Which just goes to show how refined the practice of child abuse had become in the English schools of that benighted age.

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. 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.On the topic of literature, Murray is somewhat indignant about attempts to “decolonise” curriculums, which often just means adding some modules on race and identity and taking a little bit of focus away from the usual suspects. One of the tweeters being a maths teacher, Murray warns of the risk that mathematical standards in education “will be lowered or expunged altogether” as a result of such ideas and reminds the reader of the obvious parallels to be found in “George Orwell’s most famous book.

For example, in analysing the work of Robin DiAngelo, who asserts that “Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities as white people”, Murray is horrified at her generalising (something DiAngelo admits to), and yet he seems to miss the point. But again, if such subversive people do exist within western society itself, then they have failed completely. He objects, not without justification, to the demonising of Churchill as an irredeemable racist when the same man defeated Hitler. Clearly, country’s are complex and their successes and failures are deeply intertwined with their histories. I’d be lying if I said that The War on the West hadn’t proved a thought-provoking read, though perhaps not for the right reasons.Murray claims this isn’t true and that colonialism, Indian independence and the slave trade are all big parts of history syllabi in the UK. In 2021, Oliver Dowden, then secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, “summoned” the heads of Britain’s largest heritage bodies for a telling off over their attitude to history.

It will surprise and disappoint people,” Dowden had previously said in the Telegraph, that the Trust had made Churchill “a subject of criticism and controversy. This book is not an easy read because it tackles many uncomfortable truths and many people are likely to dislike him for that. Murray’s description of the Tate’s decision to close a restaurant due to a Rex Whistler mural that includes an enslaved boy also makes for uncomfortable reading. Additionally he claims the employees were told white make culture = KKK/ white supremacism; these associations were actually created by the employees themselves and were alongside mundane words like golf, successful, baseball, founding fathers etc. A common description of the west is that it is a set of moral beliefs and cultural norms that arose in Europe from Judeo-Christian roots and spread to the US and other European colonies during the age of discovery.Here, Murray engages in a neat bit of statistical trickery: he cites police killings of unarmed black men. Thus, Michael Tippett’s oratorio ‘A Child of Our Time’ can be denounced for “cultural appropriation” because it incorporates Negro Spirituals. I also felt like Murray draws attention to how one sided the criticism is for the west, when many eastern and Asian countries have done or doing similar things.

I think that to some degree, if the old narratives about history, such as the glory of manifest destiny, the American dream and the greatest democracy on earth have failed, then it’s because those narratives ring hollow for a generation who don’t feel that they describe or have any utility in the modern world. It’s far too lucrative to tell the reactionaries what they want to hear, and so Murray, who is clearly an intelligent man, panders to this audience rather than delving more deeply into the subject in the hopes of dredging up any real insight. The term was used by the author in a different context and was being used to mean opposition to genocide.People who live in the West must realise how fortunate their position is, to inhabit some of the richest, freest, most tolerant societies that human beings have ever been able to build. Modernity, for the former, is “materialistic” and “consumerist,” just as for the latter it is “fickle,” “shallow,” and “empty. Having decided that the world is starting to see through the horrors of Critical Race Theory, he brings up an interview with Christopher Rufo, an anti-CRT activist, who was asked what made him proud to be white. 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).