Linking up with Rose City Reader's weekly Book Beginnings
The War
on the West: How
to Prevail in the Age of Unreason by Douglas Murray (2022)
"In recent
years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This
is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural
war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western
tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.''
Murray, a
British author and journalist, describes
“Western” societies as European countries or countries descended from European
civilization. He wrote this book to address the one-sided view of the West that
has come from ‘politicians, academics, historians, and activists who are
saying things that are not simply incorrect or injudicious but flat-out false.’
''In order
to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the
history of the rest. The only thing modern western populations are more
ignorant about than their own history is the history of other people outside
the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive
at any moral judgements.”
The author
sites a poll of young British people carried out in 2016 that found that 50%
had never heard of Lenin and 70% had no idea who Mao was. 41% of 16- to
24-year-olds who had grown up after the fall of the Berlin Wall had positive
feelings about socialism, while 28% felt the same sentiments about capitalism:
“One
possible reason for this is that 68 percent said they had never learned
anything in school about the Russian Revolution.’’
From the
back cover:
“If the
history of humankind is one of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and
exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it?’’
I'm about a third of the way through this book and although the subject matter is heavy at times, the author is articulate and thoughtful. His thoughts on the dearth of historical knowledge, although not surprising, is alarming.