Source: Bigstock

Douglas Murray’s opus The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a doozy. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world. It is a book about what happens when the good guys—those on the side of democracy, reason, and rights—prematurely surrender. As he writes in his preface, “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe the great gifts that the Western tradition has given the world?” The war that he writes about is carried out across the media and networks, and from as early as preschool. All major cultural institutions are now willingly distancing themselves from their own past, and the very top of the American government has called for the dismantling of the systemic racism prevalent in American life.

Personally, what I have yet to understand is, who is behind this war? As Murray points out, “the culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science and medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty, is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility.” All much too true, I’m afraid. Everywhere we now look, all we see and hear about is white privilege and racism. We no longer discuss Bach, Bernini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and so on, not to mention Shakespeare, but are deluged by our so-called cruelties against African-Americans to this day. Is it some kind of a collective urge for suicide, or are there dark plotters aiming to benefit from our self-inflicted wounds?

Murray does not deal with that last question because as of now none of us can answer it. The closest I can get is that it is a political project aimed directly at the white race, a witch hunt using state and cultural power at their disposal against perceived enemies. Who is behind this war against us? I wish I knew. What I do know is that it’s a crusade, a slanderous campaign against our institutions, especially education. My wife, who lives in Europe, thinks it’s the academics. I’m not so sure. The only thing they are capable of corrupting is young minds, something television and the movies have already accomplished. A black British academic by the name of Kehinde Andrews claims that the whole system in the West needs overturning. When Murray asked him what he really meant, the so-called academic answered, “I mean simply revolution.” That’s old hat, as far as I’m concerned, clapped-out 1968 hippy talk that helped bring two great presidents to power, Nixon and Reagan.

Racism equals capitalism, according to many academics, whose race-baiting is far superior to their intellectual prowess. What amazes me is that so many in the media and the arts refuse to admit that those growing up in the West today remain among the luckiest people in human history. This is the bad news. The good is that if you thought comedy was dead due to political correctness, you were wrong. Another friend and colleague in The Spectator, Rod Liddle, has had to include me in one of his columns, declaring me a black man in order to justify “Britain’s dimmest university efforts to decolonize mathematics.” Let me explain:

Staff at Durham University in Britain were encouraged—read forced—to find brilliant mathematicians from beyond the West. They looked through Google and found plenty of Chinese, and even some Arabs, Indians from the subcontinent, but none whatsoever from sub-Sahara. Nor were there any Aborigines. So what were they to do, all those lecturers who were told to find mathematicians from Africa in order to decolonize mathematics? Easy, according to my colleague from Britain: Declare that the Greeks were black, starting with Taki, “or at least a kind of stepping stone between the putrid whiteness of Western Europe and the vibrancy of and dignity of true blackness.”

Mind you, I didn’t mind a bit when I read that I qualified as black—both my parents were blond, as is my brother, but who cares? It allows the academics recourse to Pythagoras, as well as Archimedes and the father of geometry, Euclid. (And I am rather suntanned the year round hanging out on sailing boats and ski slopes and stuff like that.) Hence I decided to ask one of my editors to alter a picture of me to make me look a bit like Al Jolson, but for some reason I doubt that my request will be granted.

Joking aside, America is becoming a very sad place to live in, especially if one is a Christian. The fact that gay pride symbols and BLM slogans are allowed in schools, but a white high school football coach is fired because he took a knee and prayed on the fifty-yard line after the game—the case has reached the Supreme Court—makes the good old US of A not only sound ridiculous but also appear to have a death wish. Teachers promote transgenderism, white guilt, and the totally phony 1619 Project, but prayer is now seen as the kiss of death. Thank God my children live in Europe, and I will make sure my grandchildren stay away.