The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

The lesson had seemed clear: treat people as individuals, and reject those who would try to reduce them to membership of a group they belonged to solely by accident of birth.

Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

After the 2020 US presidential election, the Washington Post even introduced its readers to the concept of “multiracial whiteness” as a way to explain how ethnic minorities might have voted for the Republican candidate.

Twenty-two percent of people who identified as “very liberal” said they thought the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten.

Thirty-two-year-old Tony Timpa was killed in Dallas while being detained by five police officers. He himself called 911 from a parking lot, saying that he was afraid and needed assistance. He told the services that he suffered from depression and schizophrenia and had failed to take his medication. He was reportedly off his mental-health medication, though he had, like Floyd, taken other drugs. The detention and death of Tony Timpa, like those of George Floyd, was caught on camera—this time in police bodycam footage. Like Floyd, Timpa was unarmed, and like Floyd, his death was horribly, brutally protracted.

To date, more than a million men, women, and children of the Uighur Muslim minority, among others, have been forced into the sprawling network of internment camps—often referred to as “concentration camps”—across the Xinjiang region.

David Cameron certainly learned his lesson and seemed to have discovered where the money and power now lay. A year after leaving office, it was announced that he was taking a leadership role in a new $1 billion investment fund set up to promote and back China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“Indeed, in many Chinese dialects, the idiomatic term for any foreigner, be they Indian or Ivorian or Irish, contains the ghostly ‘gwei’; only ethnic Chinese are constantly referred to as ‘ren’, which means ‘person’.

In other words, only the Chinese really exist as full-blooded people.”

One of the most significant reformers in early-twentieth-century China, Kang Youwei, once argued that there should be medals called “Improver of the Race” medals. These would be given to white people or “yellow” people who were willing to marry black people. In time, Youwei believed that this would “purify mankind.”

When Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) in 1980, the average life expectancy in the country was just under sixty. After his rule, or rather mismanagement, of the country for a little over a quarter of a century, the average life expectancy in Zimbabwe had almost halved. By 2006, the average Zimbabwean man could expect to live to thirty-seven. For women, life expectancy had fallen to thirty-four.

A poll of young British people carried out by Survation in 2016 found that 50 percent had never heard of Lenin, while 70 percent had no idea who Mao was.

A poll carried out in 2020 found that almost two-thirds of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine had no idea that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

That is the history exam used at the end of high school. In these exams, issues to do with slavery, colonialism, race, and other related rights issues constitute around half of all the subjects that are tested. Out of forty-eight questions in the 2021 AP exam, eight dealt exclusively with racial issues, another four with related racial issues, and another four with economic matters from a point of view that is familiar with anyone who understands the Marxist critique of capitalism.

The historians said that the 1619 Project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”