While the Western and European nations have been lacerating themselves and expecting the world to lacerate them for the behaviour of their ancestors, no serious authority or government has recommended that any other people should be held responsible for the hereditary crimes of their people. Not even for crimes committed in living memory. It might be because there are few sadists in the West. Or more likely it is because there are not enough masochists in other countries for such a mission to have any chance of success. The Mongol invasions of the Middle East in the thirteenth century remain among the worst brutalities in recorded history. The massacres at Nishapur in 1221, in Aleppo and Harem and the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 not only saw the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, but the despoliation of unimaginable quantities of knowledge and learning. If we hear much of the Crusades and little of these brutalities today it is not only because the idea of tracing Mongol descendants and blaming them would be difficult, but because no Mongol descendants would be receptive to the idea of being blamed for the atrocities of their forebears.

Only the nations of Europe and their descendants allow themselves to be judged by their lowest moments. But what makes this self-laceration more sinister is that it should go on at the same time as Europeans are expected to treat everybody else only by their highest moments. While it is common enough to hear the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades brought up in any debate on religious extremism, it is equally common to then hear once again about Andalusia or the Islamic neo-Platonists. It cannot be a coincidence that these two things – judging ourselves by our worst moments and everyone else by their best – have gone hand in hand. It is a demonstration that what is going on in the West is a political as well as a psychological affliction.

Nevertheless, although modern European guilt is currently described as though it is a terminal condition, there is no certainty that it will be. Will young Germans, the grandchildren, great-grandchildren and eventually great-great-grandchildren of those people who lived through the 1940s always feel the taint of their heredity? Or is it possible that at some point there will come a moment when young people who have done nothing wrong themselves say ‘enough’ with this guilt? ‘Enough’ of the feelings of subservience that such guilt forces upon them, ‘enough’ of the idea that there is something uniquely bad in their past, and ‘enough’ of a history they were never a part of being used to tell them what in their present and future they can or cannot do. It is possible. Perhaps the guilt industry is a mono-generational phenomenon, to be replaced by who knows what?

11. The pretence of repatriation

11

The pretence of repatriation