Just as equality feminism gave way to gender feminism and misandry, Murray contends that civil rights equality has given way to Critical Race Theory, which contends that white supremacy and racism is pervasive and immutable with white people. Bent on destroying Western and white supremacy, this thinking has perverted academia and has crept into the media, business and civil society in general. The only people who can be criticised and vilified in this way are white people, their accomplishments dismissed as inherently racist, while everyone else in the world gets a free pass. That there is some truth to toxic over-reaction to George Floyd's killing is obvious. The CNN and MSNBCs of this world would have you believe that CRT doesn't exist but in this, they are not on the planet. Just as misandry has made MeToo ludicrous, CRT has undermined any sympathy by it's negative cancel culture anti- Western hysteria. I believe in the Enlightenment and science created movements that have lifted societies and living standards. They are not white, though white people have helped propel them. I think the negativity of the deconstructionists in academia are poisonous. So Murray is right to make his points. The Bible burned in Murray’s example was burned on US soil, disrespected by someone who, most likely, was brought up in a Christian culture and carried out his act in a country that’s majority Christian. The burning of the Qur’an, however unknowingly, was carried out by an occupying military force from a foreign culture in a Muslim majority country. The situations were totally different, and as the responses were different.

And while it is true that no one alive in the US today has been a cattle slave on US soil, the effects of 200 years of slavery, and 100 years of enforced racism, still show its scares across racial lines today. While there are no cattle slaves, there are millions of people in the US today who have been denied access to generational wealth building for 300 years. Just outlawing racist practices isn’t going to fix that amount of exploitation. 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. Murray quotes well, throughout the book. This from Chinua Achebe: “The legacy of colonialism is not a simple one but one of great complexity, with contradictions – good things as well as bad.” Murray also shares quotes from Damon Albarn and June Sarpong, unfortunately for them. The author is eminently quotable himself as well. Murray’s writing is cogent, pithy and not without a wry sense of humour. The book entertains, as well as enlightens. Although Murray will doubtless be condemned by some for his supposed heretical thinking, he should be celebrated. As white woman married to a brown man, living in South Africa, and who has a bi-racial child… I have been fiercely on the side of the “anti-racism” movement from the beginning. However, over the last 2 years as race discussions online began to turn more and more malevolent, I began to question the wisdom of fighting racism by hyper focusing on racial identity, policing these discussions and who may participate, and what qualifies them to do so. Also I couldn’t reconcile the fact that I would wear the label of being inherently racist no matter what I did simply by virtue of being white. A worthy successor to crowds, with more than enough new and original material to make it completely fresh.Even the anti-slavery poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge came in for suspicion – for having a nephew who worked on slave estates in Barbados. You couldn’t make it up – but clearly you don’t need to. Considering how willing Murray has previously been to dig deep into stories about characters like Cecil Rhodes and Churchill, it’s rather hypocritical that Murray doesn’t extend the same curtesy to Michel Foucault. I guess it’s only a problem to mischaracterize people you agree, right? 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. And it is here that Murray makes some interesting points about a hero for many who proclaim their opposition to racism, slavery and Empire: Karl Marx. A man who ‘Inspires’ contemporary anti-capitalists today. Surely Marx was a die-hard anti-racist who hated Empire? His headstone stands largely undamaged in Highgate cemetery today – none have pulled it down. Yet, as Murray notes Marx was clearly:

For the rest of the chapter, I’m rather confused as to what point Murray is trying to make. What I got was that China uses the colonialist and slaveholding past of the West as ammunition in the international hegemony, that China is also racist and that we should also criticism China for their exclusionary policies. 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 antiracism 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. Readers around the world have thrilled to Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, and Killing Jesus—riveting works of nonfiction that journey into the heart of the most famous murders in history. Again, this goes to show that Murray can’t really grasp the difference between individual actions and systemic actions. As I read The War on the West I thought of Thomas Sowell’s iconic Dismantling America and his observation that “ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of ur enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children.”So, behind ideas about universal values can lurk Western and white racism, it seems. Yet, as Murray points out, the Enlightenment was a massive step forward for the concept of objective truth and the value of reason. Yet the focus today, Murray notes, is on ‘my’ truth (and my ‘lived experience’ as many put it). Yet, it was the Enlightenment that helped unleash a way of thinking that would undermine illogical racist thinking. For some reason, when I started reading this book I was under the impression that Douglas Murray was a provocateur a la Alex Jones or Milo however-you-spell-his-last-name.

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. Isn’t life hard enough already without shouldering an additional sense of Original Sin over the history and immutable characteristics we are born with? All animals have fought for expanded territory and conquest against rival groups to the best of their means and capabilities since day dot. Why is the west particularly bad and compared to where?This line of thinking has spread its tentacles into virtually every faction of society, from its genesis in fringe leftist academia. From these humble beginnings, this ideology has now managed to achieve a virtual stranglehold on most of corporate America, Ivy League academia (including many of the non-social sciences), pop culture, Hollywood, even the Catholic Church and wider mainstream America. I don’t want to pass these negative attitudes about whiteness to my son. None of us should feel shame or discrimination on the basis of skin colour which we are unable to choose.