftist, discusses in great detail the contemporary failings of Europe. Here's a taste to whet your appetite:
"By the evening of September 11, a majority of our citizens, despite their obvious sympathy for the victims, were telling themselves that the Americans had it coming. Make no mistake: the same argument would have been made if the terrorists had destroyed the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame."
"Europe gave birth to monsters. No doubt. But by the same token, it created the ideas that enable us to analyze and to destroy those monsters."
"Obsessive attention to past abominations has blinded us to the horrors of the present. Repentance is not a policy, and the continent of Europe cannot model its relationship to the past on that of Germany. Neither the status of victim nor that of executioner is hereditary. The duty to remember implies nothing about the purity or guilt of descendants."
"How can we command respect if we do not respect ourselves, if we constantly depict ourselves, in literature and the media, in the darkest colors?"
"When a crisis erupts, we do our utmost to delay. We temper our indignation with cynicism and treat the aggressor and his victim as equals, as though, in light of our own disenchantments, nothing made any difference."
"It is hard to tell what is most hateful in present-day anti-Americanism; the stupidity and bitterness it manifests or the willing servitude that it presupposes toward a superiority it denounces-in order not to change it."
"The "USAers" may experience moments of great solidarity or bursts of patriotism, but they are not made to rule the world like Romans because the "message" of America is self-fulfillment and love of life."
"We Europeans can challenge the dominance of the English language and the finance capitalism of Wall Street (with its extraordinary compassion for the rich), we can easily denounce the ambiguities of the melting pot and the ravages of communitarianism, and we can reject a world made in the image of American society. But then we have to offer in its place something more than mockery and reproof. We must really construct better models of social justice, economic efficiency, and ethnic coexistence. We are far from doing so. We lag far behind the Americans, out of breath. We still imitate their mistakes after they have devised remedies. Some Europeans place their hope in a theory of reverse genesis. America, the offspring of the Old World that has surpassed its progenitor, would witness the birth of a new Europe that would then put the United States in its place. For now, since geopolitics is the contemporary form of fortune telling, this is nothing but wishful thinking. The bitter truth is that Europe lags behind our transatlantic cousin in almost every area. But our possibilities are enormous if we enact a genuine intellectual revolution. Europe is today's largest contemporary political and cultural laboratory; something unprecedented is happening there without its inhabitants' even being aware of it. Europe has to recover its civilizing capacities and its pride, not in blood and battle, but primarily in spiritual conquests. Europe holds its own cards. Either it will build a counterforce endowed with credible political and military tools or it will be vassalized, willingly. In the latter case, an aging and declining Old World will reduce itself to being a luxurious vacation resort, coveted by predators, and always prepared to abdicate its freedom for a little more calm and a little more comfort."
I cannot agree with everything he says, but Bruckner has a lot of great insights into both Europe and America. Read the whole thing. (many thanks to Michael Totten for the link)
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