Anti-colonial guilt was recast by French intellectuals as masochism justifying Third World repression

Evidence

MSF’s leading figures, a news article of the time noted, ‘are disgusted by the fashionable current wisdom holding the west responsible for the Third World’s destitution and that seeks to make us feel guilty about our standard of living’. This theme of guilt and responsibility was taken up most ferociously by Pascal Bruckner, the French essayist and ‘New Philosopher’ who today is best known for his vehement attacks on multiculturalism and Islam. Bruckner delivered a key speech, ‘Third World, Guilt, Self-Hate’, at the inaugural LSF colloquium. In Le Sanglot de l’homme blanc (‘Tears of the White Man’), published just before the colloquium, Bruckner had launched an excoriating attack on what he depicted as the Third Worldist guilt complex about colonialism. ‘How long will the peoples of Europe continue to be blamed for the atrocities committed by their ancestors?’ he asked – just two decades after France’s withdrawal from Algeria. For Bruckner and the founders of LSF, Third Worldism was a product of masochism and guilt, which generated a willingness to tolerate Third World repression. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 395

Categorization

• SEED: The inversion — that guilt over colonialism produces tolerance of current repression — is a charged rhetorical move worth unpacking in an essay on how moral sentiment is weaponized against structural critique.
• XREF: Bruckner’s ‘Tears of the White Man’ is a precursor to contemporary anti-woke and anti-white-guilt polemics; connects to the reader’s work on backlash discourse. — connects to: Some French contemporaries condemned colonial progress as manufactured misery and labor extraction. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 196; Even critics framed French colonialism as disguised utilitarian egoism.

Broader Connections

• Some French contemporaries condemned colonial progress as manufactured misery and labor extraction. #complicates (0.75) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 196
• Even critics framed French colonialism as disguised utilitarian egoism. #expands (0.72)