The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

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The actual arguments made in the 1619 project turn out to be faulty and ideology-led and that simply isn’t acceptable, here I agree with Murray, but he does a bit of moaning about the validity of reframing history before he gets to the factual objections, even when he quotes historians as saying that reframing is acceptable but the 1619 Project’s inaccuracy isn’t. The USA may not have had an empire, but it has earned the ire of many a foreign nation through its constant tampering in the affairs of independent nations: much of South and Central America is justified in its resentment towards the USA, as are Vietnam and Cambodia, a swathe of the Middle East, Haiti, Japan and a certain amount of Eastern Europe, to name but a few. Murray’s book is not, of course, apolitical as a whole, and its political aspects account, I think, for some of its shortcomings. Thus, in Sweeney Among the Nightingales, the spectre of Agamemnon can stalk through modern Paris, and the seediest quartiers acquire a sudden and tragic depth.

The term was used by the author in a different context and was being used to mean opposition to genocide. Similarly, it does not denigrate our history to point out that Euclid’s Elements—the most influential mathematical work in history—only entered western civilisation because Adelard of Bath translated it from the Arabic in the 12 th century, or to point out that Adelard’s translation introduced Arabic numerals into the west, the numerals that form our current number system. It’s worth noting that Murray focuses on the statistics for shootings before delving into the cases of Floyd and Timpa, neither of whom were shot by police but were suffocated. Murray’s problem consistently is that he doesn’t seem to want to contextualise anything: you either accept the west as it is or you leave, there’s no inbetween. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows the ways in which many well-meaning people have been lured into polarisation by lies, and shows how far the world's most crucial political debates have been hijacked across Europe and America.I will continue to support diversity, I will continue to condemn racism in all its forms and I will continue to appreciate the contributions of and uplift people from all backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities.

Among the strongest passages of the book are those concerning the artistic achievements of European civilisations. At one point, following a discussion of the absurdities of “anti-racist” school curricula, he cites a Twitter thread seeking to prove that “the idea of 2+2 equalling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization.

Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia? Nothing speaks more strongly to the spiritual aridity of social justice extremists than their complete insensitivity to aesthetic nuance and artistic value. Maybe that’s the best way of summing it all up: it’s very easy to fall back on “facts” when a corrupted system supports your viewpoints. That there is something lacking in modern life is one of the few things about which, in their way, the Left and the Right can agree. He’s certain that people are coming to decolonise maths and make it antiracist, although he can only cite some ridiculous quotes about people trying to prove 2+2=5, before telling the reader that such systems are being rolled out across the west (citation needed).