If The Strange Death of Europe reads like a requiem for a stricken continent, War on the West is intended to be an act of defiance. If you've ever wondered what would happen if limitless money met limitless power, wonder no longer, it's all here. As no less an authority than the Arizona Department of Education recently declared, babies are able to become racist by age of three months old. For the most part, people aren’t suggesting we stop studying Shakespeare, and anyone who does should be ignored.

He also tries to address the critique that marginalised voices were left out of the Western canon by giving examples of women and gay people in the canon, in a chapter on reparations for racist crimes. Thus, Michael Tippett’s oratorio ‘A Child of Our Time’ can be denounced for “cultural appropriation” because it incorporates Negro Spirituals. Through astonishing interviews with powerful insiders, Blood and Oil tells how MBS's cabal played the Saudi economy and capitalised on the omnipotence of feudal power while effectively stamping out dissent, before allegations of his extreme brutality and excess began to slip out. 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). If there is action then that’s no bad thing because acting as though the church has never acted racist or the scientific establishment, whose ideas were used to justify eugenics, haven’t had their racist moments is ludicrous.It’s far too lucrative to tell the reactionaries what they want to hear, and so Murray, who is clearly an intelligent man, panders to this audience rather than delving more deeply into the subject in the hopes of dredging up any real insight. He looks at race, reparations, crt, religion, history, education, China, art, music, health care and more. Their political views really aren’t any more sophisticated than Stewart Lee’s old bit “these days if you say you’re English you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail”. Murray also wants to place the death tolls of communism at Marx’s door, which we’re not doing; we don’t put the deaths from fascism at the door from Nietzsche, after all, and Murray expressly didn’t want to put the deaths from slavery and colonialism at the modern West’s door.

Indeed, it’s something of a trend with this culture war commentary that evidence is anecdotal rather than statistical.This ignores the fact that they’re part of an incredibly venal, corrupt and incompetent cabinet of banally evil morons, but we’ll let that slide, shall we? Some of that information may be faulty, but much of it seriously undermines the veracity of the old narratives. He says that the riots in Portland in 2020 had become normalised, which absolutely no one thinks, before walking it back later and admitting it’s an extreme example but it illustrates his point (which he then expands upon by citing silly incidents on TV shows). The War on the West, Douglas Murray ( paperback March 2023) €13,95 In The War on the West, international bestselling author Douglas Murray asks: if the history of humankind is one of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it? That racism is interwoven so deeply into white-majority societies that the white people in those societies do not even realize that they live in racist societies.

This is as close to the truth, to the real story of the corruption, vulgarities, horrors, and lies of the Kingdom and its current despot as we are likely to get. The wrongs of colonialism are legion, but if the exposure to new ways of thinking and creating art are wrong then it undermines many of the ideas and artistry of today; and if we tear down everything we won’t have much left.

It’s a sense that any sort of pride in one’s history is gatekeeped by people who are full of hatred and ignorance (I’d like to stress that this is how it’s perceived, it doesn’t necessarily mean those people are full of hatred and ignorance, though some certainly seem to be), and so reframings and reinterpretations of that history are borne of a sense of trying to find something to relate to within a murky morass of facts and figures that seem to bear little relevance to a present that has bred nothing but nihilism for many people under the age of forty. To say "all Chinese people think this" or "all black people behave like that" had been thought to be rude as well as ignorant. He seems to think that we’re not allowed to talk about the ideas of Hume, JSM, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson or a wealth of other characters, when this simply isn’t the case. The mantle of shame and self loathing I have worn purely on the basis of having white skin has become heavy.