May 22, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
The excerpts for this epilogue are from Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West. In them he advances several perspectives on the Wokeness ideology.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The excerpts for this epilogue are from Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West. In them he advances several perspectives on the Wokeness ideology.
- Wokeness requires people to identify themselves along line of sex, sexuality, and race. Further, to belong to some groups is shameful, e.g., the white race particularly if you are male and heterosexual.
- Wokeness is an assault on everything to do with the Western world – its past, present, and future.
- America is leading the way to wokeness in the Western world – an orgy of self-abuse. This has divided our country into tribes fomenting hate.
- Government officials proclaiming the need for American wokeness in international forums is negatively impacting foreign policy and reducing our country’s ability to positively influence human rights abuse throughout the world, particularly China.
- Focusing on wokeness has so consumed America’s interests, that we are blinded to China’s empire building goal, advances, and actions.
- If the American-led world is so terrible, as wokeness professes, we should consider what a Chinese Communist Pary-led world order would look like.
- Murray reports that China is a very racist country, looking down on foreigners with distain, particularly on those of white or black skin-color and Chinese who think in Western terms.
- He also answers a question posed by a Black News Channel reporter, who asked a white critic of wokeness, “What do you like about being white?”
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM EPILOGUES – EPILOGUE 5
THE WAR ON THE WEST – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All of the excerpts in this epilogue are from The War on the West by Douglas Murray (2022)
INTRODUCTION TO THE WAR: In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced. At first, this was hard to discern. Many of us sensed that something was wrong. We wondered why one-sided arguments kept being made and why unfair claims kept being leveled. But we did not realize 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. 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.”
It is only in recent years, when the fruits of this movement have come into plain sight, that its scale has become clear. This is an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world – its past, present, and future.
Wokeness: There were other signs that something was amiss, such as “identity politics” – specifically the attempt to break down Western societies along lines of sex, sexuality, and race. After the 20th century, national identity had become a shameful form of belonging, and all these other forms of belonging suddenly appeared in its place. Now people were being told to consider themselves as members of other specific groupings. They were gay or straight, men or women, black or white.
The discourse on race grew even worse. Racial minorities who had integrated well in the West, contributed to the West, and were even admiring of the West were increasingly treated as though they were race traitors. As though another allegiance were expected of them. Radicals who wanted to tear everything down were venerated. Black Americans and others who wanted to celebrate the West and add to it were talked to and about as though they were apostates. Increasingly, they were the ones called all the worst names. Love of the society they were in was treated as a point against them.
It was not inevitable that we would end up living in societies that justly regard racism as among the most abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and women made the case, fought for that situation, and claimed their rights. In recent years, it has come to sound as though the fight never happened. As though it was a mirage. In recent years, I have come to think of racial issues in the West as being like pendulum that has swung past the point of correction and into overcorrection. Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades. In the place of color blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted.
Yet, terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Yet, we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries of the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred.
It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created. A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame people. All aspects of the Western tradition now suffer the same attack. The Judeo-Chrisitan tradition that formed a cornerstone of the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault and denigration.
There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried out across the media and airwaves, throughout the education system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider culture, where all major cultural institutions are either coming under pressure or actually volunteering to distance themselves from their own past. And it now exists at the very top of the American government, where one of the first acts of the new administration was to issue an executive order calling for “equity” and the dismantling of what it called “systemic racism.” We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs.
THE CONSEQUENCES: Most people around the world want to think well of themselves and of the country they are born into. Most do not think it a good idea to wage a remorseless, demoralizing war against everything to do with the majority group in their society. They do not pick up questionable terms invented yesterday and try to roll them out across the entire country, using them to explain each and every problem in the society. These and many more are symptoms of a very Western disease. A disease of self-hatred and self-distrust. And a disease that is, in both senses of the term, a type of self-abuse. One which other powers, outside the West, are more than happy to observe and use for their own ends. There are several problems with this reflex anti-Westernism. One is that it ignores what is actually going on in the world today.
Synthetic opioids from China that are now decimating swaths of the United States. According to the US National Center for Health Statistics, more than half a million people in America have died in America’s opioid pandemic in the last two decades. If more people knew about China’s present-day opioid war on America, then perhaps lives could be saved.
No societies outside of the West are engaged in the same self-scouring enterprise. What is the rest of the world doing while the West – with America leading the way – engages in this orgy of self-abuse? The country that is now the only major challenger to America as the world’s leading economy is the People’s Republic of China -- it has found a way to liberalize its financial system to such an extent that in recent decades it has become the world’s second most important economy. The CCP has been very careful to keep a rein on any political liberalism. The current president, Xi Jinping, has accelerated this ever since coming to power in 2013. That year he launched a campaign to prevent liberal ideologies entering the public discourse in China.
In the name of security, he also introduced a system of “re-education” of ethnic and religious minorities who the party see as an ideological or security threat. To date, more than a million men, women, and children of the Uighur Muslim minority, among others, have been forced into the sprawling network of internment camps – often referred to as “concentration camps.”
While pursuing its hybrid form of communist capitalism, the CCP has managed to purchase greater influence and respectability across the world. In the year 2000, most countries in South America, Africa, the Far East and Australasia, and Europe did more trade with America than they did with China. By 2020, that situation was inverted. In just twenty years, all these parts of the globe were doing more business with China that they were with America. During that period, America had fallen from more than 75% of total global trade to just over 25%. And eating up all that difference was China, which went rocketing up in exactly the opposite direction.
The country’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to form a network of Chinese infrastructure and investment that covers the globe: an empire in all but name. It has already seen the country buy its way across the Far East, Near East, and Africa.
So, China, at any rate, has not wasted the past two decades. It has expanded more than it has managed to expand at any previous point in its history, and if there is going to be any country that overtakes the U.S. as the global superpower in the century ahead, then China is the only contender. If the American-led world order is so terrible, what might a CCP-led world order look like? If the United States and other Western countries are so dreadful, then would the only likely alternative system be any better?
Very few people ask the question. One of the few who did was a late colleague of mine. Clarissa Tan, who wrote in 2014 about the issue of Chinese racism. Although ethnically Chinese, Clarissa had lived for a time in Singapore. As she herself said, there she had been a “banana,” which is to say that she was “yellow on the outside but white on the inside” – that is, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose thinking was regarded as “Western.” As she pointed out, Asia is filled with labels like this, where people are summed up along ethnic lines in ways that are rarely flattering. The terms that are reserved for foreigners, and white people in particular, are especially ugly. Racism against black people remains ingrained and commonplace. And like anywhere, the racism in the present comes from a racist past.
Consider what happened just weeks into the Biden administration in 2021. America’s newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, spoke at the UN General Assembly. On that occasion she told the General Assembly that growing up in America she had lived fascism, experienced racism, and survived racism. She told the UN General Assembly that America had an “original sin” and that this sin was slavery. Among other deaths, the US ambassador talked of “the senseless killing of George Floyd.” She spoke of the justice of the BLM movement and of the importance of dismantling “white supremacy.”
At the first major America-China bilateral summit involving the new US administration held in Alaska in March 2021, Thomas-Greenfield’s boss, the new US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, briefly expressed to his Chines counterparts his “deep concerns” over actions by China in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-attacks on the United States, and the country’s economic coercion of allies. His Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, was visibly furious. The United States had no right to lecture China, he explained in an 18-minute harangue. Waving his hand angrily/dismissively at his counterpart, he continued, “There are many problems within the U.S. regarding human rights.” And these are “admitted by the US itself as well.” While China was making progress on human rights, he said, the United States was not. “We hope the United States will do better on human rights.” The CCP’s spokespeople now find this an enormously useful line of attack. In the summer of 2021, the UN Human Rights Council held a session in which developing countries denounced systemic racism and racial discrimination.
CONCLUSION: In 2021, America went through a sudden and steep learning curve on Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who had recently emerged as one of the leading voices opposed to CRT being spread in educational and other institutions across America. Rufo was interviewed on the Black News Channel by Marc Lamont Hill, who asked. “If I were to say to you now, ‘Christopher, what do you like about being white?’ what would you say?”
One way to answer is: “I don’t especially think of myself as being white and don’t particularly want to be cornered into thinking in such terms. But if you are going to corner me, then let me give you answer to the best of my ability. The good things about being white include being born into a tradition that has given the world a disproportionate number, if not most, of the things that the world currently benefits from. They include almost every medical advancement that the world now enjoys. They include almost every scientific advancement that the world now benefits from. No meaningful breakthrough in either of these areas has come for many centuries from anywhere in Africa or from any Native American tribe.
“White people founded most of the world’s oldest and longest-established educational institutions. They led the world in the invention and promotion of the written word. Almost alone among any peoples it was white people who – for good and for ill – took an interest in other cultures beyond their own, and not only learned from these cultures but revived some of them.
“White Western peoples happen to have also developed all the world’s most successful means of commerce, including the free flow of capital. This system of free market capitalism has lifted more than one billion people out of extreme poverty just in the 21st century thus far. It did not originate in Africa or China, although people in those places benefited from it. It originated in the West. So did numerous other things that make the lives of people around the world immeasurably better.”
“It is Western people who developed the principle of representative government, of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the Western world that developed the principles and practice of political liberty, of freedom of thought and conscience, of freedom of speech and expression. It evolved the principles of what we now call ‘civil rights,’ rights that do not exist in much of the world, whether their peoples yearn for them or not.
“Outside China, Chinese culture is a matter for scholars and aficionados of Chinese culture. Whereas the culture created by white people in the West belongs to the world, and a disproportionate swath of the world wants to be a part of it. For there is, even today, 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. No significant number of people wishes to participate in life among the tribes of Africa or the Middle East. Despite everything that is said against it, America is still the world’s number on destination for migrants worldwide. And the next most desirable countries for people wanting to move are Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and the UK. The West must have done something right for this to be the case.”
“It is not possible today for a non-Indian to rise to the top of Indian politics. If a white person moved to Bangladesh, they would not be able to become a cabinet minister. If a white Westerner moved to China, neither they nor the next generation of their family nor the one after that would be able to break through the layers of government and become supreme leader in due course. It is 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. 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.”
This would have been one way for Rufo to answer the question. But it is understandable that he did not. For at present, such a truthful answer remains at the very edges of permissible sayability. And into the silence left by the impossibility of saying what is true, anything and everything can roam. When white people have to be ashamed of the culture that has produced them, almost anything can happen. And that is the situation into which we have slipped.
Source: The War on the West by Douglas Murray (2022)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE WAR ON THE WEST – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All of the excerpts in this epilogue are from The War on the West by Douglas Murray (2022)
INTRODUCTION TO THE WAR: In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced. At first, this was hard to discern. Many of us sensed that something was wrong. We wondered why one-sided arguments kept being made and why unfair claims kept being leveled. But we did not realize 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. 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.”
It is only in recent years, when the fruits of this movement have come into plain sight, that its scale has become clear. This is an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world – its past, present, and future.
Wokeness: There were other signs that something was amiss, such as “identity politics” – specifically the attempt to break down Western societies along lines of sex, sexuality, and race. After the 20th century, national identity had become a shameful form of belonging, and all these other forms of belonging suddenly appeared in its place. Now people were being told to consider themselves as members of other specific groupings. They were gay or straight, men or women, black or white.
The discourse on race grew even worse. Racial minorities who had integrated well in the West, contributed to the West, and were even admiring of the West were increasingly treated as though they were race traitors. As though another allegiance were expected of them. Radicals who wanted to tear everything down were venerated. Black Americans and others who wanted to celebrate the West and add to it were talked to and about as though they were apostates. Increasingly, they were the ones called all the worst names. Love of the society they were in was treated as a point against them.
It was not inevitable that we would end up living in societies that justly regard racism as among the most abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and women made the case, fought for that situation, and claimed their rights. In recent years, it has come to sound as though the fight never happened. As though it was a mirage. In recent years, I have come to think of racial issues in the West as being like pendulum that has swung past the point of correction and into overcorrection. Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades. In the place of color blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted.
Yet, terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Yet, we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries of the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred.
It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created. A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame people. All aspects of the Western tradition now suffer the same attack. The Judeo-Chrisitan tradition that formed a cornerstone of the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault and denigration.
There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried out across the media and airwaves, throughout the education system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider culture, where all major cultural institutions are either coming under pressure or actually volunteering to distance themselves from their own past. And it now exists at the very top of the American government, where one of the first acts of the new administration was to issue an executive order calling for “equity” and the dismantling of what it called “systemic racism.” We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs.
THE CONSEQUENCES: Most people around the world want to think well of themselves and of the country they are born into. Most do not think it a good idea to wage a remorseless, demoralizing war against everything to do with the majority group in their society. They do not pick up questionable terms invented yesterday and try to roll them out across the entire country, using them to explain each and every problem in the society. These and many more are symptoms of a very Western disease. A disease of self-hatred and self-distrust. And a disease that is, in both senses of the term, a type of self-abuse. One which other powers, outside the West, are more than happy to observe and use for their own ends. There are several problems with this reflex anti-Westernism. One is that it ignores what is actually going on in the world today.
Synthetic opioids from China that are now decimating swaths of the United States. According to the US National Center for Health Statistics, more than half a million people in America have died in America’s opioid pandemic in the last two decades. If more people knew about China’s present-day opioid war on America, then perhaps lives could be saved.
No societies outside of the West are engaged in the same self-scouring enterprise. What is the rest of the world doing while the West – with America leading the way – engages in this orgy of self-abuse? The country that is now the only major challenger to America as the world’s leading economy is the People’s Republic of China -- it has found a way to liberalize its financial system to such an extent that in recent decades it has become the world’s second most important economy. The CCP has been very careful to keep a rein on any political liberalism. The current president, Xi Jinping, has accelerated this ever since coming to power in 2013. That year he launched a campaign to prevent liberal ideologies entering the public discourse in China.
In the name of security, he also introduced a system of “re-education” of ethnic and religious minorities who the party see as an ideological or security threat. To date, more than a million men, women, and children of the Uighur Muslim minority, among others, have been forced into the sprawling network of internment camps – often referred to as “concentration camps.”
While pursuing its hybrid form of communist capitalism, the CCP has managed to purchase greater influence and respectability across the world. In the year 2000, most countries in South America, Africa, the Far East and Australasia, and Europe did more trade with America than they did with China. By 2020, that situation was inverted. In just twenty years, all these parts of the globe were doing more business with China that they were with America. During that period, America had fallen from more than 75% of total global trade to just over 25%. And eating up all that difference was China, which went rocketing up in exactly the opposite direction.
The country’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to form a network of Chinese infrastructure and investment that covers the globe: an empire in all but name. It has already seen the country buy its way across the Far East, Near East, and Africa.
So, China, at any rate, has not wasted the past two decades. It has expanded more than it has managed to expand at any previous point in its history, and if there is going to be any country that overtakes the U.S. as the global superpower in the century ahead, then China is the only contender. If the American-led world order is so terrible, what might a CCP-led world order look like? If the United States and other Western countries are so dreadful, then would the only likely alternative system be any better?
Very few people ask the question. One of the few who did was a late colleague of mine. Clarissa Tan, who wrote in 2014 about the issue of Chinese racism. Although ethnically Chinese, Clarissa had lived for a time in Singapore. As she herself said, there she had been a “banana,” which is to say that she was “yellow on the outside but white on the inside” – that is, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose thinking was regarded as “Western.” As she pointed out, Asia is filled with labels like this, where people are summed up along ethnic lines in ways that are rarely flattering. The terms that are reserved for foreigners, and white people in particular, are especially ugly. Racism against black people remains ingrained and commonplace. And like anywhere, the racism in the present comes from a racist past.
Consider what happened just weeks into the Biden administration in 2021. America’s newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, spoke at the UN General Assembly. On that occasion she told the General Assembly that growing up in America she had lived fascism, experienced racism, and survived racism. She told the UN General Assembly that America had an “original sin” and that this sin was slavery. Among other deaths, the US ambassador talked of “the senseless killing of George Floyd.” She spoke of the justice of the BLM movement and of the importance of dismantling “white supremacy.”
At the first major America-China bilateral summit involving the new US administration held in Alaska in March 2021, Thomas-Greenfield’s boss, the new US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, briefly expressed to his Chines counterparts his “deep concerns” over actions by China in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-attacks on the United States, and the country’s economic coercion of allies. His Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, was visibly furious. The United States had no right to lecture China, he explained in an 18-minute harangue. Waving his hand angrily/dismissively at his counterpart, he continued, “There are many problems within the U.S. regarding human rights.” And these are “admitted by the US itself as well.” While China was making progress on human rights, he said, the United States was not. “We hope the United States will do better on human rights.” The CCP’s spokespeople now find this an enormously useful line of attack. In the summer of 2021, the UN Human Rights Council held a session in which developing countries denounced systemic racism and racial discrimination.
CONCLUSION: In 2021, America went through a sudden and steep learning curve on Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who had recently emerged as one of the leading voices opposed to CRT being spread in educational and other institutions across America. Rufo was interviewed on the Black News Channel by Marc Lamont Hill, who asked. “If I were to say to you now, ‘Christopher, what do you like about being white?’ what would you say?”
One way to answer is: “I don’t especially think of myself as being white and don’t particularly want to be cornered into thinking in such terms. But if you are going to corner me, then let me give you answer to the best of my ability. The good things about being white include being born into a tradition that has given the world a disproportionate number, if not most, of the things that the world currently benefits from. They include almost every medical advancement that the world now enjoys. They include almost every scientific advancement that the world now benefits from. No meaningful breakthrough in either of these areas has come for many centuries from anywhere in Africa or from any Native American tribe.
“White people founded most of the world’s oldest and longest-established educational institutions. They led the world in the invention and promotion of the written word. Almost alone among any peoples it was white people who – for good and for ill – took an interest in other cultures beyond their own, and not only learned from these cultures but revived some of them.
“White Western peoples happen to have also developed all the world’s most successful means of commerce, including the free flow of capital. This system of free market capitalism has lifted more than one billion people out of extreme poverty just in the 21st century thus far. It did not originate in Africa or China, although people in those places benefited from it. It originated in the West. So did numerous other things that make the lives of people around the world immeasurably better.”
“It is Western people who developed the principle of representative government, of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the Western world that developed the principles and practice of political liberty, of freedom of thought and conscience, of freedom of speech and expression. It evolved the principles of what we now call ‘civil rights,’ rights that do not exist in much of the world, whether their peoples yearn for them or not.
“Outside China, Chinese culture is a matter for scholars and aficionados of Chinese culture. Whereas the culture created by white people in the West belongs to the world, and a disproportionate swath of the world wants to be a part of it. For there is, even today, 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. No significant number of people wishes to participate in life among the tribes of Africa or the Middle East. Despite everything that is said against it, America is still the world’s number on destination for migrants worldwide. And the next most desirable countries for people wanting to move are Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and the UK. The West must have done something right for this to be the case.”
“It is not possible today for a non-Indian to rise to the top of Indian politics. If a white person moved to Bangladesh, they would not be able to become a cabinet minister. If a white Westerner moved to China, neither they nor the next generation of their family nor the one after that would be able to break through the layers of government and become supreme leader in due course. It is 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. 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.”
This would have been one way for Rufo to answer the question. But it is understandable that he did not. For at present, such a truthful answer remains at the very edges of permissible sayability. And into the silence left by the impossibility of saying what is true, anything and everything can roam. When white people have to be ashamed of the culture that has produced them, almost anything can happen. And that is the situation into which we have slipped.
Source: The War on the West by Douglas Murray (2022)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| nihl_e5l_war_on_west_--_epilogue_5.pdf |