Europe And The Vichy Syndrome: How Intellectuals Surrender To Barbarism

Europe And The Vichy Syndrome: How Intellectuals Surrender To Barbarism

Synopsis

Western Europe is in a strangely neurotic condition of being smug and anxious at the same time. On the one hand, Europeans believe they have at last created an ideal social and political system in which man can live comfortably. In many ways, things have never been better on the old continent. On the other hand, there is anxiety that Europe is falling behind in an aggressive, growing globalized world. It seems Europe wants, as of right, both security and luxury in a world that can grant neither. In Europe and the Vichy Syndrome, Theodore Dalrymple reveals how European intellectuals ushered this state of affairs. From issues of religion, class, colonialism and nationalism, these intellectual elites have promulgated a ‘miserablist’ view of European history, one that alternates between indifference and outright hatred of the past. In washing their hands of a rich, if complicated, European history, Europeans have tossed the baby out with the bathwater. The result, Dalrymple asserts, is an unwillingness to preserve European achievements and the widespread destruction of European culture by Europeans themselves. As vapid hedonism and aggressive Islamism run roughshod over the continent, Europeans have no one else to blame for their plight.

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