DOUGLAS Murray’s latest book The Madness of Crowds: Race, Gender and Identity will prove without doubt to be one of the most significant books of 2019.
One reviewer wrote that if Murray ‘were an academic or a politician, or worked for a company like Google, he would probably have been fired. But as a journalist he is, at least for the time being, able to voice his forthright views in a way few others are permitted or prepared to do’.
Thank goodness. His last book, The Strange Death of Europe, published in 2017, was a damning indictment not just of multiculturalism but of modern European culture :
‘Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, to fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument. By the ed of the lifespan of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place they had to call home.’
In his new book he is equally excoriating of those other illiberal and oppressive forces of our time: notably the rise and rise of identity and victim politics. In an article in this week’s Spectator entitled ‘On black privilege’ Murray explains the notion of privilege that almost from nowhere has come to dominate contemporary inequality discourse.
Everywhere, he writes, ‘the privilege discussion is the same. Who has privilege? Who should give it up? Who should have more?’ Until now, he continues, ‘it has been assumed in countries like Britain and America that only one form of privilege exists. That it is white, male, elderly, “cis”, heteronormative power. Anybody believed to be in possession of one, let alone all, of these ailments is assumed to be a person of power who must therefore acknowledge their privilege and in some way move aside.’
In his book Murray not only explains why the problem with this theory is not just divisive and false but inherently contradictory, but also brings us up to date with the other three interest groups in the culture wars (sex, LGBT and trans). It’s an analysis that is fundamental to and throws light on much that we comment on, criticise and discuss in The Conservative Woman.
In this interview, Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute takes Murray back to his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe. He asks him what he thinks the people are willing to put up with two years after the publication of this wake-up call to the West. Murray tells him what has changed and what has stayed the same. In the context of Britain’s ongoing battle to escape Europe it seems to me to be important to catch up with.
