I’ve been in Europe (Berlin and now Paris) continuously since May 2023, and I’ve often found myself uncomfortably puzzled by some of its attitudes toward its wrongdoing pasts. In a very Freudian way, Europe is bedeviled by its unreconciled pasts—pasts it hoped it had mastered but clearly has not. There are many possible lines of reflection here—this is just one of them.
It is perhaps well-enough known, but still bears repeating, that what is astonishing about White Europeans, by contrast with White Americans, is their presumption of historical innocence, of goodness, of rationality, of virtue. Everybody knows, and stands ready to declaim against, the scarcely disputed vulgarity and philistinism of Americans—the cynical gratification they derive from sheer global power. But there is nothing Europeans enjoy more than feeling morally and intellectually superior to Americans, forgetting that the United States is scarcely more than the wayward child of Europe, the child...
