Douglas Murray’s defence of the West

It is often said when America sneezes, the world catches cold. And the United States has definitely fallen ill. Since the death of George Floyd two years ago, Britain has imported from its North Atlantic cousins some dangerous and destructive ideologies, the most divisive of which is the idea that the West is “structurally racist”. Racial justice activists have a litany of grievances: their vision of Western history is both pathological and reductive. It is one of exploitation and appropriation of people and of wealth. With the longest arrest warrant in history, Britain and America have been deemed the West’s worst offenders.

Under the narrow lens of racism, fiery debates have broken out and are being waged in every area of life. In modern progressive parlance, the debate is getting toxic. The past is being weaponised against us and it is time we fought back.

“There is a war going on,” author Douglas Murray warns us. “A war on the West.” Unlike the current invasion being waged in Ukraine, this is a battle being fought for ideological and moral supremacy. In The War on the West (HarperCollins, 320 pp, £20), Murray argues that we are fighting a cultural war being “waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.” Those most actively engaged in launching the attack are a small but increasingly vociferous cadre of activist academics, indoctrinating the next generation into believing slavery is irrevocably intertwined with the history of Western civilisation.

Yet blame cannot rest solely with radical professors and obscure academic disciplines. With clarity and precision, Murray documents how powerful and persuasive the anti-Western lobby has become. Within the space of one generation, racial ideology has left the hallowed halls of academia and now infects every mainstream institution. The civilisation that gave us Mozart, Michelangelo and Caravaggio — once heralded as visionary creative geniuses — is now rendered “problematic”. Western history, Murray warns, has been reduced to the embarrassing product of “dead white males.” This might explain why Jimmy Fallon’s studio audience “whooped and cheered uproariously” when he announced that the white population of America had suffered a demographic decline. It is no wonder we are losing the war. To further extend Murray’s analogy, the enemy are on the battlefield and we are heavily outnumbered.

The rather strident title should come as no surprise to regular readers of Murray. The author is no stranger to controversy. His third book, The Strange Death of Europe was a detailed exposé of what happens when Western governments fail to tackle uncontrolled mass immigration. Murray applies the same level of skill to his polemical prose in The War on the West. The author peels back the curtain to reveal the true picture. As he says: “If their war is to prove unsuccessful, then it will need to be exposed and pushed back against.” And in The War on the West, Douglas Murray makes a convincing case for doing just that.

As with The Strange Death of Europe, The War on the West is a thorough investigation, documenting a civilisation in decline. Divided into chapters on themes such as race, religion, culture and history, Murray delves deep into the claims of the new anti-Western activists, exposing their lack of knowledge, their shoddy methodologies and their hypocrisy.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more prevalent than with the sacred idols of the left. Why, Murray asks, does the statue-toppler seek to pull down Churchill, Washington and Lincoln — men who shaped the West and fought tirelessly to fight fascism and defend democracy — yet feel obliged to give Karl Marx a free pass? A man who held deeply racist views and was an avowed anti-Semite. A quote from Marx in 1843 provides evidence for his claim: “What is the world religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his world god? Money.” For Murray, there is an agenda at work here. He quotes the British academic and professor of black studies, Kehinde Andrews, for whom the solution to antiracism is “revolution”.

But, as Murray argues, concepts such as evidence and justice are not that important to the new moral martinets. The logic that motivates them stems from the bizarre foundational principle that whiteness is the problem. It is the same flawed logic, Murray says, as the “witch-dunkers in the Middle Ages”. In today’s fashionably progressive world, denying you are racist is tacit complicity in the act of racism. Objection is simply an admittance of guilt. If you are white, you will suffer from what Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility”. Arguing against their claims is like entering a circular-logic firing squad, yet this forms the basis of the new anti-racism ideology.

The argument that the West is in a state of decay is not new. In 1964 James Burnham wrote how liberalism was leading to the “suicide” of the West. Before that In the Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler argued that Western culture was in its final, “Faustian” season, heading toward what he saw as its inevitable decline. While not as pessimistic as these writers, Murray’s work is often characterised as fatalistic. However, what stops Murray falling into this category is his central thesis: that Western civilisation is not only worth defending, it must be defended. This can be clearly seen when it comes to slavery.

According to Murray, it was a 2014 Atlantic article by Ta Nehisi Coates entitled “The Case for Reparations” that brought the issue of slavery into the mainstream. Slavery is an evil that has plagued every corner of the globe since the dawn of civilisation. Yet anti-Western activists have adopted a simplistic vision of slavery framed entirely through the prism of Eurocentrism. Murray points out that more slaves probably went east to the Arab states than west across the Atlantic. This is the position held by the black economist Thomas Sowell.

In his essay “The Real History of Slavery”, Sowell says: “More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or the 13 colonies from which it formed.” So if we are going to be morally consistent with reparations, then we need to ask Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia to get out the chequebook. Yet you will not see them protesting about the plight of Europeans sold into slavery on the North African coast. Unsurprisingly, for many of these activists, it is an issue that merits little attention. What determines the moral indignation of your typical anti-Western activist appears to be the colour of one’s skin.

By focusing solely on the transatlantic slave trade, these activists have heaped all of slavery’s sins upon the West. It also diverts attention from what is happening right now. According to the UN’s International Labour Organisation, there are probably as many as three times the number of people in slavery today as were captured and sold during the transatlantic 350 year life-span. Known as “the new slavery”, some 25 million people are estimated to be held in debt bondage and 15 million in forced marriage around the world. But focusing on the sins of the father means that this vitally important issue does not get the attention it deserves.

By challenging divisive ideas gone mainstream, Murray’s work provides an invaluable guide to the reader who wants to be aware of the arguments being made by the advocates of an illiberal race-based ideology now dominating the western world.

Overall, The War on the West is a thoroughly enjoyable read. But it is not without a few minor defects. While Murray offers a rich and thorough exegesis of the problem facing the West, I feel more time could have been spent on a solution. After all, if this is a war, we need to be prepared. Furthermore, by conflating the achievements of the West with the modern day anti-racism movement, Murray borders on racialising the West, in almost the same way as the movement he so brilliantly takes apart. In order to counter the attack on whiteness, he offers little more than a “nuclear answer”, a five page paean to Western achievement — describing such architectural wonders as the Parthenon as a basis for white pride. This is something I feel other reviewers on the Left will pounce on so that they can dismiss the book without reading it — no doubt labelling it a handbook for white supremacy, which it clearly is not.

The War on the West is a detailed and highly relevant work suitable to those both new to and well-versed in the culture wars. Yet if the enemy really is no longer on the horizon but at the gates, perhaps his next book might tell us when and how to man the ramparts.

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