Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt : Toward a Secular Theocracy by Paul Edward Gottfried

Author:Paul Edward Gottfried [Gottfried, Paul Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
Publisher: http://inclibuql666c5c4.onion
Published: 2002-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Common Multicultural Fate

Where Walser exaggerates is stressing the peculiarly German character of the burden he describes. By now all Christians have been generically indicted for the Holocaust, which has been extended to gays and explained in such a way as to minimize the suffering of identifiably Christian victims. An emphatically anti-German reading of the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, begins by attributing the murder of European Jewry to Christian civilization; only once that blame has been categorically asserted does Goldhagen launch his indictment of Germany’s “elimination-ist” anti-Semitic past. As documented by Peter Novick, the American Jewish view of the Holocaust (which is also accepted in the Christian community) has shifted from sharp distinctions drawn between Nazism and Christianity to a gradual blurring of the two.[194] The attempts by German governments to oversee hateful or inappropriate communications, which Jaschke, Walser, and Nordbuch document, have taken place in other European countries and reached Anglophone North America. Despite the pejorative talk about Germany’s Sonderweg, the once-patriotic German path to state-enforced political correctness is neither solitary nor exclusively German. Just as the onus of Hitlerism is said to fall in a specific way on Germans and Austrians, equivalent historical burdens have been ascribed to other Western peoples with equal solemnity. Not only are all Western Christians guilty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism but also individual Western nations are made to carry additional millstones. Thus Euro-Americans express a collective duty to atone for their racist past, and because of this historical weight, according to Canadian historian, Richard Iton, they have produced an “exceptionalist Left” that remains deeply mired in American racial issues.[195] In point of fact, none of this “exceptionalism” is truly exceptional. What is being designated is a penance that befalls Americans but one requiring the same breast-beating that all Western populations are now performing.

There are several characteristics of the present shared political-cultural fate. One is the presence of a vast state apparatus that is willing and able to practice behavior modification. Another trait, examined in depth in After Liberalism, is the bureaucratic and media efforts to “pathologize” attitudes and views by placing them outside of public discussion. Only the mentally unhealthy, we are told, would be disposed to present these views, the range and variety of which continue to grow. The pathology in question is invariably of the fascist kind, or, in the language of The Authoritarian Personality, part of the “prehistory of fascism.” We are supposedly dealing with a pattern of socially and culturally unacceptable beliefs, which in the thirties and forties resulted in right-wing derailments and may do so again. There are those who admit to this problem and, according to Walser, have turned displays of conscience into public ceremonies. No longer a brooding, individualized activity, the appeal to conscience for German intellectuals is an act of self-glorification, in which “negative nationalism” is vented upon others. Such behavior fits the liberal Christian paradigm that now towers over Western culture. The righteous few make a show of good conscience by apologizing for collective sins—and by exhorting the state to enact compulsory penance.

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