The (cultural) siege of the West

What is Europe's position in the world? How does it look from the outside? How do Europeans see themselves? British journalist Douglas Murray delves into the cultural war being waged against the West, against its tradition and values, which he has already addressed in previous books ('The Raging Mass: How Identity Politics Drove the World to Madness', 'The Strange Death of Europe: Identity. Immigration. Islam'). This time Murray opens up goal a bit more and analyzes the stakes in four major battles, often fought simultaneously: race, history, religion and culture. As a journalist, Murray uses simple language, close and everyday, and concretizes this struggle of ideas in data, figures and documented facts.

So-called 'critical race theory' is a phenomenon born in the American academic community in 1970 and which has since spread throughout Western society. Two prominent precursors were Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia, and Derrick Bell, an academic at Harvard and Stanford. The followers of this theory analyze the world and all that happens in it through the prism of race as the sole and decisive interpretive lens. Murray denounces "the insistence that white people are all guilty of harboring prejudices - especially racist subject - from birth; the claim that racism is so deeply ingrained in white majority societies that white people do not even realize that they live in racist societies." The author warns that these are "assertions not based on evidence, but basically on interpretations and attitudes"-they correspond to a "new mania" that "pathologizes white people"-and relates this subject obsession to the one that leads to taking sex or sexual orientation as the measure of everything. It is something so widespread and promoted by the vocabulary used by the media, that confronting the imposition of these activists has a cost staff, as "the price paid for not going with the flow can become very high".

As far as history is concerned, Murray highlights the senselessness of Westerners being pushed to feel an "unimaginable shame" for a past that, without being Exempt of negative aspects, has brought unquestionable progress to humanity. In reality, it is an anti-Western revisionism (promoted from different places, but the author stops to point out China) that only revises the history of the West, but not that of the rest. This is given by the ignorance that Westerners themselves have about their own and world history, and by the moral budget that "no one in the world can do anything wrong, unless the West has forced him to do it". Murray discusses very diverse examples of "historical rewriting," especially American and British, from slavery to the attacks on statues in the last five years. The author argues that lack of historical rigor, or even outright false accusations, do not deter those who spread them, and all this prevents a truth-seeking historical research , as politically incorrect conclusions bring unintended consequences for the researcher and the entity that supports it. To escape this one-sided and partial scrutiny of the rest of the planet Murray advises prudence: "to handle with great care [...] the moral scalpel" when examining history, without falling into the carelessness that seems to be allowed for "the demonization of the West and Westerners".

The author then deals with the religious and philosophical roots of the West. He mentions the different social and international reactions to the burning of a copy of the Koran or the Bible, and notes how the issue number of Christian believers, members of churches that have given ground or have shown themselves to be weak in the face of outside criticism, has fallen, while the presence of other religions and pseudo-religions has increased. By combating inherited beliefs and applying critical race theory here too, it has proceeded to "erase almost all Western philosophers", since they are found to be unforgivable blemishes. This, at bottom, has something of religion in itself, by dividing "society into saints and sinners with a clarity worthy of a revelation." Thus, the habit, which has been a disease in the West, of "venerating anything else, as long as it is not part of our heritage" is insisted upon. This was already the case with thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom "other societies were a clean slate on which to inscribe all those habits, customs and virtues that the West lacked".

Murray believes that too often "the benefits that modern Western civilization has conceived, created and exported are forgotten". There must be an exercise in honesty, in acknowledging mistakes as well, but "those fortunate enough to live in the West have inherited not only a relatively prosperous economic position; they have inherited a governmental, judicial and legislative system for which they should be grateful [...] better than any alternative we know. It is not defending it because they are white, it is defending it because they are things "worthy of respect [...] inherited by all mankind".

The last area covered in the book is that of culture, in a broad sense, where aspects already dealt with before converge with new ones such as those promoted by environmentalists, vegans and the LGTBIQ+ community, among others: these are collectives that demand freedom of expression to communicate their ideas, but also use that freedom, as Murray points out, to censor everything that is not to their liking. The book presents multiple examples, which affect areas as far apart as gardening (Kew Botanic Gardens has announced that it is opening a process of "decolonization" and "recognition of its bequest of exploitation and racism"; the famous biologist Dan Kraus has stated that lawns should be diverse and that future generations will claim the lack of diversity among gardeners) or music (the University of Oxford has remodeled its courses to make them compatible with the Black Lives Matter movement). This 'corrective' attitude does not take into account that, throughout its history, but especially since the Renaissance and the Modern Age, Western culture has appreciated, admired, imitated and reflected other cultures thanks to Western curiosity for what is not its own. However, openness to the outside is now labeled as "cultural appropriation".

Murray concludes with a call to those who make up Western societies to be courageous and sincere in the way they put their own values on internship and defend the bequest received, and to be grateful for the history they have lived through. He admits that "historical criticism and revisionism are never superfluous", but we must not underestimate the progress made by the West in medicine, science, Education... as well as the progress in democracy and freedom of expression or the achievements in all branches of art. The "most devastating" test of the attractiveness of the West, says Murray, is that "there is no great migratory flow to modern China [...] the world does not want to live there [...] and some people make great efforts - and even risk their lives - to reach" this side of the world. The West "remains the only culture in the world, which not only tolerates, but encourages this dialogue against itself".