Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden was published in 1899. Kipling wrote the poem for the United States of America upon their colonisation of the Philippines. The poem talks about colonisation as a burden necessarily borne by the White man—a result of his intellectual and cultural (and perhaps even biological?) superiority. But don’t expect thanks for undertaking this endeavour, Kipling warns. Instead, beware that colonisation is a thankless task. Those you colonise will grow to hate you, and when you return home, instead of accolades, expect condemnation. Cut to 2010, and public opinion has largely turned to agree with the colonised and critics of imperialism. It is widely recognised that the colonised peoples bore the largest burden—they surrendered, against their will and without compensation, their resources, labour and land. It is here that Pascal Bruckner comes in with his book, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, a successor to his earlier volume, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (1986). The new book is substantively the same as Kipling’s famous poem. It bemoans the lack of gratitude shown by previous colonies and racial minorities, and lampoons Left wing critics of colonisation (and anti-African racism and Islamophobia; the list goes on). It has, however, a distinctly post-colonial flavour, extending Kipling’s shorter poem to call for cultural homogeneity and assimilation in European nations, an increase in military interventionism, and vigilant monitoring of Islam. Throughout the book, Bruckner’s case rests on a range of assumptions about how people experience and understand group belonging and group differences—assumptions that are largely contradicted by research in social psychology.© The University of Sydney