The Case for Western Civilization

Contemporary intellectual culture is rife with moral criticisms of Western civilization and white people. These accusations stem from a constellation of beliefs, among them that Western civilization is exploitative and that white people are inveterately racist. Proponents of these beliefs teach history with an emphasis on Western imperialism, claim that the United States was founded to perpetuate race-based slavery, demand reparations for a brutal system terminated 159 years ago, seek to “cancel” the achievements of towering heroes, assert a theory of “white privilege” and “systemic racism” designed to keep nonwhites at a lower social level, and so on.

Are the criticisms accurate and just? Are they partly true but partly false? Are they entirely false? What about non-Westerners: have they perpetrated crimes as bad or worse than those attributed to Westerners? If so, why do so many contemporary intellectuals single out white Westerners for the bulk of their criticisms? Are they employing a double standard? And what can the answers to these questions teach us about their motives?

Accusations of Western Imperialism and White Racism

In 1967, the American writer Susan Sontag summarized a critique that was just beginning to gain intellectual traction in her day:

If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. . . . The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, Baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.¹

Around that time, the Martinique-born psychiatrist and Marxist writer Frantz Fanon expressed similar ideas:

[T]he wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth. . . . Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. . . . [The] capitalist powers . . . must pay. . . . Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster.²

Douglas Murray summarizes Fanon’s views: “the West is especially rapacious” and, in this, “it is wholly unlike all other cultures. . . . [T]he West is wholly without virtue. . . . [R]evenge is called for. . . . [T]he West needs to pay for what it has done.”³

Fanon influenced Edward Said, literature professor and author of the famous book Orientalism, which argued that Western civilization is universally racist in its portrayal of the Orient (Middle Eastern culture). Said wrote, “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”⁴ Nor did Said limit his claims of European racism and imperialism to the past; he included all present Westerners as well. As Douglas Murray noted, Said “also helped to create an interpretation of the world in which the non-Western peoples were people to whom things were done, while the Western people were people who did things. And terrible things at that. . . . [Said] added to the feeling that the West itself was overdue for some justice or, rather, revenge.”⁵

Such attacks on the West are increasingly prevalent, both in terms of broad assertions and narrower claims. Here are two more specifically focused on Western settling of the New World and on the fate of the American Indians. The first is from historian David Stannard’s book American Holocaust: “[W]hat happened on Hispaniola,” the island on which Columbus first landed and that in the present day is composed of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas. . . . Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples had been exterminated.”⁶

Here’s another regarding the indigenous peoples of the New World, this one from Ward Churchill (notice that in the following passage, he conflates the United States as a country with the entire Western Hemisphere):

During the four centuries spanning the time between 1492 . . . and 1892, when the Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter million indigenous people [American Indians] surviving within the country’s claimed boundaries . . . a hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by . . . over 90 percent. The people had died . . . of being hacked apart . . .[,] worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved . . . and . . . deliberately infected with epidemic diseases.⁷

Dr. Jason Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University, relates an encounter with a class of bright college students, some of whom repeated similar ideas. A student expressed the following viewpoint: “America was and continues to be located on stolen lands. This land was forged in genocidal conditions to eliminate Native Americans from the continent. . . . [W]e have yet to admit that genocidal policies neutralized any possibility for an ethical space [in America].” The other students agreed with this assessment. When Professor Hill challenged these claims, the students “responded by stating that their version of events was an incontrovertible historical fact.”⁸ This belief regarding the genocide of American Indians is not merely the view of these specific students; it is widely taught in American schools and colleges.

The Marxist historian Howard Zinn espoused similar views, writing that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.”⁹ Fred Siegel, associate professor of history at Cooper Union, wrote that, according to such critics, “American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”¹⁰

Anthropologist David Graeber claimed that any account praising the accomplishments of the West is merely “a retroactive apology for genocide, [given] the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations—visited upon the rest of the world by European powers.”¹¹ In his view, these are the defining characteristics of Western civilization, superseding all others.

Moreover, because most thought leaders of Western civilization have been white, its enemies racialized their verbal assaults and criticized not merely conquistadores, powerful politicians, and military adventurers, but also whiteness as such. As Sontag concisely put it, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” By the 21st century, many intellectuals were making similar assertions. For example, Professor Robin DiAngelo, an instigator of “critical whiteness studies,” writes that “a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy. . . . I strive to be less white. To be less white is to be less racially oppressive.”¹² Philosophy professor Barbara Applebaum writes that “all whites, by virtue of systemic white privilege that is inseparable from white ways of being, are implicated in the production and reproduction of systemic racial injustice.”¹³

In 2002, as such ideas were capturing the American academy, Harvard Magazine published an essay titled “Abolish the White Race.” In it, the authors claimed, “The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”¹⁴ Several of the writers launched a magazine titled Race Traitor, which featured the slogan “Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity.” They further vowed, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”¹⁵

CRT advocates stand at the center of the antiwhite assaults emanating from academia. The theory holds that racism is an essential trait of white people and is the organizing principle of American society, as well as Western culture more broadly. James Lindsay writes that, according to CRT advocates, the only way to end white American racism is “through complete social, cultural, and systemic revolution that is guided by those with a critical consciousness of race.”¹⁶

Today, this constellation of ideas is widely “taught” to college and high-school students throughout America.¹⁷ Therefore, it is urgent that the aspects of truth and those of falsity are identified as such and separated accordingly.

The Truth of Some of the Accusations

The charges against Western civilization involve slavery, imperialism, and genocide. No doubt, some Westerners and Western regimes have committed such atrocities.

The transatlantic slave trade conducted by some Westerners between Africa and the New World was a horror. Thomas Sowell writes, “Over the centuries, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 million people were shipped across the Atlantic from Africa as slaves. . . . Significant portions [of them] did not live to complete the journey.”¹⁸ Sowell writes elsewhere, “The horrors of the Atlantic voyage in packed and suffocating slave ships, together with exposure to new diseases from Europeans . . . took a toll in lives of about ten percent of all slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere in British vessels in the 18th century.”¹⁹ The British were the leading slave traders of the era, so if we extrapolate from these figures, it is possible that roughly 1.1 million slaves perished under the brutal transit conditions. European and American slave traders and owners were, without a doubt, generally merciless toward black African slaves.

Imperialism is the military conquest of territory and its population for purposes of establishing a large political union under the conqueror’s domination.

The British established a worldwide empire between the 17th and 20th centuries; their holdings were so expansive that for many years the famous boast was, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” As world conquerors go, the British were generally benign; but on occasion, they were brutal. One such instance was British troops firing on an Indian crowd at Amritsar, India, in 1919, killing at least 379 civilians.²⁰ This was rare for the British, but other European imperial powers were more malignant.

One example of this was the French subjugation of Algeria on the North African coast. France created the French Foreign Legion in 1831 as a formidable force designed to overcome fierce Arab resistance in the desert. Historian Matthew White is an expert on the most egregious atrocities of history. He writes, “The legion was stocked with the toughest, meanest cutthroats and scoundrels recruited from all over the world, lured with promises of sanctuary, citizenship, regular pay, and adventure.”²¹ Indeed, both the French regular army and the Foreign Legion often conducted themselves like cutthroats in Algeria. In 1837, they took the city of Constantine and massacred the civilian population; in all, twenty thousand Arab civilians were killed. In 1845, a tribe resisting the French, including women and children, hid in caves near Dahra in the country’s northwest. The French commander built bonfires at the cave’s mouth and suffocated five hundred people, including many civilians. Several months later, a French commander had his men blow up a cave filled with Arabs, killing another five hundred. The war of conquest dragged on for seventeen years; by the time it was over, an estimated 775,000 people were killed, most of them Arab victims of the French invaders.²²

Regarding European imperialism, the cruelty toward indigenous peoples is best illustrated by the activities of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo during the so-called Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, a period during which the European powers vied with each other to establish colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. The king established a personal fiefdom in the Congo—his so-called Congo Free State—under the guise of doing humanitarian work there. He sought to gain wealth in the trade for rubber and ivory, hired an army of mercenaries to enslave the native population, demanded that the enslaved meet high quotas for rubber production and ivory harvesting, had his mercenaries chop off the hands of those who fell short, and had them kill recalcitrant natives and burn their villages.²³

In the early 20th century, investigative reporters made clear the nature of Leopold’s activities, and public opinion turned heavily against the Belgian king. White wrote, “By 1908, it had become undeniable how badly the people of the Congo had been abused, and the outcry was overwhelming. The international community finally forced Leopold to let go of the Congo.”²⁴ Astonishingly, the Belgian government paid Leopold fifty million francs (£2 million) to “compensate” him for the loss of his personal fiefdom.²⁵ (That’s approximately £301 million or $389 million today.)²⁶ White estimates that the murderous brutality of the king and his thuggish minions resulted in the deaths of roughly ten million Congolese natives.²⁷ Understandably, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises termed Leopold II a “belated conquistador.”

All these injustices occurred, and objectivity requires acknowledgment of this fact. But we should identify the full truth—which raises several questions about the anti-Western narrative.

Misleading Claims about Genocide

Before we discuss the major errors committed by the critics of Western civilization, we should address a preliminary problem: Some of their claims are hyperbolic, severely exaggerating Western crimes—or worse. One claim regards the number of American Indians killed deliberately by Westerners during their settling of the New World. For many years it has been known that the vast majority of American Indian deaths were caused by exposure to European diseases to which the Indians had no natural immunity.

As far back as 1940, Dr. Clark Wissler, an anthropologist with an expertise in American Indian culture, wrote about smallpox devastating tribes in the West. One example was the Blackfoot tribe. The disease, he said, raged through the camps of enemy tribes to their east. “Within a few months, raiding parties of the Blackfoot had carried the scourge home with them; about half their population died.”²⁸ Wissler continued, “We hear a great deal these days about conquering populations by spreading diseases. Of course, in those days, the whites did not do it intentionally.”²⁹ According to Wissler, although disease killed far more Indians than did any weapons used against them in warfare, those diseases were spread unintentionally.

Historian Jeff Fynn-Paul concurs: “[S]ome 90% of Indigenous casualties of European intervention were due to neutral causes such as disease, rather than war. Nor . . . is there evidence that the Europeans deliberately infected Indian populations with smallpox or other diseases.”³⁰ In addition, Thomas Bowden observes, “Scientific research has shown that much of the decrease in Indian population during the first decades after the European arrival was due to diseases of European origin. No one is to blame for the spread of disease in the pre-scientific era.”³¹ Did some whites deliberately infect Indian tribes? Jason Hill answers:

There were isolated cases of European military commanders who did attempt to vanquish hostile Indian tribes by giving them small-pox infected blankets. There is no evidence to indicate that this was systematic policy at all. . . . Most of the Indians died of diseases unintentionally transmitted by Europeans to the natives who had no natural . . . [immunity] against them.”³²

So, evidence points to the conclusion that although it is possible that a few Westerners deliberately tried to infect the Indian population with smallpox, most Indian deaths were caused by an unintentional spread of disease to which they had no natural immunity.

Earlier we saw the claim that Westerners attempted genocide of the American Indians. Further evidence refutes the genocide claim. American leaders repeatedly searched for ways to civilize and pacify, not annihilate, Indian tribes. For example, Benjamin Franklin wanted to send blacksmiths to live among the Indians, hoping that this would encourage Indian men to take up this productive trade.³³ Fynn-Paul references a book by Richard Harless titled George Washington and Native Americans. Presenting Harless’s views, which were critical of Washington on this issue, he writes that George Washington “believed the only practical solution for the increasingly outnumbered Indians was that they eventually learn how to farm . . . both for their own protection and material improvement and so that they would stop being a security threat to American citizens.”³⁴ Because a number of Indian tribes sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, there were Americans calling for them to be exiled to lands north of the Great Lakes. Washington answered in part, “As the country is large enough to contain us all; and as we are disposed to be kind to them and to partake of their trade, we will from these considerations and from motives of compassion . . . establish a boundary line between them and us.”³⁵ Thomas Jefferson said, “Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians” and floated the idea of enabling them to become American citizens.³⁶

Decades later, during the Civil War, President Lincoln faced a moral dilemma. Members of the Dakota tribe had rampaged through American settlements, killing hundreds of civilians and enslaving and raping many women. After the U.S. Army defeated them, nearly four hundred were sentenced to execution, a verdict strongly supported by public opinion. But Lincoln reviewed the case and found that only thirty-eight were guilty of mass rape and murder of civilians. He agreed to hanging them and commuted the sentences of the others on the grounds that they were soldiers who had done no worse than fight honorably against the U.S. Army.³⁷ President Ulysses S. Grant sought to enable the Indians to become U.S. citizens.³⁸ Unfortunately, he was not able to accomplish that during his administration, but some fifty years later, in 1924, an act of Congress finally granted that right to American Indians.³⁹ In between these events, by the late-19th century, the U.S. Army defeated the remaining warlike tribes that had continued to attack Americans: They did not attempt to annihilate them but, instead, consigned them to reservations. Life on the reservations was difficult: Many Indians died from diseases or starvation. Many agents from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs were corrupt, grafting money for themselves by shortchanging the Indians on their food allotments. Wissler points out that, in battle, the Indians usually inflicted heavier losses on the whites than they themselves suffered. “Their [the Indians] great losses came with concentrations upon reservations; there is where they met with real defeat, economic, political, social and biological.”⁴⁰

However, the reservations were not sealed like a communist country behind an Iron Curtain. Some of the Sioux, for example (and members of other tribes), proudly maintaining their heritage as warriors, left the reservations, and enlisted in the U.S military. Indeed, many were heroes in World War I—a fact noted in the 1924 Congressional Act granting citizenship to all Indians born in the United States—and later, in World War II.⁴¹ Other Indians voluntarily left the reservations to attend schools, seek careers, and enjoy the benefits of an advanced American civilization. It is clearly not attempted genocide to consign one’s outnumbered, outgunned, exhausted, and defeated enemies to reservations rather than to wipe them out; to then permit these former enemies to enlist in the very military that allegedly sought their annihilation; and to further permit these former enemies to decamp the reservations in pursuit of a peaceful, fulfilling life.

The claim that European and American powers attempted genocide in the New World is worse than either a severe exaggeration or a gross distortion of facts: It is an outright lie.

The Major Problem with the Accusations

The primary problem with these accusations is that they are, at best, a gigantic example of the half-truth fallacy, which is taught in all logic classes. This fallacy involves drawing conclusions from only one aspect of the truth while ignoring other relevant aspects. Here is an example that I often use in logic courses: The captain of a merchant ship was a teetotaler, and the first mate had an alcohol problem. One night the captain caught the first mate drunk on duty, a serious offense at sea. When the mate saw this notated in the ship’s log, he decided to undermine the captain’s credibility. When it was his turn to keep the log, he wrote, “The captain was sober on duty tonight,” implying that this was an occurrence so infrequent as to warrant notation. The mate did not lie—the captain was sober on duty that night. But this is a half-truth; the full truth is that the captain was always sober. The half-truth raises concerns regarding the captain’s sobriety, whereas the full truth obviates them.

Half-truths are more insidious than lies because, being true insofar as they go, they have evidence to support them; whereas lies, being deliberate falsehoods, have no evidence to back them. This is why, when a witness is sworn in at court, he must swear to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The legal system explicates the concept of “truth”: The “whole truth” means no half-truths or partial truths, and “nothing but the truth” means no lies.

Like the first mate in my example, the critics of the West have told part of the truth—the part that tends to corroborate their conclusion regarding a uniquely horrific evil of the West. But do they leave out another gigantic part of the truth? Let’s cast our intellectual net wider—and see. That Westerners, including Americans, have been guilty of serious crimes against black people, American Indians, and other native people is a matter of historical record. There can be no disputing it. But have others perpetrated crimes as grievous or worse than Westerners? Of course, if they have, it will not diminish any white man’s crimes by so much as a scintilla—but it will raise a serious question: Why single out white Westerners for special moral condemnation? Is the white race truly “the cancer of human history?” Only an examination of history will tell us. Let’s look at some facts conspicuously absent from the anti-Western narrative.

The Mongols: The Chinese boasted an advanced civilization, and they had excellent reasons to build a massive wall to deter savage central Asian invaders. Unfortunately for them, the one enemy to breach the wall was the army of the blood-drenched Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. In 1211, the Mongols swept into Chinese territory, seizing the city of Mukden (now Shenyang). Historian Matthew White writes, “By wiping out every population that resisted him, Chinggis Khan [a variant spelling] hoped to terrify future enemies into immediate submission.”⁴²

The Mongols sacked Beijing in 1215. A scout from Khwarezm, a central Asian land next on the Mongols’ hit list, described the carnage. White wrote, “He reported that the bones of the slaughtered [Chinese] formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat, that some of his entourage died from the diseases spread by rotting bodies.”⁴³ When Genghis Khan conquered Khwarezm, he had molten silver poured into the eyes and ears of its governor and looted, burned, and destroyed the city so thoroughly that, for centuries, archaeologists were uncertain of its location. Gurganj, a city in what is today Turkmenistan, fell in 1221. White writes, “The women and children were sold into slavery and 100,000 captives with useful skills were sent back to China. Everyone else was herded out onto the plain and killed. According to the historian Juvaini, 50,000 soldiers killed twenty-four people apiece, for a total of 1.2 million dead.”⁴⁴ On and on the bloody conquests went. Today, historians claim that Genghis Khan was responsible for the violent deaths of forty million victims—all of this with swords, spears, and fire, not diseases unintentionally spread. It is certainly possible that his enemies across the centuries exaggerated his murder count—but by any measure and all accounts, the Mongols were almost unfathomably destructive, seemingly much more capable of destroying civilizations than of building one.⁴⁵

Tamerlane, a 14th-century Mongol warlord, sustained the ghastly pastime of wanton bloodletting, although his murder count is currently estimated at a mere seventeen million. White writes that Tamerlane’s “preferred form of architecture was the tower of skulls.”⁴⁶ That is, he delighted in decapitating tens of thousands of conquered victims, including civilians, and piling their skulls in massive pyramids. White reports:

Timur [another name for Tamerlane] stormed [the city of Isfahan] and wiped out the inhabitants, stacking up their severed heads as a warning to others who might resist him. . . . A Muslim historian exploring Isfahan shortly afterward counted twenty-eight towers of roughly 1,500 heads each. . . . The likely total was close to 70,000.⁴⁷

Outside Aleppo, he piled up twenty thousand severed heads. He devastated, demolished, and depopulated Damascus in 1401. Shortly after, he leveled Baghdad “and surrounded the ruins with 120 towers assembled from 90,000 heads.”⁴⁸ The Mongols’ mass killings were perhaps the most wantonly murderous rampages of history. And yet today, Mongolians generally venerate Genghis Khan as an illustrious ancestor, and some Western historians attempt to downplay his atrocities.⁴⁹ And of course, no Western intellectuals accuse the Mongolian population of retroactive mass murder nor seek to shame it into paying reparations to the descendants of survivors.

The Muslims/Arabs: Muslim warriors erupted out of Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries.⁵⁰ In time—inspired by a fervent belief that theirs was the one true faith, mandated by Allah to rule the globe—they and their converts (especially the Turks) overran Constantinople and the Christian Byzantine Empire. They conquered a vast territory in the Middle and Far East, much of which they hold to this day, from Syria in the west to Indonesia in the east. Over the course of a millennium, they’ve held billions of people in thrall, people who could (and still can) be executed for apostasy if they abandon the Islamic faith. Historian Will Durant called the Islamic conquest of India “probably the bloodiest story in human history.”⁵¹ One Indian historian claims that Muslims murdered eighty million Hindus.⁵² Why? Because Islam is fanatically monotheistic, and Hinduism claims that “there are millions of gods,” an egregious blasphemy to Islamic jihadists.

Arab slave traders took some fourteen million blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and sold them in Islamic slave markets. By comparison, Europeans enslaved some eleven million. The Arab slave trade began centuries before the European trade, continued in full force during the European era, was sustained after the Europeans abolished slavery, and was curtailed solely by British intervention.⁵³ The conditions imposed on black slaves by Arab slave traders were as horrendous as those imposed by Europeans—nay, worse, for the Muslims castrated their male slaves, which explains the dearth of a black population in the Middle East today.⁵⁴

Between 1530 and 1780, North African Muslims also enslaved between 1 and 1.25 million white Europeans under brutal conditions, and the phrase “white slavery” became commonplace.⁵⁵ Today, the Islamic regime in Sudan allows and even encourages the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan blacks.⁵⁶ Further, Arab militia groups in Darfur perpetrate mass—possibly genocidal—murder against dissident tribes, predominantly black.⁵⁷

In the West, Muslim warriors conquered Spain in 711 and held much of the country for centuries; they crossed the Pyrenees and invaded present-day France but were defeated by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, a death struggle deciding which religion—Christianity or Islam—would dominate Europe. The Ottoman Empire, an Islamic caliphate, conquered Constantinople in 1453, subjugated vast swaths of eastern and central Europe, and twice besieged Vienna before its final defeat there on September 12, 1683.⁵⁸ (This makes 9/11/1683 the highpoint of jihad in the West. It is a date virtually forgotten in the West but is humiliatingly remembered in Arab-Islamic lands and was certainly known by Osama bin Laden.)⁵⁹

In its dying gasp during World War I, the Ottoman Empire slaughtered roughly 1.5 million innocent Armenian Christian civilians in the ghastly Armenian genocide.⁶⁰

Undoubtedly, there are tens of millions of peace-loving Muslims in the world, but Islam’s core philosophy calls for world domination. In recent decades, Islamic jihadists have launched bloody assaults on the United States, Israel, France, and other civilized nations—and they continue to do so. The website www.thereligionofpeace.com provides weekly updates on bloody jihadist attacks across the globe, many occurring in Arab-Islamic states. The count for the month of March 2024, for example, was 118 attacks in nineteen countries (including 6 suicide blasts), 599 killed, and 606 injured.⁶¹ Islam has always been a hyper-aggressive, bloodthirsty religion bent on global domination by any means necessary. It still is.

The Asian Communists: Any discussion of communist atrocities should properly begin with the Soviet Union. But Soviet leadership was overwhelmingly white, and we are concerned here with atrocities perpetrated by nonwhite non-Westerners. Observe also that the West’s critics don’t include in their litany of crimes ascribed to whites the Holodomor (the Ukrainian Terror Famine deliberately wrought by Stalin in 1932–33 that killed millions of Ukrainian civilians) and other mass murders committed by Russian and European communists—and that Sontag included Karl Marx, founder of the bloody ideology driving such atrocities, as a positive value partially offsetting the terrible crimes of white Westerners. These are certainly clues regarding the political-philosophic orientation and goals of Western civilization’s critics.

Communism, in any of its iterations, is a political ideology emphasizing the subordination of the individual to the collective—specifically, the working class. It holds that individuals are right-less. In practice, this means that the state may dispose of an individual’s life in any way it deems fit. By conservative estimate, Mao Tse-tung, longtime Chinese communist dictator, disposed of forty million Chinese civilians, making him one of history’s most egregious mass murderers. White wrote of him, “Mao is almost certainly the deadliest individual in history to have wreaked havoc inside a single country.”⁶² Perhaps twenty million so-called “counterrevolutionaries” languished to death inside the Communist Chinese prison system. In Tibet, the communists murdered, at minimum, hundreds of thousands of civilians, some 10 to 20 percent of the country’s population. Historian Jean-Louis Margolin wrote of Mao:

To that total should be added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great Leap Forward—estimates range from 20 million to 43 million dead for the years 1959–1961—all victims of a famine caused by the misguided projects of a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his mistake and to allow measures to be taken to rectify the disastrous effects.⁶³

In the mid- to late-1960s, Mao turned loose the Red Guards, a horde of fanatical young Communists, to brutalize Chinese intellectuals. Thousands of teachers, writers, musicians, and professors were tortured or beaten to death. White writes, “In the south Chinese province of Guangxi, fanatic mobs tore apart and ate at least a hundred enemies of the state. Cafeterias displayed bodies on meat hooks and fed them to workers. Students killed, cooked, and ate their principals.”⁶⁴ Nobody knows the exact murder count under Mao, but it is clearly in the tens of millions.

Cambodia was even worse. The Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Reds or communists) told their innocent victims, “Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain.” That they murdered 25 percent of the country’s population between mid-1975 and late 1979 attests to this belief. Ethnic minorities were brutally persecuted; Chinese, Vietnamese, and Muslim civilians were often killed. “Intellectuals,” meaning anyone who owned books or wore glasses, were, likewise, often killed. Urbanites were swept out into the countryside and, with ineffective equipment and little knowledge, forced to try farming.⁶⁵ White wrote,

Party cadres enforced discipline all across the countryside. On the farms, Khmer Rouge overseers summarily killed people for laziness or backtalk. They killed them for slowing down after the endless cycle of hard work, poor food, and little sleep. They killed them for stealing food to supplement their meager rations. They killed them if they showed anger or sadness when someone else was killed. Famine swept through the rest.⁶⁶

In the end, before the Vietnamese Army surged in to end the mayhem, perhaps as many as two million civilians were butchered.⁶⁷

North Korea is a gigantic, communist slave labor state. Citizens can get tossed into prison or executed for the most innocuous things: humming part of a South Korean song, for example, or joking about the dictator, or some such minor act. Entire families are often forced into slavery for the transgression of a single member. White wrote, “Sisters are hauled away when a brother they haven’t seen in years is exposed as an enemy of the state.”⁶⁸ The descendants of landowners, South Koreans, business people, and others are considered a “hostile” class. White noted, “Nearly a quarter of North Koreans are stigmatized as members of the Hostile class, who are only one wrong step away from a [slave] labor camp.”⁶⁹ Pierre Rigoulot related a story from the North Korean gulag system that captures the essence of life in this country:

Mrs. Li Sun Ok was a member of the Workers’ Party. . . . She fell victim to one of the purges and was arrested. . . . She was tortured for a long time with water and electricity . . . and ended up confessing to anything she was asked. . . . She was then given a thirteen-year prison sentence. . . . In her penitentiary, some 6000 people, including 2000 women, worked as slave labor from 5:30 A.M. until midnight. . . . Any detainees who became pregnant were brutally forced to have abortions. Any child who was born in the prison was smothered or had its throat cut.⁷⁰

The North Korean government suppresses reporting of the brutal conditions there. Consequently, it is difficult to know how many thousands of innocent people like Mrs. Ok are subjected to hard slave labor. But according to the 2021 Global Slavery Index, 104 out of every 1,000 people in North Korea were enslaved—for a staggering total of 2,696,000 slaves out of a total population of 25,778,000.⁷¹ The government is estimated to have murdered three million of its own citizens. But, given the numbing cruelty of the slave labor camps, one wonders if quick death might be the more merciful alternative.⁷² Communism, like Islam, is an active ideology, still promoting mass murder, slavery, and totalitarianism in our day.

Non-Westerners Perpetrated Widespread Slavery: Despite the fact that Westerners commonly associate slavery with white ownership of black slaves, the hideous institution of human slavery has existed all over the world going back into prehistory, and whites often have been the ones enslaved. The eminent social scientist Thomas Sowell wrote, “[S]lavery was . . . one of the oldest and most widespread institutions on Earth. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus’s ships appeared on the horizon, and it existed in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for thousands of years.”⁷³ Powerful African tribes had conquered and enslaved weaker Africans for thousands of years; the Yao and Ashanti were two formidable African tribes that we know enslaved fellow Africans in more recent centuries. Later, a lack of natural immunity to malaria restricted most Europeans from venturing into the African interior, so they stayed on the coast and exchanged goods for slaves with powerful natives.⁷⁴ In Europe, so many Slavic peoples were enslaved by both other Europeans and by the Ottoman Empire that the English word “slave” was derived from the word “slav.”⁷⁵

To the extent that slavery has been abolished, the credit lies with the abolitionism developed in the West, ending slavery in its own territories and then applying pressure on non-Western nations to shut down the evil practice.⁷⁶

Why then, do Western intellectuals limit the call for reparations to the West? Shouldn’t the Turks pay reparations to the descendants of the Armenian survivors of their attempted genocide? How about the powerful African tribes who enslaved other Africans both for their own use and for sale to European slave traders—shouldn’t they pay, as well? And the Mongolians to the descendants of the survivors of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane? The list stretches on endlessly.

Even such a brief survey of history shows Sontag’s claim to be utterly false and is more than enough to raise the question: Why single out white Westerners for the most virulent moral abuse? But we still have not mentioned the major truth overlooked by these fallacious arguments against the West. When we do, the question hits home with redoubled force. We refer, of course, to the enormous life-giving achievements of Western civilization—life-giving for human beings all over the world.

The Immense Life-Giving Achievements of Western Civilization

One could write entire books on this theme. I’ll merely provide a few examples of these achievements.

Growing sufficient food is and has long been a terrible problem throughout the nonindustrialized world. One towering hero in this regard is the American agricultural researcher Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution.” In the 1950s and 1960s, he developed wheat varieties with resistance to various diseases that could grow abundantly in different climates around the world, including in Mexico, India, and Pakistan. The Green Revolution helped people grow vastly increased supplies of food in various nonindustrialized Asian nations. Borlaug sought to minimize world hunger. Journalist Justin Cremer wrote, “By all objective measures, he succeeded wildly, saving upwards of one billion lives by some estimates.”⁷⁷

Disease prevention and cure is another critical field for human life in which Western researchers have excelled. For example, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, an American medical researcher at Merck, developed effective vaccines for numerous deadly diseases. Theodore Tulchinsky, a professor of public health, wrote about Hilleman: “His work resulted in present vaccines used for the prevention of measles, mumps, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, meningitis, and pneumonia, which have saved millions of lives across the globe.”⁷⁸

Western medical science has a long, glorious history going back all the way to Hippocrates and Galen; indeed, most physicians to this day take the Hippocratic Oath or a modern variant of it. Louis Pasteur, the brilliant French chemist, identified the germ theory of disease. Joseph Lister, the English surgeon, established the need for antiseptic conditions in the operating room. Alexander Fleming, the Scottish microbiologist, discovered the first antibacterial substance, which became the basis for penicillin. American researchers Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed effective vaccines for the dreaded polio virus. The path to these and other advancements in medicine and chemistry was paved by the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, whose discoveries and methods provided the scientific framework for such progress. We could go on and on with Western heroes of medicine, but this brief account will suffice.

How many human lives around the world did these giants of medicine save? An incalculable number.

And Aristotle, let us not forget, was the first great biologist of whom we know. His pathbreaking work in the life sciences laid the foundation for subsequent medical advances. Above all, Aristotle married his revolutionary work in logic to his commitment to painstaking empirical research, emphasizing that knowledge is gained by logical, noncontradictory thinking about observed facts. He, more than anyone, taught humanity how to think, making progress possible in every field of cognition.

And no discussion of Western science, no matter how brief, could omit mention of several of the greatest minds of history—Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, whose discoveries immensely advanced human knowledge in physics, astronomy, and biology. Let us also celebrate Socrates, the father of moral philosophy, the field deploying our critical faculties in quest of rational rather than faith-based or emotion-driven moral principles.

In literature, from Homer and Sappho through Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters to Ayn Rand in the 20th century, Western civilization has excelled. In music, the West has produced such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Verdi, Dvořák, and Puccini. Michelangelo was a towering sculptor, Rembrandt and Vermeer superlative painters, and Leonardo an all-round genius. Film was a superb American contribution to the art world and has seen such brilliant directors (from different countries) as Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Steven Spielberg, and Clint Eastwood, as well as a host of talented actors and actresses.

Even a brief recounting of Western genius must cite John Locke and the birth of the moral principle of individual rights in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, leading to substantial strides toward capitalism, including much political-economic freedom, an Industrial Revolution, and stupendous wealth creation and prosperity across vast swaths of the globe—in Western Europe, North America, and, later, the Asian Tigers. Starting in Britain, the principle of individual rights led, for the first time in history, to an abolitionist movement that succeeded, to a significant degree, in wiping out the age-old, worldwide scourge of human slavery. Slavery was ubiquitous. Abolitionism was Western.

Western civilization is and often has been profoundly supportive of human life, not because its progenitors have largely been white but because of its fundamental, driving force: reason and all its fruits—freedom, philosophy, science, technology, business, the arts, and other such life-serving values. Skin color is irrelevant to moral judgment, but reason, individual rights, political-economic liberty, technology and industrialization—these are vitally important. Western nations export many intellectual and material values to non-Western countries. But its greatest export is a culture of reason and a politics of individual rights; for, to the extent they are adopted, these facilitate immensely life-giving advances in every field of rational endeavor, as they have done in the Asian Tigers.

No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilization, nor even as much.

Why then, do critics single it out for special moral abuse?

The Reasons for the Assault on Whites and the West

Why do the critics single out white Westerners for special opprobrium? Also, why do they claim that concepts of race are socially constructed—not biologically based—for the purposes of oppressors?

Let’s begin with the claim regarding the basis of racial designations. Robin DiAngelo writes, “But race, like gender, is socially constructed. . . . Race is a social construction, and thus who is included in the category of white changes over time.”⁷⁹ Barbara Applebaum writes, “While the definition of whiteness is difficult to pin down, there is widespread agreement that whiteness is a socially constructed category that is normalized within a system of privilege, so that it is taken for granted by those who benefit from it.”⁸⁰ James Lindsay, a critic of the theory, explains it this way: “[R]acial categories are all white inventions that were historically and are still used to maintain specifically white racial dominance and to oppress other racial groups (especially blacks).”⁸¹ Critical race theorists hold, says Lindsay, that racial categories such as “white, black, Asian, and Latino [are] coarse social fictions that only poorly reflect any underlying biological realities (which they vigorously deny to exist on principle).”⁸²

In short, a certain group of people arbitrarily defined themselves as “white,” claimed to possess superior intellectual and moral qualities by bloodline; and excluded from membership those they regarded as undesirable, such as Africans, American Indians, Asians, Latinos, and so forth. Critical race theorists hold that this is part of an ongoing power struggle. If whites define themselves as morally and intellectually superior, then they can arrogate to themselves the right to conquer, rob, rape, enslave, and annihilate members of the “inferior races.” In contemporary America, the CRT advocates claim that this forms the basis of “white privilege” and systemic racism against blacks and other nonwhites. This self-proclaimed superiority enables whites to structure a society in which they are the perennial masters. For example, Robin DiAngelo writes, “White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.”⁸³

The overwhelming problem of the social construct claim is that it is manifestly false. The biological and other factors accounting for physical racial differences may be enormously complex—but anyone who follows the facts rather than fanciful theory is aware that legitimate racial categories are based on observable characteristics. It is visually apparent that some people have darker skin than others, that some have straight hair and others hair that is tightly curled, that for some the spatial configuration of the eyes to the cheekbones is different than for others, and so on. These physical, readily apparent attributes are evidence of biological differences, not “social constructs.”

It is also observably obvious that when members of the same race reproduce, the child commonly has skin similar in color to the parents; and when individuals of differing races reproduce, say, one parent is white and the other black, their children typically are darker-skinned than the white parent and lighter-skinned than the black parent. These physical characteristics are direct, perceptual-level facts that are rationally undeniable.

We can directly observe that some people, although they are different in every particular, bear greater resemblance to each other than to others. Not all black people have the same skin color, for instance, but it falls within a certain range, and that of white people generally falls outside that range. Likewise, not all black people have exactly the same natural hair color or texture, but it typically falls within a range of black curls that are generally tighter than even the most curly-haired white or Latin people. Racial concepts such as “black” or “white” designate groups of such features. Those within the racial group may not possess every feature common among those within that group—every individual is unique—but they possess enough to be visually identifiable as a member of that group.

Racial concepts typically are based in a shared ancestry, but their use value goes far beyond anthropological considerations. They can be useful for identifying the types of people whom you generally find physically attractive; those whom you want to staff your Indian or Asian or Italian restaurant; or those who fit the description of a criminal suspect. Racial concepts, therefore, have a basis in directly observable fact and are useful for communicating what a person looks like, telling us that he has physical characteristics that fall within a certain range.

It is also clear to adults with a range of life experience that there are members of one race who are moral paragons and those who are not; there are members of another race who are morally upright, and there are those who are not; and so on. Life experience in a multiracial society shows us that there is no connection whatsoever between race and the most important human trait of all—moral character. The same goes for intelligence.

White People Are Not Inherently Racist

The claim that white people are inherently racist is deterministic, premised in the belief that white people do not possess free will. But, in truth, all human beings, including whites, make choices. We choose to be honest or dishonest, respectful of the rights of others or not, peaceful or violent, and so forth. Similarly, we choose to judge people on their race or to ignore such a trivial matter and judge them on their character.

Because human beings have free will, many whites (and others) choose to reject racism. There is virtually limitless empirical evidence against the assertion that whites are inherently racist. I can take a series of famous examples from the United States almost at random. For instance, Justice Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Supreme Court and her husband, who are white, have five biological children and two adopted black children from Haiti.⁸⁴ The great jazz trombonist and singer Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, as a child, was befriended and greatly aided by the white Karnofsky family.⁸⁵ In the 1950s and 1960s, when miscegenation was still illegal in Virginia, Richard Loving (a white man) nevertheless married Mildred Jeter, the black woman he loved.⁸⁶ And so on, ad infinitum. Further, almost every day thousands of white teachers strive conscientiously to educate nonwhite children, white professors work with black college students, white doctors and nurses medically treat nonwhite patients, white police officers risk their lives to protect innocent black civilians, and so forth. Several excellent examples of benevolent whites were provided by the brilliant brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, a black American who pioneered brain surgery techniques for children. In his inspiring autobiography, Gifted Hands, Dr. Carson acknowledges the racism he encountered in his career but also mentions the many whites who gladly lent him a helping hand, from his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Williamson, to his high-school science teacher, Mr. Jaeck, to the head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Long.⁸⁷

For a long time, racism was prevalent among white people (and among many other people around the world). Race-based slavery was widespread in the United States for centuries. Jim Crow laws segregated the white and black populations in southern states for close to a century from roughly 1865 to 1965. Black American citizens were denied their basic right to vote; they couldn’t attend white schools, live in white neighborhoods, eat in white restaurants, marry a white person, or gain access to numerous lucrative professions. Murderous racist thugs lynched thousands of black Americans during the Jim Crow era, and terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan constituted a perennial violent threat to innocent southern blacks. White race riots that burned to the ground prosperous black neighborhoods were not limited to the south: for example, the devastating 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Most of the time, whites who perpetrated violent crimes against blacks went unpunished by the legal system, which provided little or no protection for blacks. This was systemic racism, a race-based persecution that permeated the legal-social-economic system of the Jim Crow South—and, to a lesser degree, the North, as well.

The Civil War enabled a first remedial step. Although President Lincoln went to war over secession, Union victories on the battlefield enabled Lincoln and a Republican Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, finally ending slavery in America, a gigantic step forward. Unfortunately, further progress took almost a century, until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and other heroes risked—and sometimes lost—their lives in the fight against bitter racial persecution and for their basic rights as American citizens. One prominent example was the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. The marchers demanded that the Alabama government uphold the right of black Americans, as U.S. citizens, to vote. It was violently opposed by Governor George Wallace, the state police, and numerous private individuals. Indeed, President Johnson had to send U.S. Army soldiers to protect the marchers along the route.

It took a long, often violent struggle, with many battles besides the Freedom Marches—but by the late-1960s the long suppression that the Jim Crow laws (and culture) wrought gradually began to die. Systemic racism means that racism is packed into “the system,” that there is legal persecution of blacks. Systemic antiblack racism in the United States, prevalent for so long, is now dead. One example of its demise was the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision in 1954, which declared unconstitutional state laws mandating racial segregation in public schools. Another example was the case of James Meredith, a black man, backed by rulings from the U.S. Court of Appeals and later the U.S. Supreme Court—and protected by hundreds of federal agents—who succeeded in integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, declared that all state laws banning interracial marriage violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. By the late-1960s, systemic racism in the United States was mercifully dying. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was the ultimate fact demonstrating its death.

Racism still exists among some white Americans, including violent white supremacists such as Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers, Patrick Wood Crusius, Payton Gendron, and others who murder innocent blacks, Jews, and Latinos; racist cops still inflict police brutality on blacks and other minorities. But let us look at the long-term trend: In the 1920s, when the white American population was just short of ninety-five million, the Ku Klux Klan, a murderous terrorist organization, had several million members.⁸⁸ Today, the white population of the United States is some 234 million, and Klan membership is estimated at under ten thousand.⁸⁹ That is ten thousand too many—but the trend is clearly in the right direction. American Nazis also still exist but in very small numbers. A Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement claims to be the most widespread Nazi movement in America. In 2011, the New York Times said it was the most popular white supremacist organization in the country but then added that it had merely four hundred members.⁹⁰

In truth, that specific Nazi organization is not the most popular white supremacist organization in the country. That heinous title probably belongs to the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang and crime syndicate totaling approximately twenty thousand members. It is a brutally violent organization that hates Jews and blacks and whose criminal activities include drug trafficking, extortion, and murder for hire.⁹¹ There is no doubt that white supremacism is an irrational, evil ideology and that white supremacists still exist in America. But today, they are, properly, a severely marginalized element of America’s huge white population.⁹² Let us remember also that a KKK rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July 2017 drew perhaps fifty Klansmen and their supporters and hundreds of counterprotestors.⁹³ And USA Today photos of the Klan and Nazi’s murderous riot in August 2017 show many more protestors than white supremacists.⁹⁴ Finally, their one-year anniversary demonstration in Washington, D.C., in August 2018 drew fewer than forty white supremacists—compared to the thousands who gathered to protest them.⁹⁵ Two final examples: Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor are two leaders of the remaining white supremacists, and yet most Americans of any race have never heard of them; their influence is miniscule.96 Thomas Sowell is absolutely correct when he says that “if [white] racism in America is not dead, then it is certainly ‘on life support.’”⁹⁷

To claim that white Americans today are inherently racist (or even generally so) and that America in the 21st century is still systemically racist requires a massive break with observable facts. The truth is: It just ain’t so. So, to promote these claims, CRT advocates concocted the theory that whiteness or white people are a social invention, not a group of actual individuals whose behavior one can observe and morally assess. In the hellish fantasy cooked up by CRT advocates—and nowhere else—all white people, whether or not they realize it, hold white supremacist views and benefit greatly from the systemic racism that deliberately holds down nonwhites in contemporary America. Barbara Applebaum, for example, writes, “The relevant point for now is that all white people are racist or complicit by virtue of benefiting from privileges that are not something they can voluntarily renounce.”⁹⁸ She also makes clear that she agrees with critical race theorists Stephanie Wildman and Adrienne Davis, who “contend that white supremacy is a system of oppression and privilege that all white people benefit from.”⁹⁹

Having made a radical departure from reality, and living in a psychotic alternative to it, the CRT advocates are impervious to factual counterexamples. Nigerian immigrants have the highest educational levels in the United States?¹⁰⁰ Yawn. Indian immigrants have the highest levels of affluence in America, and it’s not even close?¹⁰¹ So what? Black political candidates—including Tim Scott, Byron Donalds, Barack Obama, and others—in gaining election to high offices, routinely gather millions of white votes? It changes nothing. Black Americans have made enormous economic strides out of poverty and into the middle and upper class?¹⁰² This likewise changes nothing, they say. Only a small percentage of white Americans currently oppose interracial marriage?¹⁰³ Don’t pester me with factual data. Caravans of nonwhite would-be immigrants trudge toward the United States and not away from it? Stop! No doubt, regarding racism, there is still room for progress in the United States. But undeniably, the country has made enormous strides since the days of the civil rights movement. The claim of CRT advocates that white Americans today are inherently racist is beyond a terrible mistake: It is a flat-out lie.

Why Inculcate Undeserved Guilt in White People?

But why create a fantasy world in order to push these obvious falsehoods about white Americans and America? James Lindsay gives us the first part of the answer. “This—the awakening of a guilt-laden, negative white racial identity in white people—is the essential goal of Critical Whiteness Studies, which is well within the domain of Critical Race Theory.”¹⁰⁴ This is certainly true. But why? Why seek to inculcate undeserved guilt in every member of the white race?

Ibram X. Kendi, author of the famous book How to Be an Anti-Racist, provides an answer. Kendi holds that all inequities between people of different races must be closed, that merit-based earnings must be replaced with absolute equality of income, even if pay gaps are produced by factors other than racism. How are we to achieve this? By extensive government control of the economy and restrictions on freedom of speech. In a piece titled “Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment,” Kendi writes:

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.¹⁰⁵

In practice, this means that members of any race—including blacks—who rise a specified percentage above an income designated by the government, will be penalized, their “excess income” stolen by the government and redistributed to poorer persons of another race. The government must—by force—ensure that there is little or no disparity of income along racial lines. Even more ominously, the government must restrict the speech of those who criticize this policy. Obviously, this is a huge step toward dictatorship and away from capitalism, the system in which an honest individual is free to both retain his earnings and criticize government policy.

So massive theft directed at all affluent peoples, including Indians and other wealthy nonwhites, but especially at the huge white middle class in America, and the imposition of a totalitarian state to impose it—these are the goals. Presumably, if white Americans are made to feel deep shame about their “oppressive” whiteness, they will be more tractable in going along with Kendi’s plans to limit their incomes and restrict their right to criticize government policy.

Why Assault Western Civilization?

But bitterly relentless CRT attacks on Western civilization are puzzling. After all, consider the facts: The widespread injustices of Europeans and Americans are largely in the past, and Western civilization has contributed and continues to contribute enormously to human life all over the world. On the other hand, since the end of the Golden Age of Islam eight hundred years ago, Muslim countries have “contributed” little to the world but fanaticism, aggression, tyranny, and terrorism. The communists are even worse. They never had a golden age—they’ve had nothing but gulags, mass murder, and brutal totalitarianism. As we have seen, the crimes of the Muslims and, certainly, the communists exceed those of Westerners and today are ongoing. And yet, it’s the West that modern—including Western—intellectuals so bitterly hate. Why viciously attack the greatest of the good guys and give a moral pass to some of the worst of the bad guys? Whatever the haters of Western civilization are after, it is not justice. Also, if CRT advocates such as Kendi want equal, ongoing distribution of wealth along racial lines, then this presupposes the continued creation of wealth, something that the still relatively free West excels at. Attacking Western civilization is like assaulting the goose that lays the golden egg. What’s going on here?

Brilliant writers gave us clues to answer these questions: “Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile,” wrote William Shakespeare.¹⁰⁶ Envy is “hatred of the good for being the good,” wrote Ayn Rand.¹⁰⁷

Could it be that anti-Western intellectuals consciously (or subconsciously) seek to harm, if not destroy, the most life-giving civilization in the history of mankind? These writers are well-educated; many are historians or professional intellectuals of other disciplines. They know the truth of what I’ve written here. They choose to assail the good rather than the evil. Why? Philosopher Leonard Peikoff, an expert on intellectual history, explained:

The term that captures twentieth-century [and twenty-first century] culture; the term that includes . . . every . . . value-annulling doctrine and attitude; the term that names the modern soul is: nihilism. “Nihilism” in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. . . . Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it.¹⁰⁸

Recall what the authors of “Abolish the White Race” wrote: “[W]e intend to keep bashing the dead white males [a line that includes Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Galileo, Newton, Mozart, Beethoven, Darwin, Pasteur, Edison, and many other creative geniuses] and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.” But there is no social construct of “a white race.” There are only living, breathing white people. The horrendous truth is that CRT advocates hate Western civilization not despite its life-promoting achievements but because of them.

Amid their relentless, rabid, biased attacks, we must keep a vital truth in mind: Western civilization is the most life-giving culture of history. All human beings who care about human life on Earth—regardless of their race or gender—morally must celebrate this life-advancing civilization and repudiate critical race theory in all its deeply fallacious and venomously destructive claims.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at Marist College. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020), and, most recently, Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math.

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