By Melissa Knox
If compelled to choose only one book about the impact of the 2020 racial reckoning on democracy and Western culture, take Douglas Murray’s The War on the West. It demolishes myths, from the presumed racism of George Floyd’s death to the notion that there’s such a thing as “whiteness,” while showing how these myths throw Western democracies into turmoil. Murray begins with our confusions: "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.”"
Diagnosing anti-racism ideology as a form of religion—I might have said mass hysteria—Murray builds on the insights of John McWhorter, who in Woke Racism explores why “the Elect”—believers in this new religion—get angry at those daring to question current notions of whiteness or white supremacy, the meaning of the murder of George Floyd, or any other current ideology about so-called anti-racism.
Murray argues, “this new religion constitutes something to do,” (his Italics) and “allows them to imagine a perfectible upland toward which they and everyone else on earth might strive [ . . .] imbues them with confidence [ . . .] dividing the society they are in between saints and sinners” (156). And then the kicker: “Perhaps most crucially, it also allows them to war on what were their own origins. The appeal of this conflict should not be underestimated [. . .] the instinct to destroy, to burn, and to spit on everything that has produced you,” and of course the “one final appeal. The opportunity to treat other people badly beneath the guise of doing good” (156). As I write, the “Just Stop Oil” protesters have been throwing soup, cake, and potato mush at priceless paintings and blocking traffic on major throughways, preventing scientists working on climate change from getting to work, exemplifying the phenomenon Murray speaks of.
This religious impulse supplies a feeling of superiority, offering certainty where none exists. Those who accept as gospel Ibram X. Kendi’s formula in his 2019 book, How to be an Antiracist—namely, “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity” (18) —have an illusionary answer to a tremendously complex question. Asserting that anyone of color is a victim and all representatives of the West are oppressors who should “do the work” and “check” their “privilege” is unfortunately more than a ritualistic, self-demeaning distraction from the real ills of modern slavery, climate change, immigration, failing democracies and totalitarian regimes.
The self-destructiveness that fuels emotional self-flagellation, self-censorship and brooding guilt facilitates the destruction of forms of government, art and culture which preserve democracy, free speech and tolerant ways of life. The state of California is currently considering a mandatory “Ethnic Studies” curriculum for high school students that frames American history as “an ongoing colonial project, in which white ethnic groups subjugate non-white ethnic groups,” marked by inherently unjust legal, economic and educational systems that should be overthrown. Of course, this approach ignores a complex story involving the virtues as well as the errors of liberal democracy, and shows no compassion for difficult decisions made in difficult times.
In the arts, Murray reports (213-219) on the censorship of Rex Whistler’s 1928 mural at the Tate museum, because a few of its strange, satiric non-European figures were deemed evidence of imperialism by an Instagram account called “The White Pube” (216). Similarly, in the United States, fantastic figures drawn by the children’s writer Dr. Seuss have been condemned as racist, partly because they are presumed to be based on African-American vaudeville, partly because they are perceived as stereotypes of black and Chinese people. But everything Dr. Seuss draws is a caricature—the drawings of white people are just as absurd. The campaign of destructiveness, driven by masochistic guilt, is ongoing.
Murray makes a point that ought to be obvious, but is seemingly not to the proponents of critical social justice: “what cannot be disputed [ . . .] is the simple matter of footfall: a footfall that is entirely one directional [. . .] there is [. . .] no serious movement of peoples in the world struggling to get into modern China [. . .] The migrant ships across the Mediterranean go only in one direction—north.” (263) Because the West offers the best deal: “It is,” Murray reminds us, “America that has twice elected a black president—the son of a father from Kenya. It is America whose current vice president is the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is the cabinet of the United Kingdom that includes the children of immigrants from Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, and Ghana and an immigrant who was born in India.” Finishing off this peroration, Murray adds, “The cabinets of countries across Africa and Asia do not reciprocate this diversity, but it is no matter. The West is happy to accept the benefits this brings, even if others are not.” (264).
The new, race-based, Marx-and-postmodern influenced ideology attacks Western values by retroactively cancelling the numerous white men who were responsible for building these values. Thomas Jefferson’s writings, for example, have been seized as evidence of an unforgivable racism that taints the entire system of democracy. None dispute that Jefferson owned slaves, raped or exerted arm-twisting power over Sally Hemings, the enslaved mother of several of his children, and to top it off, expressed opinions most people would now consider racist. In private letters Jefferson aired thoughts seemingly at odds with his political message in the Declaration of Independence, a document built on the best notions of fairness the eighteenth century could summon. (But reasoning is so often dialectical; any thinker considers all manner of opposing ideas in order to move forward to a new one). Lincoln is condemned for similar reasons, George Washington as well. Ibram X. Kendi dismisses the philosopher David Hume for supposedly declaring “all races unequal.” (33). Kendi presents this notion as if it were Hume’s central ideology instead of, Murray mentions, “a single footnote in [Hume’s] essay, “Of National Characters” [. . .] notorious among Hume scholars,” (168).
There is one great exception to this dismissal of white men to which Murray draws attention. Widespread condemnation of the blatantly racist Karl Marx doesn’t exist. Ethnically Jewish, Marx famously rejected religion and, as letters quoted by Murray reveal, remained virulently anti-Semitic and anti-black all his life. Murray quotes from one of Marx’s letters to Engels, written in July 1862:
The Jewish nigger Lassalle, who, I’m happy to say, is leaving at the end of this week has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation . . . it is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like. (177 Murray; Marx and Engels Collected Works, p. 388).
This sounds like Madison Grant on steroids, but while most people condemn Grant’s racism and the devastating ways in which it inspired Hitler and the Nazis, the prevailing view of Marx is forgiving: he was just a man of his time. Not to be held to the same impossible “presentist” standard as other political and cultural giants. In 1847, Murray notes, Marx wrote in a letter, “Slavery is an economic category like any other,” (179) and then considered what he called “the good side of slavery,” namely, “Without slavery, North America would be transformed into a patriarchal country . . . Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.” (179) Marx was, Murray observes, “far worse than any of the people who largely leftist campaigners have spent recent years lambasting” (179).
Even so, Marxian insights certainly underscore the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi and followers. Kendi makes this point himself in How to be an Antiracist. A chapter entitled “Class” begins with two definitions: a “class racist” is one “who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes.” Meanwhile, an “antiracist anticapitalist” is one “who is opposing racial capitalism” (151). With conspicuous lack of proof, he insists: “Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-capitalist policies”. Anticapitalism “cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism” (Kendi, 159). Then he claims: “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.” (163) Counteracting these baseless assertions, Coleman Hughes lists “several historical examples in which capitalism inspired anti-racism.” Kendi offers no more proof for his outlandish claims than did Madison Grant, who claimed “race is everything” in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race, and whose sweeping rhetoric led to terrible social policies, such as forced sterilization, which disproportionately affected women of color see here, here and here.
Murray could and should have said even more about the popular misreading of George Floyd’s tragic death—inciting, as it did, many of the subsequent “anti-racist” readings of the intentions and character of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, David Hume, and so many others. Like many people, I initially understood Floyd’s death to be a lynching in broad daylight, a racist cop taking sadistic pleasure in killing a black man. Further reflection—as well as close study of videos of Floyd’s murder, of reportage on the trial of Derek Chauvin, and of the disturbing footage of the deaths of Tony Timpa and others, have led me to understand how wrong I was.
Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Attorney General, who might have gained in political popularity by asserting racism as a motive in the Derek Chauvin trial, said there was “no evidence” that Floyd’s murder was racially motivated. In 2016, Tony Timpa, a white man who had called police for help, died in the same horrible way, gasping out his last in the same position as George Floyd, but his death was caught by body cams only. His mother reports finding him in the morgue with his mouth filled with grass and dirt, so desperate had he been to breathe. Timpa’s killers were never convicted; his mother was lied to about his death by the Dallas Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office.
The lesson to be learned from the murder of George Floyd was not that it was racist but that it was brutal, cruel, criminal—and that it was seen by onlookers desperate, but powerless, to stop it. The murder was the exploitation of power by a rogue cop allegedly disgruntled with his life and his marriage, and ready to take out his rage on the first unlucky victim. John McWhorter made the point in a June 10, 2022 NY Times essay that the combination of the pandemic and this very public murder added fat to a fire; McWhorter didn’t take the abhorrent murder to be an issue of race.
II
In four chapters, “Race,” “History,” “Reparations” and “Gratitude,” and three “interludes” functioning as examples or focusing on specific issues, like reparations, namely “China,” “Religion,” and “Gratitude,” Murray establishes the existence of a cultural war on the west, offering facts, statistics, and biting sarcasm to target widely held, erroneous beliefs and unfortunate human predilections. Dissecting the "slow but steady assault" (122) on Winston Churchill as a "coward" who sat home while others died in battle, Murray writes: "You must wonder how hostile somebody must be to ask why a prime minister who, as a young man, saw action on four continents and volunteered to fight in World War I, should, in his sixties, have fought on the front line of the conflict like some medieval warlord." (123). This hostility strikes the keynote of much anti-racist propaganda, which Murray is well-prepared to thwart.
His “Race” chapter begins by noting that Westerners tend to be white—white means “having ancestors from Europe.” Remarking that the majority of people in Africa have been black, he writes, “If [ . . .] you wished to level an assault on everything to do with Africa, you might at some point target people for being black.” (15) Which, like all targeting of persons for immutable characteristics like skin color, is inhumane. The commonsense approach of Dr. Martin Luther King, namely to treat everyone as an individual, was lost in the rise of the academically obscure ideology of Critical Race Theory, whose followers “saw nearly all progress in American race relations as an illusion.” (17) Evidence was out the window; lived experience was all, and Smith professor Peggy McIntosh’s list of ungrounded assertions about white privilege in her 1989 article replaced thinking with ideology, becoming the basis for Robin di Angelo’s bestseller, White Fragility.
The “invisible backpack,” the notion that being white confers privilege automatically, regardless of social or economic status, appears to have morphed in Robin DiAngelo’s work into the more radical idea that anti-blackness “is foundational to our very identities as white people.” (Murray 23, note 12). DiAngelo told Slate journalist Lauren Michele Jackson that “White fragility” is “the current moment’s ‘white privilege’ by Peggy McIntosh.” Murray punctures DiAngelo’s claims with: “To say ‘all Chinese people think this” or ‘all black people behave like that’ had been thought to be rude as well as ignorant. But Robin Di Angelo positively reveled in the naughtiness of doing it and getting away with doing it because she was doing it against white people.” (23) He characterizes her as “The Miss Whiplash of antiracism” (267) and yes, she’s sadistic, but he might have drawn the more obvious parallel to Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century author of the notorious sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which Edwards terrorized parishioners by informing them that their God “abhors” them and felt “dreadfully provoked” and inclined to cast them into the fire as you would a spider “or some loathsome insect.”
This same sense of doomed, inescapable guilt afflicted many US citizens, Murray writes, offering results of a 2019 poll in which twenty-two percent of people identifying as “very liberal” thought that the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year; “fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten.” (27, note 20) Yet “whiteness” became a disease; a psychoanalyst named Donald Moss described it as a “parasitic-like condition.” (64)
What follows Murray’s race chapter is the first of three reflective “interludes” offered by way of illustrating educational and policy lapses as well as identifying hidden and sometimes mysterious psychological and philosophic influences derailing Western culture. The “China '' interlude nails the “reflexive anti-Westernism” (66) evident in the assertion that all China’s problems are the fault of the West. The notion that the opium wars caused more damage than Chairman Mao’s killing of “perhaps seventy million of his own people” and the delusional emphasis on “racism” in the U.S. while more than a million men, women and children of the Uighur Muslim minority are imprisoned, tortured, and raped in camps across the Xianjiang region (67) is obscene. But the Chinese have leverage because the West has given it to them: “The elites of America and Europe thought that bringing China into international organizations would push democratic norms into the country.” (69). Instead, China rose in global trade while America fell; the Chinese could therefore buy Western tolerance of their worst policies.
Murray’s “History” chapter investigates the rash of unscholarly attempts to cast the foundation of the United States as racist; an egregious example is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, which asserts that the “arrival of the first slaves on the continent should be regarded as the true founding date of America,” (Murray, 86) America’s original sin. Published in The New York Times, this propaganda was criticized by a number of major historians and an anthropologist. Murray offers the critiques of Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, but I wish he’d included Peter W. Wood’s 1620, because Wood, an anthropologist, is particularly sensitive to the meaning of customs and beliefs.
It is Peter W. Wood who answers Hannah-Jones’s question of why her father, the son of Mississippi sharecroppers, flew an American flag in their yard (Wood, 70). Wood perceives the father’s appreciation of American ideals even when he could not enjoy them personally. Hannah-Jones’s father knew “all men are created equal” was an aspiration, that it could be fulfilled, that every generation would improve chances for immigrants, persons of color, and women. And it is Peter W. Wood who dares to criticize the hypocrisy of the Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, who saw the lies in the 1619 Project but refused to condemn it because, she said, “I would be signing on to the white guy’s attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way . . . I support the 1619 Project as a kind of cultural event.” (Wood, 217). Wood rightly points out that this is condescending, if not racist, by setting low standards for black journalists. (Wood, 217).
In his Interlude, “Slavery,” Murray is on well-trodden ground; here his remarks largely repeat those of Thomas Sowell in Intellectuals and Race, but Murray adds an analysis of how the facts of slavery continue to be twisted. The pattern is to “zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did” (113). Offering the well-known history of worldwide slavery, he remarks: “the history of slavery is far more universally morally compromising than the current discussion is remotely willing to concede” (114). He spots the absurdities of Kendi’s claims on the topic, identifying them as fundamentally anti-Western. Although “curtly” acknowledging that American and European nations were hardly unique in engaging in slavery, Kendi insists, “At the dawn of the modern world, the Portuguese began to exclusively trade African bodies” (116, note 15).
For Kendi, Murray writes, “the question of diversity is of foremost importance. A form of slavery that involves the enslaving of one racial group is the worst of slavery’s forms. While a form of slavery that has diversity at its heart is somehow better slavery.” (116) That this point of view is deemed rational stirs Murray’s—and my—incredulity: Kendi’s definition is not just a “strange standard” but a “moral retrofit.” (116). His hyperbolic claims about slavery, empire and colonialism obviate the real history, namely that slavery and how it ended was “what the West got right,” (118) considering the length of time the practice continued in the Ottoman empire and in Brazil, and the fact that in Saudia Arabia and the Middle East, Africa and, not long ago, even in New Zealand, the practice continues (118).
Of the final sections, “Gratitude” is perhaps the most prescient. Murray draws our attention to a mysterious scene in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. One of the brothers, Ivan, begins to lose his mind, and the reader doesn’t know why, until we learn he’s routinely visited by the sadly debonair devil, a former landowner with serfs, who is dressed “like a Russian gentleman, using French phrases.” The devil may be inside Ivan’s head or he may really be there: we don’t know. What he says, however, is extraordinary. His “best emotions” like “gratitude” are “forbidden [. . .] on account of my social position.” (Murray, 204)
The question of why the devil can’t feel gratitude opens up an understanding of the willful destruction of Western values. Noting how easy it is to destroy what takes time to create—human beings, churches, cathedrals, statues—Murray notes these “can be burned to the ground [. . .] brought down in an afternoon.” (204). Wending his way through German philosophers, Murray interprets Dostoevsky’s devil as the embodiment of a fatal resentment currently igniting the West: “blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserved more” (205). Invoking Nietzsche’s reasoning in The Geneology of Morals and the concept of resentment, or “Ressentiment”, Murray diagnoses the current need to “sanctify revenge with the term justice—as though justice were fundamentally simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged.” (205). This vengeful feeling animates the victim/oppressor narrative popularized by Ta-Nahisi Coates (with his demand for reparations), Nikole Hannah-Jones (with her fantasy that America’s purpose is slavery), Robin diAngelo (with her blather about “white fragility”) and Ibram X. Kendi.
But now, to return to George Floyd, the unlikely symbol of all this resentment: “Nobody knows what was going through the mind of George Floyd during the last terrible minutes of his life. But it might have surprised him to learn that his death could lead to a purge of historic harpsichords at one of London’s premier music conservatories.” (238) Yes, at the Royal Academy of Music, steps taken in response to Floyd’s death included “making our curriculum more diverse” by looking at their music collection “through a decolonization lens.” Since George Frideric Handel—composer of the breathtakingly beautiful The Messiah—also invested in a company that owned slaves, out went some of his harpsichords.
The tragic misinterpretation of George Floyd’s murder will emerge, eventually. He’s become a Rorschach test. I’ve seen neo-conservative sites dedicated to pointing out what they consider his “resistance” to the police. Nonsense. George Floyd looks like Pooh Bear Got Drunk. He barely understands what the police are saying. He’s scared, confused, and anything but dangerous. He’s childlike, bumbling, too incapacitated to understand the demand to get in the car. He was unlucky in the extreme when Derek Chauvin—known for brutality on the force already—crossed his path. But to see George Floyd with his drug use and his phony twenty-dollar bill as a hero, is sad. He might instead be seen as an American underdog catalyzing a reform of police brutality. If only his death could lead to this reform, instead of to the assault on the West.
For Murray, the restoration of gratitude could stop this assault. Gratitude could help us understand how concepts like “cultural appropriation” and “de-colonization” are born, not out of reality, but out of despair and rebellion in the wake of racial unrest. Murray speaks at the end of “forgotten humility, ” meaning the failure or refusal to find common ground in political, artistic, and cultural areas. Recognizing imitation as appreciation, or creativity or as the desire to understand from the point of common humanity would be one start. Our common longing for ideals that unite us—not the immutable and accidental differences of skin color and ethnicity—can lead the way back to social cohesion.
Melissa Knox is a writer living in Germany; she teaches at The University of Duisburg-Essen.
