Gee’s Reviews > The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism > Status Update

Dean Acheson once said that Britain had lost an empire and not found a role. You might say of Europe that it had lost its purpose, and not found any to replace it.

limitless guilt being a form of grandiosity, the past commission of great crimes is a consolation for those who have lost power. It assures them that, notwithstanding their loss of the more immediate trappings of power, important, indeed determining, factors in the current situation of the world are traceable to them.

When the French first tried to invade Algeria in the sixteenth century, the Algerian Jews sided with the Moslem power, perhaps partly from a consideration of who was more likely to win, but also because they believed that they would be treated better by the Moslem than the Christian power.

individualism without individuality. People who are unwilling to brook the slightest restriction imposed by any authority are completely subservient to the tastes, opinions, and mores of their peers, and intolerant of deviation from them by others.

The second baleful effect of the view of life as an existential supermarket is that no choice is taken very seriously, because a whole future of choices spreads endlessly before one, like a landscape without a horizon.

The second baleful effect of the view of life as an existential supermarket is that no choice is taken very seriously, because a whole future of choices spreads endlessly before one, like a landscape without a horizon.

Choice as a good in itself, even as the only good in itself, is now almost an unthinking orthodoxy in the West, and affects everything from economic policy to medical ethics. Life is conceived as a vast supermarket

Apathy masquerading as tolerance will alternate with short periods of violent reaction.