Douglas Murray Quotes

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.

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.

One of the strange habits of our time is the one in which a self-appointed class roams the land, hands cupped to their ear, hoping to discern something they can identify as a ‘dog-whistle’... One oddity of the whole business of trying to hear dog-whistles is very basic: if you can hear the whistle, you must surely be the dog. It is the nature of the analogy that a non-canid cannot hear what the dog hears. So to be able to hear on a whole different aural wave-length to everyone else – to be peculiarly attuned to the tones of the time and to be able to explain to everyone else – is one heck of a power to bestow upon yourself.

This is how it goes in Europe now. Everything barely worth saying will be said endlessly. And the only things that are worth saying won’t be said. What are those things? Among other things the fact that we are living with the consequences of an immigration and ‘integration’ fantasy which should have been abandoned years ago. Instead our governments have kept pretending that the weakening of Europe’s external borders and the erosion of its internal borders happening at the same time as one of the largest population replacement exercises in history could have no tangible effects on our continent’s future. They pretend that Britain will always be Britain, France will always be France, Sweden will always be Sweden and Belgium will always be Belgium.

Guilt, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed it in his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence, has become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe. People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it.

Campaign groups which used to oppose neo-Nazis realized that there weren’t sufficient Nazis to justify their business models. They decided that, henceforth, attacking parties such as Ukip should also come under their anti-fascist remit. Soon anybody who opposed supranational institutions or sought to restrict immigration found themselves labelled as beyond the pale. It meant that the views of the majority of the public — in Britain and elsewhere — effectively became defined as far right. In recent years this terminological mission-creep has morphed from being annoying to being disturbing. For if everybody is a fascist, then nobody is. And anyone who knows the scene across Europe will understand that we may well have need of these terms.

Edmund Burke made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

Contra all the assurances and expectations, the people who came into Europe did not throw themselves into our culture and become a part of it. They brought their own cultures. And they did so at the precise moment that our own culture was at a point that it lacked the confidence to argue its own case.

… we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences.

People in wealthy Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose. Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past at least gave life meaning. The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich where we can and have whatever fun is on offer – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in new battles, ever fiercer campaigns and ever more niche demands. To find meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered.

Humza Yousaf, as far as I can see, is not the First Minister of Scotland [...] He's become the First Minister of Gaza, or an ambassador for Gaza, or something like that.
But people like Humza Yousaf, I say it carefully, have infiltrated our system. He does not seem to be much bothered by the situation of the Scottish people, or the people of Glasgow who have one of the lowest life expectancies not just in Britain but anywhere in Europe.
He does not seem to care about that or if he does, he does nothing about it. But my word if you look at his social media proclamations … you would think that he was indeed First Minister of Gaza.
This is a problem that the Scots must sort out, the Scottish electorate must sort out, indeed the British electorate must sort out.

A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future.

It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created, one in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it.

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.

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.