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

“There is a war going on,” warns author Douglas Murray. “A war on the West.”

It is unlike earlier conflicts “where armies clash[ed] and victors declared.” This is a cultural war “waged remorselessly against all the roots of Western tradition, and everything good that the Western tradition has produced.” 

Many of us sensed that something was wrong for quite some time, notes Murray, but the full magnitude of the attempted assault eluded us. People began talking about anti-racism “but they sounded deeply racist.” They spoke of justice “but they seemed to mean revenge.” 

Radical racialist lenses have been laid over everything, and as though Martin Luther King Jr’s heroic fight never happened, society’s hard-earned colour blindness has been replaced by ‘racial ultra awareness’. Before long, the demonisation of white people was normalised, and “an unfair ledger created” in which non-Western cultures are deemed virtuous, Edenic, and innocent, while the reprehensible West is guilty of an endless multitude of crimes. “We have become locked in a cycle of unending punishment,” warns Murray, with no effort for its alleviation in sight. 

With painful clarity, Murray’s War on the West shows the scale and reach of the anti-Western crusade. How within one generation, racist rhetoric has shifted from the loony outskirts of the supremacist fringes to the heart of the mainstream, with the culture that produced Michelangelo, Mozart, and Bach being dismissed as irrelevant and anachronistic. He shows how the remarkable history of Western thought became the shameful product of ‘dead white males’, how denigrating whiteness became the consensus, and how white peoples’ downfall was a cause for celebration. This is why a Cambridge professor who tweeted that “white lives don’t matter” was promoted by the university, and why Jimmy Fallon’s studio audience “whooped and cheered uproariously” upon his announcement that “for the first time in American history, the number of white people went down.” For them, reflects Murray, “it was not just funny news, but good news.” 

The Enemy Within

“For far too long,” argues Murray, “the discourse has been riotously one-sided, with politicians, academics, historians, and activists getting away with saying things that are not simply incorrect or injudicious, but flat out false.” Within the course of a couple of generations, they have entirely rewritten the West’s history; from virtuous and universally appreciated, to a source of embarrassment. “Anti-western revisionists have been out in force in recent years,” advises Murray, “it is time we revise them in return. If their war is to prove unsuccessful, then it will need to be exposed and pushed back against.” The War on the West is Douglas Murray’s brave stab at doing just that.

Articulate, engaging, and thoroughly researched, The War on the West continues Murray’s investigation into a civilisation in turmoil. The Strange Death of Europe brought to light the impact of mass migration on Western states, while The Madness of Crowds stared boldly at the attempt to break down the populations of Western societies along the lines of gender and identity. Murray’s new title examines the nature of the ongoing assault against the Western world, stressing that the greatest threat comes from self-hatred:

“People inside the West [are] intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece.” 

These people’s claims and accusations are the thread running through this book. One by one Murray lays their claims out, refutes them and dispels their myth. Delving deep into the leading perpetrators’ ethos, Murray exposes the anti-West movement’s hypocrisy, sloppy research, and unsettling lack of knowledge. 

Guilty Residue from a Discredited Civilisation 

As highlighted by Murray, critics of Western civilisation hold the burning conviction that “the West is the problem and the dissolving of the West is the solution.” For that to happen, the West’s past of course has to be rewritten. The legacies of ‘dead white males’ must be tarnished, and their bodies of work erased, regardless of their contribution to humanity, or any suffering they endured in their sacrifice for others. 

Writers, artists, thinkers, and statesmens’ history have been scrutinised—going back hundreds of years if need be—until any alleged stain of slavery, racism, or colonial association is found. Voltaire, Rhodes, Orwell, Wilde, Lord Byron, Jefferson, and Lincoln are just some of the unfortunate whites caught in the outing net: “one by one the same techniques have been used,” explains Murray, “if a person cannot be found to have invested inappropriately in the companies of their day, then their work can be scoured for anything not fitting the mores of the modern world these men helped create.”

Take for example Edward Said’s “extraordinarily hostile” attack on Jane Austen and his attempt to smear her as a supporter of the slave trade. His ‘evidence’ rests largely on a solitary reference to slavery, uttered during a conversation in Mansfield Park between Fanny and Edmund. Fanny remarks that “there had been such a dead silence” the night before, when her uncle, who just returned from a plantation, was asked about the recently abolished slave trade. To Murray, this is an example of how the post-colonialism professor interprets everything in the West, including “the most delicate and perfect world of art” through an interrogative, hostile, and “amazingly ungenerous” lens. Said gave impetus to “the feeling that the West was overdue for some justice,” notes Murray, but “it’s not justice, it’s vengeance they seek, not equality but a pathological desire for destruction.”

“This is the essence of deconstruction—endless pulling apart, so a Jane Austen novel is taken apart until a work of fiction is turned into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilisation.”

Confuse, Demoralise, and Disorient

The War on the West demonstrates how every part of life has fallen for the anti-West narrative championed by the likes of Angela Davis, Ibram X Kendi, and Noam Chomsky, among others. It is carried out across the media, education, and within our culture where countless organisations endeavour to distance themselves from their own past. We hear how Cambridge University, the National Trust, and Shakespeare’s Globe volunteered to investigate any links they might have had to slavery and decolonise their archives, how archbishops and sportsmen took the knee, and how Enlightenment thinkers’ ideal of rationalism and objective truth gave way to ‘my truth’ Oprahism.

We learn that minorities’ love for their adopted Western state is ‘multiracial racism’, and that neatly cut lawns are racist because ‘like nations, they should be diverse’. Murray shows how even “sacrosanct” logic and math have fallen, with math declared as elitist and privileged. We hear of the ‘equitable maths’ movement set to cure the practices of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus of its colonial mindset, and how the Ontario curriculum is to weed out ‘Eurocentric mathematical knowledges’. The Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras is therefore stripped of any credit, and his genius Pythagorean Theorem is replaced with the non-racist term ‘side length relationship for right triangles’. 

“The remaining building blocks on which everything else is built are kicked away,” reflects Murray. “The true aim of this attack is to confuse, demoralise, and disorient, [similar to the kicking away of] the idea that there is such a fixed thing as men and women.” 

Perhaps most ironically telling is Orwell’s 1984 vision ‘coming to life’ when several activists—either unaware of the timeless masterpiece or dismissive of it as the work of a dead white male—endeavoured to ‘deconstruct’ 2+2=4. Their attempt to “sock it to the white supremacists” failed, but their flat-earth zeal further cemented Orwell’s uncanny 1984 observation.

Racist Baby

Murray’s harrowing look at CRT’s invasion of the education system is a wake up call to humanity—proof thatnot even childhood innocence can halt the ideologues’ march. We hear of the fierce battle raging across America between schools and parents outraged at their children’s indoctrination, where even punctuality and giving correct answers in math is portrayed as ‘hidden racism’. Murray tells us of the Arizona education department’s declaration that “babies are able to become racist by the age of three months,” and of a multitude of accompanying anti-racist children’s books hitting the bestseller lists. We see illustrated picture books such as Inosanto Nagara’s A is for Activist—where‘T’ stands for Trans, ‘L’ for LGBT, ‘X’ for Malcolm X, and ‘Z’ for Zapatista—and Abram X Kendi’s Anti Racist Baby which offers a nine-step program for babies with advice to parents such as “knock down the stack of cultural blocks,” and “confess when being racist.” Striving to “make equity a reality,” the book was published to great fanfare in the US, but “what is the imperative to indoctrinate children this way?” asks Murray. “One explanation is that even American babies need reprogramming from the racist society they have been born into.”

The Vengeful Spin Cycle 

The War on the West asks many important questions. Why is the state of women’s rights, racism, and sexual minorities presented as if they have never been worse, where in fact they have never been better? Why do some authors refuse to allow their books to be translated to Hebrew but are thrilled to see them appear in China? Why is the insulted Western majority allowing the evident self-destruction to continue? Why are schoolchildren lectured on Westerners’ past sins but not their accomplishments, sacrifice and heroism?

Take for example the story of artist Rex Whisler who at just 21, spent 18 months labouring over a mural covering the walls of the refreshment room at London’s Tate Gallery. The piece ‘In Pursuit of Rare Meats’ was a fantastical feast with great lakes, seas, and mermaids. When World War II broke out, however, Whisler turned down a cushy job as a war artist to become a tank commander. After several months of training, the 39-year-old fought the Nazis in Normandy, where on his first day of action he was killed by enemy fire.

Eighty years later, complaints were made about Chinese people in one tiny corner of the mural, allegedly portrayed in the ‘stereotypical way’, and a woman appearing to drag a black child “who must be a slave.” Upon much uproar and the proceeding recommendations by the gallery’s ethics committee, the Tate announced the permanent closure of the Whisler restaurant. 

Murray’s quest to discover how ‘the most amusing room in Europe’ turned into white supremacy revealed that the Instagram account White Pube, which started the pressure on the Tate, was run by people who claim that the arts in Britain are dominated by middle-class white people, and whose revolutionary 2020 post reads “F the police, F the state, F the Tate: Riots and Reform."

“Eighty years after giving his life fighting the Nazis, Whisler is besmirched by the gallery he toiled for,” concludes Murray. Instead of bowing to the mob, The Tate could have explained that "a work of art and a political manifesto are two different things” or that “a work of art depicting something evil does not mean that the artist is urging for it to happen.” 

This assault is “a textbook case of a modern mobbing by extreme activists,” added Murray, the familiar “vengeful spin cycle” attacking countless Western figures, including the great Winston Churchill.

Why Churchill? 

Voted in 2002 as the Greatest Briton of all time, Churchill’s figure is revered unlike any other. The Western world admires him as a genuine hero and an example of a great man. “His arrival into the position of Prime Minister,” Murray movingly writes, was described by Lord Hailsham as the one time he could “discern the hand of God intervening in human affairs.” Still, the man who identified Hitler’s evil plan even before war broke out, who defeated fascism and liberated concentration camps, is increasingly portrayed as nothing but a white colonialist whose memory should be erased from humanity. 

Murray’s sensitive account of the merciless assault on Churchill reveals many truths, the most striking of which is “how extraordinarily historically ignorant its proponents are.” We hear of a Cambridge Panel discussion ominously titled The Racial Consequences of Churchill, chaired by ‘White Lives Don't Matter’ professor Pryamvada Gopal, a woman who professes to resist daily urges to ‘kneecap white men’. The discussion claimed that the British Empire was “far worse than the Nazis,” that the war would have been won without Britain and with anyone else as PM, that the victory of the Allies over Nazism was not especially significant and that the Holocaust was not “unusual in recent history.”

Murray then moves on to Chomsky’s claim that in 1919 Churchill advocated for the gassing of Iraqi civilians but as Murray points out, it was not mustard gas as is often claimed, but tear gas. We learn of the 1943 Bengal famine, which began when a cyclone hit the area, and the claims that Churchill neglected to assist the hungry. Here, Murray presents records proving that Churchill has in fact insisted that “famine and food difficulties” are dealt with—even at the height of ww2 Churchill saw ‌that emergency grain supplies reached India.

Murray then recounts a panel discussion where the then Labour shadow chancellor was asked the question “Winston Churchill: hero or villain?” to which John McDonnell replied “Tonypandy. Villain.” This refers to a 1910 incident when then home secretary Churchill sent police to deal with Welsh riots where one miner was killed. Pointing to the “astoundingly one-directional” nature of the revisionists’ accusations, Murray asks why, even if the miner died because of Churchill’s decision, “did nothing that Churchill achieved in the decades after 1910 make up for that? Does his central role in defeating fascism count for nothing against this?”

He also points to Marxist McDonnell proudly waving his little red book in the house of commons in praise of Mao Ze Dong. “Chairman Mao,” asserts Murray, “is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of sixty-five million people,” yet as Labour’s Diane Abbott said “on balance, Mao did more good than harm” because he “led his country from feudalism.”

Questioning this accounting system, Murray wonders how it can be that a Left-wing dictator can kill tens of millions and be praised for ‘agricultural matters’, but Churchill “can help see the world from fascism yet be forever damned because of a Welsh miner’s death three decades before.” 

“If what Churchill did in his life doesn’t count for anything,” concludes Murray, “then it is hard to see how any human’s action counts for anything.”

Churchill is attacked because “his story is a heroic story” that stirs feelings of pride in people; “they may not believe in God, but they believe in Winston Churchill.” The academics who attack him “know what a holy being he is” says Murray, “it is precisely for that reason that they attack him—to kick at the holiest beings and places of the West.”

Why Their Gods Don’t Fall 

The War on the West is a monumental book leading to several pivotal realisations, the first of which is that the grossly disproportionate assault on Israel is part of the assault on the West. This is a tremendous deal coming from such a prominent influencer.

The book shares damning insight into the lives of Leftist idols Marx and Foucault. Karl Marx’s private letters to Engels, among other examples, expose his antisemitic and racist views. Murray argues that these were consistent throughout the revolutionary’s life. A telling example is Marx’s 1843 quote “what is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.” 

Murray makes a shocking revelation about Foucault. According to Professor Guy Sorman:

“In the late 1960s, when Foucault was living near Tunis, he would have sex with the local children.” Sorman claims that he “witnessed young children running after Foucault asking him for the money he offered other children before raping them” - eight, nine, ten-year-olds who met him at the local cemetery. 

Murray’s point is that Leftist Marx and Foucault are left unfeathered, but non-leftist figures are battered over the faintest misdeed. Had a conservative thinker been the subject of the accusations made against Foucault, he would be labelled a paedophile and rapist. Yet Foucault “remains on his throne.” These double standards mark “the attempted imposition of a political vision on the West.”

When One Side in a War Prematurely Surrenders

Murray’s sobering look at slavery and reparations centres around Ta Nehisi Coates’s 2014 Atlantic piece The Case for Reparations. An article credited with shifting the cultural and political discourse over the burning matter. Of the multitude of aspects covered here, two stand out. 

Murray’s account of how in 1807 the British abolished slavery at an immense cost shows human decency and British resolve at its finest. Murray explains how the financial settlement that secured slaves’ freedom was achieved—Britain only completed making these payments in 2015. We also hear of the many Royal Navy men who died at sea, fighting to secure slaves’ newfound freedom. 

Coates also cites Germany’s post Second World War payments to Israel, leading Murray to discuss the essence of forgiveness. Here, Murray shares a story from a book by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal of a dying SS soldier, tormented by an atrocity he took part in, where his unit set a house on fire with three hundred Jews inside. They shot dead the Jews jumping out of the windows. Seeking forgiveness, the guard wanted to confess to a Jew before his imminent death, but Wiesenthal left the room without saying a word. “Wiesenthal, like the soldier’s victims,” believes Murray, “had neither the right nor the ability to forgive the soldier.” 

Murray’s account brought to my mind the Israeli Holocaust survivors who refused to accept Germany’s payments. To these tormented survivors, the idea of financial compensation for the horror of the Holocaust was degrading and morally wrong. Their leader, Menachem Begin, has explained that the translation to Hebrew of the German word for the payment program, meant ‘correcting injustice’. Begin argued that nothing can ever correct the wrong that was done to Europe’s Jews, including the former PM’s entire family who perished.  

The War on the West is about what happens when one side in a cold war—the side of democracy and reason—prematurely surrenders. 

Murray poignantly illustrates how deeply rooted within our culture the anti-Western toxin is, that culture is where the war is fought, and that ours is a civilisation in decline. As such, it is a pivotal book; a call for society to realise that the pillars upon which our civilisation rests are being demolished from within. Everyone should read this book, especially those doubting the ferocity of West haters’ assault, and those believing current troubled times to be a temporary snag. 

The War on the West will dishearten you as you stare at the abyss of anti-West destruction, the demise of academia, the loss of children’s innocence, and the astounding ignorance of so many of our current cultural leaders. Murray’s clarity and rock-solid arguments, however, will restore your faith in reason and fuel your love for all that is Western, noble and worth fighting for.