If you feel like everything you hold near and dear is under assault from every corner of society, you are not paranoid.

Well, you might still be paranoid, but at least in this case, your paranoia will be well documented by Douglas Murray.

There is no writer better suited to this task than Murray, who attacks his "The War On The West" project with a combination of passion, grace, sophistication, intellectual honesty, and a smartypants British accent which science has proven makes him a-priori smart, so there's that, too.

Regular readers of Not the Bee are all-too familiar with leftists' increasingly unhinged attacks on Western culture. It is relentless and there is no sign that they intend to stop.

And why would they? They have gotten away with it so far, infiltrating every fiber of society. The most powerful institutions of the West, institutions that owe that power to the very social and political structures they want to tear down – from Hollywood, to Big Tech, to corporate media, to the the global billionaire class, along with the grifters and shallow intellectuals who prosper from their incoherent bleating.

Speaking of shallow intellectuals…

[Ibram X.] Kendi does not like the conservative Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. He does not like the former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell who worked for George W. Bush condemning them with typical understatement for "the most egregious black on black racist crime in recent American history."

How can this be, you may ask?

"Remember, we are all either racists or anti-racists," he says before saying that, "black on black criminals like Blackwell get away with their racism. Black people call them Uncle Toms, sellouts, Oreos, puppets, everything but the right thing: Racist. Black people need to do more than revoke their black card as we call it…"

I did not know they could do that, but okay.

"…we need to paste the racist card to their foreheads for all the world to see."

You know what else Kendi finds racist?

• Opposition to reparations.
• Not having an opinion on reparations.

In other words, if you don't share Kendi's views on reparations,

"You are, guess what, racist."

But then, you knew that.

Speaking of reparations, Murray tells a tale I had not appreciated fully before this book. The enormous cost in money and blood paid by the British people in the 19th century to end the Atlantic slave trade.

In addition to devoting the might of the Royal Navy to the effort, one that spanned 47 years, the British taxpayer footed the bill to make up for the financial losses incurred by private companies that abandoned the trade.

The British government of the day spent 40% of the entire national budget to buy freedom for the people who had been enslaved. At the time the only way that the British government could get the consensus needed to abolish the trade was to compensate those companies that had lost income because of the trade. This sum was so large that it was not finally paid off until 2015.

That's not a typo.

The British people did not pay off the debt incurred to end the Atlantic slave trade until seven years ago.

Murray further writes,

The cost of abolition in the 19th century was almost certainly greater than the benefits that came in the 18th century.

Among the many, intractable problems with the notion of people who never owned slaves giving money to people who never were slaves because of slavery is the fact that reparations have long since been paid, and paid by those who at the time had at least had some tangential connection to it.

Also, consider this:

Western culture certainly did not invent slavery. Slavery is rife throughout world history.

However, it was Western Civilization that put an end to it.

Here is a map of modern-day slavery from the Global Slavery Index. The countries with the most ardent laws against slavery and who continue to work worldwide to abolish it are, with just a handful of notable exceptions, western nations and their former colonies.

That reparations are intensely divisive is a feature, not a bug. It is that very divisiveness that serves the purposes of those who want to tear down the West.

That's just the beginning of course.

To understand how vapid, how paper-thin, how mean-spirited and vacant are the charges against the West, let's examine just a handful of examples Murray provides.

A link between Voltaire and Adolf Hitler is somehow conjured up despite his "devastating attacks on the immorality of slavery,"

So, out goes Voltaire…. On to the dust heap with everything else.

Voltaire was a leading light of Western thought. He is a barrier to those who want to replace Western notions of freedom and self-determination and therefore an impediment to their malign intentions.

John Locke owned stock in companies that were "connected" to the slave trade. And so, "A Letter Concerning Toleration," 1689, has been transformed from one of the great advances of humanist thought into a guilty man's meaningless hypocrisy

One does not have to imagine that your ownership of stocks involved in the fossil fuels that have powered the rise of the West will be similarly condemned since it's already happening.

Then there's the story of Jeopardy! contestant Kelly Donohue who created a race meltdown when he was briefly glimpsed holding up three fingers in a manner that some (by which I mean race-obsessed grifters and opportunists) interpreted as a "well-known white supremacist sign."

The normal hysteria ensued, of course, including a signed letter by 594 previous constants wanting to know why Jeopardy! had not edited out the white power sign.

"We cannot stand up for hate. We cannot stand next to hate. We cannot stand on stage with something that looks like hate." they wrote.

Oh, the endorphin rush of their righteous outrage must have been quite the high.

One little problem with that.

As the tapes of the previous episode showed, when he won his first victory, he held one finger against his jacket. On the second victory he held out two.

I think you see where this is going.

It was less of a "white supremacist sign," and more of a "counting sign."

On the night in question, he had just achieved his third victory and so he held out three fingers with his thumb and forefinger tucked in.

That's a three. No more. No less.

No matter, he was forced to issue the ritual apology.

For counting to three.

Next up on the chopping block, Aristotle.

The problem with Aristotle?

Charles Murray of "The Bell Curve" fame, likes him.

As Murray puts it,

"It was enough."

That, and Aristotle "laid the groundwork for race science" because he believed in taxonomy.

Murray reminds us that Aristotle lived in 300 BC. According to the Washington Post, as a result,

"Aristotle was linked with the Alt Right and its chilling embrace of Western civilization."

Chilling.

Embracing a movement that advanced human prosperity by almost every conceivable measure is "chilling."

As Murray tells it, this is part of a two-pronged attack: Judeo-Christian religious traditions, and the philosophic underpinnings of the Greek tradition. "To go for Aristotle as well as the bible."

"So each successive strand of the Western tradition have been picked off in turn."

And so, the Enlightenment itself has to go.

Consider the assault in recent years on the tradition of the Enlightenment. This was the movement, or set of movements, that occurred across Europe around the 18th century and saw some of the greatest leaps forward in human history providing among other things the philosophical bases for the principles of toleration, the utility of reason, and the separation of church and state.

Murray points out that these were once universally accepted as positive developments.

The Enlightenment did not occur in Asia, it did not occur in Africa, or any other continent or set of countries.

It happened in the West.

And that's… problematical.

Of course, people who are not racists understand that this has nothing to do with race. That the Enlightenment occurred on a continent populated by mostly "white" people is irrelevant. It is an unlikely confluence of events that created it, but it's not based on genetics.

But, that is only if you are not a racist.

Not everyone, however, is not a racist.

Writing in The New Left review in 1994, the late Eric Hopsbawm was already warning of an interpretation of The Enlightenment as "a conspiracy of dead white men in pettiwhigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism."

As if conquering nations was a new thing.

While Hopsbawm was, according to Murray, a "lifelong apologist for the crimes of communism."

[He] understood the importance of protecting the Enlightenment, for he warned his readers, "in spite of its downsides, the Enlightenment provides the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on this earth."

And that is precisely why it must be torn down, bit by bit, leading light by leading light, statue by statue, freedom by freedom, until all that remains are a handful of apparatchiks wielding the levers of power they've long sought, to subjugate other human beings to their will and fill their empty, angry existence with fleeting and purely earthly pleasure.

While a leading intellectual of the Left could still publicly state support for the Enlightenment – indeed, a leading intellectual of the Left could genuinely appreciate it – the Left has since been consumed by its Marxist fringes to the point that it's all that is left of the Left.

This assault is everywhere.

It is carried out across the media and airwaves, throughout the education system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider culture…

Murray notes that we are "lucky" to have been born in the West. But "it is more than a complete lottery."

Societies are not simply lucky. As Branch Rickey famously said, "luck is the residue of design." We in the West are lucky because men and women before us worked hard to make it so and performed feats both extraordinary and mundane that still much of the world wants take part in.

Which brings us to possibly the greatest testament to the attraction of western culture, particularly those from other cultures, those not so "lucky," those looking in from the outside at a culture that embodies universal principles, no matter their origin:

Footfall.

What cannot be disputed is perhaps the most devastating proof of all which is the simple matter of footfall. A footfall that is entirely one directional. For there is even today no serious movement of peoples in the world struggling to get into modern China. For all its financial prowess, the world does not wish to move to that country. It does want to move to America and will got to extraordinary lengths, even the risk of life to reach that goal. Similarly there is no serious movement to break into the countries of Africa. Indeed, a third of sub-saharan Africans polled in the last decade said that they wanted to move. Where they wanted to move is clear. The migrant ships across the Mediterranean go only in one direction: North. The people-smuggling gangs' boats do not halfway across the Mediterranean meet white Europeans heading south desperate to escape France, Spain or Italy in order to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities of Africa.

It is only those who have benefited from the labors and sacrifices of others, who have grown fat and intellectually lazy, who want to tear down everything around them in nihilistic rage, the useful idiots of their puppet masters who would gladly reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

It was, ironically enough, the pandemic that exposed their plans as parents, of every race, watched firsthand in horror at what their children were being taught. This pandemic, an event that was used as an opportunity to seize ever more power, woke the sleeping giant of the populace that had themselves grown complacent and overly trusting in institutions that had long since begun betraying them.

At the same time, whistleblowers were noting that the same CRT poison was being spread throughout all our institutions, from corporate America to even the United States military.

CRT was experiencing its first encounter with the general public, and the encounter was not proving to be a success.

The pandemic, for all its damage, was a bridge too far. Too much was exposed too quickly.

The frog, stirred from its sleepy hot-water slumber, jumped out of the suddenly boiling pot.

This is an opportunity, perhaps the last one we will have, to stand up against these would-be tyrants.

It's not too late.

I hope.

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