How attacks on the West became socially acceptable
Don’t judge this book by its title. Douglas Murray’s introduction offers some remarks about the Western tradition and its achievements, but chapter one gets down to the real order of business: “Race”.
The author of The Strange Death of Europe has never been afraid of controversy, and Murray’s latest is no exception. The War on the West is a panoramic survey of a new prejudice that has commandeered Western institutions in the name of social justice. It is, Murray argues, out to “demonise the people who still make up the racial majority in the West”. The war on our civilisation turns out, for Murray, to mean a war against whiteness.
As a result, we get two books in one. A series of celebrations – and defences – of the best of the West sits alongside a catalogue of anti-white discrimination, mostly pursued as a form of white self-flagellation to atone for racial sin. Murray shows how, beginning in the early 2000s and accelerating from 2018, the new anti-racism has spread from America and seized many of Britain’s vital and much-loved institutions, from the Church of England to the Royal Academy of Music.
As one might expect from a polemicist as smart and gifted as Murray, both elements are wellexecuted and repay the reader’s attention. Applause for the West has become the exception rather than the rule in recent years. Here we get the almost unsayable: a full-throated hymn to its permanent and continuing contributions.
As he praises the West, Murray explores the importance of gratitude. He argues that resentment and envy often underpin high-minded attacks on Western achievement. He also skewers the inconsistencies, historical distortions and blatant hypocrisy at work among the West’s attackers. Why, he wonders drily, is it that those out to topple Churchill and cancel Aristotle, Kant or Hume, appear curiously indifferent to Michel Foucault’s penchant for child rape, or the vicious anti-Semitism and racial prejudice expressed by Karl Marx?
But the central concern of Murray’s book is the new anti-racism. Early on, he recounts the moment in 2016 when he shared a panel in London with General John Allen, the American commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan. When an activist stood up and dismissed them both as “two white men”, the General winced. Afterward, Murray recalls, he told Allen to get used to it. “Little realising,” he adds, “how fast we all would.” Five years later, the studio audience for America’s Tonight Show whooped and cheered when Jimmy Fallon mentioned that the number of white people in their country had fallen.
As Murray shows, attacking whiteness can now be at home in the most respectable circles. In the words of one New York Times contributing editor, whiteness is “a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left to infect”. Last year, a psychiatrist used a talk at Yale’s Child Study Centre to describe white people as a “demented violent predator,” with “holes in their brain”. Britain, too, has prominent academics who make public statements about how they “resist urges to kneecap white men every day,” or claim that the defeat of Nazism only ushered in “a new version of white supremacy”.
Murray also uncovers the human price of anti-racism. As when English Touring Opera announced in September last year that it had dropped half its orchestral players in order to increase diversity. Or when America’s health authorities proposed in December 2020 a system of priorities for Covid-19 vaccination that would, in the name of rebalancing racial equity, mean the deaths of more people – but mainly old, white ones.
Such choices break with the Western ideal of justice, and not by accident. Most of those carried along in the slipstream of the Great Awokening no doubt believe it is just the latest stage in the West’s long pilgrimage to live up to its own principles. As Murray points out, the intellectuals have something far more ambitious in mind. He quotes British academic Kehinde Andrews, for whom the logic of antiracism requires overturning the whole system of the West: “There is no other solution than revolution.”
By celebrating the West’s achievements and pointing out the anti-Western character of the new anti-racism, Murray once again provides a valuable counterweight to bad ideas that have gone mainstream. However, by merging his two topics, Murray also ends up racialising the West just as much as his opponents do. His conclusion offers a “nuclear answer” to attacks on whiteness: a fivepage encomium to Western greatness, casting it as a white achievement and a basis for white pride.
In celebrating the West’s whiteness, Murray is, for once, off-target. Ideas of racial identity are not the West’s destiny, but our enemy. The anti-racists are not wrong that such
When a TV host said the number of white people in America had fallen, the audience cheered
thinking is a poisonous legacy of slavery and imperialism. Their mistake is to imagine that the answer is simply to swing racial prejudice in the other direction.
In the end, for all the West’s failings, as Murray says in his chapter on China, the most important question to ask its critics is: “Compared to what?” Today, the China-Russia alliance presents a chilling glimpse of the real alternative: a pair of genocidal, expansionist regimes, each justifying its crimes in the name of civilisational purity.
Susan Sontag called white Western civilisation “the cancer of human history”. Given what Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are up to, it might be fairer, if unconsoling, to see the West as history’s chemotherapy. Traumatic to encounter, in many ways destructive, but the alternatives don’t bear thinking about.