War on the West

War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

First edition
Author	Douglas Murray
Language	English
Subject	Western world, Western cultures, Public opinion, Race relations, Critical race theory
Genre	Political journalism
Published	2022 (Broadside Books)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Pages	320 pages (hardcover)
ISBN	9780063162020
Preceded by	The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
Followed by	On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West
Text	War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason online

The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason is a 2022 book by British journalist Douglas Murray. The book is an examination of what he deems to be attempts to destroy Western civilisation from sources within. Murray argues that a culture war is being waged remorselessly against all the pillars of the western tradition not sparing everything good that it has produced. His earlier books, The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, address several aspects of this war.

The book debuted at number one on The Bookseller's nonfiction bestseller list in the UK and reached the New York Times bestseller list in the United States.

Thesis

In the Western emerging cultural consensus, the West is the problem, the dissolving of the West a solution. Many countries are more abusive and discriminative than the West but nobody speaks of them with an "iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against the West from inside the West." And if other countries do have any such vices, it must be because the West exported them to the non-Western world of "Edenic innocents." World history becomes the history of Western crimes and non-Western innocence.

Murray criticizes the wholesale attack on Western history for its counterfactual implication that had any other people got first to discoveries made by the West - of new lands or of the atom bomb - the results would have been more peaceful and socially more equal and just. Murray finds the opposite counterfactual more credible, that things would have gone far more deadly and destructive had the West not been first in a whole range of discoveries.

Murray outlines Western double standards. The Muslim slave trade is completely overshadowed by the transatlantic one despite their comparable scales. There is no movement of reparations for the descendants of Arab, Ottoman, or Berber slavery, and no European or African has seriously suggested trying to find out where any bill for compensation should be sent.

Written in the wake of the George Floyd protests, the book criticizes demolitions of monuments and memorials calling them the "great iconoclastic rage." Murray notes that along statues of confederates who were in favor of slavery, came down those of Union leaders who opposed slavery, as well as the statue of George Washington who freed his slaves.

Anti-Western hate speeches and dehumanization of white people are common and tolerated or even encouraged. The progressive West target Western most significant institutions, values, events, and persons. Beginning with Aristotle, almost all pillars of the Western philosophy were blacklisted for their failure to stand to the anti-racist standards of a progressive Western university in the 21st century. The pendulum of racial issues in the West has swung "past the point of correction and into overcorrection." The West has been pushed into "racial ultra-awareness" to the point where none of Western history and culture is safe from the charge of racism.

But there is one exception. Marxism remains widely regarded as positive among both non-Western peoples and the progressive thinkers in the West. "Intent in shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism." Ironically, according to Murray, Marx happens to be "a Western thinker, with next to no knowledge—let alone experience—of non-Western cultures or societies." Murray claims a double standard in treating Marx and Western thinkers who were lambasted:

Marx's anti-Semitism is more nopious than Immanuel Kant's. His career-long record of racism makes a single footnote in the work of David Hume look very slight. His language of superior and inferior races was of a kind that progressive thinkers such as John Stuart Mill already abhorred and worse than anything Thomas Jefferson engaged in.

Murray explains this double standard by anti-Western sentiment:

Marx is protected because his writings and reputation are useful for anyone wishing to pull down the West. Everybody else is subjected to the process of destruction because their reputations are useful for holding up the West.

Reception

Robert Colville described the book as "a convincing and often terrifying case that the barbarians are at the gates."

The reception on the left wing was less positive. Two critics of Current Affairs Magazine deny the existence of such a culture war and describe its arguments as the overflown with bigotry white supremacy, ethnic chauvinism, and xenophobia. Effectively presented in a tone of powdery aloofness, they say, the conservative extreme positions appear as acceptable "common sense" opposed to "madness." It is subgenre of polemical conservative, right-wing nonfiction advancing such arguments as "leftists are destroying our great Western culture," immigration is destabilizing the West, and social justice warriors complain too much about bigotry and oppression.

Jay Elwes in Prospect describes Murray as a militant nostalgist who pushes a single, authorised version of history. Such an attempt itself is counter to basic western values and thus weakens the West. His very argument rather than the subject of his argument is the most dangerous and divisive of all. The composition of the British government has not changed for the last several centuries and in 2020 legislation to protect historic monuments was introduced. If there is anything close to culture war, the West is winning it. For his examples, Murry cherry-picked most radical but not most notable persons, such as Michael Moore, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

See also

• Suicide of the West (Burnham book)
• The Death of the West
• The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
• Suicide of the West (Goldberg book)
• The Tears of the White Man
• The Tyranny of Guilt