The greatest strengths of Douglas Murray’s The War on the West are his refutation of anti-western myths and exposure of the extreme and often ridiculous levels to which the ‘woke’ anti-racist obsession can go.
Since the worldwide riots and protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the concerted attack on western culture and traditions, going on for many years among our elites, has taken on a new ferocity and now manifests itself in all areas of life from politics to religion, the arts to business. Douglas Murray’s The War on the West represents a worthy attempt to combat these attacks and restore a degree of sanity to the modern West.
At the forefront of the attack on the West is the ideology known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT has its origins in American academia and developed from the 1970s onwards. It essentially interprets everything in the world through the lens of race. It is tellingly described by two of its leading supporters, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in the following terms:
…a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
Academics who support CRT call themselves academics ‘with an activist dimension’. In other words, they are proudly biased. Central to CRT is a belief in the collective guilt of white people. Murray states:
The claim is that white people are in their totality of prejudice, specifically racism, from birth. That racism is interwoven so deeply into white-majority societies that the white people in those societies do not even realize that they live in racist societies. Asking for proof was proof of racism…even the concept of aspiring to be “color-blind” when it comes to issues of race is itself deeply racist.
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