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

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He says that china is currently in an opioid war on America which strikes me as being a big claim which he fails to substantiate.

As expected from a polemicist as smart and gifted as Murray, both elements are well-executed and repay the reader’s attention. Applause for the West has become the exception rather than the rule in recent years. Here we get the almost unsayable: a full-throated hymn to its permanent and continuing contributions. For some reason, when I started reading this book I was under the impression that Douglas Murray was a provocateur a la Alex Jones or Milo however-you-spell-his-last-name. Hatred and self-loathing toward Western Civilization and white people, in general, has been a growing trend. Murray traces the roots of this trend to thinkers like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Herbert Marcuse out of The Frankfurt School in Germany (al But let’s break it down by chapters, shall we? Although, I will not go into the introduction and the conclusion. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.In the end, for all the West’s failings, as Murray says in his chapter on China, the most important question to ask its critics is “compared to what?” Today, the China-Russia alliance presents a chilling glimpse of the real alternative: a pair of genocidal, expansionist regimes, each justifying its crimes in the name of civilisational purity. The problem is that Murray never does anything to discredit these things. This entire chapter is like Murray standing on a pier, looking over the ocean, and stating that there’s obviously no fish out there, refusing to join bell hooks in the submarine to on an aquatic safari. Indeed, in 1853 Marx wrote this for the ‘New York Tribune” about the Balkans, which Marx claimed had: In celebrating the West’s whiteness, Murray is, for once, off-target. Ideas of racial identity are not the West’s destiny, but our enemy. The antiracists are not wrong that such thinking is a poisonous legacy of slavery and imperialism. Their mistake is to imagine that the answer is simply to swing racial prejudice in the other direction. I’m a musician, educated in the 60-70’s. I was taught theory, western civilization, learned to play EVERY orchestra instrument, and already could read musical notation prior to auditions a plenty. That notation has apparently become racist and is causing stress for students of color. There are prestigious universities considering eliminating the end of required notation reading, conducting, studying classical composers, (they’re all white) and of course, their music, due to this stress. WHAT ?!?!? That will not be a fine arts degree in music; appreciation, perhaps. Add this to all the art and sculpture that’s being canceled; yes, angry. History isn’t meant to be canceled but to be learned from lest we repeat the horrors.

Of course, racism hasn’t completely departed from Western societies and maybe Murray could have emphasised that a bit more. The book could have explored further, perhaps, claims and disputes around ‘Islamophobia’ and identity, as well. That would have been interesting – but it would have made it an even heavier book! Murray starts out with a brief and very surface-level explanation of ressentiment, with a focus on the way Friedrich Nietzsche framed ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morality. However, the way Murray lays out ressentiment and applies it to the progressive movements in the West, you’d think he had never read any Nietzsche.Again, this goes to show that Murray can’t really grasp the difference between individual actions and systemic actions. Network FOX News Duration 01:00:58 Scanned in San Francisco, CA, USA Language English Source Comcast Cable Tuner Virtual Ch. 760 Video Codec h264 Audio Cocec ac3 Pixel width 1280 Pixel height 720 Audio/Visual sound, color Notes At times Murray is aware of the counterargument that this 'war' is overblown and asserts this not just standard culture war fare but an existential problem yet regularly he cites just a few or even a singular example as evidence or worse just rants about what 'they' think without any attribution. And if Murray had actually strived towards constructing an alternative to progressive discourse, this book might have been half interesting. Instead, Murray falters to the same tired, stereotypical tropes of the recently popular conservative and Liberal pop-critics.

Well researched and argued, with an impressive reach, as Murray's books tend to be. One can only hope that today's reverse racism will be a passing phase in our civilization's development, though it's legacy will surely taint our progress for years to come. Finally, Douglas Murray has released a new book. Having listened to his previous works (The Madness of Crowds, The Strange Death of Europe), I have been eagerly anticipating his next reflection on the modern state of play. And yet – as ‘The War on the West’ highlights - hypocrisy abounds in many so-called anti-racist or anti-colonial campaigns, not least concerning the history of slavery and the claimed need for reparations, even for those not directly impacted by slavery. I’m sure Murray doesn’t buy into Kendi’s analysis, but there’s no way for the reader to know that, because Murray never engages with the analysis in any way. Without repeating himself it is a perfect addition to his body of work. His three books, that I’ve listened to, all look at how our current society is being irreversibly vandalised, largely, from within. Each of his works deconstructs the myths that have been created around these new paradigms, then proceeds to skewer them and drag their creators into the light.Murray’s account exposes the UN as a powerful hub of anti West rhetoric, and the UN human rights council’s twisted system of values – there, “Israel, America, and the European powers are constantly berated for historic crimes by such luminaries of human right as Iran, Syria and Venezuela.” It leads readers to the inevitable conclusion that Israel is a target because it is a thoroughly Western state – the obsessive assault against it is part and parcel of the ongoing demonizing of the West.