Douglas Murray Quotes

[T]his is one occasion when saying that some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole.
Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler's were rarely proud of their average days' work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up.
Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff "morale".

Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilization was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can't pay universities to do it.

To immerse oneself in popular culture for any length of time is to wallow in an almost unbearable shallowness.

If you import the world's people you also import the world's problems, with perhaps some new ones.

Mark Steyn for instance wrote a wonderful book [...] Bat Ye'or of course, a great scholar, a great writer, with famous Eurabia [...] More than half the children in Amsterdam schools are non-Dutch [...] It will happen during our lifetime. This is not the distant future. 11 years until you lose the Netherlands.

This era is defined by one thing above all — a civilizational shift that has been underway throughout our lifetimes. A shift that has been rocking the deep underpinnings of our societies because it is a war on everything in those societies. A war on everything that has marked our societies out as unusual — even remarkable. A war on everything that the people who live in the West have, until recently, taken for granted.

The desire to continue to feel yourself guilty arguably finds its endpoint in modern European liberal societies: the first societies in human history who, when they are hit, ask what they did to deserve it. Unassuageable historical guilt carries over into the present.

I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century.
In Europe, in particular, nationalism after all sounds different depending on the country you're in.
Nationalism in Israel sounds different to nationalism in America, sounds different to nationalism in Italy, sounds different to nationalism here in Britain.

There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.
So in general, I begin to feel in good company. If government agencies are going to compile lists of suspect books, then I am very happy to stand condemned alongside these fine people, both living and dead.

A society that says we are defined exclusively by the bar and the nightclub, by self-indulgence and our sense of entitlement, cannot be said to have deep roots or much likelihood of survival. But a society which holds that our culture consists of the cathedral, the playhouse and the playing field, the shopping mall and Shakespeare, has a chance.

Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid over everything. Terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Travel anywhere in the Middle East — even to the ‘progressive’ Gulf States — and you will see a modern caste system at work. There are the ‘higher class’ racial groups who run these societies and benefit from them. And then there are the unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an imported labour class. These people are looked down upon, mistreated, and even disposed of as though their lives were worthless. And in the world’s second most populated country, as anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste system remains in vivid and appalling operation. This still goes all the way to regarding certain groups of people as ‘untouchable’ for no reason but an accident of birth. It is a sickening system of prejudice, and it is very much alive. Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism.

The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know.

… many Western people today find themselves imbibing the idea that 'primitive' societies had some special state of grace which we lack today – as though in a simpler time there would have been more female dominance, more peace and less homophobia, racism and transphobia. There are an awful lot of unsupported assumptions among these beliefs.

[Friedrich Nietzsche] said somebody must stand over the life of the person of resentment and say to them at some point: 'You are right. You have reason to be resentful. There is somebody who has ruined your life. There is somebody who has held you back. The person is you.' Now, that is probably the least pleasant thing to hear and probably one of the hardest things to ever say. How can a politician, should a politician, say to certain people 'You know, you have screwed up your life, and it's been your responsibility and your fault. You can turn it around, but if you don't want to, you'll still be the only person to blame.'

Today the West faces challenges without and threats within. But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece. By assaulting the majority populations in these countries. By saying that our histories are entirely reprehensible and have nothing good to be said about them. By claiming that everything in our past that has led up to our present is irredeemably riddled with sin and that while these same sins have beset every society in history, the debtor should knock at only one door. And most importantly by those who pretend that a civilization that has given more to the world in knowledge, understanding, and culture than any other in history somehow has nothing whatsoever to be said for it.