Race grifters and assorted racial grievance collectors, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi are also covered here. The world culture which has brought equality, human rights, individual dignity and democracy into being on a global scale — the West — has suddenly turned on itself and begun tearing itself apart. 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.

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. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Murray drops this excellent quote, that was part of an interlude in the book titled "Gratitude." I agree 100%: Murray has a rich well to draw from with regular misunderstandings of facts and statistics as social media crowds whip themselves up into a frenzy. The audiobook in particular makes for a good listen as he gives the angry, irrational outbursts a suitably deranged voice for quotations.He says that china is currently in an opioid war on America which strikes me as being a big claim which he fails to substantiate. 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.

Regarding Murray’s distinction between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, that completely misses the point. On an individual level an artist can apricate a culture different from their own, but the culture around them is what makes it cultural appropriation. The issue with Michael Tippett’s usage of spirituals in his music is that Tippett himself wanted to create spirituals. It’s that his renditions of the spirituals became the versions people knew. Not only affording Tippett the ownership over songs he didn’t create, but removing the complex, racial history of spirituals from versions that entered the popular culture. 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. I’m a musician, educated in the 60-70’s. I was taught theory, western civilization, learned to play EVERY orchestra instrument, and already could read musical notation prior to auditions a plenty. That notation has apparently become racist and is causing stress for students of color. There are prestigious universities considering eliminating the end of required notation reading, conducting, studying classical composers, (they’re all white) and of course, their music, due to this stress. WHAT ?!?!? That will not be a fine arts degree in music; appreciation, perhaps. Add this to all the art and sculpture that’s being canceled; yes, angry. History isn’t meant to be canceled but to be learned from lest we repeat the horrors.

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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 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.” Of course, racism hasn’t completely departed from Western societies and maybe Murray could have emphasised that a bit more. The book could have explored further, perhaps, claims and disputes around ‘Islamophobia’ and identity, as well. That would have been interesting – but it would have made it an even heavier book!

Murray concludes with a most arresting and memorable line to say that “just as the line between civilization and barbarism is paper thin, so is the miracle that anything at all survives given the fragility of all things plus the evil and carelessness of which men are capable.”When one peers behind the curtain, to reveal those who would have us blindly follow an anti-Western mindset, one will encounter an old and familiar enemy. “Marxist thought” may be deemed an oxymoron and “Marxist hypocrisy” a tautology.

I don’t know if I’m just getting tired or if Murray is slowly running out of steam. Honestly, it could very well be both. The main thesis of this chapter is that it doesn’t make sense for people that haven’t directly committed atrocities to pay reparations to people that haven’t directly been the subject of atrocities. The book includes too many thoroughly moving accounts to detail. One example to come to mind is the spine chilling account of Hutus in Rwanda who butchered a doctor and laughed at his brain spilling – “all the years of education and learning all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things” reflects Murray, “it is one of the saddest realizations we have as a species not just that everything is transitory, but that everything particularly everything we love and and into which love has been poured is fragile.”

At the heart of the book is the strange and culturally suicidal emergence of neo-Marxism; with race acting as a proxy for the historical class struggles. In this familiar paradigm, the underclass proletariat have been substituted with "people of colour", and the overclass bourgeoisie have been substituted with white people. The distillation of his implicit beliefs around equality in the chapter 'gratitude' is interesting. His critique of Kendi's circular definition of racism seems correct to me and its application invites policy confusion. 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.