Guilt Perverting American Foreign Policy

Quote without comment:

“[S]ome people feel guilty for anything done by rulers who are our friends. Our intelligentsia, like our enemies abroad, call our friends our ‘puppets’ and blame us for what they do, or are said to do. . . It is the opposite with regimes that are unfriendly to us; we feel able to ignore our guilt for their crimes, no matter what our role in creating or sustaining them.

“Is it motivated only by feelings of guilt for ‘our’ sins, or by aggressiveness against our society, which is called ‘us’ but viewed as the enemy? Is there an element of projection, expiating a sense of personal guilt by punishing one’s society at large?

“The phenomenon was analyzed decades ago by several major scholars. Prof. Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her essay ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards.’ James Burnham, former philosophy professor, in the chapters on ‘Guilt’ and ‘The Dialectic of Liberalism’ in The Suicide of the West: how recent liberal doctrine implies an inexpiable Western guilt before the Third World; how liberal society tends to identify with the Left as ‘us,’ feeling bad when crossing the Left, feeling good when attacking the Right and the West, proposing indirect strategies for the West that consist in the here and now of attacking the interests of ‘our side.’ Prof. Paul Hollander, in Understanding Anti-Americanism: our cultivation of negative self-image, which affects the society’s future. Prof. Lewis Feuer, a Freudian socio-psychologist, in The Conflict of Generations and subsequent books: the inward redirection of the normal stock of societal aggressiveness; the alienation of the societal superego to the Left; the inducing of guilt in the mainstream.”

--Ira Strauss, National Review, 6.13.11