PASCAL BRUCKNER: Europe’s Guilty Conscience: Self-hatred is paralyzing the Continent. “We too often forget that modern Europe was born not during a time of enthusiastic historical rebeginning, as was the United States, but from a weariness of slaughter. It took the total disaster of the twentieth century, embodied in Verdun and Auschwitz, for the Old World to happen upon virtue, like an aging trollop who moves directly from debauchery to fervent religious belief.” Well, those tend to be tiresomely preachy, too . . . .