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Through concepts such as “critical whiteness theory”, the Western world is slandered uninhibitedly in the media, at universities and in schools. The self-hatred in the West is analyzed with great precision in a new book by Douglas Murray, British editor and author.
For me, who started following the political debate in the 1970s, I recognize the zeal and strong belief in some simply formulated dogmas, which “woke” has become in today’s debate. That time it was Marxists who argued for “class warfare” and chanted that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” must be introduced! If you do not win the people through democratic elections, an armed revolution must take place!
Dogmatism past and present
The same dogmatism exists now fifty years later, in the 2020s, although then the dogmas are not class struggle but injustice between races and ethnic groups.
The difference is that fifty years ago the debate took place against a fund of the reality that existed behind the wall, the brutal and totalitarian communism ruled by the Soviet Union. This made it relatively easy to dismiss the “truths” of the Marxists.
Today, it is more difficult to refute the extreme messages presented through “critical whiteness theory”. It is more subtle and it takes the form of a circular reasoning, which means that anyone who disagrees with the premise is immediately branded as proof that the theory is true. Anyone who goes against the theory is a racist.
This way of aggressively attacking dissenters has been very successful. The left-wing activists have managed to silence the criticism. Few are prepared to risk being labeled racist.
It is also the case that racism has existed, and exists. But it is the extent and how much it affects people’s everyday lives in the West today that is overestimated in an extreme and completely disproportionate way.
And the misleading propaganda that can point to an ounce of truth, can be very effective and have a huge impact. Discussing gray scale, when one side always paints in black and white, is very difficult. The debate becomes almost impossible to win.
Dare to puncture the anti-Western propaganda
One who both sets out to expose the lies of “critical whiteness theory” and does so with great skill is Douglas Murray in the book “The War on the West – Mastering an Age of Unreason”.
It is a joy to read Murray and how he exposes the weaknesses of the woke reasoning that the West is so terribly horrible and harmful.
I read the book to see what methodology Murray would use to expose “critical whiteness theory” without getting caught up in the charge of racism myself. And he does it really convincingly.
How? Well, through the simple and unequivocal method of comparing the Western world with other civilizations here on earth. How has the worst systematic form of racism – slavery – functioned in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, in relation to North America? Slavery has been significantly more extensive in Muslim countries.
The reason we don’t have many stories about it is that slaves were consistently castrated, so there are no survivors. In India, the caste system is far more brutal than anywhere in the West in terms of the division between “high caste” ethnic groups and those belonging to the lower class.
And in Africa, there were certain tribes who captured members of other tribes and sold them to slave traders both in the eastern and western directions. Africans are thus not just victims at all. There are also those responsible for slavery.
Murray believes that it is a distorted view that people in the non-Western world are populated by innocent paradise creatures.
Against this background, he influences that there are flaws in the debate about “compensation”, which has become a popular theme for the woke left. How much will the African tribes pay who enslaved others? And should whites whose ancestors came to the US after the Civil War when slavery ended, and were therefore not part of the system, pay reparations? And those of the same ethnic background as the slaves who came to the US in other ways than as part of slavery, should they really get reparations, even if they were never harmed?
Save the West’s tradition of values
The purpose of the book is to defend the great progress that Western civilization has contributed with: democracy, civil rights and the rule of law. The factors that lifted not only the West but the whole world out of misery.
“We have gone from appreciating and highlighting what is good in Western culture to arguing that every part of it must be dismantled.”
It is to prevent this development that Murray wrote the book. And it is needed.