Revisionist trap

The West's obsession with atoning for past sins gives cover to human rights abusers and authoritarian regimes, a British author argues.

- ANI O'BRIEN

THE WAR ON THE WEST: How to prevail in the age of unreason, by Douglas Murray (HarperCollins, $39.99)

What he calls "the war on the West", Douglas Murray says, could perhaps be more accurately described as the self-destruction, or even the slow and systematic suicide, of the West.

The War on the West, like the earlier books from the British author and political commentator, The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, breaks many of the new cultural and political rules of what one should and should not say in "polite society" in the West in the 21st century. It pushes back on "truths" that cultural and political elites have to a large degree deemed beyond examination or criticism - for example, that racism cannot be perpetrated against white people, or the West is unique in its history of slavery and this has imbued it with an original sin that cannot be atoned for.

Murray says there is nowhere more progressive, at any time in history, than the West today; there is no better set of societies to live in as a member of a minority group of any kind. He is not reluctant to acknowledge the tragedies and travesties of the past, but rejects appraisals of the current West - by many in the elites - as an irredeemably evil, racist and oppressive place.

And, he says, our self-obsessed perpetual self-flagellation is providing cover for human rights abusers and malignant regimes in other parts of the world.

He gives the example of a speech the US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made to the global organisation not long after President Joe Biden took office.