The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.

People began to talk of “equality,” but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism,” but they sounded deeply racist. They spoke of “justice,” but they seemed to mean “revenge.”

There is an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world—its past, present, and future. Part of that process is that we have become locked in a cycle of unending punishment. With no serious effort at (or even consideration for) its alleviation.

What I had a problem with was why the Europeans were allowing this to happen and why they were expected to abolish themselves in order to survive.

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.

the eyes of many people, not least within their own populations, these countries appeared to have done something wrong. Something for which they must atone. The West was the problem. The dissolving of the West was a solution.

After the twentieth century, national identity had become a shameful form of belonging, and all these other forms of belonging suddenly appeared in its place. Now people were being told to consider themselves as members of other specific groupings. They were gay or straight, men or women, black or white. These forms of belonging were also loaded to lean in an anti-Western direction. Gays were celebrated so long as they were “queer” and wanted to pull down all existing institutions. Gays

who just wanted to get on with life or actually liked the Western world were sidelined. Likewise, so long as feminists were attacking “male structures,” Western capitalism, and much more, they were useful. Feminists who didn’t toe that line or thought they were comparatively well off in the West were treated as sellouts at best, enemies at worst. The discourse on race grew even worse. Racial minorities who had integrated well in the West, contributed to the West, and were even admiring of the West were increasingly treated as though they were race traitors.

At the same time, it had become unacceptable to talk about any other society in a remotely similar way. 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.

Authors who refuse to allow their books to be translated into Hebrew are thrilled to see them appear in China.

everything was presented as though it had never been worse at the point at which it had never been better.

In the place of color blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness.

Like all societies in history, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted.

Terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Travel anywhere in the Middle East—even to the “progressive” Gulf States—and you will see a modern caste system at work. There are the “higher class” racial groups who run these societies and benefit from them. And then there are the unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an imported labor class.

Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism. This warped claim even has a final extension, which is that if other countries do have any racism, it must be because the West exported the vice to them. As though the non-Western world is always made up of Edenic innocents. Here again, it is clear that some unfair ledger has been created. A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it.

a civilizational shift that has been underway throughout our lifetimes. A shift that has been rocking the deep underpinnings of our societies because it is a war on everything in those societies.

The War on the West is a book about what happens when one side in a cold war—the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles—prematurely surrenders.

The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Over the course of the book, I’m going to be exploring two key ideas. The first is that critics of Western civilization do provide alternatives. They venerate every culture so long as it is not Western. For instance, all native thought and cultural expression are to be celebrated, just so long as that native culture is not

Western. This is the comparison they want us to make, so we will make it. Two major problems come from celebrating all non-Western cultures. The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past.

But the other major problem is that it leads to a form of parochial internationalism, where Westerners mistakenly presume that aspects of the Western inheritance are common aspirations across the rest of the globe. From Australia to Canada and America and throughout Europe, a new generation has imbibed the idea that aspects of the Western tradition (such as “human rights”) are a historical and global norm that have been rolled out everywhere.

The culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity. The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini, and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say. New generations are taught this ignorant view of history. They are offered a story of the West’s failings without spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories.

A new generation does not appear to understand even the most basic principles of free thought and free expression.

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.

Specifically, it led to an upsurge of descriptions of white people in terms that would be used about no other group in society.

interpret almost everything in the world through the lens of race.

everything in the academy and everything in the academy’s understanding of wider society was racialized, or rather racialized anew.

Yet followers of CRT saw nearly all progress in American race relations as an illusion. That is how Bell himself referred to it in 1987, when he wrote that “progress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power

to ensure their dominion and maintain their control.”

Because one of the distinguishing marks of CRT was that its assertions were based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes. This marked a significant shift in the manner in which people were expected to prove assertions. While rarely announcing the fact, the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s “lived experience” could be attested to, then the question of “evidence” or “data” had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all. The intersectionalists who grew up at the same time comfortably overlapped with CRT. These people, who built a theory from the assertion that all oppressions “intersect” and must be simultaneously “solved,” made this leap possible.

All made

from a standpoint which was neither provable nor disprovable. It was simply asserted. Whether leveling claims against colleagues or against wider society, it became sufficient to fall back simply on the evidence of one’s own perceptions. If one person pointed to evidence that proved America had become less racist, another person could say that he knew this not to be the case. Why? His own “lived experience” (as though there is any other kind). In many ways, it was a clever move to make. For it is true that no individual’s personal experience can ever be fully comprehended. But neither can it be always and wholly believed. Certainly, assertions about entire societies and groups of people should come with some evidence attached? Well, not now. At its best, the shift from evidence to “me” allowed a stalemate: You have your views and reality. I have mine. At its worst, it left any exchange of ideas vulnerable to being taken over by bad-faith actors who simply insisted that things are as they say they are. And that is precisely what happened.

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.”

The hallmarks were there from the beginning. An absolute obsession with race as the primary means to understand the world and all injustice. The claim is that white people are in their totality guilty of prejudice, specifically racism, from birth. That racism is interwoven so deeply into white-majority societies that the white people in those societies do not even realize that they live in racist societies. Asking for proof was proof of racism. And, finally, there is also the insistence that none of the answers Western societies have come up with to address racism are remotely adequate or capable of dealing with the task at hand. The work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others insisted that even the concept of aspiring to be “color-blind” when it comes to issues of race is itself deeply racist.4 But what was racism by this new and assertive definition? It was, it was repeatedly asserted, “prejudice plus power.” Partly thanks to the influence of Michel Foucault, these academics had become obsessed with the issue of power.5 They saw it both as the central issue of a free society and as being wielded negatively by all state institutions. As a result, the priority was to wrestle power out of these hands and wield it elsewhere. Attributing power, or taking power, on the basis of skin color was enormously advantageous to these academics, even if their thinking on the matter remained wildly confused. For instance, they maintained that someone could not be guilty of racism if they ha...

But they failed to take into account Sowell’s follow-on observation that racism was now being kept alive “by politicians, race hustlers, and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”7 These exact figures were the ones who now gave racism a new lease on life. They did so by two means in particular. The first was by declaring a change of rules. The second was in announcing themselves to be the referees. In doing so, among much else, they identified and cut off all the paths that a normal person would have to avoid being accused of being a racist. If you were

unable to see it everywhere, it was only because your racism prevented you from really looking.

It became DiAngelo’s contention not only that white people were all racist but that white people who disliked being told that they were racist, or objected to being called racist, were simply providing further evidence of their racism.

In fact, she happily admitted to it, writing, “I am breaking a cardinal rule of individualism—I am generalizing” [italics hers].13 Until this point,

“generalizing” about people had indeed been deemed to be a low tactic. To say “all Chinese people think this” or “all black people behave like that” had been thought to be rude as well as ignorant. But Robin DiAngelo positively reveled in the naughtiness of doing it and getting away with doing it because she was doing it against white people.

There is something in that moment that is worth confronting right away. Because there are those for whom the killing of George Floyd was not just something that happened in America but something that was emblematic of America. And this perspective, that what happened that day was not the behavior of a rogue cop who was subsequently arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for his crime but rather a pulling back of the curtain

and a revealing of something in the heart of all white Americans, was an interpretation that DiAngelo, the critical race theorists, and others had primed Americans for. And primed college-aged Americans for in particular.

They also claimed that whiteness was contagious. For how else to deal with the fact that many black people were not in 100 percent agreement with the new racial theorists and did not all agree with the new ideas being foisted upon everyone?

In these settings, in which you could get black-white people, though not white-black people, it becomes clear that “black” and “white” had simply become synonyms for “good” and “bad.”

And much of the venom and fury that exists today in America, and in the West as a whole, now comes down to this one specific problem: that people have been shown a version of their society that is exaggerated at best and wildly off at worst.

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.

Defining or rather redefining terms and words has become a career specialty for Kendi.

Rather than taking race out of a discussion (the very concept of which Kendi also describes as racist), this worldview goes out of its way to impose race into every discussion.

At the exact moment that racism had never been more discredited or more socially and politically unacceptable, it is portrayed as omnipresent and needing a great pushback.

What can have happened to a society for such behavior to have become normal? One answer is that a set of claims about America and American society were allowed to wash by. People made claims about the state of race in America that were subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, untrue.

Because “antiracist” theory had taught them to draw sweeping morals first and ignore all details later. It was more important to send the right signals than to be right on the facts.