The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

In other words, it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today. For just as we are not up against justice but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction. An only vaguely milder version of this has existed in plain sight for decades. That is the obsession that started in the academy and then spread elsewhere that is given over to the veneration of “deconstruction.” This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.