The Construction of Totalitarian Self-Righteousness

Despite the diversity of its population, the United States benefits from a powerful unifying ideology based on abstract concepts — individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness, etc. — which enables U.S. leaders to go out into the world aggressively with a clear conscience, certain of the benefits they are destined to bring to the universe.

Made up of nation states with vastly diverse histories and languages, Europe lacks even the natural identity of America. Those who want to make of the European Union a confident partner of the United States within the International Community (IC, what I call the Imperial Condominium) are striving, just how consciously I cannot tell, to endow Europe with a comparable idealistic identity.

The banner is "human rights". The first concrete example of this newly found European virtue is abolition of the death penalty. It is a relatively recent development in European countries, which for centuries enjoyed the spectacle of beheadings, hangings and other more or less gruesome forms of execution, but is now constantly celebrated as a demonstration of the eternal essence of humanitarian European sensibility. This is used to make Europeans feel that they are more virtuous than the Americans and the Chinese, among others. Abolition of the death penalty costs little to the countries that adopt it and does no harm to anybody else. But the matter of proving moral superiority does not stop there.

Next comes the ban on "holocaust denial", now to be radically enlarged to include punishment for any statement casting doubt on the accuracy of labeling certain acts as "genocide". The objective is supposed to be to punish "racism and xenophobia", but the result is clearly the opposite: various peoples ("the lesser breeds") will be branded as genocidal by their moral superiors in Europe, who will then feel justified in whatever economic sanctions or military intervention they choose in order to improve the behavior of backward peoples.

Angela Merkel, who was conformist in communist East Germany before becoming conformist in the capitalist West, is the worthy sponsor of this measure which would establish an Official Truth outlawing dissent.

Of course, enforcing such a law will entail sending some of us to jail for having said the wrong thing. This is bad enough, but even worse will be the eventual exploitation of "anti-genocidal" self-righteousness to justify EU military actions in Third World countries, actions that may even turn out to be — well, genocidal.

* And by the way, as I stressed in my recent article on the ICC, its Statute does not include "aggression" as a war crime.

Diana Johnstone is a widely-published essayist and columnist who has written extensively on European and international politics. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe's Role in America's World (Verso, 1985). Her writings have been published in many publications such as New Left Review, In These Times, The Nation, Counterpunch, and Covert Action Quarterly. Her latest book is Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions, Monthly Review Press, 2003, ISBN: 1-58367-084-X.