The War on the West (HarperCollins) has had a particular fortune: the vast, valiant book by Douglas Murray, author of The madness of the crowd, talks about the ongoing culture war, the painful attack that Western culture suffers without really having a wall of defense, while real cannons are fired, the Russian ones, shaking our world to its foundations. Those blows, despite the general confusion, resonate everywhere, questioning the political and cultural world; Murray tries with evident fury, passion, sense of urgency, just dampened by an ironic British accent, to wake up the world from the hysteria and guilt by which it is put in grave danger of life.

Murray examines the war against our world above all from the center of the empire, the United States, and from his own England. The lens chosen is that of racial obsession, the so-called "critical race theory" that developed with the horrid killing of George Floyd by the American police in 2020 and then with Black Lives Matter. Like a deadly disease, CRT takes hold of Western society, creating deep ramifications: the consequence is a form of obsessive and definitive guilt, Murray says point by point. Our civilization has been reduced to this by the texts that now fill the bookstores, the school curricula, determine the chairs of the major universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, inspire the screams of incongruous and devastating demonstrations: they see our civilization as an octopus wrapped in slavery and racial hatred, from the foundations of Jerusalem, religion, and Rome, the order of the law. Racial culture, according to the CRT, nullifies all the way to equality and human fraternity regulated by postcolonial rules, by law, by democracy: "Progress in race relations is for the most part a mirage that obscures the fact that whites continue consciously and unconsciously to do everything in their power to secure dominance and maintain control." This is affirmed, among a thousand that Murray cites, one of the most important authors who wrote the new Talmud of our time, Derrick Bell.

The author of The Strange Death of Europe has never been afraid of controversy, and Murray’s latest is no exception. The War on the West is a panoramic survey of a new prejudice that has commandeered western institutions in the name of social justice. It is, Murray argues, out to “demonise the people who still make up the racial majority in the West”. The war on our civilisation turns out, for Murray, to mean a war against whiteness.
As a result, we get two books in one. A series of celebrations – and defences – of the best of the West sits alongside a catalogue of anti-white discrimination, mostly pursued as a form of white self-flagellation to atone for racial sin. 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.
Susan Sontag called white Western civilisation “the cancer of human history”. Given what Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are up to, it might be fairer, if unconsoling, to see the West as history’s chemotherapy. Traumatic to encounter, in many ways destructive, but the alternatives don’t bear thinking about.