Free Republic

Pascal Bruckner has skillfully highlighted the perversity of Western self-hatred. Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West.” So writes the French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner in his book La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), capably translated into English by Steven Rendall and recently published by Princeton University Press as The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. “All of modern thought,” he adds, “can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.” He exaggerates, but not by much. He shows how Europeans see themselves as “the sick man of...

A Communist Life With No Apology By SARAH LYALL ONDON, Aug. 22 — Born in 1917, the year of the October Revolution, the historian Eric Hobsbawm has lived through much of "the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history," as he describes it, from the rise of Communism and fascism to World War II, the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Recent events, he says, "fit in with the gloomy picture" he has had of world affairs for the last three-quarters of a century. But for an unapologetic pessimist, Mr. Hobsbawm is remarkably robust, bordering on...