Douglas Murray’s War on the West—A Review
by Gisa Tunbridge, Quillette:
[…] Fortunately, Murray’s new book War on the West steers clear of the humourless gloom so typical of other “Spenglerian” works, which take as their theme the notion that Western culture is imperilled. The book departs, in fact, from the rather lugubrious tone of Murray’s own recent output. If The Strange Death of Europe reads like a requiem for a stricken continent, War on the West is intended to be an act of defiance. “The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years,” he writes in the prelude to a chapter on history. “It is high time that we revise them in turn.” It should be obvious that the “anti-Western revisionists” to whom Murray refers represent a loose coalition of left-wing ideologues convinced that Western culture is irreparably corrupt, its institutions polluted at a fundamental level by various forms of prejudice concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation. These ideas, in Murray’s view, are not only hysterically misguided, but harmful and even dangerous.
Among the strongest passages of the book are those concerning the artistic achievements of European civilisations. Murray writes very eloquently about some of the artists, musicians, and sculptors of the Western tradition, contrasting the depth, humanity, and universality of their works with the sheer crassness of recent attacks mounted upon them. Thus, Michael Tippett’s oratorio ‘A Child of Our Time’ can be denounced for “cultural appropriation” because it incorporates Negro Spirituals. This work, as Murray movingly relates, was conceived as a protest against Kristallnacht, by a Jewish-American composer so deeply affected by the plangent music of the African-American tradition that he once wept at a performance in 1960s Baltimore, at which the largely black audience recognised the spirituals and began, spontaneously, to sing them. This piece of music is now deemed to be somehow suspect, tainted by “white supremacy” despite its profoundly humane and sympathetic intentions.
There is something very disturbing about this reductive, inquisitorial reaction to even the least objectionable artefacts of Western history. Nothing speaks more strongly to the spiritual aridity of social justice extremists than their complete insensitivity to aesthetic nuance and artistic value.
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