Douglas Murray: The War on the West

If you need a wakeup call about "this game" being played, this should do it

“I think that by this stage it is clear that there is not an aspect of Western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level, that if you were to continue this game, there’s just nothing left.  Nothing.”

The comment caught me a little off-guard.

“…if you were to continue this game, there’s just nothing left. Nothing.”

Wow… You’ve been feeling it, but until now, unable to put your finger on it. Well, there “it” is… There is some serious stuff going on, and the end game is going to result in some serious inequity - some will have nothing, others will end up with everything. Whatever that means.

As the YouTube video started, within the first 15-seconds of the video, Douglas Murray explains without question, why you should read his new book, “The War on the West”. And it is certainly a compelling reason.

That is - from my perspective - if you want to prevent “what Western Civilization is not” from completely replacing “what Western Civilization is” within the foreseeable future.  I wrote about that distinction in my first Substack article a few days ago in “To Define Western Civilization, First Define What It Is Not” 

I just finished reading Murray’s book that came out on Amazon on April 26. Despite my resolve to not purchase electronic books a few months back, I made an exception for this one.  How could I not, considering that he had seemingly reached a number of the same conclusions that I had made, and he was discussing them with Jordan Peterson?

Between the two of them, there was no doubt in my mind that questions were going to be raised and answered, and new questions posed. That’s how things go with interviews with Jordan Peterson.

The video from which the quote above is taken, and from which I learned about the book, is a video on Jordan B. Peterson’s YouTube channel. The video is titled “The War on the West: Douglas Murray’s newly released book.” You can watch the video here:

At nearly 2-hours, it is a long video. To be honest, I still haven’t made it all the way through it. I stopped to read the book first, taking a massive number of notes along the way, seeking answers to a flurry of questions that I had after watching and then re-watching just the first 15-seconds, the keywords being “this game”:

• What exactly is the game that’s being played?

• Who are the players in this game?

• Who is the Gamemaster, the one(s) running the game?

• Who designed the game?

• What is the Premise of the game?

• How does the Premise fit into the overall Narrative, or the Theme of the game?

• How does the game start and how does it end?

• When you say “Nothing”, does that means the Loser literally ends up with “Nothing” (up to and including life itself), and the winner literally ends up with “Everything”?

I am pretty sure that I don’t know anyone that would be OK about losing that game!

Especially if they don’t even know they are playing a game but are at risk of losing everything.

When did “this game” start, and why are we just now finding out about it?

If you think about the chaos around the globe and imagine there being a group of players looking on from some perspective out in space, as if they were players and observers sitting around a Monopoly board for example, you can think not only about the players, the overall theme of the game and how it is played, but also in terms of the starting and ending points for the game.

If you do that, if you look at the game called “Destroying Western Civilization” as a board game, what is the starting point in the game? What is the first opportunity for attack? And who should have been defending Western Civilization from the start of the game from destruction?

I think the real start of the attack on Western Civilization can be traced back to the work of the Frankfurt School, and more specifically, to Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s. Some consider Gramsci to be the “godfather of Cultural Marxism”. The move from concept to action can then be traced to Herbert Marcuse. It was Marcuse who issued a call to intellectuals in academia to restore the possibility of a return of Marxism (that’s what his term “historical possibilities” means according to Dr. James Lindsay) in his 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance”.

One possibly oversimplified way to think about is that Gramsci came up with the ideas on how to “improve” Marxism, Marcuse came up with a plan to implement this new verson of Marxism - by using intellectuals throughout academia.

Some, like Dr. James Lindsay, believe that the “Repressive Tolerance” essay provides the logic of the Progressive Left to this day, the logic that is responsible for much of the attack on Western Civilization, and that its first effects were seen during the race riots that occurred in the late 1960’s. Dr. Lindsay does a 4-part, extreme deep-dive review of the “Repressive Tolerance” essay on his New Discourses website. Part 1, “How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance” can be found here:

The first real call to action, the first strike in “this game”, one specifically aimed at the destruction of Western Civilization, may have been a march at Stanford University that resulted in changes to the teaching about Western Culture at Stanford and other universities. As Murray explains:¹

We have gone from appreciating and weighing up what is good about Western culture to saying that every part of it must be dismantled

It is now over thirty years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protestors at Stanford University with the chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”  Back then, Rev. Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University’s introductory program “Western Culture.” They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it was what happened next that was so striking. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of “Western culture” with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead.  The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilization has met with sustained hostility, ridicule, and even violence.

“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” I wonder where that idea came from?

There’s much more in the book, but this article is about “this game”

My intent in this article is to talk about “this game” that Murray mentions in his opening statement in the video, but in no way do I want to diminish the message that he puts forth in the book. That may very well be the topic in a future article.

For now, as an aside, I’ll break momentarily from the discussion on “this game” and highlight a few extremely important points that Murray makes regarding the book in his interview with Peterson. In the interview, Peterson asks “What do you mean by war, and why use that term?” After all, it is a very inflammatory term if taken out of context. To that, Murray replies:

“Because what I say in the book is that this is what we’ve been going through. We’ve been going through a war on everything to do with the foundations of the West. Everything to do with the results of the Western Inheritance.

And when I say that, of course, I mean the war as I do it bit by bit on Western history, a war on Western peoples, a war on Western culture, a war on Western religion and philosophy.”

He then goes on to explain that we are at a point that if something comes from the West it is bad, and that if it is from the non-West it is good. That is a topic that he discusses at length throughout the book. It is at this point that I think he could have made some deeper connections, particularly with regard to the modern definition of “tolerance”, as I will mention again later in this article.

The most telling thing that I took away from the interview, and one of the most striking things about the book that is not actually described precisely in the book, is what he describes using the specific term is “Western Anti-Westernism”:

“This position that I argue that we’ve come to in the present age where everything is bad if it came from us, let me say, us in the West, and everything is good so long as it hasn’t come from us.

Now I should stress, by the way, that what I’m describing here is Western Anti-Westernism. There are plenty of other forms of anti-Westernism, Russian anti-Westernism, there’s Chinese anti-Westernism, anti-westernism, of all sorts of other kinds, but the one that I think is most interesting, partly because it is so pathological, is what I’m really writing about here, which is Western Anti-Westernism. 

Why we in the West have arrived at this strange place where we venerate everything so long as it’s not our own.  We respect things so long as it hasn’t been produced by the society that also produced us.  And I do think this is a fundamental assault.”

In the book, Murray highlights some of the most memorable characters throughout history, and then describes the manner in which they have been attacked. He discusses the degree to which they have been attacked, with statues being torn down and buildings and streets renamed. Names like Washington, and Jefferson, and Churchill and others. The reason? If the most honorable among those in the West are impeachable for their past, everyone else will be too.

“I think is a fundamental assault as I try to demonstrate in the book, on all of the foundations, the principles, the foundational figures, the heroes, the great stories, the great themes of the West even, have all come in recent decades under this just relentless assault.

And I try to explain why, why I think that’s happened.  It’s not an entirely new phenomenon as you know, I mean, it’s been a strain of Western thought arguably for some centuries, if not longer, but that in recent decades it’s picked up a pace, and it’s picked up a pace for some very obvious reasons.”

Why is it happening, and why is the pace of change picking up? What are some of the obvious reasons, and what are some that aren’t obvious?

“After the Colonial Era, it was inevitable that there was going to be an anti-colonial backlash.  A post-colonial movement.  But that’s lingered and turned into something else.  As have all of the other backlashes that I lay out.  So, I do think it’s a complete and fundamental assault on everything that the West has produced, and I think that’s why it’s deserving of the term.”

That explains why he refers to “this game” as a war, and it gives an obvious reason for some of the backlash, part of the reason for the pushback against Western Civilization. But there’s more to the story.

Peterson follows up Murray’s explanation, asking:

“So, to what end?”

Indeed. What do the Western Anti-Westerners hope to achieve out of all of this? Don’t they recognize the downsides, the unintended consequences of getting things wrong?

It is on this subject that Murray talks about gratitude, resentment, and deconstruction. In a section titled “Interlude: Gratitude", Murray gives a fantastic explanation of how the three are related. He explains that gratitude as being the most important emotion.

If you put the fact that the West has had racism in its history and leave the scale weighted only on that side, then of course you will come out with unbalanced judgments. And that is what has been allowed to happen. But must the good things not count for something? What about the great cathedral and university towns of the West: Oxford and Cambridge, Heidelberg and Regensburg, Ely and Salisbury, Bologna and Valencia?

Why is it possible to discuss the whole history and guilt of the West and not linger on these jewels even for a moment?

It is because the people of resentment are intent on forbidding the best emotions. What are those emotions? The most important, without doubt, is gratitude.

The people of resentment also tend to tear things down as an act of revenge. Vengeance for the sake of vengeance.

“…it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today. For just as we are not up against justice but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction.”

And of the process of deconstruction?

“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.

Those who have made a career out of this find a number of things in their favor. One is the fact that their task is potentially endless, as the possible subjects appear limitless. It is a career for life for the deconstructionists. But still nothing is created or even produced at the end of this process.”

Nothing.

“Understanding the concepts of Gratitude and Resentment, of Justice and Vengeance, and of Deconstruction and Deconstructionism itself is something is critical to saving Western Civilization. Murray does a great job here in his explanation of deconstruction:

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.”

:

“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.”

If nothing else, it is this section of the book that makes me state that you should buy the book and read it. While you will not find solid recommendations toward solving the problems of the West today, you will find definite “hints”. This section is full of “hints” as to what needs to be done and what any solutions should be based on.

For more on that, you’ll need to watch the video and read the book. They are both important, and you’ll find different takeaways from each. For more on what’s not covered in the book, but needs further discussion, read about Marcuse and Gramsci, and their influences in the West today.

Let’s get back to talking about “this game”.

In “this game”, aren’t most of us just Non-Player Characters (NPCs)?

Continuing the line of thought that the complete destruction of Western Civilization and all who are part of it is the objective of “this game”, so many other questions come to mind.

That 15-seconds of the video sent me rushing off down a fresh set of rabbit holes, imagining how it may actually be more beneficial to discuss current events from the context of game theory or game design rather than from the context of a war on the West as described by Murray. Or from the context of a “multi-front” war as described by Kenneth Abramowitz².

When the chaos taking place around the world today is viewed from the perspective of a game, taking into consideration elements of game design (and here I am now talking specifically about video game design, in case there were any questions about that), questions such as those I pose above might start to make a lot of sense as you try to get your head around what’s happening.

Viewed from the lens of a video game designer, you can imagine the underlying storyline, the theme, the narrative behind the whole game. You can think through the various characters, and the premises that they hold as truth. You can question whether the game designers allow, or even require, the players to allow contradictions in their premises (which, according to Ayn Rand, when it comes to Objectivity, contradictions cannot exist).

You can dig deeper into the individual characters and understand the programming behind their actions, their focus, their objectives, their strengths, and their weaknesses. You can think about how the game designer can manipulate both the active and the passive characters to extend the gameplay, and to entertain and reward the players.

And as you imagine working your way through the game with your Virtual Reality glasses on, for example, you can recognize the Non-Player Characters, NPCs. You’ll see NPCs throughout any game environment. They might mumble a few words to distract your attention, or block your path, but they are not controlled by a player - they are controlled by the game. Or more precisely, the actions of the NPCs are controlled by code - by the person that wrote the lines of code that control the non-player character in the game.

If you look at the game called “Destroying Western Civilization” as a global, multi-player game, one in which there are several players from around the world, each having their own abilities, strengths, weaknesses, resources, and so on, where do you see yourself? Are you an active player in the game? Or are you just another Non-Player Character?

As I thought through this idea, it struck me that we are where we are today because almost everyone that considers themselves to be a member of Western Civilization today is a Non-Player Character in the actual game that is being played!

Worse than that, hardly anyone knows anything about the game!

There’s a game being played for global control, and the citizens of the West are mostly NPCs.

I’ve been feeling for some time that things are happening around the world that are beyond our ability to control, or even influence as individuals, assuming that there was even a will to do so. Most people are too busy to be bothered with it. Or too distracted, just like Neil Postman said we would be in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”³ back in 1985.

Douglas Murray touches on some of those things, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, for example. Over the last few years, China has pushed forward with plans to reinstate their historical trading routes under their massive Belt and Road Initiative, and as Murray explains, they have made tremendous progress.

“The country’s Belt and Road Initiative seeks to form a network of Chinese infrastructure and investment that covers the globe: an empire in all but name. It has already seen the country buy its way across the Far East, Near East, and Africa. It has also chosen to buy up key infrastructure across the West. Sometimes it is a key port, such as that of Haifa in Israel or that of Piraeus in Greece. In 2019, Italy signed a deal with China to become the first G7 country to be a part of the Belt and Road Initiative. This allows China’s Communications and Construction Company to access the Italian port of Trieste and develop the port at Genoa. It will also include Chinese entry into Italy’s agricultural, financial, energy, and engineering markets.”

They have made truly unprecedented progress when you consider the timeframe over which they have done so.

He goes into some detail explaining how that has happened, and one example he describes is what is being called “Elite Capture”. He explains how China has gained influence over “Elites” from government and from industry, all over the world, in order to push forward with their agenda. It takes no imagination to recognize these players in the game.

“…no country could carry out such a swift global expansion without a key ingredient, and that is elite capture. The CCP’s ability to buy up influence among the elites in each of the countries the party is hoping to enter is unparalleled in its scope and munificence. Across the countries of the West, all who have been in need of some postretirement financing, from former prime ministers on down, have found comfortable sinecures thanks to Chinese firms.”

After describing several cases of “elite capture”, Murray poses the question:

“If the American-led world order is so terrible, what might a CCP-led world order look like? If the United States and other Western countries are so dreadful, then would the only likely alternative system be any better?”

Probably not. In the book, Murray talks more about this, as well. If you are anti-West, and if your dreams of the destruction of the West are fulfilled, are you going to like what fills the void? There are a few alternatives, and the reality is that the Western Anti-Westerners aren’t going to like any of them.

How else has China been able to make so much progress in such little time? By piling on to the war on the West that the Western Anti-Westerners started, using their same tools, weapons, strategies, and tactics.

“On the national and international stage, China is willing to hit the West—and America in particular—in what it regards as its weak spot. And one of those weak spots is racism.”

China is the topic of one full chapter in the book, and the one I chose for this example because it makes it easy to explain the idea of a US citizen as a non-player character in a video game. I can isolate the concept of “Elite Capture” in describing a villain in the game, and have you immediately put a face on it. You know who some of them are without hesitation.

Pick a politician out of the bunch and see if he/she/they has/have Chinese connections. The players in the game are China and the Elite that’s been captured. That Elite politician’s constituents, or the Elite hedge fund manager’s investors - the citizens that he or she was elected to represent or investors who chose him or her to invest their savings - are just along for the ride. Those citizens and investors are just NPCs in the game being played!

It’s not just China. It’s Race, History, Culture, and More.

What is not so easy to be explained in an example of a video game is covered in his other chapters on Race, History, and Culture. Those chapters are filled with other examples that might help identify other players, better explain the storyline of the game, the rules the players must abide by, and even the limitations imposed on certain players by the designer of the game, among other things.

As with everything political, there is more that Murray does not cover in the book. There always is. You won’t find similar critical stories about geopolitics, collectivism, or religion, for example. I’m not clear on the reason for their exclusion, other than possibly for the sake of brevity, or that Murray feels that they are not the top-tier concerns at this time. These are all complicated topics.

As you read through the accounts in the book, you come away with the feeling that neither the US, nor the West in general, are in control of “this game”. It turns out that in “this game”, the West is the prize - or more accurately stated, the destruction of the West is the prize - the objective of the game. The player that achieves that first will move on to the next level in the game.

If the game were redesigned to actually give the West a chance of survival, what would it look like? Let’s design a new game…

How would you set up the opening scenes of the game if the goal is to save the West? To preserve all that is good, the “jewels” as described by Murray. Would you start from where we are today, where chaos and disorder are already widespread, where some of the “jewels” have already been destroyed, or would you go back to the beginning, back to a point that the West was the envy of the world?

As pointed out above, Murray ponders that question throughout the book, stating that

“We have gone from appreciating and weighing up what is good about Western culture to saying that every part of it must be dismantled.”⁴

He then points to that moment in time that I highlighted above, one that might be considered a good starting point for the revised game - a moment in time, perhaps the first moment in time, that the idea of Western Civilization itself publicly came under attack (at least from someone within Western Civilization - a Western Anti-Westerner):

It is now over thirty years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protestors at Stanford University with the chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”  Back then, Rev. Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University’s introductory program “Western Culture.” They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it was what happened next that was so striking. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of “Western culture” with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead.  The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilization has met with sustained hostility, ridicule, and even violence.

If we re-start the game at that point, giving the players the option to allow the marches at Stanford, those first marches that were geared toward destroying Western Civilization, to proceed or not, would that improve the chances for success for the player trying to save Western Civilization? It might.

However, it might just create an opportunity for a different player intent on destruction to gain power by other means, by using other similar rules and similar weapons at his disposal. At that point in time, with that chosen starting point, the goal of the game is still the destruction of the West by at least some of the players.

If we don’t restart the game with the players deciding on whether to march or not, then where do we start? Maybe early-1965, just before Herbert Marcuse was ready to publish his essay titled “Repressive Tolerance”. As everyone knows (or as everyone SHOULD know), this represents a turning point in history - a point at which the definition of the word “Tolerance” was made to mean that anything from the Left is to be tolerated, while anything from the Right is not.

After all, Herbert Marcuse is not considered to be the “Grandfather of the New Left” for nothing…

That might be a good starting point. The point at which the New Left came into existence, fighting against the Old Right. Once the players recognized that it was no longer the Old Left fighting the Old Right using tools and weapons common to both sides, the rules of the game could be explained that the New Left has secret tools, secret weapons, and secret powers that the Old Right must defend themselves against - of course, without the NPCs in the game having knowledge of there even being any such things a New Left. How confusing that would be to the NPCs. I’m sure the New Left players would find that entertaining.

As I think about it, that doesn’t seem fair. The starting point needs to go farther back in time, to a point where the rules were known and the players were more evenly matched. No secret powers, no changing of the meanings of words. When it was Old Left versus Old Right against a common enemy.

If that’s the starting point, maybe the storyline can be traced back to a jail cell in Italy, where an evil mastermind is furiously writing out instructions for the destruction of Western Civilization. Within his notes are plans to enslave her citizens in a system that controls mind, body, and soul.

The storyline might go like this:

Before the devious mastermind perishes in jail before his masterpiece can be unleashed on the world, he has completed 3,000 pages of notes in a language that is foreign to most in the West. Before the notes can be destroyed, the Prison Notebooks are smuggled out of the jail and into the hands of an interpreter who either has the option to translate them into English, the language of the West, or not.

This interpreter could be the player that has to make the decision, or the player might be the one with the task of retrieving the Prison Notebooks. He might be charged with eliminating the prison guard who smuggled the notes out of the prison, or who steals the interpreted notes before they are published. With this starting point, there would be so many options to prevent the destruction of Western Civilization before it got started.

With that in mind, I think this would make a great starting point for the redesigned game. Rather than call the game “Destroying Western Civilization” or “Saving Western Civilization” the new game can just be called “The War for Western Civilization”. At least it gives Western Civilization a chance to survive, unlike the current game being played.

The Set Up

The theme would be set in an Italian jail in the 1930s. The opening scene would start as the prisoner named Antonio Gramsci takes his last breath before succumbing to tuberculosis. A prison guard he befriended over the last 11-years secures his Prison Notebooks and smuggles them out of the prison and into the hands of Joseph Buttigieg⁵, the interpreter for the enemy of both the Old Left and the Old Right.

The world was much simpler then. The players were easy to discern. There’s no question about who is good and who is evil. And it is conceivable in the new game, “The War for Western Civilization” that the Old Left and Old Right could align in their fight against their common enemy. That would be refreshing, compared to having the New Left aligned with the enemy fighting against the Old Right in “this game” being played today.

With that starting point, the first level of the game, the one that would determine how easy and to what extent Western Civilization could be saved, depends on first those Prison Notebooks. They must either be destroyed, prevented from being translated, or maybe even from being written.

So that’s the question when it comes to “this game” today. Can we destroy the devious mastermind’s instructions for the destruction of Western Civilization and have a fair game of “The War for Western Civilization”, or do we have to keep them in the game and leave the name of the game as “Destroying Western Civilization”.

What’s a game designer to do?

1. Murray, Douglas. The War on the West (p. 7). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

2. Abramowitz, Kenneth. The Multifront War, Dialog Press (October 8, 2020). ISBN: 978-0914153825.

3. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Penguin Books; Anniversary edition (December 27, 2005), ISBN: 978-0143036531.

4. Murray, Douglas. The War on the West (p. 7). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

5. Gramsci, Antonio (Author), Buttigieg, Joseph (Translator). Prison Notebooks (Volumes 1, 2 & 3). Columbia University Press; Slp edition (January 3, 2011). ISBN: 978-0231157551.