Politics & Government
![Douglas Murray - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001JP4BBY.jpg)
The War on the West
China has concentration camps now. Why do Westerners claim our sins are unique?
It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world.
In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn't we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
It's not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the "America is a racist country" bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and "pro-justice" movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests.
If the West is to survive, it must be defended.The War on the West is not only an incisive takedown of foolish anti-Western arguments but also a rigorous new apologetic for civilization itself.
It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world.
In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn't we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
It's not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the "America is a racist country" bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and "pro-justice" movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests.
If the West is to survive, it must be defended.The War on the West is not only an incisive takedown of foolish anti-Western arguments but also a rigorous new apologetic for civilization itself.
Readers Top Reviews
ToddP. CaetanoP.
With all the attacks on the West today, love this powerful, pragmatic response. Let’s first start with the obvious. If the West is so bad, why do all the world’s immigrants want to come here? It’s because they will have free speech, it’s because if they do good work, they will get paid for it, it’s because there is a system of due process (12 people need to agree you are guilty), it’s because their person and property are protected, it’s because they will get an education, it’s because they have access to the best healthcare in the world. The West is not perfect but the attacks by Marxist wanting a complete revolution are frankly ridiculous. All the Marxists regimes of the past have killed millions of their own people, become autocratic, and limited free speech. We need to get off this this attack vector and realize the West is the best thing we have going in the world today. It may need some tweaking but should be defended instead of attacked.
benjiToddP. Caeta
You will be horrified, enlightened, and laugh quite a bit, sometimes in a single paragraph.
lighten_up_alread
I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would because so much of it, to me, was like reading a stack of yesterday's newspapers, or a list of yesterday's web news articles, or a queue of yesterday's news videos, but that's not the author's fault. It's mine, for staying on top of things, in America at least. So, the recounting of news events in the first section of the book was just tedious to get through, and I'll admit I resorted to skimming the content and not reading every word. To make matters worse, I just couldn't get quite so interested in the detailed accounts of "war on the West" battles in Great Britain, although I did read or skim through all of them. That's my fault for thinking of America as "the West" when America is a part of the West. But what made this whole book worthwhile for me was the short "interludes" between the four main sections, and especially the once entitled "Interlude: Gratitude." I've had quite a bit of personal experience with today's "anti-racists" who like to demoralize anyone with light skin who was born a citizen of the USA, and who like to disparage the USA by recounting only the most evil atrocities committed by it's citizens during it's history, and I've noticed that they seem to lack the ability to experience gratitude. I'm not going to repeat what the author wrote in this chapter, but inside I was so...er...grateful that a famous, edgy author on this subject had figured out exactly what I had. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who has been thinking that there's some really weird stuff going on in our culture, and who wants to get up to speed and get some genuine understanding quickly.
Alexander Gutierr
Douglas Murray’s The War on the West insightfully blends his last two books, The Madness of Crowds and The Strange Death of Europe. As always, Murray’s factually driven position against the radical push for absolute intersectionality to the outright racism being pushed from the left’s “elites” is impressive and important. Must read for 80% of Western society.
Bright PathAlexan
Douglas, again, has written another timely and erudite book about what's going on in the world around us. He has the humane gift of writing about complex issues with a compassion that doesn't obfuscate the obvious. His common sense arguments empower those too timid or afraid to speak out in defense of the values that are their birthright. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
