The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

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. In almost any other realm of race relations, this would be understood. And so the logical outcome of all the antiwhite rhetoric of recent years can hardly be a surprise. The ideology has been pumped into the Western system in recent years, and it has resulted in a surge of antiwhite activities.

For instance, in December 2020, at the end of the year of COVID and BLM, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its initial recommendations on vaccine prioritizations. It identified three competing priority groups (essential workers, the over sixty-fives, and adults with underlying conditions). It then identified three ethical principles to decide who to prioritize among these groups. The three ethical principles included “Promote justice” and “Mitigate health inequities.” And here the CDC encountered a serious ethical problem. Because racial and ethnic minority groups were underrepresented among adults over the age of sixty-five.70

Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, stated that a perfectly reasonable set of priorities was at play in the new guidance. “Older populations are whiter,” said the expert in ethics. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.” Of course, “leveling the playing field a bit” here cannot mean anything other than “letting more white people die.”71 Formal support for this policy also appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.72

Of course, there is another danger in all of this. For medicine is one of those areas in which some knowledge of racial background may be not just useful but lifesaving. Different genetic groups carry different vulnerabilities to particular diseases and ailments ranging from cancer to osteoporosis, as well as varying responsiveness to different drugs. And this presents a particular problem. Because it suggests that race is not just a “social construct” but something that affects real areas of our lives, including health. Because this is such an unpalatable truth for the presumptions of the era, whenever the issue arises, it causes a great flare-up of nonmedical concerns. There is, for instance, an ongoing controversy around the accurate determining of kidney function, but “antiracists” have tried to remove the clinical algorithms and treatment guidelines that would help diagnoses, and have done so in the name of combating racism.77

Like Kendi, Coates, and others, she had her own origin story. And where Kendi has the tale of the girl with her hand up and Coates has a story of a woman getting into a lift, Khilanani’s tale is a terrible story of a fallout with a boss over scheduling vacation time. Building on this traumatic origin story, she used her talk to express visceral and violent racism against white people. For instance, at one stage in her talk, she fantasized about “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.” Which in a lecture ostensibly about psychopaths is a strangely psychopathic way to talk.

Most people around the world want to think well of themselves and of the country they are born into. Most do not think it a good idea to wage a remorseless, demoralizing war against everything to do with the majority group in their society. They do not pick up questionable terms invented yesterday and try to roll them out across the entire country, using them to explain each and every problem in the society. These and many more are symptoms of a very Western disease. A disease of self-hatred and self-distrust. And a disease that is, in both senses of the term, a type of self-abuse. One which other powers, outside the West, are more than happy to observe and use for their own ends.

The truth is that unless he could blame the West, Albarn (like so many other cultural and other figures in the West) was stumped to find any explanation for malfeasance in the world. So long as there was a story of Western wrongdoing, that story could suffice to be the founding problem of the country in question.

There are several problems with this reflex anti-Westernism. One is that it ignores what is actually going on in the world today. For instance, almost every anti-Westernist knows that some people from the West were engaged in selling opium to the Chinese in the nineteenth century. But how many of them know that it is synthetic opioids from China that are now decimating swaths of the United States? According to the US National Center for Health Statistics, more than half a million people in America have died in America’s opioid pandemic in the last two decades. The Chinese authorities know of this drug production and do little or nothing to halt it.

Because while pursuing its hybrid form of communist-capitalism, the CCP has managed to purchase greater influence and respectability across the world. The elites of America and Europe thought that bringing China into international organizations would push democratic norms into the country. Instead, China has pushed democratic norms out of international organizations. It has used the period since its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization to especially great effect. In the year 2000, most countries in South America, Africa, the Far East and Australasia, and Europe did more trade with America than they did with China. By 2020, that situation was inverted. In just twenty years, all these parts of the globe were doing more business with China than they were with America. During that period, America had fallen from more than 75 percent of total global trade to just over 25 percent.4 And eating up all that difference was China, which went rocketing up in exactly the opposite direction.

These countries are not alone. The UK government gave the Chinese the go-ahead to build and maintain a new nuclear reactor in England. And before a swift reversal, China’s government-backed communications firm Huawei was briefly tasked with helping to create the UK’s new 5G network. Of course, no country could carry out such a swift global expansion without a key ingredient, and that is elite capture. The CCP’s ability to buy up influence among the elites in each of the countries the party is hoping to enter is unparalleled in its scope and munificence. Across the countries of the West, all who have been in need of some postretirement financing, from former prime ministers on down, have found comfortable sinecures thanks to Chinese firms. Even among the relatively lower ranks of political figures in the West, the CCP and its fronts have been busy buying people up.

The Liberal Democrats were the junior partner in the coalition government in Britain between 2010 and 2015. But since leaving office, its senior and junior figures have been hoovered up by Beijing. The party’s present leader took funding for his leadership campaign from Huawei. The former head of strategy for then leader Nick Clegg ended up joining a PR firm that tried to launder China’s international image while it was snuffing out democracy in Hong Kong. And former treasury secretary Danny Alexander, who helped the UK become the first Western country to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, joined the bank after leaving government, helping to front the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative.5 Similar stories have occurred across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and all other parts of a once solid Western alliance.

Across the West, the same story has unfolded. From New Zealand to Washington, DC, the CCP has been buying up influence both big and small. From making massive infrastructure investments to arranging for the government-run Bank of China to become the largest single shareholder in BHR Partners, set up by Hunter Biden and John Kerry’s stepson after Hunter accompanied his father on an official trip to Beijing in 2013.7 China has also bought its way into elite institutions across the West. Ancient universities including Britain’s Cambridge University have welcomed Chinese investment and allowed Chinese authorities the right to decide what should and should not be studied or said in the institutions, and to suppress criticism of the munificent regime that is paying the checks.

Always the country has used its growing financial clout to flex its diplomatic muscles. Early in his time as prime minister, in 2012, David Cameron met the Dalai Lama while the Buddhist leader was on a trip to London. Because the CCP has a disagreement with the Dalai Lama over the issue of Tibet, they responded swiftly to news of the meeting. The British ambassador to China was immediately called into a meeting and given a telling off. In the wake of the incident, the CCP announced that relations with the United Kingdom had been severely damaged. Sure enough, Chinese investment there was put on hold. A trip to the United Kingdom by Chairman Wu Bangguo was called off, and the CCP talked about how “hurt” the Chinese people had been by the meeting. The British prime minister was understandably spooked and soon afterward announced that he planned never to meet the Dalai Lama again. The British government then issued a formal apology to the Chinese authorities for the offense caused. Normal trade relations were eventually restored. But what struck me most about the affair was an account I was subsequently given of the first meeting between British and Chinese officials after this affair. I was told by a source who had been at the meeting that before the meeting had got underway the CCP officials pushed a copy of the British apology across the table toward their British counterparts, who were then asked to stand up and read it aloud, which they duly did. Sitting down afterward, ...

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. A former British prime minister was helping China to develop its empire. Similar stories can be found everywhere in financial and political circles in the West. A couple of years ago, one of the foremost financial authorities in America was trying to persuade an acquaintance to invest in Chinese infrastructure projects. The businessman expressed doubts about the mo...

Yet for some reason all this is counted up on an entirely different side of the ledger. A fact that suits the CCP enormously well. At the same time that the CCP has been actively engaging in the most appalling human rights abuses, it is clearly delighted that the West has distracted itself with a set of self-abasements of its own. So long as the West is into the masochism business, it will always find a very willing sadist in Beijing. On the national and international stage, China is willing to hit the West—and America in particular—in what it regards as its weak spot. And one of those weak spots is racism.

It is worth noting that at the time Thomas-Greenfield said this to the UN, there was no evidence that the Atlanta spa shooting (in which eight people, including six Asian women, had been killed) had any racial component. The suspect being held in custody had previously spent time in a clinic where he was treated for sex addiction, and he later claimed he did not do it for race-related reasons. But the UN General Assembly was left with the clear impression that this was yet another mass racist shooting in the USA. Not content with being racist against the black population, the US citizenry was now also turning on Asian Americans.

There was nothing any noticeably less racist about Russia in the 1930s than there was in America. Just as there is nothing less racist about China in the 2020s than there is in America. Very much the opposite. And yet it is enormously helpful to China today, as it was to the Soviets in the past, to encourage the perception of America as uniquely racist and China as uniquely virtuous. There are an endless number of reasons why Beijing does this today, as Moscow did in the past. It allows Beijing to get away with grotesque rights abuses of its own. It distracts Western attention. It suggests that the West has no moral legitimacy to act anywhere. And it runs off the claim that the West has not merely done things that every other civilization in history has done, but rather has always been worse than any other civilization, meaning that the West is uniquely unqualified to pass moral judgment today. This in itself relies on two fundamental presumptions, which both turn out to be true. First, it runs on the presumption that knowledge of Western history inside the West is uniquely lacking: Westerners have become increasingly unaware of what is true and what is not about their own past. Second, it runs on the presumption—again also true—that almost nobody in the West has any knowledge of what countries such as China have done throughout history or are doing today.

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. The situation got so bad that the average life expectancy for Zimbabwean women fell by two years in two years. Mugabe put his people on a treadmill that got shorter with every step.

Similar stories played out across the world. Six decades ago, Uganda was a net exporter of food, indeed one of the breadbaskets of Africa. In the decades after colonization, it became a basket case, struggling even to feed its own people. Other countries such as Egypt have seen average wages fall lower since colonialism than during it. And that is not adjusting for inflation, but in simple, practical salary terms.

There are a number of explanations for situations like this, which can be replayed and repeated across Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. These explanations include gross mismanagement by postcolonial governments and grotesque corruption and self-enrichment by the governing class, who spent their years in office prioritizing the siphoning off of the nation’s wealth to private bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. On the other hand, there are countries that have been relative success stories. More than seven decades after independence, India today is not just the world’s most populous democracy but one of the world’s foremost economies. Although the age of empire linger...

Naturally, despots who have immiserated their own countries have a clear reason for blaming imperialism for all ills that currently beset their countries. But the only other group to join them in doing so are a portion of people in the West themselves. People who believe that the history of the world is a history of Western malfeasance and non-Western innocence. As well as being an insultingly partial history, it is also one that has absolutely no sense of global or historical perspective. And there is an obvious reason for that. In order to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the history of the rest. The only thing modern Western populations are more ig...

This is the chief reason that within the course of only a couple of generations, the history of the West has been entirely rewritten. And rewritten in order to tell the people of the West that their history is not especially glorious but instead a source of unimaginable shame. The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years. It is high time that we revise them in turn.

In her racist speech at Yale in 2021, Dr. Aruna Khilanani made many extraordinary claims. And in an interview around the same time, she made many more. Here is one of the things she told Katie Herzog: AK: People of color myself included, suffer from being positioned in the world, psychologically, and the stuff that goes with it: violence, this, that. Now, white people suffer from problems of their own mind. They suffer with trust, they suffer with intimacy, they suffer with closeness, shame, guilt, anxiety. They suffer with their minds. Don’t get me wrong, people of color are also neurotic and have their own stuff and ups and downs. But there is a fundamental issue I think that is very unique to white suffering and I think that’s their own mind. KH: What would you say is the cause of this? AK: I think it’s colonialism. That history. If you do this much lying to yourself it’s going to have an effect on your mind. There’s no way it can’t.1 That may be a characteristically extreme way of putting it. But it is not rare to see someone claim that in all of human history, there is something especially evil about white people.

Yet there it was. Or there it had been. For as the controversy grew, the New York Times silently edited the web pages in question so that this especially inflammatory claim no longer appeared on them. The words “understanding 1619 as our true founding” were quietly removed. And after they had done this little bit of erasing, the paper’s editors then went about pretending that they had never said the words that they had in fact said, or that when they had used the words, they had used them in a way that had a different meaning than the usual meaning such words had. Jake Silverstein, for instance, wrote that what the project was trying to explain was a “rather complex idea” and that when they had said that 1619 was the true founding date of America, they had in fact intended it as a “metaphor.” In a generous act of self-back-patting, he noted that some critics had said that this metaphor of his offered “a clearer vision” of American history than had previously been available.5

Silverstein then did a little rejigging of his own. In his introductory essay, published in August 2019, he had written: 1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Soon the online version of this, too, was silently edited. Specifically, the words “this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date” were deleted. Perhaps Silverstein wondered for a moment whether to pretend that the words “is wrong” was also a rather brilliant metaphor, also praised by many critics. Instead, he fell back on something else, which was claiming that the changes to the text were “so minor as to be immaterial.”6

The project was a deliberate transposing of American history into a minor key. The move of the founding date was not just about proving that everything that made America exceptional, including its economic power, its industrial power, and its system of democracy, had come out of slavery. It was intended to formalize the idea that the USA was founded on an original sin. It sought to turn a tale of heroism and glory into one of oppression and shame. Perhaps the authors of this project did not expect to get so much attention, or failed to imagine that they would dominate the nation’s discourse at such extraordinary speed. But that is what they did.

The historians said that the 1619 Project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”11

But the most interesting thing that happened with the 1619 Project was what happened when it moved from the page onto the street. In June 2020, when protests and riots followed the killing of George Floyd, the New York Post ran an opinion piece saying, “America is burning.” It described how rioters had already set fire to police stations and restaurants, had looted shops across the country, and were now coming for statues, including George Washington’s, which had just been torn down in Oregon. “Call them the 1619 riots,” the author wrote.15 Hannah-Jones noticed this and took to social media to accept the compliment. Call them the 1619 riots? “It would be an honor,” she said, as the country was burning. “Thank you.”16

There are several interesting things about this. Not least that Fanon, like many other postcolonial writers who became famous in the West, is not really interested in restoring the cultures of the non-Western countries he claims to care about. He is not interested in returning African nations to an era of tribal customs or any other precolonial Indigenous tradition. What he is interested in is analyzing these cultures through a Marxist lens and then “saving” them by applying a Marxist ideology to them. Naturally there is something perverse about this. For Marx was a Western thinker, with next to no knowledge—let alone experience—of non-Western cultures or societies. Just one of the ironies of the postcolonialist thinkers is that so many take the same path as Fanon. Intent in shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism.

Other arguments in Fanon have also become familiar through the West in the decades following. There is, for instance, the argument that the West is especially rapacious—and that in this regard, it is wholly unlike all other cultures. There is the argument that the West is wholly without virtue, even while it is strangely, indeed dangerously, alluring. And then there is the insistence that revenge is called for and that the West needs to pay for what it has done. Finally, there is the curious fact that the rage against the imperial powers of the nineteenth century does not stop at the nineteenth-century imperial powers, but extends to a country that never had an empire: America. An interesting truth can be discerned here. There may be many reasons to criticize the European powers for their empires. But if this is seen as a founding sin, and Western countries that did not have empires are lumped in with those that did, then it would seem that it is not in fact empire that is the problem in the eyes of such critics, but the West itself.

Like other postcolonial writers, Said’s central claim is singularly anti-Western. He is uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers. And that disinterest helps lead him to believe that every aspect of the West—even or especially its intellectual and cultural curiosity—is to be not just condemned but derided. His central work explaining this trend—Orientalism, published in 1978—has become one of the most widely cited books across disciplines in academia. Said’s central critique is an attempt to prove that when Westerners encountered other societies, they did so through the lens of the societies they came from. Despite the intelligence and style that Said could bring to his writing and his public debates, this central point is wholly unremarkable. After all, through what other lens might Western travelers and scholars have been expected to look at the Orient? Could they have been expected to look at the Middle East through Chinese eyes? Or Middle Eastern eyes? And why should Western explorers, linguists, and others be held to such a strange standard? It would be curious indeed to expect Arabs to have looked at Europe through European eyes. Or for the Chinese to look at the Middle East through Aboriginal eyes. Everybody approaches a different culture through references they have picked up in the culture they are from. There is nothing sinister about this. It is inevitable.

Yet for Said, so long as the people doing the looking are Western and the cultures being looked at are not, it is very sinister indeed. Everything about the West, even the learning of its scholars, is held against it. For instance, Said wishes to blame Westerners for their allegedly narrow worldview. He ignores the fact that the Orientalists who he spurns were remarkable men and women: people who learned the languages and dialects of faraway societies and who studied these cultures almost always because they were fascinated by and admired them.

Again, there is nothing so terrible about this. All descriptions must by necessity include some generalization. Not every sentence can be the length of a dissertation. Concepts that sum up large swaths of peoples—including “the West”—are useful even if they cannot sum up everything contained therein. But an interesting aspect of Said’s judgment in this is that while he loathes essentializing in others, he indulges in it frequently himself. For instance, at one point in his most famous work he says, “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”28 Every European? Every single one? Where is the evidence to support that fact? If you replaced the word “European” in that sentence with “African,” “Arab,” or even “Palestinian Christian,” what might you be called? Elsewhere Said refers in passing, perfectly blithely, to an “average nineteenth-century European.”29 What is that, you wonder? It essentializes an awfully large array of people.

The petition to the authorities at Oxford University cited several quotes from Cecil Rhodes. Describing him as an “apartheid colonialist” they claimed that his statements included this one: “I prefer land to n*****s . . . the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism. . . . one should kill as many n*****s as possible.” These quotations were then picked up and used by other media when reporting on the petition and protests.35 And they are terrible quotes indeed. For they showed Rhodes to be not only a racist but someone advocating genocide against black Africans. At such moments, with such damning material put in front of everyone, it is not easy to even query such material. But a small number of people at Oxford did, including students. They began to look at the sources of the quotes that the anti-Rhodes campaign was using and look into their claims about Rhodes’s life. What they found revealed a deep dishonesty. The anti-Rhodes petition itself offered no sources for its quotations. But the quote did turn up, ellipses and all, in a book review in the Times Literary Supplement in 2006. The author of that piece, Adekeye Adebajo, happened to be a former Rhodes scholar himself, and was quoting from a book under review by Paul Maylam.36 That book makes it clear that the three phrases were all said at different times. But all three parts of the quote turned out to be unstable in their sourcing. These include a work from 1957 that is not a work of scholarsh...

Why do these details matter? Rhodes was certainly a colonialist. He was certainly a believer in the British Empire. Would a critique of this not be enough? Why would anybody need to lie and exaggerate the offense? Certainly, there are people who claim that there is an overdue reckoning or rebalancing needed for historical figures such as Rhodes. But why would they decide to base such a reckoning not on the rights or wrongs of empire, or a weighing up of its human costs and benefits, but rather on an outright lie? Or, rather, on a set of lies? Why would a reckoning with the legacy of empire not be enough? Why is it necessary to slip in racist epithets in order to make the past worse than it was and to make important figures in it all come out looking like racist monsters?

Just as in the early twentieth century the default consensus at a university such as Oxford would have been that the empire was a force for good, so by the early twenty-first century it had become the default position at such places that the empire was solely a force for bad. The dogma had simply shifted. So now it was not even possible to try to weigh up the moral complexities of empire without being accused of being an apologist for, or supporter of, colonialism. Inadvertently, these critics showed the fragility of their arguments.

For instance, the Nigerian novelist and hero of anticolonialism Chinua Achebe said in 2012, “The legacy of colonialism is not a simple one but one of great complexity, with contradictions—good things as well as bad.” And in his final book, There Was a Country (2012), Achebe wrote, “Here is a piece of heresy. The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care. There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with a high level of knowledge of how to run a country . . . British colonies were, more or less, expertly run. . . . One was not consumed by fear of abduction or armed robbery. One had a great deal of confidence and faith in British institutions. Now all that is changed.”45 Achebe is not alone in his assessment. Scholars and writers such as Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Dr. Zareer Masani have argued eloquently in the case of India that what the empire left behind was not just the railroads and the Indian civil service but the scholarship of men such as Sir William Jones and James Prinsep, who unlocked the classical language of India and handed that civilization back to itself.

It may not be possible to answer, but is it not an interesting question to ask why this one monstrous event—or any number of others—could not be weighed up against any good the British Empire did? Does it get outweighed by the British Empire’s decision not only to abolish slavery in its colonies but to police the seas in order to outlaw it across the world? If not, then why not? And if the sins of the West are ineradicable, then are the sins of all other peoples ineradicable too? Or is it only Western crimes that are judged in such a light? Nobody appears to know the answer to these questions. More sinister is the fact that nobody is even meant to ask them.

As it happens, there were several codas to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Oriel College promised to scrap the Rhodes statue and then promised to save it. The college then agreed to have it withdrawn and also agreed not to do anything about it. This is where the situation currently stands. Since coming to fame for his Rhodes Must Fall activism, Ntokozo Qwabe returned to South Africa, where he briefly made headlines in May 2016, when he boasted in a Facebook post about something “so black” and “wonderful” that had happened that he couldn’t “stop smiling.” The wonderful thing was that in a restaurant with a friend, he had bullied a white waitress, telling her he would give her a tip “when you return the land.” When the waitress burst into tears, he laughed and dismissed her tears as “typical white tears.”48 Later, back at the University of Cape Town, Rhodes having gone, Qwabe was involved with the new “Fees Must Fall” campaign and was reported to have whipped a white student with a stick while racially abusing him. Qwabe took to Facebook to object. He admitted that he had hit the student’s phone out of his hand with a “protest stick” he always carries around with him for “cultural purposes,” but he said that he had not whipped the student. However, Qwabe added, “I wish I’d actually not been a good law-abiding citizen and whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard.” The white student told the media that he did not want to be identified. “It’s a...

In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It is to zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did. The case of slavery is a pertinent one. For slavery has been a constant in almost every society since the dawn of recorded history. In antiquity, slaves came from Ethiopia and then farther afield. When the Muslim empires arose, they expanded the trade. As the Muslim empire spread across West Africa during the Middle Ages, it made possible the trading of black slaves across the Sahara. Some ended up in Muslim Spain and Portugal. But when Ferdinand of Aragon and Charles V agreed to a couple of hundred, and then four thousand, slaves to be shipped to the New World they can have had no idea of the change that they were bringing about. From the 1400s to the 1800s, somewhere between ten and twelve million Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the new world. The slaves that were brought out of Africa not only suffered the indignity of being ripped away from their homeland and taken abroad without their permission. They suffered the additional indignity of having been sold by their neighbors and families. There were times when the Portuguese, among others, seized slaves after a military campaign in Africa. But the overwhelming majority of slaves taken out of Africa durin...

Other examples of similar bad-faith arguments can be found everywhere in the current debate on slavery and empire. For example, it is now common to hear the Atlantic slave trade being described as though it had been an act of genocide. Though this is, on its own terms, a nonsensical argument. Appalling as it was, the transatlantic slave trade was dedicated to getting as many living people as possible from Africa into the New World. Though many people died on the way, the aim of the exercise was not to kill the slaves but to get them to the Americas alive so that they could be put to work. That is a great wickedness in itself. But it is far from being a deliberate attempt to wipe out a people. Had the Americans or Europeans ever wanted to attempt such a thing, they might have taken a leaf out of the Arab traders’ playbook and castrated all their slaves. Had they done so, then there would be no descendants of slaves in America, just as there are none today in the Middle East.

Similar hyperbole has been attached to every aspect of empire and colonialism. In recent decades, it has become increasingly common to talk of the European settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and America as though they involved—by intent—the genocide of the local Indigenous populations. Most of the time, this includes reference to the Indigenous populations having been wiped out or significantly diminished by the deliberate spreading of disease. This, too, relies on a distortion of events. But at some point, someone else in the world was going to discover the New World. And whoever did so was—like the Europeans—likely to enter with a level of immunity to disease that the native populations (being more homogenous and having had less exposure to outside peoples) would not possess. The natural spread of diseases brought in by Europeans could not have been deliberate because the Europeans had no knowledge of immunology, what diseases they themselves were carrying, or how those diseases might spread. Still, none of this has stopped propagandists and academics from asserting that what happened in post-Columbus America, as well as Australia and New Zealand and Canada, was not just genocide but the worst genocide ever. Here is an academic with tenure at a British university speaking on the subject: “What is the first act of Europe in the Americas? It is the largest genocide that has ever existed on the planet . . . I actually don’t understand the science of this, but app...

Slavery persists today, in countries including Mauritania, Ghana, and South Sudan. In recent years, the world watched the Islamic State put thousands of Yezidi women and children into slavery, killing husbands and bartering wives and children in slave markets. In 2020, a Samoan chief in New Zealand was sentenced to eleven years in prison for slavery. He was caught luring people from Samoa to New Zealand, where he would then bind and enslave them in order to enrich himself. In the West, this is unusual and punished when discovered, but in much of the world, the modern slave trade goes utterly unpunished. There are estimated to be over forty million people living in slavery around the world today. In real terms, this means that there are more slaves in the world today than there were in the nineteenth century.53 So this is not a question of historic what-aboutery. It raises the question of what might practically change for people today if we spent even a portion of the time that we focus on past slavery focused, instead, on present-day slavery. And what we might be able to do about this modern horror.

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.

What was the situation of a coal miner in England in the 1800s? How much freedom did he have to make life choices, or escape the background into which he had been born? What of those forced into child labor in countries such as England, pushed before the age of ten into dangerous textile factories or agricultural work? As one recent author on slavery conceded, the life expectancy for slaves in Demerara was exactly twice the life expectancy of an industrial worker in Lancashire or Yorkshire at the same time. Is there anything to learn from this? In the case of that particular historian, the only th...

It is strange to still read of such genuflections, after all these years, simply based on race. For if one race of people should be expected to make them, how could any race avoid them? Not just the peoples who traded but the peoples who sold. What answer can there be, even after all these centuries, to the challenge Voltaire utters in his Essai sur les moeurs, where he made the observation that while the white Europeans were guilty of buying slaves, far more reprehensible was the behavior of those Africans who were willing to sell their brothers, neighbors, and children (“On nous reproche ce commerce: un peuple qui trafique de ses enfants est encore plus condamnable que l’acheteur” [They reproach our trade: a nation that traffics its children is even more to be condemned than the buyer]).55...

If Britain’s decision to abolish slavery in 1807 was unusual, more unusual by far was her decision to send the Royal Navy around the world, establish the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, and grow the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade. The cost of this extraordinary decision was not only financial. It was paid for in British lives as well. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. They also lost a huge number of personnel themselves. More than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy were killed in action during this period, and the acts of bravery and selfless heroism of those men is worthy of some note, surely? Anthony Sullivan’s recent history of the operations of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron is one rare work to highlight the extraordinary bravery of these British sailors, chasing boats across the oceans, boarding them, and fighting for their own lives and for the lives of the slaves that they invariably found stowed away in the holds of ships bound for a wide variety of countries.56 It was a game of cat and mouse across the high seas, with standoffs and guessing games about slave ships trying to pass themselves off as other vessels. Until the British sailors boarded the ships and searched for themselves, they never had any certainty that they were right in this high-risk strategy. It is a tale of great heroism that carried ...

The person who chaired the discussion was one Priyamvada Gopal, who happens to be a teaching fellow at Churchill College. In recent years, she has distinguished herself on Twitter through her antiwhite race-baiting. This has included such gems as “abolish whiteness,” “white lives don’t matter,” and her claim that she has to “resist urges to kneecap white men every day.”58

When the BLM movement spilt out from America into Britain in May and June 2020 the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square immediately became one of the focal points for protestors. The statue was repeatedly graffitied and otherwise defaced. At one stage, a BLM banner was taped around the statue’s waist and the statesman’s name was crossed out with black spray paint. Then, beneath “Churchill,” the words “was a racist” were added in more black paint. It was in reporting this protest that the BBC ran the headline “27 Police Officers Injured during Largely Peaceful Anti-racism Protests.” A headline only bettered in our time by CNN, a month later, having its reporter standing in front of a burning city with the tagline “Fiery, but Mostly Peaceful Protests.”

For instance, Noam Chomsky, among others, has claimed that Churchill advocated the gassing of Iraqi civilians in 1919. What such critics fail to realize is that Churchill was advocating the use of tear gas, not mustard gas. Then there is the example of the Bengal famine of 1943–44. This terrible famine, in which official estimates say that upward of 1.5 million people died, was started when a cyclone hit Bengal and Orissa, destroying the rice harvest. Local officials failed to deal with the problem, as did the viceroy and others. The cabinet records in London show that Churchill insisted that “famine and food difficulties” in the area be “dealt with.” Churchill’s recent critics accuse him of failing to send sufficient grain to India to alleviate the famine, distort the historical record, and fail to note that the truth is that even at the height of World War II, Churchill personally saw to it that emergency grain supplies reached India from Iraq and Australia.