There is a war on the West – our most basic principles of free thought are in great danger
THERE is a war going on: A war on the West. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of Western tradition and everything good it has produced. At first, this was hard to discern. Many of us sensed something was wrong, but we did not realise the […]
THERE is a war going on: A war on the West.
It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of Western tradition and everything good it has produced.
At first, this was hard to discern.
Many of us sensed something was wrong, but we did not realise the full scale of what was being attempted.
Not least because even the language of ideas was corrupted.
Words no longer meant what they had, until recently, meant.
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People began to talk of “equality”, but they did not seem to care about equal rights.
They talked of “anti-racism”, but they sounded deeply racist.
They spoke of “justice”, but they seemed to mean “revenge”.
A new generation does not appear to understand even the most basic principles of free thought and free expression.
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In January 1928, a young British artist could be found in the basement of London’s Tate Gallery, painting his first major commission.
Rex Whistler was just 21 when he was chosen to design a mural that would cover the walls of the long refreshment room of the gallery.
When the Second World War broke out, Whistler volunteered straight way.
In 1942, on his way to Normandy, Whistler’s tank crew engaged the Nazi enemy.
Whistler was killed by enemy fire. It was his first day of action. He was just 39.
Almost 80 years later, in December 2020, it was announced that the Tate was to permanently close the Whistler restaurant following a set of complaints two years earlier about the mural.
A depiction in one tiny corner was deemed to portray the Chinese in a “stereotypical” way.
Worse was that in one of the strange hunting parties, a woman in a frilly frock appears to be dragging a black child, who must be a slave, and hauling him off against his will.
Soon an online petition was got up.
This carefully selected the two tiny images, blew them up and put them on either side of a carefully selected photo of a group of white people of a certain age looking satisfied after finishing a meal in the restaurant.
The assault on the Whistler mural is a textbook case of a modern mobbing by activists.
In the past few years, almost every great figure in the history of Western art has been put through the same process.
Modern mobbing
In May 2021, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London announced that it was seeking to become “anti-racist” and to “de-colonise” Shakespeare.
The crack squad of Shakespeare scholars the Globe unleashed included one who complained that, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the character Lysander says, “Who would not trade a raven for a dove?”, and that this meant Shakespeare associated whiteness with beauty and blackness with ugliness.
Meanwhile, one Dr Vanessa Corredera claimed all Shakespeare’s plays are “race plays” and contain “racialised dynamics”.
Only months earlier, the School Library Journal had run a debate on whether Shakespeare’s works should still be taught in American classrooms
According to one expert, the works are “full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir”.
Other writers are being blacklisted not for anything they have ever written or said but for ancestors they could never even have met.
In the antiracist stampede of 2020, the British Library announced it was creating a list of authors who were found to have any connection to the slave trade or colonialism.
The initial list contained the names of 300 guilty parties, including Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron and George Orwell.
Although the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had expressed anti-slavery views, he was on the blacklist because he was recorded as having a nephew who lived in Barbados and worked closely with estates where there were slaves.
Former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes was born in 1930, some years after the slave trade was ended and too young to have any significant effect on the last days of empire.
Yet still the British Library added him to its dossier of wrongdoers.
One of Hughes’s ancestors, Nicholas Ferrar, was “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which helped to set up colonies in North America.
Eternally guilty
There was no claim that Hughes had any connection with Ferrar, because he was born in 1592.
Nevertheless, the British Library insisted he was one of those who fitted their blacklist criteria of being a person with “connections to slavery” or someone who had “profit[ed] from slavery or colonialism”.
They smeared one of the 20th century’s great poets.
The estate of Ted Hughes stepped in to demand an unqualified apology, which was forthcoming.
There are several reminders in this affair.
One is that the people who claim to know what they are talking about do not.
The other is that the slightest firm pushback can bring about a reversal.
So why does this not happen more often?
Why is it that the same language, ideas, assertions and dogmatisms are able to run through everything?
Everything is inspected under the same remorseless light.
And everything comes out looking equally and eternally guilty.
While the West mires itself in this ever-greater, self-inflicted sclerosis, does the West beat China? Does it even stand a chance? Is the game that our entire culture has dedicated itself to even a game worth playing?
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Today the West faces challenges without and threats within.
But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece.
- The War On The West: How To Prevail In The Age Of Unreason by Douglas Murray (HarperCollins) is out now, £20.
