Pun Salad

The author, Douglas Murray, does a fine job of demonstrating just how nuts we went just a few years ago, summed up in his book title. It became extremely fashionable to attack All Things West. (And, often, its associated evil, "whiteness".)

Yes, the West had its share of sins: slavery, racism, sexism, eugenics, indigenous mistreatment, colonialism, etc. But these sins were present, and usually worse, in other cultures as well; that was ignored or downplayed. And the West was accused of "sins" that weren't sins at all: "cultural appropriation", for example. The works of liberal philosophers (e.g., Mill, Hume, Kant) were fine-tooth combed for any instance of racial insensitivity; the far worse bigotry of Marx, for example, was given a pass.

Like most wars, a lot of well-meaning people were caught up by the propaganda. And there was a lot of collateral damage.

Nobody seemed to notice, or care, that the West, however clumsily and incompletely, became a culture that brought prosperity, liberty, artistic beauty, peace, and happiness to an ever-increasing share of the crooked timber of humanity.

I think it's safe to say things have improved since the events Murray describes so well. Although ("like most wars") much of the damage remains. You can still see "Black Lives Matter" posturing here and there, but they seem like quaint leftovers of an intellectual fad that's fading fast.

People eventually noticed: the "War" mongers had no coherent criticisms of the West; Their "victories", such as they were, were mostly symbolic, and didn't remedy any of the evils they decried. (At Caltech, for example, Millikan Library was renamed, and a bust of Millikan was removed from a campus walkway. And so what?)