In the film “Life of Brian” made by the Monty Python group of British comedians there is a scene of talk between members of the People’s Front of Judaea, declaring liberation of Judaea from Rome their goal. One of the activists pushes through that in a discussion every appeal to brothers (in arms) be followed by “and sisters”. “Why are you always on about women, Stan?”. “I want to be a woman. From now on I want you all to call me Loretta and that’s my inalienable right as a man” – replies Sam. It continues as follows:
– Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
– I want to have babies. It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
– But you can't have babies.
– Don't you oppress me.
– I'm not oppressing you, Stan – you haven't got a womb. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
– Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault but that he can have the right to have babies. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies.
Satisfied, Stan says: – It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
– It's symbolic of his struggle against reality – an insufficiently woke discussant gives a mercilessly common-sense answer.

The film was shot in 1979 when there was still no PC wokeness, at least it wasn’t called thus although artists intuitively feel the spirit of time and are in the know.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE Chaos and an inversion of concepts

In the year “Life of Brian” was made, Douglas Murray was born in London: the writer and journalist whose books translated in Poland treat about this Loretta who, in order to achieve her “rights”, must fight against reality; that – apart from chaos and a total inversion of concepts – leads to nowhere anyway.

“Wojna z Zachodem” [orig. “The War on the West”] is Murray’s latest book, it appeared on the book market in September. The title is slightly altered, presumably by the translator, and suggests a war by some outside force against the cultural and civilizational, not strictly geographically defined West, namely Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The suggested attack from the outside was probably meant to encourage reading, but is somewhat misleading. The original title is: “The War on the West”. That is, “in” the West and within the West. Without self-hatred and self-disgust and an ever-growing imaginary sense of guilt, no cultural onslaught from the outside would have led to what we are dealing with.

When black Americans began to demolish monuments to white slave owners or those who drank tea with them, there was no reaction from local authorities in American cities. There was full understanding in the media, and admiration in the leading ones. The Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged after the death of George Floyd, a drug addict and recidivist, was undoubtedly influential in the culture war against the West, or rather, the West against the West. Critical Race Theory has moved from lecture halls to the streets that have (literally) caught fire which TV, especially CNN, reporters, standing against a background of smoke and flames, have reported as peaceful protests.

By the way, it is also obvious to Douglas Murray that it was the white policeman who killed the African American George Floyd because he had suffocated him by kneeling on the back of his neck. Of course, it is unacceptable to treat the detainee in such a way, even if he is a drug addict and a recidivist, but in Floyd’s blood a large dose of fentanyl, an agent that causes respiratory arrest in large doses, was detected. This did not help the policeman who was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

That a white “killed” a black is an indisputable fact in the whole West. Murray is disturbed by the reaction that it resulted in another stage of the revolution, so far cultural, which moved across the Atlantic to his homeland. The entire canon of education and culture is shaking in its foundations, not only in America and Canada. Floyd's death did not start anything but accelerated and radicalized many processes.

“War on the West” has chapters on race, history, religion, and culture. The author describes the Anglo-Saxon world, so race has a priority here in the aspect of mentioning slavery, colonialism, imperialism and appears in every chapter, even as a point of reference. The author gives numerous examples of the fight against white supremacy and the exclusion of colored people, which is the more dominant in the Western world, the more it is not there. Terrified by racism is the academic world, followed by the growing masses of ordinary burger or fish ’n’ chips eaters.

The Ku-Klux-Klan in a habit

In April 2016, at Indiana University, in one of the campuses, someone noticed a member of the Ku Klux Klan at around nine o'clock in the evening. Student computers and cells became red hot. “Students, be careful” wrote one of them, “someone with a whip is wearing a KKK outfit”. Another entry was addressed to the university authorities: “A man in a KKK hood and a whip is walking around the campus, and you cannot do anything to make the students feel safe”. “Please, PLEASE, PLEASE take care of yourselves tonight”. Then it was about not leaving the buildings individually, etc. – nothing short of a panic.

The KKK member turned out to be a monk in a Dominican habit – indeed their habit is white and it has a hood – and the whip turned out to be a rosary. After explaining the situation, the tension eased, which did not prevent one of the students from writing: "Why the hell was a priest hanging around campus at night!” As you can see, you can be anti-racist woke: masses less, most sensitive individuals – more.

In June 2017, the police were called to the University of Maryland after someone had noticed a “noose” somewhere in prominent place. The policemen found white foil tied in a knot. An investigation into a hate crime was launched, but the police concluded that it was a garbage bag “for storing and protecting loose items during transport”. Pull the other ones, not the insightful and woke youth. Many students have posted pictures of the white foil on social media, urging their classmates to draw their own conclusions.

There was no Ku Klux Klan in Britain, but there was an Empire. A statue of Cecil Rhodes was erected in front of one of the University of Oxford buildings. Rhodes, undoubtedly imperialist, which automatically adds racism to the register of his sins, studied at Oriel College in the second half of the 19th Century. He bequeathed a large sum of money to the university, which he set aside in his last will for the new university building and the scholarship program. Among the terms of granting the scholarships, there was one providing that racial or religious criteria could not be applied to applicants. The first black beneficiary took advantage of the scholarship five years after the founder’s death.

The Cecil Rhodes monument in Oxford might have survived had it not been for the phenomenon of the rapid march of anti-racism across continents. At first, the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town was demolished – he had bequeathed a lot of land to the university there. Oxford couldn’t have been worse, especially since Rhodes grant holders from South Africa joined the action. The leader of the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement believes that the memorial is an example of “structural violence” and that it is not limited to the memorial: “structural violence is, for example, the syllabus, lack of black professors. (…) Frankly speaking, Oxford as a space is racist. Blatant violence, assault and racism are unacceptable in a university that is supposed to be inclusive”.

Too white of a Shakespeare

Winston Churchill may have had a fondness for the British Empire, but unlike Cecil Rhodes, who had strengthened the Empire, Churchill was its receiver in bankruptcy. This does not prevent his London monument from being sprayed for racism. Douglas Murray believes that hitting Churchill is hitting the Britishness, which is what the islanders have in common out of consideration for the prime minister’s war merits. Here no one is manufacturing quotations and ascribing the dreadful “n” word as they do to Rhodes. The attack is the more bitterly pointless, the fewer scratches you can find on the character of the attacked person.

There is never enough inclusiveness and it’s enough not be a racist, you have to be an anti-racist i.e. track racism down in white man’s history, culture and religion. And it is everywhere, standing behind everything the Western culture can be (falsely) proud of.

In May 2021, Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London felt a sudden desire to become anti-racist by “decolonizing” Shakespeare. At the Globe seminars, one of the experts quoted Lysander from “A Midsummer Night's Dream”: “Who would want to put a rook next to a dove?”, showing that Shakespeare associates white with beauty and black with ugliness.

That same year, the “School Library Journal” magazine organized a debate on teaching Shakespeare in American schools. According to one expert, Shakespeare's works are full of: “problematic, outdated ideas with a great deal of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and hostility towards black women”. And one of the teachers admitted that she had given Shakespeare up wishing to depart from “focusing on the narration of white, cisgender, heterosexual men”. Another teacher stated that teachers must “challenge the whiteness” of the thesis that Shakespeare's works are “universal”.

In a world where a priest on campus stirs up panic and aggression, pre-Christian culture is not safe either. One Massachusetts school banned the reading of Homer as part of the canon qualified as “problematic texts by dead white men”.

Back across the Atlantic and, in 2020, the British Library: “committed to its employees and users that it would become an actively anti-racist organization and will take all necessary steps to make that commitment a reality”. A list of authors in any way related to colonialism and imperialism was dressed up. The list contained three hundred names, including Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, and George Orwell. Rudyard Kipling was found guilty because the British Empire was one of the most important topics in his work. How improper indeed. The list was published on the internet. It was probably intended to discourage from reading and encourage anti-racist reflections by those who had already read. Murray does not say what the effects were and for whom the blacklist was supposed to be.

So far, it has brought results for its creators. The family of the eminent contemporary British poet Ted Hughes (died in 1998) asked for an apology and publicly received it. Hughes was associated with Nicolas Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century and colonized America. An allegedly disgracing ancestor of Hughes’ was found in Shakespeare’s time. What an inquisitive fervor indeed. Except that Ferrara was against slavery and died childless.

Notes – exclusive, white narrative

There is much more nonsense and absurdities streaked with anti-racism in the book “War on the West”. If you leave the world of history and culture and rely on common sense in these more objectively measurable areas, you can miscalculate. In education, for example, in mathematics, the notion that 2 + 2 doesn’t have to make 4 is becoming louder and louder – it is a manifestation of white supremacy, and non-whites can have their own narrative. Discriminating students with non-white skin tones lies already in requiring answers that are considered correct by white teachers. Similarly, with the requirement of punctuality and timely submission of homework – this is a manifestation of “white paternalism”.

When it comes to teaching music, the best, if not “the best”, American universities feel increasingly worse, requiring notation, which is also a white, exclusive narrative. The progressives are hurt by classical music as white music and the fact that there are not enough black musicians in orchestras playing classical music. The echo of this American unrest and awakening is heard quickly, as always, across the Atlantic. In times of a pandemic, people were bored to death and had time to make decisions – the British Touring Opera dismissed half of the orchestra to pursue diversity. There was also a response of a more fundamental nature.

In March 2021, Oxford University Music professors received a letter reading: “In connection with the international Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the faculty council proposed changes to increase the diversity of the undergraduate studies”.

At the meeting of the music department, music notation was called the “colonial representation system” and the current curriculum is characterized by a focus on “European white music of the slavery period”. The notation system “did not get rid of its ties with its colonial past”, that is, ties with the times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Keyboard playing and conducting should not be taught in a postgraduate course as the relevant repertoire is “structurally focused on European white music”, causing “great concern among colored students”. And now a completely different story – the discomfort of colorful visitors to botanical gardens in England is also caused by the Victorian cast-iron gates through which they enter.

As much as anti-racism in its dynamics resembles the class struggle in terms of Joseph Stalin, which was supposed to exacerbate with the progress in the construction of socialism – it exacerbates and radicalizes the less there is real racism – the definition of the role of BLM in anti-racism eludes any comparison and analogy. BLM is like a rhinoceros in Eugène Ionesco's “Rhinoceros”: it disorganizes, terrifies, mentally massacres, attacks everything. But that threat was invented by a writer, creator of the theater of the absurd, and this is not theater.

The West is losing to itself. Universities and the media instill shame and guilt for racism, slavery and colonialism. Of course, slavery was exclusively transatlantic and the Ottoman Empire, the Arab Middle East and the African tribes themselves had never had anything to do with the slave trade. The self-humiliated West does not have the moral legitimacy of teaching human rights in, for example, China. The Middle Kingdom was the most indignant in the international arena at the death of George Floyd.

Sorry to be alive

The history of the West has to be rewritten and the culture has to be erased. What coms instead? Emptiness, no identity and no reference points. After everything is voided, the happiness of humanity will reign, without white domination and exclusion. For this to come true, young people should be instilled with shame and guilt so that they do not leave them for the rest of their lives.

In a pandemic, one of the American universities initiated remote classes in the first year, asking students to enter their place of residence in a special application. In response, each student received information on the lands of which Native American tribes (we still call Indians with impunity) where their house is located. The USA is a great country and it is not known if it can be done in every state, but this idea is so sophisticated that even Orwell would not be ashamed of it.

Fanatics are increasingly powerful, supported by their ignorance and the ignorance of the ruled. The most fanatical and primitive things also quickly dominated the French Revolution. There are no simple analogies in history, but there is to hope that some corrupt Directorate will replace those Jacobins. For even a white, cisgender, heterosexual man is afraid to think that some version of the Chairman Mao will tame those Red Guards,. Anyway, it would be falling out of the frying pan into the fire.

This Loretta, or Stan from “Life of Brian” at the beginning of the text, with these inalienable rights against reality … there is no point counting for them to get back to normal. However, it’s a pity that the stories given in “The War on the West” by Douglas Murray are not a continuation of this scene from the movie by Monty Python. The gentlemen had an absurd imagination, but not as far advanced as the present-day reality in the Anglo-Saxon world.

It is recuperative to imagine John Clesee presiding over various departmental councils – especially the music one in Oxford. How would a man roll on the floor laughing! It is actually the key to a healthy and enjoyable reading of all Murray’s books known in Polish – “The Strange Death of Europe”, about replacing the British in two generations with someone else; “The Madness Crowds. Gender, Race and Identity ”and the last one.

So many lines for virulently absurd skits and nothing funny comes out of it. Murray is not playing Monty Python, he is serious, concerned, but subtly ironic. He discusses facts, events and processes with extraordinary culture that beg for satirically sharp treatment. Douglas Murray restrained his polemics, explains self-evident truths that the West is Kant, Hegel, moreover, Handel, a culture that has always been curious about others, who have never revealed their curiosity in anything other than themselves. That the Empire had abolished slavery and the Royal Navy was pursuing slave traders across the seas and oceans. The costs of amnesty were enormous for Britain. The state paid compensations to companies that lost due to the lack of slaves, which hardly anyone knows.

Somewhat with a lot of work and energy, he explains that the white is not a camel. Sometimes you get the feeling that he is apologizing to be alive. Probably wrong, because Murray is reserved, he had a chance to be formed by such a culture of thoughts and words, which is no longer given – according to what he writes about universities on both sides of the Atlantic – to current students. Douglas Murray’s narrative does not conceal the author’s mild pessimism and hope that he appeals to people like him and that this thought and approach to the world will spread. Well, he writes a lot, insightfully and uncompromisingly. Murray’s sharp intelligence goes hand in hand with outstanding diligence and energy. It’s good that it is there, and what’s next, we shall see.

We, Poles, can stay calm, all that is happening far away from here. We had no slaves at home or in the colonies, although there are already attempts to replace them with serfs as a culturally embarrassing and paralyzing element. Of course not! After all, every Pole comes from the nobility.

– Krzysztof Zwoliński
– Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists