Shortly after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama declared America’s need to “restore” good relations with Muslims, forging a new way forward “based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Many critics, including the columnist Charles Krauthammer, read the president’s comments as an unwarranted apology for American actions in the struggle against Islamic radicalism. The United States was at least partly to blame for the Islamic world’s anger, Obama seemed to imply; the rage and threats of obliteration directed at Americans, the death-dealing terror—our actions must have provoked them. When President Obama later bowed before the Saudi King Abdullah (among other world leaders), it reinforced the impression: we needed to change our ways.
President Obama’s blame-us-not-them approach would come as no surprise to the French philosopher and novelist Pascal Bruckner: it is a mild form of the cultural masochism that the Left has often exhibited before modern democracy’s despisers. In a brilliant work from the mid-1980s, Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, Bruckner exploded the myths of “Third Worldism,” showing how Western intellectuals romanticized underdeveloped nations, whatever barbarities they committed, while pouring scorn on the basic decencies of democratic societies. In The Tyranny of Guilt, first published in France in 2006 and updated for the fine English translation by Steven Rendall, Bruckner provides a vigorous, powerfully written sequel.
The indisputable failure of “regimes thought to incarnate the new revolutionary Eden,” Bruckner notes,
