Douglas Murray Quotes

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.

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody’s ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.

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.

If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?

I regard a lot of these modern social movements as being forms of spilt Christianity or residue Christianity which the people engaging in it don't recognize and would be quite annoyed by if told this. Nevertheless, as you say very visible, recognizable aspects of Christianity are interwoven in this. But here's the difference and here's the fatally important difference: What is being offered at the moment is a form of secularized Christianity, without any ethic of redemption and that is dangerous. Very, very dangerous. The great brilliance of Christianity is the concept of redemption. The possibility of successfully atoning for sins. Take away the possibility of successful atonement, and all you have is a perpetual cycle of guilt and I believe that is what underlies a lot of the unhappiness in our societies today.

Sweden in 1950 was an ethnically homogeneous society with almost no migration. A century on it will look an almost entirely different place. And within the life-spans of many of us it is fair to say that such a country - like most other countries in Western Europe - will become unrecognisable even to fairly recent inhabitants.

While the concepts and realities of borders and national identity, which are erroneously believed to encompass a “Fascist” worldview, remain so tainted as to be unusable before any audience of people under 30, the concepts of solidarity, equality, and other benign spillages from the Marxist-Communist worldview remain wreathed in halos. What their exponents mean in practice, what endpoint they seek and what restraints they would ever exercise, never gets asked. But it is in this environ of spilt Marxism that such figures as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren now address their growing young audiences. Were equality (which they press instead of fairness) to have been tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that heaped on the concept of borders, then our current conversation would be very different.

Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.

What about the Hindus? This thought occurred to me the other night while watching an evening of documentaries about Islam on BBC4. By the end, the viewer was left with the distinct impression that we would all still be living in mud-huts if Muhammad's mother had remained a virgin.... But what this farce of bad TV and worse history did remind me of was that if, say, the Hindu community had only been fortunate enough to produce four young men willing to blow the hell out of Londoners and provided a clerical and political class willing to make excuses for them, then the BBC might credit Hindus with inventing the modern world. The government would be pumping tens of millions of pounds into their community events. Young people would be taught Hindu scriptures with resources from the public purse. The Guardian would be bowing its collective editorial knee before their deities. At Christmas, the most rabidly genocidal Hindu leader available would doubtless broadcast to the nation on Channel 4. When you stand back and look at it, the problem for all the other religions is that they just can't seem to provide the eager young foot-soldiers that Islam can.

… 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.

[At] Stanford, it turned out there is roughly one HR person on staff or faculty for every student. It would be cheaper get everyone a butler. And much more useful. And it would make me want to go to Stanford.

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.

Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.

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.

[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.'