The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Anyone interested in looking into historical mistreatment of people in any century before our own will find a great amount of material. It happens that our age has decided to burrow down on a couple of issues in particular. But doing so means we have lost the whole context in which these horrors themselves occurred. When we say a person was “of his time,” we mean the beliefs of those times, but we also mean the hardships of those times. The current interest in slavery alongside the obsession with “privilege” (especially “white privilege”) elides the fact that white Europeans during this time were not living in some type of privileged paradise. For instance, the working classes in the United Kingdom throughout the early nineteenth century, when slavery was still going on, were in absolutely no position of privilege themselves. When you look at the charge sheet now leveled against the West and everything in its history, you cannot help noticing the complete lack of context as well as the grotesque lack of balance that exists.