The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Whether the migrants were fleeing war or (as in the majority of cases) economic deprivation, they were doing something that was very understandable. What I had a problem with was why the Europeans were allowing this to happen and why they were expected to abolish themselves

Only the Western countries, spread across three continents, were told constantly that in order to have any legitimacy at all—to be even considered decent—they should swiftly and fundamentally alter their demographic makeup.

In spite of all the unimaginable abuses perpetrated in our own time by the Communist Party of China, almost nobody speaks of China with an iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against the West from inside the West.

Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn’t become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems.

As usual with bad ideas, they originated in the universities.

This logical trap is the same one favored by witch-dunkers in the Middle Ages: if the woman drowns, she is innocent; if she floats, she is a witch and can be burned. In DiAngelo’s logic, the person who denies that they are racist is racist, and so is the person who says they are racist. Meaning that the best thing to do in any given situation is for a person to save time and confess to being a racist.

If you created a movement that sought to demonize “blackness,” then that movement would inevitably end up demonizing black people. As it was with the old racism, so it is with the new racism. If you are going to demonize whiteness and being white, then it must at some stage mean that you are going to demonize white people.

It is one of the saddest realizations we have as a species: not just that everything is transitory but that everything—particularly everything we love and into which love has been poured—is fragile. And that just as the line between civilization and barbarism is paper-thin, so it is a miracle that anything at all survives, given the fragility of all things plus the evil and carelessness of which men are capable.

One is the fact that their task is potentially endless, as the possible subjects appear limitless. It is a career for life for the deconstructionists. But still nothing is created or even produced at the end of this process. The only possible demand at the endpoint of deconstruction is to deconstruct some more. And it seems possible to pull apart and find cause for resentment endlessly.

You might pull its subjects apart, and “interrogate” its meanings in the light of things that have come after it. You might see all manner of things.

You could do all these things and more. Or you could stand back and admire the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Cappella Sansevero in Naples, the Duomo in Florence, or tens of thousands of cathedrals, churches, chapels, and other monuments. Why should we not simply stand back and credit our good fortune to have inherited these things and enjoy the great good fortune of being able to live among them?

And some people would have to look to themselves to explain their lack of outcomes, achievements, and more. They would have to look into the causes of their discontents and see that at least one of them is themselves. How much easier it is to keep claiming that another party—and a vast, historic party at that—is responsible for all the ills of the world and of their own lives.

For if you are to weigh a thing up, then you must not simply pile things up on one side of the scale. You must put something on the other side too. If you put the fact that the West has had racism in its history and leave the scale weighted only on that side, then of course you will come out with unbalanced judgments. And that is what has been allowed to happen. But must the good things not count for something?

Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations.

Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got.

But it makes no sense to do so unless you also recognize, for instance, that to live in the West in this time is to enjoy a piece of historical good fortune unlike almost any good fortune in history. You might feel some regret that things happened in the eighteenth century that people are not proud of today. But you might balance that out by feeling some gratitude to be part of a civilization in which all human life came to be regarded as sacred, in which people are regarded as being endowed with innate dignity, in which peace is the normal state of affairs and where wrongs done in the current day can be remedied through the application of the law.

Such people, ideas, buildings, and cities of the West are worthy of respect not because they are the product of white people but because they are the inheritance of all mankind. It is possible today to fixate on the identity of these people and to demand that we “tear this all down.” Or, more moderately, that we tear some of it down. But a saner, more reasonable approach would be to look at what we have inherited that is good and try to build on top of it.