The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

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He also points to a moral panic in Canada which I don’t think you can level purely at the door of antiracism. So impressively certain they are of the inherent superiority of the west that they can’t imagine that these societies might have been happy with their own way of forging ahead through life.

He says that the riots in Portland in 2020 had become normalised, which absolutely no one thinks, before walking it back later and admitting it’s an extreme example but it illustrates his point (which he then expands upon by citing silly incidents on TV shows). He also champions the diversity of the west, in the sense that the UK cabinet, for example, contains many people from a wide range of minority group backgrounds. This ignores the fact that they’re part of an incredibly venal, corrupt and incompetent cabinet of banally evil morons, but we’ll let that slide, shall we? Could it be because repeated governments dismiss the concerns of the young and merely continue to wreak the same outmoded, futureless policies that were rendered obsolete by the 2008 recession? Here, Murray engages in a neat bit of statistical trickery: he cites police killings of unarmed black men.

All in the hope of persuading the peoples of the West not that they were better than anyone else or that they were the same as anyone else, but that they were uniquely evil and therefore worse than everyone else. It has bought its way into the global stage and is able to level demands at western nations as a result. For instance, the mention of sugar and rubber plants would be changed to ‘reflect their links to slavery and colonialism. In 2021, Oliver Dowden, then secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, “summoned” the heads of Britain’s largest heritage bodies for a telling off over their attitude to history.

As Nietzsche thought that the very idea of justice was itself a delusion produced by resentment, there can be no distinction between “sincere” and spiteful motivations on the part of those who claim to seek it. In The War on the West, Murray argues that a new cultural war has arisen to denigrate the West and western values. Similarly, it does not denigrate our history to point out that Euclid’s Elements—the most influential mathematical work in history—only entered western civilisation because Adelard of Bath translated it from the Arabic in the 12 th century, or to point out that Adelard’s translation introduced Arabic numerals into the west, the numerals that form our current number system. Yes, the backlash has its own propaganda to promulgate, but don’t act like you’ve got objective reality on your side because there’s no such thing.It is of course possible Guy Sorman is correct and the victims have been lost to time or do not wish to come forward, we should not discount that but using his own standards Murray has acted like those he criticises. Casting directors ‘discover’ movie stars and your friends ‘discover’ a great restaurant across town.

He also makes a rather disingenuous leap when he quotes one author who claims that standardised testing is racist, then says the idea is widespread, quoting the president of the American Federation of Teachers who says that standardised testing isn’t perfect and there are better ways of measuring student progress. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric.To pretend that the USA hasn’t meddled on the world stage in a truly spectacular way is a staggering omission, and Murray knows it. On cultural appropriation vs cultural admiration I’m broadly in agreement too; while some moves in artistic history may look dubious now, for the most part the intention seems to have been well meant (Murray gives the example of Michael Tippet’s oratorios inspired by traditional black gospel spirituals which he wrote as a response to the horrors of Kristallnacht) and it seems another case where context is key. We are told that the West is irredeemable, a fundamentally racist place, the institutions of which need to be either torn down or re-educated until they’re unrecognisable.

Britain, for example, is still run by the same sort of people who’ve governed it for several hundred years—the prime minister being the latest example of that unbroken trend. The rest of the volume is dedicated to whether he should have or even could have forgiven the SS guard, and the broad conclusion according to Murray is that Wiesenthal could not have offered forgiveness even if he wanted to because the question of forgiveness was between the guard and the people he killed, or perhaps their surviving relatives. Murray’s first historical gripe is a project by the New York Times that claimed that the “true” founding of America happened in 1619, the year that the first slaves were brought to America.And in the event of a confrontation with a hostile foreign power, why risk anything at all to defend what is indefensible? Not all of the world’s ills can be blamed on the west, that would be simplistic, but it’s still a rather transparent bit of sophistry on Murray’s part. Fully 52 percent of Democrats, and some 36 percent of Republicans, said they would leave the country instead. Take, for example, his remark that: “Demonisation of the west and of western people is now the only acceptable form of bigotry at international forums such as the United Nations.