Douglas Murray on why they hate the West

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When Douglas Murrays book The Strange Death of Europe came out in 2017 I started recommending it to basically everyone I knew. Some of them, quite a lot of them actually, came back to me and said that they now saw the world in a different light. But they were also so disconcerted that they sometimes asked me to present a solution, since I was guilty of leading them down this path. What is to be done, Ivar?

So today I’m putting that question to the author himself. He’s one of the foremost thinkers and writers of our time, and that’s not an exaggeration. He followed up The Strange Death of Europe with The Madness of Crowdstwo years later, which focused less on migration and islam, and more on the cultural issues afflicting us, centered around identity politics.

And last year he came out with The War on the West which is what we focus on in today’s conversation. Why is the west waging a war on the west? Why are we so preoccupied with feeling guilty over things that we fail to notice our achievements? How did antiracism become so racist? When did much needed self-criticism morph into abject self-flagellation?

Below you can read the transcript of interview with Douglas Murray, for those of you who prefer that over listening to podcasts.

Welcome Douglas Murray to Rak höger!

– Very good to be with you!

It's an honor to have you on! One of the reasons I've been very keen on having you on is because your books really are some books I recommend as I said before in the monologue. The latest one is called The War on the West and it came out a year ago and it really ties into the book you wrote before which was The Madness of Crowds and it sort takes it a step further. What is the War on the West and why did you chose choose that title?

– Well, in in a number of recent books, as you say, I've been sort of groping towards what's going on in our time. In The strange Death of Europe I addressed the question of immigration and integration in the West, in particular in Europe. And this is obviously a subject which Swedes know very well, the challenges around. One of the things that I recognized that comes from mass migration and the great changing of a society is the identity of society changes. You might like the direction of change, or you might dislike it but it's pretty hard to argue against the simple proposition that if the people in the society changes, the society changes. One of the ways in which our societies have changed has been that we've had to change our guiding ethos and in my last book The Madness of Crowds, I looked at one of the things that is a changing ethos which is the way in which the public religion of our time has come to do with identity and what has become known as identity politics, obsessions with LGBTQIA+ issues, obsessions with women and the place of women in society and obsession with race and other identity related issues. These have become the dominant issue in our in our societies.

– I addressed that as I say in The Madness of Crowds but there was an element of it that I had not addressed and which I wanted to address and did in in my most recent book in The War on the West,