By Dr Tomislav Sunic

In a world of media-produced images, reality must be rendered surreal. The historical consciousness of different peoples must become more “historical” than history itself. In order to make their historical narrative about the suffering of non-European peoples more credible historians increasingly resort to paraphrases full of strange adjectives, coupled with selected victims.

This is especially true of the victimhood of African and Asian peoples, which now belongs to guilt-ridden Europeans as part of global memory. It is no accident that along with the loss of their own identity, white Europeans stage saccharine commemorations for non-Europeans. They erect monuments to exotic tribes that they never heard of until the day before last. Days of atonement keep accumulating on the calendar. Every white European or American politician is obliged to pay moral and/or financial tributes to peoples whose identity has nothing in common with his own. While Western media and opinion makers assure us that history is creeping toward an end, we are witnessing a staggering demand for the revival of new non-European micro histories.

Each victimhood requires an expanding number of its dead and its culprits. Culprits, as a rule, are always white Europeans, forced in turn to practice the ritual of remorse. The old sense of the tragic, which until recently was the fundamental pillar of European historical memory, cedes its place to jeremiads for Asian and African tribes. Slowly but surely, the European culture of death is being supplemented by a fixation on the extirpation of distant foreigners. What a scandal if a white European or American statesman fails to display remorse for the past suffering of some non- European people, or fails to accept the latest revised upward moving figures for the victims!

One must, however, make a clear distinction between the culture of death and the cult of death, as Pierre Vial notes in his book La Mort. The old culture of death, so common to ancient European identity, is being replaced by bizarre cults of the dead, stripped of any redemptive meaning. What counts in each non-European victimhood is the impressively high figures for the dead, the endless enumeration of surreal body counts, which serve as an additional weapon to impose guilt feelings on white Europeans. And where does the appetite for the massive foreign dead stop? On the hit parade of various victimologies or, as the buzzword now goes, in the “battle of memories,” victims can never be equal. Some must take precedence over others. Given the victimological atmosphere, which prevails today in the multiracial West, each non-European tribe, race or community is led to believe that its own victimology is unique. This is a dangerous phenomenon in view of the fact that each victimology is by definition conflictual, inevitably aiming at the removal of the other competing victimology.

The Dogma of Human Rights

The essence of victimology lies in the liberal dogma of human rights. The dogma of human rights, and its most logical social consequence, the foundation of the multiracial world system, is the main motor behind the resurgence of the spirit of victimhood. When all men are declared equal, each human being and each tribe on Earth must be automatically entitled to victimhood. By their nature, multicultural countries in the West are required to allot the victimhood status to every human being. Each ethnic group, every racial, and even every sub-group, practicing some exotic life style, needs it own martyrology in order to legitimize its political identity. To illustrate this point, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the non-European Other. i.e., a Congolese, a Samoan, an Algerian, residing in Paris, London, or New York. Does he not pose the following question: “Why do the others, for instance the Jews, have the right to their victimhood, but not my group?”  Indeed, in the name of humanity, some of the largest genocides were made possible during the twentieth century. In the name of abstract human rights, dissident intellectuals or political opponents, or the whole groups of people, have been dehumanized. The legal fallout of this social ostracism, as Carl Schmitt noted in his work Der Begriff des Politischen, is the physical removal of undesirable peoples and individuals. To put it differently, each spirit of victimhood searches for its negative identity by negating Otherness, i.e. by abolishing the Other, who is henceforth no longer perceived as human, but depicted as a monster who needs to be eliminated as quickly as possible. 

There is a serious problem regarding the viability of the multicultural system in the West. On the one hand modern Western societies require that each ethnic group receive an appropriate identity and a right to historical grievance; yet on the other these same societies are unable to function in an environment beset by ethnic balkanization. Therefore, the contest of diverse victimologies will makes the functioning of the modern liberal system extremely precarious in the years to come. In essence, each victimological spirit in multiracial society is confrontational and discriminatory, as it constantly creates the climate leading up to latent civil war.

Europeans are facing a perilous postmodern situation. On the one hand, they are being overwhelmed by the rhetoric of anticolonial victimologies and by endless palaver about past fascist crimes; yet on the other one can barely hear a word about crimes committed by Communists and their liberal allies against the peoples of Europe. Who does remember Europe’s victims of communism who have no victimological status, at least in Western Europe?  If there is a victim group, which is ignored but which truly suffered, then these are the millions of Germans who were butchered or expelled from their homes at the end of World War II. Needless to say, the recognition of this politically incorrect victim group, like the Balts in Eastern Europe who were murdered in the millions by the Soviets, is not likely to occur in our selectively sensitive multicultural society.

Tom Sunic is an author and a former professor in political science. His latest book Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age is available through Amazon.