Tel-Chai Nation: Western wackos wage war within

Clifford May looks at Douglas Murray's new book about how far-leftists in the west destroy it from within:

Douglas Murray's new book, The War on the West, looks at the Westerners who denigrate the West. No greater threat exists, he writes, "than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies piece by piece."

[...] Anti-Westerners determinedly ignore progress. Murray notes that author Robin DiAngelo, coiner of the term "white fragility," maintains that "the younger generation" of Americans is no "less racist than the older ones."

What's more, she and many other commentators are either ignorant of or uninterested in racism elsewhere in the world. Murray writes about one exception, "a late colleague of mine, Clarissa Tan," who attempted to call attention to the prevalence of racial bias in Asia. She noted, for example, that people like her, ethnically Chinese but with Western values, are derided as "bananas," that is to say, "yellow on the outside but white on the inside."

In Asia, too, "Racism against black people remains ingrained and commonplace," Murray writes. This has become especially egregious in the growing number of African countries now dominated by "new Chinese masters" ostensibly engaged in economic development but, in reality, draining the continent's natural resources.

In much of the Arab Middle East today, Murray points out, "black people are referred to as Abid' (plural Abeed'), which literally translates as 'slave.'" That is likely a legacy of the 13 centuries during which there was a flourishing Arab slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa.

He adds: "There are estimated to be over forty million people living in slavery around the world today" – which is more than in the 19th century. Anti-Westerners don't give a fig.

Another contention of the anti-Western crowd, Murray observes, is that "nobody in the world can do anything wrong unless the West has made them do it."

I learned that as a newspaper correspondent in Africa years ago when several of my editors discouraged me from focusing on such issues as corruption, ethnic/tribal conflicts and the failure of the "socialist path to development." Their preferred macro-narrative was that the new nations of Africa were doing just fine, and whatever problems remained were "the legacy of colonialism."

Murray contends: "Although the age of empire lingers over" many countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, "in few does it remain the salient factor in whether a country has been able to succeed or fail."

Western "self-hatred and self-distrust," Murray observes, are being used by the West's enemies "for their own ends."