The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

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