Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a doozy. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world. It is a book about what happens when the good guys—those on the side of democracy, reason, and rights—prematurely surrender. As he writes in his preface, “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe without irony, cringing, or caveat the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world?”
The war that Murray writes about is carried out across the media and networks, and from as early as preschool. All major cultural institutions are now willingly distancing themselves from their own past, and the very top of the American government has called for dismantling the systemic racism allegedly prevalent in American life.
What I have yet to understand is who is behind this war. “The culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty … is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity,” Murray writes. All too true, I’m afraid. All we hear about is white privilege and racism. We no longer discuss Bach, Bernini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Shakespeare, but we are deluged by the West’s so-called cruelties against minorities. Is it some kind of a collective urge for suicide, or are there plotters aiming to benefit from our self-inflicted wounds?
Murray does not deal with that last question because, as of now, none of us can answer it. The closest I can get is that it is a political project aimed directly at the white race, a witch hunt using both state and cultural power. Who are those behind this war against the West? I wish I knew. My wife, who lives in Europe, thinks it’s the academics. I’m not so sure. The only things they are capable of corrupting are young minds, something that television and the movies have already accomplished. A British black academic by the name of Kehinde Andrews claims that the whole system in the West needs overturning. When Murray asked him what he really meant, the so-called professor of black studies answered, “revolution.” That’s old hat, as far as I’m concerned; clapped-out 1968 hippie talk, which provoked a public reaction that brought two great presidents to power, Nixon and Reagan.
Racism equals capitalism, according to many academics, whose race-baiting abilities are far superior to the prowess of their intellects. What amazes me is that so many in the media and the arts refuse to admit that those growing up in the West today are among the luckiest people in human history. This is the bad news. The good is that if you thought comedy was dead due to political correctness, you were wrong. Another friend and colleague at The Spectator, Rod Liddle, has had to include me in one of his columns, declaring me a black man in order to justify “Britain’s dimmest university efforts to decolonize mathematics.”
Let me explain: staff at Durham University were encouraged (read forced) to find brilliant mathematicians from outside the West. They looked through Google and found plenty of Chinese, and even some Arabs and Indians from the subcontinent, but none whatsoever from sub-Sahara. Nor were there any Aborigines. So what were they to do, all those lecturers that were told to find mathematicians from Africa in order to decolonize mathematics? Easy, according to my colleague from Britain: Declare that the Greeks were black, starting with Taki, “or at least a kind of stepping stone between the putrid whiteness of western Europe and the vibrancy of and dignity of true blackness.”
Mind you, I didn’t mind a bit when I read that I qualified as black—both my parents were blond, as is my brother, but who cares? I am rather suntanned year round, hanging out on sailing boats and ski slopes and stuff like that. The reclassification would allow the academics access to such pillars of black mathematics as Pythagoras and Archimedes, as well as the father of geometry, Euclid. Hence I decided to ask the editors of Chronicles to alter the picture above this column to make me look a bit like Al Jolson, but I doubt that my request will be granted, since the wokesters have made blackface a capital offense.
Joking aside, America is becoming a very sad place to live in, especially if one is a Christian. The fact that gay pride symbols and BLM slogans are allowed in schools, but a white high school football coach is fired because he took a knee and prayed on the 50-yard line after the game—the case has reached the Supreme Court—makes the good old U.S. of A not only sound ridiculous but morbid. Teachers promote transgenderism, white guilt, and the totally phony “1619 Project,” but prayer is now seen as the kiss of death. Thank God my children live in Europe, and I will make sure my grandchildren stay away as well.
Image: Building a square according to Euclid’s Proposition 47 Book I (JRGoma, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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