The War on the West: An Instant NYT Bestselling History of the Modern World

For Nietzsche, one of the dangers of the men of ressentiment is that they will achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves—to shove their misery into the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy “start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy!

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody’s ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.

In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It 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.

If you do not respect my past, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my culture, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my forebears, then why should I respect yours? And if you do not like what my society has produced, then why should I agree to your having a place in it?

The only possible demand at the endpoint of deconstruction is to deconstruct some more. And it seems possible to pull apart and find cause for resentment endlessly. Certainly, that is the hope of the deconstructionists, who now scour the world of art and look for symbols of rape, male dominance, privilege, racism, and much more.10 And of course they find things to occupy their time.

In all matters, whether to do with money, sex, or anything else, no man feels that the scales are weighted in his favor. And so just as the men of resentment talk about “justice” while meaning “revenge,” so it is that something is disguised within their talk of “equality.

To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West. It is necessary to demonize white people.

This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.

There are many attitudes that we all take in our lives, some of which dominate at one point in our lives and recede in another. But a life lived without gratitude is not a life properly lived. It is a life that is lived off-kilter: one in which, incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented by nothing but revenge.

The most important, without doubt, is gratitude. The reason Dostoyevsky’s devil cannot feel gratitude is that only a person intent on great evil would be denied, or deny themselves, this crucial human attribute. Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations. Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got. Bitterness that everything did not turn out better or more exactly to your liking—whatever that “liking” might be. Without some sense of gratitude, it is impossible to get anything into any proper order.

Today the West faces challenges without and threats within. But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece. By assaulting the majority populations in these countries. By saying that our histories are entirely reprehensible and have nothing good to be said about them. By claiming that everything in our past that has led up to our present is irredeemably riddled with sin and that while these same sins have beset every society in history, the debtor should knock at only one door. And most importantly by those who pretend that a civilization that has given more to the world in knowledge, understanding, and culture than any other in history somehow has nothing whatsoever to be said for it.

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.

Always at the hands of people who range from the semi-informed to the uninformed.

Why should “gratitude” be an emotion that is denied to the devil? Dostoevsky leaves this unanswered. But it is worth reflecting on. For acts of deconstruction and destruction can be performed with extraordinary ease. Such ease that they might as well be the habits of the devil. A great building such as a church or a cathedral can take decades — even centuries — to build. But it can be burned to the ground or otherwise brought down in an afternoon. Similarly, the most delicate canvas or work of art can be the product of years of craft and labor, and it can be destroyed in a moment. The human body is the same. I once read a particular detail of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. A gang of Hutus had been at their work and among the people they macheted that day was a Tutsi doctor. As his brains spilled out onto the roadside, one of his killers mocked the idea that these were meant to be the brains of a doctor. How did his learning look now? All the years of education and learning, all the knowledge and experience in that head was destroyed in a moment by people who had achieved none of those things.

Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment.

But they praise any culture so long as it is not Western solely and simply in order to denigrate and devalue the West. As a result, they reach their final end argument, which is to demand why anyone should admire or wish to continue a civilization that has done so much wrong and had such bigotry and hatred built in throughout its history.

It suggests that the West has no moral legitimacy to act anywhere. And it runs off the claim that the West has not merely done things that every other civilization in history has done, but rather has always been worse than any other civilization, meaning that the West is uniquely unqualified to pass moral judgment today. This in itself relies on two fundamental presumptions, which both turn out to be true. First, it runs on the presumption that knowledge of Western history inside the West is uniquely lacking: Westerners have become increasingly unaware of what is true and what is not about their own past. Second, it runs on the presumption—again also true—that almost nobody in the West has any knowledge of what countries such as China have done throughout history or are doing today. In other words, the assault on the West’s history succeeds because it speaks into a vacuum of vast historical and contemporary ignorance. It speaks to a populace inside the West as much as outside it, which is willing to see the whole of history through a single lens. If anything bad happens in the world, it must be the West’s fault, because there is no other legitimate explanation of how things can go wrong, other than explanations involving the West.

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. They include “farang in Thailand, gaijin in Japan, mat salleh in Malaysia, gweilo in Hong Kong.” This last one is particularly interesting. Gwei means “ghost,” and it is meant literally—a white person is not fully human. “Indeed, in many Chinese dialects, the idiomatic term for any foreigner, be they Indian or Ivorian or Irish, contains the ghostly ‘gwei’; only ethnic Chinese are constantly referred to as ‘ren’, which means ‘person’. In other words, only the Chinese really exist as full-blooded people.

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.

Not least that Fanon, like many other postcolonial writers who became famous in the West, is not really interested in restoring the cultures of the non-Western countries he claims to care about. He is not interested in returning African nations to an era of tribal customs or any other precolonial Indigenous tradition. What he is interested in is analyzing these cultures through a Marxist lens and then “saving” them by applying a Marxist ideology to them.

The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became.

It is one of the saddest realizations we have as a species: not just that everything is transitory but that everything—particularly everything we love and into which love has been poured—is fragile.

They regard it as barbaric and unenlightened. They look down on those who have not joined their group of the elect, especially those who they believe have seen what they have seen and yet come to different conclusions. Crucially, this new religion constitutes something to do. With any and all other grand narratives collapsed, the religion of antiracism fills people with purpose and a sense of meaning. It gives them drive and allows them to see where they are going. It allows them to imagine a perfectible upland toward which they and everyone else on earth might strive. It imbues them with confidence, and consolation, dividing the society they are in between saints and sinners in a way that gives them the illusion of great perception. Perhaps most crucially, it also allows them to war on what were their own origins. The appeal of this conflict should not be underestimated. It is a very deep-seated instinct, the instinct to destroy, to burn, and to spit on everything that has produced you.

The issue of reparations now comes clown not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong. lt is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.

Like all societies in history, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted.

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.

This is an unusual language for academics to write in: to boast that a particular collection of academics and teachers are, in fact, academics "with an activist dimension." And as for the admission that CRT seeks not just to understand society but to "transform it"? This is the language of revolutionary politics, not a language traditionally used in academia. But revolutionary activists were exactly those involved in GRT turned out to be.

Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn't become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme answers. If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.