The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Now, “equity” was the watchword, and it was code for equalizing outcomes even if that meant making things worse for whites instead of better for blacks.

There are several problems with this reflex anti-Westernism. One is that it ignores what is actually going on in the world today.

If they are not aware, then it is in part because people have been persuaded that picking over a select group of historical wrongs will help solve problems in their societies today. Whereas the truth is that a better understanding of the issues facing our societies today is a more likely way to help solve those issues.

But raking over the past, and judging it as harshly as possible, seems to be so much easier than doing anything practical about problems that face us all today.

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.

If the American-led world order is so terrible, what might a CCP-led world order look like? If the United States and other Western countries are so dreadful, then would the only likely alternative system be any better?

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.

But nothing about this is new. The CCP is only weaponizing Western weaknesses in the way that totalitarian regimes and competitors to the West have always operated.

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. In other words, the assault on the West’s history succeeds because it speaks into a vacuum of vast historical and contemporary ignorance. It speaks to a populace inside the West as much as outside it, which is willing to see the whole of history through a single lens. If anything bad happens in the world, it must be the West’s fault, because there is no other legitimate explanation of how things can go wrong, other than explanations involving the West. Aside from the historical illiteracy of the anti-Westernism of our day, there is something else going on here. It is a gigantic moral presumption. That presumption is the idea that nobody in the world can do anything wrong unless the West has made them do it. A presumption that is quite outstandingly wrong.

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 ignorant about than their own history is the history of other peoples outside the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive at any moral judgments.

It is worth keeping figures such as this in mind as we see the next manifestation of the war on the West. The assault on Western history.

Because when you are speaking into a great vacuum of ignorance, people with malign intent can run an awfully long way awfully fast. They can tell their listeners things that they will simply believe and tell them what they should not question. And as you speak into a vacuum of knowledge, you can—if you are so ideologically inclined—completely rewrite the history of the West, divorcing it from any proper understanding and certainly from any wider context. All in the hope of persuading the peoples of the West not that they were better than anyone else or that they were the same as anyone else, but that they were uniquely evil and therefore worse than everyone else. That the history of the West is especially shameful.

For even a couple of years earlier, it would have been inconceivable for an anchor at one of the main networks to use language entirely lifted from the most radical, revisionist figures in America. If Mount Rushmore is “stolen,” then what is the rest of the country? Before the modern era, the whole history of our species was one of occupation and conquering. One group of original peoples were replaced by another group of other peoples. And someone outside the American continent was always going to “discover” America.

What exactly were Columbus and subsequent Europeans meant to do after making their discovery? Should they have returned home and said that there was nothing to see? Should they have kept their discovery to themselves, waited for someone else to find it, or declared America a place with no potential? The ineluctable conclusion of this narrative is that it would have been better if Columbus had never discovered America. Or that it would have been better if it had been found and settled by some more suitable civilization. Such as the Chinese or Japanese. But these notions are not just ahistorical. At this stage, they are also completely self-destructive. For if the land you are on is simply stolen, the Founding Fathers were simply “slave owners,” the Constitution needs to be rewritten, and no figure in your history deserves any respect, then what exactly holds this grand quarter-millennial-long project like America together?

Throughout this period, perhaps it was inevitable that a certain anti-Western attitude would advance. The postcolonial

period got off to a variety of starts. In some places, the withdrawal was smooth; in others, it opened up vacuums that consumed everything in the vicinity. But wherever the case, as the West retreated, anti-Westernism advanced. A correction was due. But in no time, that correction became an overcorrection. People in the former colonies who praised or emulated aspects of the colonial era were suddenly pariahs. And in the West itself, the pendulum also swung. Where once many people had thought that the West could do nothing wrong, the West entered an era where it became dangerous to concede that the West had ever done anything right.

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.

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.

In doing so, he held the West to standards expected of no other society and then castigated the West for failing to live up to these standards. He also helped to create an interpretation of the world in which the non-Western peoples were people to whom things were done, while the Western people were people who did things. And terrible things at that.

The rise of postcolonial studies had been a necessary correction within academia, but that period itself now needed interrogating.

Former colonial powers that had found themselves constantly compared with the worst regimes of the twentieth century might easily find themselves denuded of the will or confidence to act even against serious rights abuses going on around the world today. The result, in other words, could be Western inertia. Something over which other powers might happily seek advantage.

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.

The oddity of those who argue against weighing up the various merits and demerits of empire is twofold. First, they say that it cannot be done: there is no way to form the moral calculus necessary to work such things out. Then, they insist that

in any case because of a specific terrible thing that happened, any positives must be discounted.

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.

And while huge attention has been paid in recent years to the trade in slaves that went west, very little has been expended on the trade that went east.

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move past it. Who wants to litigate or relitigate a past in which nobody’s ancestors were saints?

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.

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.

it is a reminder of how strange it is to see only one group of people consistently in the dock for a crime that everybody took part in.

Historical judgment calls like this tend to come with complications. The first is that they are so astoundingly one-directional.

than harm,” because “he led his country from feudalism.” It seems right to ask exactly what accounting system is going on here? How can it be that a left-wing dictator can kill tens of millions of people yet still be praised for great leaps forward in agricultural matters, whereas Winston Churchill can help save the world from fascism yet be forever damned because of a Welsh miner’s death three

decades before? There is something so outrageous in this that it must be put down to a desire to win some other political fight. Something else is going on in the attacks on Churchill, which are a possibly deliberate attempt to cause enervation. It is almost impossible to look at people trying to weight the scales of history in such a fashion and not sigh with exhaustion. If what Churchill did in his life doesn’t count for anything, then it is hard to see how any human action counts for anything. If Churchill’s good points cannot outweigh any bad points, then no one can ever do enough good in their lives. In other words, if we cannot get Churchill right, and get him in a proper perspective, then there seems little point in trying to do so with anyone else. Finally, there seems little point in trying to do anything good ourselves. The attacks on Churchill make all human endeavor seem futile, because if even defeating the greatest evil in history will count as nothing, and you will not be lauded for it in your own country even half a century after your death, then what good deed could ever count for anything?

To understand what is going on here, it is necessary to consider this not at a historical level but at a religious level.

This, then, is the reason why Churchill must be particularly assaulted. Because as long as his reputation stands, the West still has a hero. As long as his reputation remains intact, we still have figures to emulate. But if Churchill can be made to fall? Why then one of the great gods, perhaps the greatest of the West, falls. And then? Well, anything might be forced upon a people so subjected and demoralized. The academics and others who assail Churchill know what a holy being he is. They know how much he is revered. And it is for precisely this reason that they assault him. Because they want to kick the “white men,” they want to kick at the great man view of history. They want to kick at the holiest beings and places of the West. They choose their targets well.

But this desire to mock the West’s holy places seems almost unassuageable.

Assumptions of obvious guilt were made, followed by a scouring search for culprits to blame. Always the indictable force is the West, and the institutions and ideas that have made up the West. History becomes the history of Western sins. And ignorance reigns not only over anything good the West ever did but over anything bad that anyone else has ever done.

But as with so many other occasions in the present moment, nearly all actual knowledge of what had happened at the point in question had been long forgotten. The history had been rewritten in the same one-note tone as everything else: a story of Western racists taking advantage of innocent natives.

International bodies such as the Human Rights Council are perfect places for oppressive states to deflect attention from their ongoing crimes and focus instead on the historic sins of the West.

In order for true forgiveness to occur, the parties involved must be not only the one who has done the wrong but the one to whom the wrong has been done. Wiesenthal may have been a Jew, like the victims, but he does not have the right to forgive on behalf of his fellow Jews who were gunned down by the soldier as they jumped from a burning building. Wiesenthal is not these men, women, and children. He is not even a close relative of these men, women, and children. These victims may never have wanted to forgive their killers. Perhaps they would have hated their killers forever and not wanted them to die in peace. The SS soldier had participated in such a terrible end for them, so what right did Wiesenthal have to say on behalf of all of these people that the SS soldier is forgiven? Why should the SS soldier die with even a part of his conscience cleared? After taking no care about the consciences of so many other human beings.

owed. The issue of reparations now comes down not to descendants

Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who

look like the people who may have done the wrong. It is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a we...

After all these years, it is still only the sins of the West that the world—including much of the West—wish to linger over. It is as though when looking at the many, multivariant problems that exist in the world, a single patina of answers has been provided that is meant to explain every problem and provide every answer.

generalizations about the West

remain the only generalizations acceptable to make. Whereas specific questions about specific claims made about non-Western countries are batted away as though they could not possibly contain any merit and are in fact presumptuous even to raise. What is anyone from the West—let alone a white person from the West—to do in such a setup? To date only a few options have been made available. One is to raise the next generation of people in the West with a sense that they are the heirs of an illegitimate, ill-gotten fortune.

Another option is to try to alleviate or otherwise pay down that guilt. But how to do it?

Otherwise, it may be possible to arrive at equality by giving “non-Western” people a freer pass and carrying out acts of vengeance on “Western” people.