Western self-flagellation, Murray claims, plays into the hands of the Chinese, allowing them to dismiss any charges against themselves as coming from countries with their own serious issues with regards to racism; that the west has no moral high ground and cannot criticise China. The irony is that all these culture war commentators whinge about moral panics without realising that their own crusade is a confected moral panic (ok, they probably do realise it, there’s a lot of grifting in these quarters).

This, Murray contends, is because of a general ignorance about domestic and world history, which allows the narrative that the west has perpetrated everything bad and all other countries are innocent victims to proliferate.

In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows the ways in which many well-meaning people have been lured into polarisation by lies, and shows how far the world's most crucial political debates have been hijacked across Europe and America. There are many attitudes that we take in our lives, some of which dominate at one point in our lives and recede in another. It obviously backfired but he was not praising or defending Mao unlike the shadow home secretary who really did defend Mao in a cringe inducing conversation. The idea that people don’t study Shakespeare or Roman history or the Tudors or the American Revolution or the Enlightenment or any other topic you can name is laughable.

Murray’s focus is narrowly centred on a movement within universities that he doesn’t approve of, which has subsequently bubbled over into the mainstream. Many statues are unexamined and people know little about whom they represent, but if we were to examine them more closely we may find ourselves wishing to remove and replace them.Some of that information may be faulty, but much of it seriously undermines the veracity of the old narratives. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the "America is a racist country" bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and "pro-justice" movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests. If enough are convinced that Western history is nothing more than a catalogue of moral outrages and that Western societies remain irredeemably oppressive, tyrannical, bigoted, and all the rest of it, then what sense is there in preserving such a system? These numbers are low, but it discounts anyone who might be armed in a country known for a extraordinary levels of gun ownership.

He also tries to address the critique that marginalised voices were left out of the Western canon by giving examples of women and gay people in the canon, in a chapter on reparations for racist crimes.CRT and most race scholars talk about systems, and while talking about a white system might be opening oneself up to misinterpretation, I don’t think it’s hard to discern that they don’t mean every individual white person so much as they mean a white system. The average person doesn’t care about “cancellation”, that’s why it doesn’t work, even in cases where it’d be nice if it did. He also becomes rather exercised about antiracist training in the workplace—has anyone ever paid attention or cared about what was said during a training day? I felt he sidestepped the history of native American-settler relations, yes there was unintended disease spread but there were many massacres to consider as well and he sidesteps tougher questions around Churchill and racism.