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Disingenuous and often fabricated claims are taken to task. An interesting point is made when Murray asserts that the “leftist” love for native cultures is fetishistic and shallow. They often wish to impose another foreign, western ideology; in this case putting them under the boot of Marxist industrialism and deconstructionist narratives. The countless well-meaning individuals swept in the woke social activism hysteria, brought to mind Uri Bezmenov’s Love Letter to America. These are the very ‘Usuful Idiots’ Bezmenov refers to – individuals believing themselves to promote justice but are in fact puppets dancing to ideologues’ and revisionist’s tune. Jane Fonda antics during the Vietnam war is one example famously noted by the Russian defector, describing the actress as a spreader of the enemy’s doctrine on American soil. As expected from a polemicist as smart and gifted as Murray, both elements are well-executed 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.
Recent years have seen “politicians, academics, historians and activists getting away with saying things that are not simply incorrect or injudicious but flat out false” argues Murray, “they have got away with it for far too long.” They have rewritten our history and turned our universally appreciated writers, thinkers and statesmen into shameful ‘dead white males’ – it is time to revise the revisionists and refute their anti West claims. An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. I felt he sidestepped the history of native American-settler relations, yes there was unintended disease spread but there were many massacres to consider as well and he sidesteps tougher questions around Churchill and racism. I also find his moral approach to history of weighing good and bad unconvincing. The War on the West is a landmark publication. Its strength is in the solid, well considered arguments and Murray’s sound, knowledgable and sensitive reasoning.
Douglas Murray breaks down “The War on the West” by showing how the basic tenents of America’s foundation have been eroded. He looks at race, reparations, crt, religion, history, education, China, art, music, health care and more. Not only are these subjects spoken about but Murray gives specific examples that demonstrate his claims. There’s an interactive notes section in the Kindle edition that makes this an easy function to follow up on.
For example, he discusses the case of the US CDC (Centre for Disease Control), which when deciding how to allocate Covid vaccines at the end of 2020, initially elected to vaccinate health workers first rather than elderly people, partly in the name of eliminating health inequalities, though it was pointed out that older people were more likely to be white. Underpinning Murray’s book is a sense that the racial divisions stirred up by the ‘cultural revolutionaries’ could result in serious and bloody conflict in decades to come. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. sometimes the language is too emotional - yes, it's easy to get pissed off with some people's stupidity, but still, let's stay pro It’s not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the “America is a racist country” bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and “pro-justice” movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests.I liked the use of humour in the book, It helps lighten the tone of an otherwise very negative book. The sections on cultural appropriation seemed correct to me, I dislike the movements trying to create ultra rigid barriers around cultures and insistences of cultural purity. He has cogent points here about the inconsistencies in its advocates. I liked the use of polling data on Americans and racial tensions surrounding the police and more generally. I liked several of his refutations, particularly surrounding Nicholas Ferrar and anti-Cecil Rhodes activists. Murray begins the book with a great intro. He is an excellent author and orator. Douglas is one of the sharper authors/pundits of our modern day, IMHO. The intro here is worth the price of the book alone. The audiobook version I have is also read by the author; which is a nice touch I always appreciate. He added sarcastically: “Amazing! Who could have expected that? We expect everyone to have the same attitudes as us in 2022, which we know to be totally perfect.”
It is worth noting that the quotes he mentions from the toolkit cited published research and it would have been more interesting if Murray had critically examined the research itself. Some of this research has some clear limitations (sample size/IAT) which the toolkit did not discuss critically and would have been a better example than the very short presentation. Far from being a nationalistic defence of the West, the book is actually sympathetic to a genuine cosmopolitan, liberal outlook. As Murray points out: Long story short, Douglas Murray yet again managed to raise awareness on some very sensitive topics, and also to show that too much zeal leads to absurdity. To denigrate an entire civilization and its culture because of what happened in the past is useless. It's the present that counts and what can we do to make it better: There are estimated to be over forty million people living in slavery around the world today. In real terms, this means that there are more slaves in the world today than there were in the nineteenth century. So this is not a question of historic what-aboutery. It raises the question of what might practically change for people today if we spent even a portion of the time what we focus on past slavery focused, instead, on present-day slavery. And what we might be able to do about this modern horror.
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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. Mr. Murray, I may not agree with everything about your politics but I am proud as an American that you had the courage to write this book. It is a clarion call for all of us to reject this noxious divisiveness that is happening around race. So, Murray asks – why is Marx (or Mao) exempt from criticism, when other European thinkers aren’t? Why has no-one ‘cancelled’ those thinkers? Why are Marxist groups and parties not tainted by all this? Like Murray, Bezmenov spoke of academia being the breeder of the poisonous anti West ideology and highlighted demoralization and confusion as Soviet subverters’ weapon – bring the West to a point where void of patriotism, it stops defending itself. Create deep confusion over shared values and terminology. Indeed, according to Murray, part of the reason Westerners were so slow to recognize the scale of the attempted assault is because “even the language of ideas was corrupted – words no longer meant what they had until recently meant.”
As vast swathes of Russia, China, Asia, The Middle East, Africa, South America et al continue to lurch from insurmountable misery to insurmountable misery throughout history, there is presumably a sense of comfort and certainty for the critics in turning their attention inwards. They have the luxury of policing the old quotes of western historical heroes and searching for modern day micro-aggressions on social media. As Don Quixote tilted at windmills in the absence of any remaining giants to fight so must they create such chimeras.Race grifters and assorted racial grievance collectors, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi are also covered here. I’m sure Murray doesn’t buy into Kendi’s analysis, but there’s no way for the reader to know that, because Murray never engages with the analysis in any way. Indeed, in 1853 Marx wrote this for the ‘New York Tribune” about the Balkans, which Marx claimed had:
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